Stupid Fangirl Nonsense

After we got the Valkyrie towed 'inside', a process that took all three of our heavy loaders and the skifftruck, some of the uncles went to work with the arc cutters on the crown. We figured after being down for three hours now if the pilot still hadn't ejected already something must be really wrong, so we set ourselves to the task of getting them out.

"Ay cousins!" one of the uncles shouted. "Get a chain over here and we can pull this cut plate out!"

Theresa tossed a coil and hooked it on to the crane while I threw it up the scaffold to uncle Rica.

"Estra," they said after catching the chain. "Come up here and help us get this thing open."

I took off up the rails of the scaffold, right as the crane started pulling at the plate.

"Alright take it up Theresa!" uncle Ortega called out.

The slack pulled out of the chain and there was a heavy groaning noise on both ends before the cutout of the plate snapped loose and flew past our heads.

We waited for a moment in silence to see if someone was gonna crawl out or something. "Hello!" Uncle Theo shouted towards the hole in the Valkyrie's crown "We're from Claret Family Salvage, "he continued. "We towed you out of the desert and we're just looking to make sure you're alright yeah?" Another prolonged minute of no response before he passed me a torch. "Hey Estra, take a look inside, Goddess knows I'm too fat to squeeze in that hole," he added the last part with a chuckle.

I laughed in return before taking the light from him and sticking my head down in the gap. The inside wasn't particularly large, no bigger than my bunk honestly. I didn't see any panels or controls or even a chair to sit on. Which should have struck me as odd at the time but I guess I must have glossed over it. Half of the space was taken up by a large, bulbous looking sack of some sort. But I saw no people, living or otherwise. I pulled my head back out of the hole. "Get that chain over here, and some drop lights. I'm going down in there."

Five minutes later cousin Martine and I were inside the crown, a few drop lights hung on the walls.

"So... where is the pilot?" Martine asked.

"You're the mech fanboy," I replied. "You tell me."

"I dunno man, there's no controls or anything in here," He said. "What's this thing?" He pointed at the sack.

It was attached to the ceiling and part of the back wall of the crown, up close I could see a reinforced, rubbery green texture to it that almost looked like it was... sweating?

"Condensation maybe?" Martine asks, gesturing to the wet sheen of it.

I reached up to run my hand across it and a small zap of static arced from my fingers to the sack, and the whole thing suddenly convulsed violently.

"Fuck!" Martine shouted as we both jumped back. "Goddess, what the fuck is that?"

I had a hunch and I didn't like it. Nerves twisted in my stomach as I stepped towards it. I raised my torch up and after a moment's hesitation I pressed the bezzle into the rubbery material, the whole thing lit up like a sickly green lamp and I gasped in horror as I made out the humanoid shadow inside it. Without thinking I pulled the knife off my harness and drove it into the material as shallowly as I could before running it across the bag. As soon as it opened this viscous gel, thicker than oil poured out all over the floor, followed immediately by a mass of cables and a mostly naked human body.

"Estra what the fuck??" Martine shouted again.

"Get the doctors!" I shouted up to the uncles before kneeling next to the body. "Martine help me get these cables untangled from them."

He knelt down on the other side and started tracing the various tube with his hands, trying to get them loose. I put the fact that they looked borderline emaciated out of my mind while I started looking over the only thing resembling a piece of clothing or armor which was the visorless, full helmet fully incasing their head, with more cables coming out of it, I could see some fasteners on the side of it and went to go undo them before Martine spoke up again. "Estra," he said shakily, a pale horror in his voice. "Look..."

I looked over to where he was holding his light to see one of the cables he'd traced and where it ran straight into the pilot's spine. "What the fuck..." I mumbled looking at the series of other connectors coming off the length of their boney spine. I quickly began looking over the pilot before I noticed something on their arm. I pulled my light over it to see a tattoo in bold back lettering.

VALKYRIE CORE MODULE NO. 7723

"Martine..." I said feeling sick. "It's not a pilot..."

"What do you mean they're not a pilot?!?" He shouted, equal parts fear and confusion.

I know I’m not supposed to talk to the cores. It’s not like they’re even conscious when Cloning and Development delivers them here to Neural Programming, but what can I say? I’m a softy. And also the best at what I do so I’m not in any risk of losing my job.

I drive the neural spike up and into 7723’s skull.

There’s an access point at the base of the spine, a little soft spot that isn’t there in a human. An artificial fontanelle. Bleeds a little, but sterile waldos hovering in the surgical ring around me automatically such it up. My hands deep in the actuators I send a test pulse into the core, and it flops obediently in the harness that holds it up there. Reading come back, I see the connection is good. Of course it is. I’m good at my job.

I remove my hands from the actuators, send them flicking across twin displays. The brain is structured for this, empty, pliant, built for receiving. And I’m about to teach 7723 everything it would ever need to know. I hit play on the routine, and put my feet up as my programmed course starts, the core moving as, in a dream, in learns how to fly a Valkyrie.

I’m about two hours in when I notice the fault. A tiny little thing. Those brains are supposed to be identical, but cloning is never exact. I sigh all the same, they’re supposed to catch this, cull them before they reach me. The entire point of Project Laika Come Back is to produce repeat labor results. I am just about to hit the reject but and report this to QC when I freeze.

It’s late in the day. I want to go home. The neural architecture isn’t baseline but that’s C&D’s fault. I just happened to notice it. And it’s not like 7723 has responded to the programming with anything out of the expected. Green across the board.

I lean back in my chair, put my feet up again. I’m good at this. I will keep being good at this. No need to report what isn’t my problem. And if this bitch fucks up in the field it’ll be on C&D, not me.

Doc's says he can't tell how old she is, says she's built sorta like a teenager, but between the malnourishment and the fact that she's vatborn it's impossible to actually tell.

One thing's for sure, she learns at a terrifying rate. Two weeks ago I was watching her propped up on the floor while one of the little cousins barely five, was showing her how he sorts his colored blocks. Today, she's reading. Doc says that if she had any vocal cords she'd probably have been talking within a few days.

I'm trying to stay out of sight at the moment, it always feels a little unsettling how she just stares at you with those green eyes, the whites stained an almost mint color from the oxygenated gel they had her suspended in. It seems like she's always trying to analyse you, I'm not sure whether that's from a curiosity or a preprogrammed threat analysis response.

And considering she spent Weaver knows how long plugged into a 400 ton war machine, I don't want to assume and guess wrong.

"Hey Estra," Martine shakes me out of my thoughts. "Walk with me, I wanna show you this thing I've been working on." I follow him to his little corner of the workshop where he has the control harness from the Valkyrie half dismantled on a bench and an old EVA exoframe laying on a table near it. "I think I'm onto something. I might be able to get her walking again."

That definitely gets my attention. "What do you mean? Get who walking?"

"Pi!" he says excitedly. "If I can reverse engineer the motor-control functions that her brain passes through the control harness I might be able to translate that signal into the controls for this exoframe."

A cold horror settles into my stomach as his plan becomes clearer in my head.

"It's not a one to one of course," he says, continuing, entirely oblivious to the nightmare taking shape in my mind. "There's no feedback or sensory control, and it might put a lot of strain on h-"

"Absolutely fucking not!" I shout, cutting him off.

"What?" he's confused. "Estra I-"

"I don't care Martine! The fact that she's ninety percent vegetative is a boon to us right now," I exclaim. "We don't know what the Colonials put in her head, what if she kills us all in our sleep?"

"Estra... she's just a kid," he says.

Kevin Dalton lay down on the operating table and gave the labtechs a thumbs up. Good kid, brave, loyal, family-guy, or at least that’s what the file said. To be honest, he didn’t matter much. He looked good on camera and he had a working brain. We could have had a million like him. What mattered was his sister.

I wasn’t in the surgery team. Even back then C&D was doing their own thing. I was watch from the observation room above, safe behind a two-way mirror. I watched as the lead gave the kid a last friendly fist-bump, lied to him that the drugs they were about to administer would feel a little like a shot of adrenaline, like he was about to be in a fight, and then sedated him.

Of course, it’s trivially easy to close a genetic copy of Kevin Dalton in a vat. We had his genes on file from when he enlisted, that would be easy. But what then? Then we have an infant, and even if we waited thirteen, fourteen years, trained it, molded it to by a pilot, it still would be no better than baseline human pilots were in all the sims. And that was not what we were after. We needed to modify, to iterate, and for that we needed useful points of comparison. A baseline. Say, an identical twin.

In the surgery suite the labs were doing non-invasive brain scans. They had done all this before, of course, but still, more data was always good. They wanted to see one last time how Kevin Dalton’s brain worked before they took it apart.

So, that was the idea. To build a better pilot we’d need a fairly unique brain. To do that we’d need a fully analyzed brain that we could construct over, and over, and over again, and slightly modify each time as quality checking process. Thousands of times if we were at all successfully. And we’d have two brains this way, identical save for the part we’d isolated in Amy. The part that had, we were fairly sure, made her apply for the Gender Affirmation Packet when she’d enlisted. Just a little bonus we could, if we wanted, turn on or off at will in the brains we’d make that we’re, roughly, patterned off these two.

Beyond the glass window I watched with mild interest as the techs opened Kevin Dalton’s skull and began to dissect his brain. Cell my cell, layer, he was being undone, and the data fed into a vast database. Random chance in neural development would not bother us. We could make this brain as many times as we wanted.

Not that Kevin Dalton would ever live again, no. We’d test, iterate, refine. The first few hundred cores never even got to me for their training. Turn off the section of the brain that handled empathy. Pull away everything you didn’t want. See how badly the results broke, slowly add stuff back. Experiment, validate. Switch segments of the brain off, then on again. Add data from his sister, twist, turn, play.

And in the end we got what we wanted, of course. Sometime north of a thousand the results started to become predictable, standardized, neat. No memories of Reclaimed Nebraska, of course, nothing anyone who had known either of the Daltons would have recognized, had anyone asked, which no one did. No, this was sleek. This was quick and predatory and controllable.

That is to say, more accurately, I take care of the cradles when the cores aren’t on deployment. They come back, the bay teams get the Valkyries settled, the handler inputs the code to open a hatch, and then the girls become my responsibility.

I call them girls ‘cause that’s what they look like to be, in the infrared when I can see through the protective shock gel and amnion. No idea if they self-identify any particular way. No idea if they can. Similar enough to be sisters.

I have four of them, on this deployment. 8998 is my favorite. She kicks while she sleeps, while I’m monitoring the levels, injecting nutrients into the fluid she dreams in. I talked, just once, with the Handler about that. He said that, naturally, as I make sure, they’re sedated and asleep between deployments. I check those meds and regularly up them myself, so no surprise there. Said that, as I expected, the pseudamphetamines and complex dopaminergic stimulants I also check wake them up just before a deployment, drugged to the gills.

But he also speculated that, for a mind like that, combat must feel like the best wet dream feels to us. Or perhaps the best high, the best drug trip. All of them rolled into one together. Unreal in it’s sheer unrelenting intensity. For a mind like that, maybe recuperating in the soft, amniotic sleep of the cradle feels more like waking, and their time awake feels like a dream. He liked that, I thought. Creep. I didn’t talk to him again after that.

9009 and 9010 are nice, easy, predictable. Each deployment they consume the precise amount of polypeptides, saccharides, carbohydrates, proteins expected. Just a top off for them. Deep down I know I’m damned already for what I’ve done, that I’m no better just following orders and doing my job than the Handler. But it makes it easier when the job’s at least predictable.

We’re over some god-awful colony or post-colonial terraform botch-job of a world right now, I think. I don’t pay much attention to that. I’m focused on the last girl I’m responsible for keeping alive. 8998 might be my favorite, but she’s not the oldest, not the Handler’s favorite.

I look at 7723, as I pull my access probe from the cradle, and initiate the self-repair protocol, the last checks. I can see her, through infrared cameras at least, but I’ve never seen her. Not with my eyes. I don’t have access to their drop numbers, either. That’s all classified way above me.

So what I know is this. 7723 is the oldest core we have. Each deployment she comes back with her cortisol levels way, way in the red. As near as I can figure that should make her defective, candidate for immediate replacement. But she’s still here. She keeps coming back. Handler keeps defending her, requesting her back. Her bones are jello, muscles atrophied, her hormones are out of wack, I regularly flag reports that indicate her body is autocannibalizing and breaking down muscle mass to try to keep itself alive. She’s a wreck and Handler and the political officer have kept her here.

“Alright,” Victor, the Scav leader that controls this whole zone speaks. “So, who wants to talk about the Valkyrie?” He’s a greasy thug. Him and all his men. We outnumber them almost ten to one. But they have the guns.

“Well you se-,”

“No no, Ortega,” Victor interrupts. “You are much too good at lying. How about…” he spins around pointing at us all dramatically, before stopping at Theresa. “There we go!” He says. “You, girlie, tell me about the Valkyrie.”

I can see her swallow from nervousness. Theresa doesn’t normally have to deal with the Scavs, but she just happened to be in the repair bay with us at the time. At least none of the little cousins are here. Martine is supposed to be with Pi, I can only hope they’re hiding.

“W-well,” she begins. “It crashed.”

“We are off to a thrilling start,” Victor says with a sneer. The two goons he brought this time chuckling along.

“We dragged it out of the sand,” Theresa continues. “And started breaking it down…. For you!” She adds when he looks at her expectantly.

“I like where this is going so far,” he smiles at her, black greasy teeth showing. I can only imagine how bad his breath must smell. “And what about the pilot?” He asks.

Theresa turns and looks at me, I nod. “There wasn’t a pilot,” she answers.

“Hmmm,” he makes a show of tapping his chin with his pistol. Before he strikes her across the face with it. “Wrong answer.”

I flinch to move towards her and he aims at me. “Ah ah, let’s just stay calm.”

“Victor,” Uncle Rica pleas. “They’re just kids.”

“They’re gonna be dead kids you don’t answer me.” He points his gun at the machine. “You got a Valkyrie, that means there’s a Valkyrie pilot. So you can get it to me, or your family gets smaller.”

I don’t pretend to know why the Weaver does what she does. Most of the family are big believers, me not so much. But why she chose that moment to have Pi come stumbling into bay chasing a sand cricket with Martine chasing after her, I will never know.

“Pi, please,” Martine begged. “Let’s go back to the bunk.”

A month in and she was all pale skin, thin limbs, and mechanical grace, with a brown fuzzy head. Her hair had started growing now that she was outside of the goo. Martine managed to work some kinks of the neural interface with her frame but it still wasn’t a one to one match for the Valkyrie. Doc said she shouldn’t use it too much, too much strain on her brain.

“And it’s my lucky day huh?” Victor says, striding over to Pi. “You got a new member of your family huh?” He asked, grabbing Pi by the wrist and hoisting her damn near up in the air. “She looks a little pale to be one of yours Rica,” he says, dragging her out in the open. “Hey what’s this on her arm huh? ‘Valkyrie Core Module’,” he says with a laugh. “Guess I found the pilot.

I don’t remember much of what Victor said over the next few minutes. I was too busy watching in terror as Pi got yanked around by a man twice her size.

She didn’t look scared, just confused. Those green eyes thinking, analyzing. Flitting from Victor to the goons to all of us frozen in fear.

I blinked and she had his machete out of its sheathe. A heartbeat later and his whole arm was severed clean at the shoulder. Before my next breath the machete was buried to the hilt in the chest of the Scav fifteen paces away. I blinked again and the other Scav was pinned to the wall by a chunk of hullplate heavier than he was.

Pi was standing in the middle of it all, we’d barely seen her move.

It had taken her zero effort.

It was like crushing a bug.

I ran up to her, checking for any injuries that by all rights I knew she wouldn’t have before throwing my arms around her. “Thank the Weaver you’re okay.” I said.

She didn’t seem to know how to respond to hugs, no matter who was doing the hugging. She was just semi-limp whenever it happened.

That’s what usually happened at least.