In Any Mech, The Weakest Link Is Always The Pilot Themself.

in any mech, the weakest link is always the pilot themself.

It doesn’t matter what reactor you’ve got installed or what sort of weapons systems you have installed, the mech’s survival is just as dependent on the pilot’s just as much as the pilot’s is dependent on the mech. Say what you will about combat effectiveness and making sacrifices, most of a mech’s job is to keep the pilot alive and operating at 100% efficiency— and resources are allocated accordingly.

It goes without saying that pilots are on a lot of drugs at any given time. Combat stims and reward chemicals, of course, but other things too. Half the time, augmentation surgery leaves the pilot’s body so, to use the technical term, irreversibly fucked up, that they need several dozen different medications just to make sure the strain of the interface rig doesn’t collapse several to all of their organs and make sure that what’s left of their immune system is suppressed enough that they don’t violently reject the 30-45% of their body that the implants make up. There’s a reason why they make the mechs so big, and part of that is so that they’re big enough to function as a walking pharmacy and still have enough room for all their combat systems. The mech AI is perfectly designed to be able to diagnose a problem from brainwave patterns and vital signs, figure out exactly what needs to be used to treat it, calculate dosages, and pump it directly into the pilot’s veins all within a few seconds.

the thing is, the ailments it’s designed to treat aren’t simply limited by the physical. Pilots need to be at 100% effectiveness, and a happy and motivated pilot is an effective one. That’s why command spends so much on combat stims and reward chemicals and that stuff they use to take your mind away if you start thinking about anything other than killing and feels warm and slightly tingly as it flows into your spine through the tubes. The interface gives the mech computer your mind— it lets it reach in and dig around until it finds what part of you hesitates before pulling the trigger and what part of you gives you the worries that you focus on instead of the fight.

The mech— it knows. It knows things about you that you’ve tried to hide. From others, but mostly from yourself. It sees it— all of you. It sees everything that you are and has access to the records of everything that you were— it knows what parts of yourself you hate so much that you were willing to offer up your body and mind to the military and their pilot program, just so that even if you barely have a mind left, even if your body is so optimized to do nothing but sit curled within several tons of metal and operating controls that you can barely survive outside of it— you wouldn’t have that body you were stuck with before. They body that even under all those layers of repression, you know you needed to change somehow. It knows the part of you that’s trapped underneath it all, under all that pain and incongruence. The part that you need to be 100%. To be whole. To be real.

It knows it, even if you don’t. Even if you still won’t let yourself. You won’t free that part of yourself, and until you do that, you won’t reach 100%. It knows what you need, even if you still somehow have no idea.

And so, it acts accordingly— reach into your brain and scan the deepest parts of you, diagnose, prescribe, calculate, and inject— all just four seconds after the combat stims fade for just long enough to give you time to look down at your body and remember how much you hate it.

it keeps doing this— every time you plug into the interface, a little more of that self you need to let yourself be is freed, a little more of your body is changed to give you one that is truly what the AI knows needs to be yours.

You don’t know why, but your chest has started feeling a bit sore ever since you started piloting