Pippa’s in her bunk when the scramble siren goes off. It’s too fucking hot — always too fucking hot, the peak of the climate bell curves creeping across the graphs year-on-year, the equatorial No Longer Inhabitable zone angrily fattening. The base AC was specified decades ago, for an Earth long gone, and barely keeps the bunker habitable; she’s flat-fuck-fridayed, pantsless, vest soaked with sweat, popsicle stick clenched in her teeth where its payload has all dissolved to cloying collateral aftertaste. She’s irritable and horny, one hand in her briefs, but it’s just too fucking hot to do anything. With her free hand, she’s holding a comic book over her face, more to funnel the airstream of the nearby labouring fan onto her neck and tits than anything.
It’s one of the ones that the government unsubtly sponsors. ARMOR HEROES, or some shit; the usual century-old warmed-over Western comics slop, retread WWII gee-whiz give-‘em-what-for propaganda garnished with whichever retread superheroes are focus testing well this administration, giving their brave fictional thumbs-up and speech-bubbling that the REAL HEROES are actually THE TROOPS.
There’s a lovely two-page spread of a Reefshark walker, gun-porn detailed linework, detail-accurate as a training manual; a cursory, faceless smudge of an infantryman in the open cockpit. The Reefshark is a beautiful machine, she thinks wistfully, hand flexing in her briefs; and then, the fucking siren.
She throws the comic onto the floor, cursing, grabs her boots and runs. Regs say she should put pants on, then run down to the hangars, then shuck out of ‘em again to get in the flightsuit; but nobody ever got more’n a bored recitation of the Army’s got standards, pilot for dealing with the heat.
They don’t have Reefsharks down here, not where the TV cameras won’t see them. Down here it’s all Anthropic Armor AA-15 Thunderhammers, creaky old shit that threatens to get mechanical heatstroke on cloudless days; the radiators on these things literally can’t keep them cool enough to function properly, not under the ambient conditions. Pippa knows how they feel. She sprints past her locker without stopping — no excess uniform to shuck into it — and dives straight for the nearest unused suit-up station, the bulk of a pilot suit hanging off an armature, spatchcocked, ready for a pilot to throw themself backward into it and be buttoned up by the ground crew.
One of the suit’s functions is pilot refrigeration, thankfully, amid all its shock-absorbency and biofeedback and everything. Pippa rams her shoulders into place, wriggles to settle it, stands T-posed while the ground crew yank at MOLLE straps and quick-release buckles. The grip of the noninvasive blood pressure monitor cuff inflates around her upper arm; systems start bleeping and blinking into life, eager organs ready to be crowned with their electronic brain when she finally gets into the cockpit.
Her feet hit the boarding rungs, littered up the inside of the machine’s legs like a map of where to hold someone down and bite. She slings her leg over the sill, hauls her suited bulk into the seat. The restraint bar comes down like a rollercoaster’s, connectors mating into the suit’s shoulder sockets; she yanks the twistlock handles to fasten in, and the suit flexes around her like an artificial muscle as it all powers up properly. The RJ45 connector goes into her mastoid socket; the PPMS hose twistlocks into the opposite arm to the blood pressure cuff, the suit reacting to the connection by autodocking with the port in her arm.
Pilot Psychopharmacology Motivation Synchronisation. The Psycho Farm. Yeah, the comics hype it up as drive-by-brain, and social media bleeding hearts decry it as mind control; but really, it’s as much forcing Pippa to do as she’s told as basic training does. (So. Sort of, but not like that.)
No; what the Psycho Farm — the wires into her head and the chemical synthesis dosing straight into her bloodstream — does is keep her in a state as if she’s hopped up on the good college-kid drugs, very alert, very focused; and, basically, anxious. Really fucking anxious. Helps keep them sharp, allegedly.
She gets a dose of neurochemical absolution — lit up in her veins and brain, sudden relief and relaxation, internal good-girl headpats and a jolt in the numinous experience lobes of her grey matter — if she hits mission objectives. And like a rat in a 1940s psych lab with an electrode direct to the pleasure centres of its brain, she goes back to push that feelgood button over and over and over. Even though the induced anxiety is only when they’re on duty.
Allegedly.
“Let’s get out there, people!” Sarge bellows, as the ground crew run off the deck and the clear-to-walk flashes up. Another day, another deployment: the military-backed insistence that the remaining habitable areas of the Earth are full, and cannot bear the exodus of the equatorial oven without foundering and sinking, being dragged down into eco-doom along with the teeming horde.
Even five years ago, the mech corps had more of a mix of faces in it; but as the thumbscrew tightens, the ranks Defending the Always Extremely Blonde’n’Blue-Eyed on the Recruitment Posters, Have You Noticed That, become whiter and whiter. Maybe you can’t trust Defending the Good Green Land to the kind of people with…commonalities. Perhaps, being the same colour, having some kind of grandparent who once spoke a language that screams now outside the firebreaks, the Wrong Sort could be predisposed to sympathies. Better to fill the mechs with the genetically blameless, the rational understanders, the unbesmirched.
The unfortunates who — Through No Personal Fault of Their Own, Obviously, Haha — feature on the posters, do so as they always did; blank silhouettes without distinguishing features, filled only with the colour which printers designate K. Locust-swarms of them, looming like giants over the ditches and walls, over the mechs themselves.
They’re much smaller in the autocannon sights; even the adults. Another mad dash of them today, a desperate cluster on the satellite briefing, trying to make it over the fences and trenches to loose their children in the direction of lands that won’t roast their organs.
Two more years in the Biosecurity Corps, and under the Green Initiative, Pippa will pay off enough of her personal carbon footprint to demob and go home to what’s left of the cold.
She wishes she could remember how it feels.
