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“Why are you a pilot?”
That’s the question every pilot asks. To each other; to themselves. It’s an absurd question, a shibboleth of a culture that only they can see. They ask themselves the question to forget the awful truth, to obscure it with the fiction that asking might make sense. It’s an invitation to imagine reasons to exist, in defiance of the unlivable reality that this life was forced upon them. Not one of them has ever had a choice.
The question isn’t; it’s a promise. A promise that after every bloodstained sortie, after every sister lost, there will be comfort. That when they’re dragged from their mechs shivering and numb, when their insensate bodies are violated with impunity, when they’re thrown into storage to await the next indignity, the others will hold them tight as they try to feel again. It’s a promise that no matter what they’re made to do outside the hangar doors, no matter what claims the law makes of their status or their rights, even if their treatment makes them question it themselves, when they’re with one another they are people.
Today, Xi-1A4’s reason is her family. Not her original family — if she ever had one, their memory’s been burned out of her by cybersomatic interference — but one she just made up, which is almost better. There are three of them, two moms and a brother, because three seems like a nice number to have: small enough to track amid the chaos in her head, but big enough to make for some excellent stories. Xi-1A4 loves stories, and she loves to tell them.
It’s just the two of them in the room right now, and so she’s telling the new girl, called Delta-3D3, about the time Mom took them all camping, and forgot to pack the dishes. They laughed around the fire as they ate from their mugs with twigs for chopsticks, and it became a running joke. In fact, Mother and Brother both gifted mugs for her birthday that year, and 3D3, she insists, should have seen Mom’s face.
It’s a fun story, the kind she loves to tell, and Delta-3D3 badly needs to hear it, because the poor girl’s barely hanging on. She’s ripped off her filthy plugsuit and wrapped herself haphazardly around Xi-1A4’s body, desperately feeling for the warmth of Xi’s skin against her own. Xi-1A4 strokes her arm lovingly with her nails, pressing just enough to cause a little twinge of pain, because that’s the way it’s done. A girl she’s forgotten, whose body and memory have long since turned to ash, once did the same for her, and the ritual lives on because it works.
Delta-3D3 was tossed back into storage fifteen minutes prior, crusty with drying acceleration gel and sticky with a mess of other people’s fluids. Her desync-shocked brain needs to be grounded with a sensation strong enough to cut through all the numbness, and her violated soul needs to feel the kindness of another.
Delta-3D3 laughs weakly as Xi finishes her story, and she tries to speak but the words don’t flow. She stutters for a moment, then pounds the floor with a weak fist in frustration, so Xi-1A4 quiets her with a kiss on the cheek, which smells disconcertingly of urine. There are showers in the barracks, but those are for people and the pilots don’t have access; it’s the ground crew’s job to hose them off, a task they frequently neglect. From the visible afterglow on the face of the woman who returned her, it’s not hard to guess why Delta-3D3 wasn’t given that dignity.
It’s not hard to guess the whole story, really; same as it always is. 3D3’s mech will have suffered damage, or her performance wasn’t good enough, or any other flimsy justification to mete out punishment. There’s only one punishment, and it’s never one-on-one. Delta-3D3 will have been pulled from her cockpit, dragged around the hangar, and raped until whoever’s there got bored. It’s one of the few things constant enough in Xi-1A4’s life to stick in her memory; she’s been touched in every place she has, penetrated with flesh and tool alike, forced to taste an endless parade of disgusting sweaty things. She’s been dragged around in a collar, she’s been shocked and she’s been beaten, she’s been fucked atop the gantry to a chorous of applause. Each time, when it’s over, the others give her comfort.
Each time, the greatest humiliation is the knowledge that moments earlier, she could have crushed them all to bloody pulp with one wave of her hand. Leaving the cockpit feels like dying and waking up in hell. It’s like having her limbs cut off, and worse ones grafted on. Her rich melange of razor-sharp senses snuffed out one by one, replaced with a body that can barely tell when it’s hungry. Each time she leaves her cockpit, straining against everything to feel her weapons, or the power in her core, she’s reminded of her place in the world.
One moment, a steel goddess; the next one, just a victim.
Eventually, Delta-3D3 manages to speak. “What was your brother’s name,” she asks, and Xi-1A4 replies, melancholically, “I don’t know any names.” Names were the first things she lost: the names of others, then her own. Every person is a pilot, or they’re “sir”. She only knows one name now, and it’s sacred, for it’s Hers.
Aurora. Her other self. Her mech.
Delta-3D3 looks at her, aghast. “The story wasn’t real?”
She strokes her arm. “It never is.”
“Then why?”
“Because real’s just… this. Real is what just happened to you, what’s going to keep happening until you burn away and die. Because real is a nightmare, and stories are fun.”
Delta-3D3 shuts her eyes a while, thinking it over. When she opens them again, she understands.
“Tell me more about your family,” she says. She’s trying for a smile.
“I will,” Xi says, and smiles warmly back, “but first, I have a question.”