The Engineer

The Engineer

I catch a glimpse of the pilot as she is wheeled towards the med bay. Her eyes have that telltale glaze of just having been wrenched out of herself.

I've never spoken a single word to her, but for a brief moment as the gurney slides by, those eyes briefly clear, ice blue pinning me to the spot. She raises an emaciated arm and her hand almost seems to beckon to me before something in the gurney clicks and whirs and she slips back into catatonia.

That brief moment of clarity, that piercing gaze, unsettles me. She recognized me.

It's neural bleed. I know it has to be. She doesn't know me, but Morrigan does.

Good god. In the pilot's present state of post combat haze, she probably doesn't even know where she ends and the machine begins.

Does neural bleed work both ways? Is it her head that I'm about to climb into?

My wrist strap buzzes. I have a job to do and I am late.

The pilot is a problem for the med team and the psychs.

The machine is my problem.

I hurry down the corridor, keeping my head down, avoiding the eyes of every passerby.

I don't like people.

I don't like how their eyes follow me. I don't like the whispered gossip that follows me.

One of the techs is waiting for me at the vestibule.

I don't know his name.

All clear, he says to me. Time to work your magic.

He says it without sarcasm. Others have been less kind.

Even so, he can't quite hide the leer as I strip down to the skinsuit. I don't have the physique of a pilot. My body hasn't been subjected to the stresses that ravage their bodies. Unlike them, I have fat and muscle and the skinsuit clings to every curve of my body.

I force a cursory smile and try to forget him as I walk barefoot to my destination.

The vestibule is small, windowless. It's impossible to assess the scale of the machine from here. The only part visible to me is roughly four square meters of pitted and scarred metal plating framing the access hatch and the pilot's cradle beyond.

B0-987T the stenciled lettering reads. And below, in flowing script, is “The Morrigan”.

She's a Javellin class, medium weapons fire support unit. She isn't meant to be on the front lines in a skirmish, but one-on-one, she can hold her own against a Wraith. Which is exactly what happened only a few hours ago.

I place a bare palm on the bulkhead. She thrums with some distant vibration. Her reactor is still online, still in the early stages of drawdown as she transitions to dock power.

“Hey beautiful,” I say to her.

I think of the pilot. I think of piercing blue eyes and I think of neural bleed.

I flinch my hand away.

The tech looks at me, asks if I'm alright. I'm fine, I tell him.

I climb through the hatch and into the cradle.

I feel like an interloper here. The cradle isn't calibrated for my body. Everything still smells like the pilot. Mingled with the smell of the machine is her sweat and her adrenaline and the particular scented soap that she prefers.

There is a faint whirring as her cameras track my movements from a dozen angles. The access ports open to receive me.

Against my better judgment, I imagine eagerness for this exchange.

This is immediately followed by an all too familiar sense of inadequacy. The engineers’ rig is not nearly as all encompassing as a pilots’. It's only the most basic neural interface. No haptics. No neurotransmitter feedback. No access to the suite of sensors studded throughout her hull.

I can't interface with her the way her pilot can.

My rig is a remnant from basic training. The pilot corps wanted me for my exceptional ratings in synchrony and neuro-elasticity, but after serval training exercises, they determined that I didn't have the temperament for the battlefield. I froze up too easily.

A neural rig is a massive investment and removing one will fuck a person up a hell of a lot more than installing one. The selection process is designed to weed out washouts before we even get to installation, but some of us still slip through the cracks. Most end up reassigned to logistics, operating loader mechs or piloting long haul supply frigates. But my aptitudes made me ideal for the engineering corps, so here I am.

Morrigan senses my mood and the cradle shifts slightly, aligning itself to my dimensions. Her eagerness to connect morphs into a sort of tender reassurance. It's a slippery slope, ascribing human emotions to these machines, but she does seem genuinely happy to see me.

I can never be part of what she and her pilot have, but I can be part of something in my own way.

The pilot knows about me, she would even without neural bleed. Does she envy the relationship I have with her mech? Does she envy that I can exist both together and apart with the machine?

Is she jealous of us?

Morrigan slips her jacks into my rig and my mind enters hers and I feel tension leave my body. Some dull ache that I wasn't even consciously aware of ebbs within me.

My senses dull and my visual cortex is fed a series of diagnostic logs and telemetry streams. The techs have access to the exact same data, but Morrigan highlights particular data points that she and the pilot flagged. I log them in the engineering report.

A wireframe schematic of the battlefield spreads out in my awareness. Green markers for our battlegroup. Red markers for the pack of Wraith interlopers.

I hear the ghost of music, strange and ambient, like whale song. The first time I heard it, I asked the techs about it. They had no idea what I was talking about. One even suggested I get an eval for some psych leave.

Later I realized Morrigan was singing to me. Or rather she was interpreting tightbeam comm links as something my brain could process. A human mind can't possibly interpret the full datastream, but with Morrigans's rendition, I can suss out the basic meanings. The battlegroup is a choir and Morrigan is playing me their song.

I caused quite a stir when I first made that connection and started flagging battle events the analysts had missed.

I survey the battlefield before me, reconstructed from feeds from TacCom and all the individual mechs.

Morrigan and I have done this enough times that she knows my preferred display layout, but she holds back, allowing me to pull off the virtual displays on my peripheral vision. There's an odd sort of intimacy to it, her letting me take charge like this.

God-knows how many tons of metal and ceramic and miles and miles of wire and optic fiber and see waits eagerly for me to start the playback sim. She wants to show off. She wants me to assess the actions of her and her pilot and tell them they did well.

Other engineers, few as we are, have mentioned similar experiences with their assigned machines.

“Alright,” I whisper so that only she can hear. “Show me the dance. Sing me the song.”