No matter how little logical or logistical sense the mech makes on a battlefield, it makes perfect sense to the fascist, Butterfly thinks. The soldier is a figure both prized and reviled; obedient, but never perfectly. Even when in practise they follow orders, the suspicion remains that they could not. At some future hypothetical time, might not. The Troops are heroic; individual heroes loci of suspicion, individuality handed a megaphone. Dead heroes preferable, since they cannot contradict whatever story you’d prefer surround them; and so easy to arrange.
The mech is like a person, a subject of the state, but on a heroic sculptural scale. And, importantly, while personlike in form, it is not a person; it is a device, a dumb instrument for enacting command’s will. The combat ace is displaced from the propaganda portraits by their machine itself; they are reduced from mythic warrior-hero to mere guidance component.
The mech is the ideal fascist battlefield hero: an unreasoning terror weapon that walks like a man.
Which is to say, Butterfly has been walking past the greatcoat behind the dumpsters down the alley next to her workplace for weeks before she sees the person inside it. Soldiery does not always well-prepare its fodder for the invisibility of Civvy Street’s gutters, but mech piloting—
After she notices, it’s impossible not to see the faded unit patches. A serial survivor, of battalions broken and obliterated, disbanded for suspect loyalty, thrown away by command incompetence and overconfidence. Dregs and remnants repeatedly re-conglomerated into weaker and weaker structures, and still somehow persisting long enough to fall through the cracks and land here.
There are things to admire in roachlike tenacity, even if not in soldiery. Butterfly notices the person inside the coat more often; a straw-haired stick figure, lips chapped to livid, scabby soreness, eyes watery and colourless. Deeply unattractive. Sometimes the pale gaze is entirely vacant; the pilot is a stripped cog, pulled from its housing and thrown away, drool running slowly from a slack mouth, seated uncaring on the cold ground.
It’s one of those days that Butterfly notices a couple of local toughs gassing each other up to do more than kick loose dirt at this unflinching, still-breathing corpse. One of them is fumbling with his fly, voice booze-cheery and loud. It’s not clear whether he plans to urinate on the pilot, or slot his cock into an unresisting face.
She marches out of the door, clutching the shop broom.
“Get!” she says fiercely. “Pisshead wastrels!”
The ringleader wastrel has his flabby little meat out in the cold, halfheartedly jacking it; intentions thus clarified.
“Do you turnip-heads have any idea the bacterial filth in a human mouth?” Butterfly says with spit-flecking contempt. “When you get that tiddler-bait bitten, it’ll rot off—”
She doesn’t think the pilot would actually bite. Might not, in fact, notice in any meaningful way.
The toughs swear at her.
“Hard enough getting antibiotics without you hogging them for dick gangrene!” Butterfly shouts, and waves the broom threateningly until, pissed off, they piss off, evidently feeling just outnumbered enough by the broom’s presence not to make something of it.
The greatcoat doesn’t move. The figure inside it doesn’t move. The pilot’s expression stays blank and slack.
Butterfly makes a noise of guttural self-contempt, knocks the broom against the alley’s crumbling surface a couple of times, and starts to turn away to re-enter the shop, and something happens — she thinks — in the corner of her vision. The pilot’s pale wet eyes, she thinks, track up to her face.
Butterfly turns away quicker.
It takes a week or so to notice that the city’s rats have abandoned the shop. Butterfly thinks, when she first realises, that they’re just passingly skulking from some cat wandering by or some such, but no: they’re gone.
She worries, for a while, that some dreadful gas leak or other creeping danger has displaced or slaughtered them, that the shop will get her next; that, at least, is allayed when she arrives in the filmy grey light of dawn one day, only to have a screaming rodent dash out of the alley, almost over her feet, leaving a pumping trail of bloodsplash.
Butterfly shrieks into the city’s faintly-grumbling morning stillness. The distant huffing and clanking of the freight yards continue as if uninterrupted; nobody cares about her wails any more than the rat’s. After a minute of clutching at her skirt, she sticks her squeamish head into the alley, where nothing else seems afoot. The blood trail gleams on the ground.
She picks her way over it, braced for some other horror to leap and scamper and scream at any second. It does not. Behind the dumpster, the greatcoat sits unmoving, pale eyes staring at the opposite wall of the alley. Butterfly mutters some half-considered syllable under her breath.
The filthy, ragged hem of the coat stirs, as if nudged by some boot behind it, and then something slithers out. She thinks, for a blank horrified second, that perhaps it’s the worst-looking near-death cat; then as its movements become more apparent, she thinks an incredulous monkey?
As the heavy fabric falls fully back over the hump of its little head, she realises, no. It’s not a barely-fleshed skull at all; it’s ancient, filthy, rotting, skin-toned plastic, the grotesque wide ovoid of a cat-eared baby dolly head, one articulated eyelid bobbing with its movements over the glassy eye beneath; the other jammed open, forever glaring. The bulk of its torso is the fat black bulk of a battery, the spare elegance of its articulation around it made necessary by a dearth of materials; coathanger wire and drone servos. One finely-articulated hand, tiny as a baby’s, no doubt scavenged from the otherwise crumpled remains of an ordnance-defusing scuttler bot; the other forelimb ending in the gleaming length of a kitchen knife.
The pilot, hollowed out and reduced to a guidance system, stares at the wall. The tiny, scavenged, scratchbuilt homage to the manmade war god the pilot is no longer permitted to inhabit squats between whatever wear-ravaged footwear hides beneath the coat; and with its tiny baby hand, lovingly runs a red-stained cleaning rag along its primary armament, lithe and fluid as any real creature.
“Fuck!” Butterfly yells, in an excess of horrible feeling, and the pilot cracks the first actual expression she’s ever seen, and smiles like a blameless little cherub.
