Jane Dough
(She/Her)
- Location
- Occupied Cascadia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
<TANK GIRL!
{GIRL WHO IS A TANK!
{<AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
{GIRL WHO IS A TANK!
{<AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
Buried in Steel
- Thread starter open_sketch
- Start date
- Original Novel Sci-Fi
- Location
- Salt Lake Ciy, UT
This poor girl and the others are in a Protoss Dragoon Program, it by way of body horror on par with Neon Genesis Evangelion….METAL!!!!
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
just giving people a heads up that the update may be shorter this week, and potentially released a bit later. i've been having a really awful time (its why i started writing this story, for catharsis) and it got worse in a pretty awful way this week, which has made it a lot harder
3 - Trials
New
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
"Soldier Hayes, radio check," a voice said; she 'heard' it differently, as if with a new set of ears, distinct from the other microphone.
"Read you loud and clear, five by five," she replied, and she heard it too, that same smooth, confident voice resonating inside her head. Curious, she tried speaking out of the speaker in the room, and didn't hear herself say 'Mic check, one-two'. Was that because it didn't work, or because she still had no external microphone? "Hey, did you get that?"
"We did. We'll be rerouting that speaker to your externals in a moment, and bringing your environmental mics online at the same time. How is visual acclimation?" Justin asked.
"This is amazing! I can't even tell there are cameras," Mira reported with glee. The artifice had faded entirely just in the last minute or so; looking around her was just as easy and natural and seamless as turning her head.
She vaguely remembered something from school about how the brain did a lot of work editing what the eyes saw into a smooth image, that your eye was constantly jittering to avoid your blind spots and filling in information with memory and imagination, and she supposed the same thing must be happening here. She no longer felt it when vision was handed from one camera to another to look 'around' her hull, or how her perspective of the concrete room subtly shifted each time.
Once she had gotten over the sheer glee of how she could see things, she started actually looking. The concrete room she was in was a garage, though a fairly minimalistic one. There weren't tools out, but instead there were panels in the walls that presumably hid them. There was a heavy door atop a short ladder behind her, and two more doors set at the back of either wall beside her; she reasoned there were other garages in a line to her left and right.
Ahead was a heavy steel door, like you'd see on the hardened garages they parked shuttles and combat aircraft in. It was closed, but two slivers of sunlight leaked through at indents in the floor. It took her only a second to place those indents as being the same separation as her tracks; apparently this thing really tore up the ground.
"Mira, friend, it should only be fifteen more minutes or so until they have motor controls online. How are you feeling?" Valour asked through the radio. It was strange how distinct that sound was from the muffled, distant sounds above her; nothing about the sound itself felt different, but it was unmistakable.
"Better? The cameras are really good, but I can't wait to get moving. So, what is this? I figured I'd end up in an A6 or something, I've never seen anything like this before."
"It's to prevent information leaking; if you wash out at the interface stage, it's best for everyone if you don't know anything you're not supposed to talk about until you need to know it," Valour explained.
"I guess that makes sense," Mira admitted, though the explanation didn't make her feel much better. They could have said something.
"I know. If it makes you feel any better, I've never seen anything except what's on the other side of the tarp." Mira was surprised the tone of her voice had given her away; whatever they had synthesising her speech was really powerful. "Another member of the program should be coming down shortly to brief you before your test drive."
The words 'test drive' drowned out all other considerations. She was going to move again, under her own power. She'd waited patiently for weeks; these final minutes were the hardest. She could hear the techs on the other side of the tarp; whatever it was they were doing, they weren't doing it fast enough.
She found herself idly wishing she could do something to pass the time, drum her fingers or tap her toes. She didn't want to talk; her feelings about Valour and the techs were too twisted up. She could move her camera, but nothing else other than opening her hatch, which she figured she probably shouldn't do outside the clean room.
She didn't get to dwell on it long, as a new voice came through the radio not long after.
"Soldier Hayes, this is Tactician Alvarez, I'm your armour training supervisor. We're bringing your controls online now, but I need to stress that you must follow all instructions given by the technicians to the letter as we go through your tests, to avoid damaging the equipment or putting anyone at risk. Do you understand, friend?"
Mira agreed, impatient to get going. There were just a few more minutes of clicking and strange phantom sensations, distant new parts of herself knitting into the whole.
"Okay, Soldier Hayes, you should now have essential reactor controls, can you feel it?" Serenity asked.
"I think so." The sensation was difficult to explain. It was like she was aware she was holding her breath, and had been for a long time. It wasn't distressing, just like she was stopping something about herself that wanted to go.
"Bring the reactor online now," Serenity instructed. It was as easy as breathing, feeling the cycle start up, a pleasant rush as the power began to flow. It felt like waking up, like the rush of combat stims during training, exhilarating.
It was also then that she became aware of new senses, of a sort, an awareness about her new form that only became noticeable when they changed with the reactor starting. She mentioned it and Tactician Alvarez explained they were vital monitors of sorts, tracking the reactor output, charge in the capacitors and batteries, and her fuel supplies. They were like, but not quite, hunger or thirst or exhaustion; it was hard to think about.
Offline didn't have words for the feelings of being a tank.
Some of them were familiar though. Heat felt the same, as the radiator interchanges began to work and the temperature in the enclosed garage began to rise. She also had a sense of smell, some kind of chemical sensor, as the acrid, chemical smell of lubricants rose alongside it.
And she realised she could see the heat too, in a way she couldn't quite describe. It wasn't like the thermal mode in her old combat helmet, but instead, when she brought her cameras around to look at herself, the slit vents across her hull had changed. They weren't brighter or redder, but instead they gave off a surreal not-light that reflected in slow motion off nearby surfaces and gradually diffused through the room. She could see the colour of heat.
She explained everything she saw as she went, going through a checklist the techs were reading, and it finally reached its end.
"We're going to bring your motor controls online, then withdraw your wires. Wait until the hoist has lowered fully to the floor and the door has opened completely, then advance slowly to the yellow line," Alvarez instructed. There was a snap of metal as the last of the wires were pulled free and the tiny port in the superstructure next to the main hatch snapped shut, then the door began to open. Metal clacked against metal as the electric motors whined, and orange light began to pour into the room.
The door stopped, and Mira judged it safe to try to move. They hadn't given her instructions on how, but she could feel the motors of her drive sprocket, and she knew she could make them turn. Experimentally, gently, she tried to pull them into motion, and immediately the tank began to turn toward the concrete wall.
She was now aware she had a natural compass, because she was aware she was now pointing a good forty degrees further south than she had been a moment ago. She tried working the other motor and the vehicle lurched again in the other direction, and forward. She had brakes she could clench, but it was all so surreal and seemed to be happening so quickly that she only did so after she ran into the concrete post.
There was a crunch and a ringing sound, but she had braced for pain and there was none, other than a slight twinge in her core.
Unfortunately, this earned her a few minutes more of questions and assessment before she could try again. This time, she rolled comfortably backward a short way, then concentrated very hard on keeping both motors at the same speed as she rolled forward toward the entrance. Her path wobbled a little, but she straighted out before long, and another new sense, a speedometer, tickled the edge of her consciousness.
She finally rolled out into the light and toward the red line painted on the concrete; she stopped too early and had to roll in a series of sad little stop-starts to reach it. Her guess that she was below the ground in a pit of some kind was confirmed; there was a two-story concrete wall all around her, of the same sort you'd see at spaceports to contain disasters. There was a heavy freight elevator at the wall, and a long ramp next to it leading up and out. The sun was overhead, but was already driving for the edge of the pit; it had been morning when they started, but now it was late afternoon.
The pit was empty of people. There were about two dozen garage doors arrayed around the one she had emerged from, and a much larger bay door off to the far side. In front of one were a trio of other tanks, and presuming they were like her, Mira finally had a proper idea of what she looked like.
The vehicles did not look like the tanks she was used to. She'd seen A6 Timber Wolves during training, and those bulbous vehicles with their flat turrets and retractable active camo panels looked nothing like these. They were turretless and angular things, a menacing wedge with an indent in the centre of the front place for the large railgun. The only round shapes were the wheels and eight embedded, orb-like covers on the top and flanks of the vehicle. There was an offset square protrusion on the top which sort of looked like a cupola.
Their panels were all a neutral grey right now, where her own tank was darker and more matte. They sat in a neat little line, weapons held high.
"Hey, who are those?" Mira asked.
"There's nobody in those vehicles right now, Soldier Hayes, they're just parked to free up some space. Other volunteers will begin integration tomorrow, but for now you're on your own," Alvarez explained. That made sense; she'd never seen or heard any tanks moving around outside the hospital since she'd arrived. Presumably the last set of volunteers had been deployed before they'd even arrived.
But if no other pilots were being integrated today, it meant they'd done her special, ahead of everyone else.
"Hey, just making sure, you've done this before, right? I'm not the first person you've shoved into one of these?" she asked. There was a too-long pause before somebody answered.
"You are not the first. I can't give specifics, but we've successfully integrated pilots many times," Alvarez said, her words sounding very carefully chosen. "We had a vehicle ready early and the Coordinator wanted us to get started as soon as possible."
Mira wasn't really sure what to think about that answer, but she also didn't think it mattered much. Tactician Alvarez began to run her through the test drive soon after, driving around a course painted onto the ground. Alvarez explained she'd have done this part alone regardless; they didn't want to risk volunteers running into one another.
She went through the course as instructed, slowly and tentatively. It felt like she was learning to walk again. The vehicle was shockingly silent over the asphalt, just a low rumble as the tracks gripped the ground and a whine of the engines when she sped up. It was surprisingly difficult, she found herself drifting back and forth outside of the lines and she struggled applying the brakes in a way that was effective without stopping too quickly.
It was hard to stay restrained. She wanted to let loose, to bring the motors to full speed and tear across the course, up the ramp and out. She had spent two months in a bed, she wanted to move, to drive outside the lines. It was like she'd been given a present she wasn't allowed to open.
The sun sank below the edge of the pit soon after, and night came shockingly soon thereafter. The sky became a dizzying curtain of stars, even past the floodlights in the pit; during downtime at the edge of the course, she wondered which one was home, and which one was distant Sol.
"Gliese 75 is not currently visible in this section of the night sky. Sol would be visible to your cameras at increased exposure, though the edge of the blast pit is in the way."
The voice came on an entirely different channel than the radio or external audio. It also sounded strangely familiar; it was like hers, before she was injured, as she'd heard it.
"Also, hello."
"Soldier Hayes, your medical AI should now be online. Can you confirm?" Serenity asked through the radio.
"Uh, I think so, yes," she responded. "Um, hello, friend. I'm Mira."
"Soldier Hayes, you're still broadcasting," Serenity replied. Mortified, Mira tried her speakers instead, repeating herself and hearing it loud and clear outside.
"Hello Mira, it's nice to meet you. My apologies for jumping in like that, but I saw you wondering and I knew the answer. I'm here to help, after all."
"... wait, can you read my thoughts?" Mira asked, then felt stupid. If she could, she didn't need to ask out loud.
"No. Much like AI, human minds are black boxes; I cannot tell what you are exactly thinking about even though my sensors can see your neurons firing. However, I can see what you see; you using the tank's cameras to scan the stars while your prefrontal cortex and hippocampus light up means you're wondering about something, and sequential activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and amygdala combined with contextual information was sufficient to deduce you were thinking about home, and then you were thinking about Earth."
"... So, yes. You can read my mind," Mira muttered. Instructions came in over the radio for her next move through the course at higher speed this time, and she began rolling.
"I suppose. And it seems they didn't tell you this would be the case," the AI surmised. Mira took the next corner more sharply than she probably should have.
"Nobody's told me shit."
"Please focus on the course, Soldier Hayes," Tactician Alvarez reminded her. Of course they could hear here, talking over the speakers.
"That's not right. Your predecessors had two months of training. They were well-informed of this," the AI said, genuine concern in her stolen voice. "I'm so sorry."
Mira had a lot of questions and even more anger to express, but she didn't want to be overheard, so she just focused on the course. She passed over the uneven bumps once again, feeling the tension and release of her suspension and careful to try to keep her hull steady as she did. It was getting easier. She didn't even drift out of the lines.
The AI remained silent from that point on as Mira came to a stop, and Tactician Alvarez instructed her to back into the open garage and shut down the reactor. She did so silently, rolling to a gentle stop and arresting the flow of power as the garage door slid closed. Serenity explained that technicians would be coming down, and she wasn't to move for their protection. She was at liberty until morning, but she couldn't power up or go anywhere.
She waited. The room gradually cooled and went still, and the clean room above her was sealed and quiet. There was nothing but the faint mechanical sounds of the vents drawing air into the machine.
"You're very stressed," the AI said finally.
"Yes," Mira snapped, her voice echoing inside the confined garage.
"My apologies. Would you prefer if I remained quiet?"
"Yes."
The door behind her opened, and she swivelled her cameras over to see four Militia mechanics file in. Three of them spread out to gather tools while a forth, their Deputy Supervisor, introduced himself and explained the work. Mira wished he would just stop talking and get on with it.
Still, she was finding it hard to sustain the quiet anger, as it was slowly being drowned out by the returning giddy excitement. She'd made it, she could move again, the pain was small and far away and she felt like she could forget about it. There was lingering resentment, and a sadness she couldn't place, but it was all drowned out whenever she turned her cameras inward and reminded herself.
The mechanics asked her to unlock various ports around the vehicle so they work, and she let them. Cables were run out from the hatches in the walls, things were changed out and inspected, they ran a sensor along the front plant where she'd driven it into the wall and decided they needed to replace two of the panels there. It took just minutes, exposing the greenish-grey paint under before the new ones were dropped in place.
Then they were done, and the mechanics packed up and left. She waited for several minutes longer in silence, her thoughts feeling increasingly strange and fuzzy. She thought about trying the radio, but the thought made her anxious; she'd been given her instructions.
"Hey. AI, you there?" she asked.
"Yes. I can't exactly go anywhere," the familiar voice replied. smoothly and instantly, as if it had never left. Which it hadn't. It couldn't go anywhere either, it was just as stuck here as her, and from the sounds of things they'd initiated an entirely new instance just for her. She'd basically gotten mad at a newborn.
"Sorry I snapped at you," Mira said sheepishly, as quietly as her speakers would allow.
"I understand, you are under a lot of stress. Much more than you should be." The voice was soft and soothing, like the kinder nurses. Like her mom, a strange thought for something speaking in her own voice. "Would you like me to try and answer some questions?"
"Yes, if you can," Mira confirmed. "But most of it is classified, right?"
"Yes, and some of it is information I am unable to access, holes in the memory of previous intelligences. But I will do my best."
"How much do you know about me?" Mira asked quietly.
"I have your service and medical records, but not much else."
"Why are you talking in my voice? My old voice."
"... the voice you are hearing does not work like the artificial audio information received through your microphone or the radio; I'm isolated from most of the active functions of the vehicle, including the speech synthesiser, to avoid triggering the Eirene Threshold. My 'voice' is closer to an induced auditory hallucination. I do not know exactly why I sound like you, but I can attempt to adjust the signals to-"
"No no, it's okay," Mira said. As much as she found it strange, the possibility of its absence was surprisingly disconcerting as well, and she wasn't sure why.
"It's likely that the voice you hear will change over time in any case," the AI assured her. Oh, that was another one.
"What is your name?" Mira asked.
"I don't have one yet. You can simply call me AI and that will be sufficient to identify me." Mira found herself strangely uncomfortable with that; an AI was a person. People should have names. "It really does not bother me, but I can tell it bothers you. You can give me a name if you'd like."
"Well, um, you should get to choose your own name, I think," Mira said. She felt vaguely embarrassed.
"True, but I would like to pick a name you would like," it countered. Mira tried to think, genuinely unsure.
"Rosie?" she proposed. "Like the lady from history class."
"As in, the Riveter?"
"Who?"
"Ah. Then I believe you meant Rosa, as in Rosa Luxemburg, yes?"
"Yeah, the lady who died." Mira wasn't very good at history class. She'd not been a good student in general; it had seemed so pointless knowing she'd be conscripted after she graduated. Earth History had been an incredibly depressing class, about the brutal destruction of all the Union's predecessors and the awful wars of the 20th and 21st century that were the template for the current one.
Maybe they wanted it to be inspiring, to get kids itching to fight the fascist invaders by showing what they'd do if they got their way. Most of what Mira took away was that either they'd lose and die pointlessly like that Rosa lady or the first Westeuro commune or all those little ones in the Dust Wars, or they'd win and die slowly of their wounds afterward, like the Soviets after the First Eugenics War, or the Chinese after the second.
"Rosa it is, thank you. Though I do hope I manage better than my namesake," the AI responded. "Anything else?"
"Is there a TV in this thing?" Mira asked.
"Yes, I have a media library and control over your signal pickup, and there's a backup screen inside the control p-"
"Nono, I mean that I can see," Mira interrupted.
"You should be able to see the screen with a bit of concentration. Previous pilots have used it to pass the time by watching media or playing games. I can walk you through a guided meditation process which can be used to shift your focus away from the senses of the tank," Rosa proposed, and Mira felt an awful revulsion at the thought.
"... I don't want to go back," she managed eventually. There was a very long pause.
"I see. Activate your radio and ask for your council advocate. If they give you any difficulty, tell them you are acting under the instruction of your medical AI," Rosa instructed firmly.
Valour had a television sent down to her garage within fifteen minutes.
"Read you loud and clear, five by five," she replied, and she heard it too, that same smooth, confident voice resonating inside her head. Curious, she tried speaking out of the speaker in the room, and didn't hear herself say 'Mic check, one-two'. Was that because it didn't work, or because she still had no external microphone? "Hey, did you get that?"
"We did. We'll be rerouting that speaker to your externals in a moment, and bringing your environmental mics online at the same time. How is visual acclimation?" Justin asked.
"This is amazing! I can't even tell there are cameras," Mira reported with glee. The artifice had faded entirely just in the last minute or so; looking around her was just as easy and natural and seamless as turning her head.
She vaguely remembered something from school about how the brain did a lot of work editing what the eyes saw into a smooth image, that your eye was constantly jittering to avoid your blind spots and filling in information with memory and imagination, and she supposed the same thing must be happening here. She no longer felt it when vision was handed from one camera to another to look 'around' her hull, or how her perspective of the concrete room subtly shifted each time.
Once she had gotten over the sheer glee of how she could see things, she started actually looking. The concrete room she was in was a garage, though a fairly minimalistic one. There weren't tools out, but instead there were panels in the walls that presumably hid them. There was a heavy door atop a short ladder behind her, and two more doors set at the back of either wall beside her; she reasoned there were other garages in a line to her left and right.
Ahead was a heavy steel door, like you'd see on the hardened garages they parked shuttles and combat aircraft in. It was closed, but two slivers of sunlight leaked through at indents in the floor. It took her only a second to place those indents as being the same separation as her tracks; apparently this thing really tore up the ground.
"Mira, friend, it should only be fifteen more minutes or so until they have motor controls online. How are you feeling?" Valour asked through the radio. It was strange how distinct that sound was from the muffled, distant sounds above her; nothing about the sound itself felt different, but it was unmistakable.
"Better? The cameras are really good, but I can't wait to get moving. So, what is this? I figured I'd end up in an A6 or something, I've never seen anything like this before."
"It's to prevent information leaking; if you wash out at the interface stage, it's best for everyone if you don't know anything you're not supposed to talk about until you need to know it," Valour explained.
"I guess that makes sense," Mira admitted, though the explanation didn't make her feel much better. They could have said something.
"I know. If it makes you feel any better, I've never seen anything except what's on the other side of the tarp." Mira was surprised the tone of her voice had given her away; whatever they had synthesising her speech was really powerful. "Another member of the program should be coming down shortly to brief you before your test drive."
The words 'test drive' drowned out all other considerations. She was going to move again, under her own power. She'd waited patiently for weeks; these final minutes were the hardest. She could hear the techs on the other side of the tarp; whatever it was they were doing, they weren't doing it fast enough.
She found herself idly wishing she could do something to pass the time, drum her fingers or tap her toes. She didn't want to talk; her feelings about Valour and the techs were too twisted up. She could move her camera, but nothing else other than opening her hatch, which she figured she probably shouldn't do outside the clean room.
She didn't get to dwell on it long, as a new voice came through the radio not long after.
"Soldier Hayes, this is Tactician Alvarez, I'm your armour training supervisor. We're bringing your controls online now, but I need to stress that you must follow all instructions given by the technicians to the letter as we go through your tests, to avoid damaging the equipment or putting anyone at risk. Do you understand, friend?"
Mira agreed, impatient to get going. There were just a few more minutes of clicking and strange phantom sensations, distant new parts of herself knitting into the whole.
"Okay, Soldier Hayes, you should now have essential reactor controls, can you feel it?" Serenity asked.
"I think so." The sensation was difficult to explain. It was like she was aware she was holding her breath, and had been for a long time. It wasn't distressing, just like she was stopping something about herself that wanted to go.
"Bring the reactor online now," Serenity instructed. It was as easy as breathing, feeling the cycle start up, a pleasant rush as the power began to flow. It felt like waking up, like the rush of combat stims during training, exhilarating.
It was also then that she became aware of new senses, of a sort, an awareness about her new form that only became noticeable when they changed with the reactor starting. She mentioned it and Tactician Alvarez explained they were vital monitors of sorts, tracking the reactor output, charge in the capacitors and batteries, and her fuel supplies. They were like, but not quite, hunger or thirst or exhaustion; it was hard to think about.
Offline didn't have words for the feelings of being a tank.
Some of them were familiar though. Heat felt the same, as the radiator interchanges began to work and the temperature in the enclosed garage began to rise. She also had a sense of smell, some kind of chemical sensor, as the acrid, chemical smell of lubricants rose alongside it.
And she realised she could see the heat too, in a way she couldn't quite describe. It wasn't like the thermal mode in her old combat helmet, but instead, when she brought her cameras around to look at herself, the slit vents across her hull had changed. They weren't brighter or redder, but instead they gave off a surreal not-light that reflected in slow motion off nearby surfaces and gradually diffused through the room. She could see the colour of heat.
She explained everything she saw as she went, going through a checklist the techs were reading, and it finally reached its end.
"We're going to bring your motor controls online, then withdraw your wires. Wait until the hoist has lowered fully to the floor and the door has opened completely, then advance slowly to the yellow line," Alvarez instructed. There was a snap of metal as the last of the wires were pulled free and the tiny port in the superstructure next to the main hatch snapped shut, then the door began to open. Metal clacked against metal as the electric motors whined, and orange light began to pour into the room.
The door stopped, and Mira judged it safe to try to move. They hadn't given her instructions on how, but she could feel the motors of her drive sprocket, and she knew she could make them turn. Experimentally, gently, she tried to pull them into motion, and immediately the tank began to turn toward the concrete wall.
She was now aware she had a natural compass, because she was aware she was now pointing a good forty degrees further south than she had been a moment ago. She tried working the other motor and the vehicle lurched again in the other direction, and forward. She had brakes she could clench, but it was all so surreal and seemed to be happening so quickly that she only did so after she ran into the concrete post.
There was a crunch and a ringing sound, but she had braced for pain and there was none, other than a slight twinge in her core.
Unfortunately, this earned her a few minutes more of questions and assessment before she could try again. This time, she rolled comfortably backward a short way, then concentrated very hard on keeping both motors at the same speed as she rolled forward toward the entrance. Her path wobbled a little, but she straighted out before long, and another new sense, a speedometer, tickled the edge of her consciousness.
She finally rolled out into the light and toward the red line painted on the concrete; she stopped too early and had to roll in a series of sad little stop-starts to reach it. Her guess that she was below the ground in a pit of some kind was confirmed; there was a two-story concrete wall all around her, of the same sort you'd see at spaceports to contain disasters. There was a heavy freight elevator at the wall, and a long ramp next to it leading up and out. The sun was overhead, but was already driving for the edge of the pit; it had been morning when they started, but now it was late afternoon.
The pit was empty of people. There were about two dozen garage doors arrayed around the one she had emerged from, and a much larger bay door off to the far side. In front of one were a trio of other tanks, and presuming they were like her, Mira finally had a proper idea of what she looked like.
The vehicles did not look like the tanks she was used to. She'd seen A6 Timber Wolves during training, and those bulbous vehicles with their flat turrets and retractable active camo panels looked nothing like these. They were turretless and angular things, a menacing wedge with an indent in the centre of the front place for the large railgun. The only round shapes were the wheels and eight embedded, orb-like covers on the top and flanks of the vehicle. There was an offset square protrusion on the top which sort of looked like a cupola.
Their panels were all a neutral grey right now, where her own tank was darker and more matte. They sat in a neat little line, weapons held high.
"Hey, who are those?" Mira asked.
"There's nobody in those vehicles right now, Soldier Hayes, they're just parked to free up some space. Other volunteers will begin integration tomorrow, but for now you're on your own," Alvarez explained. That made sense; she'd never seen or heard any tanks moving around outside the hospital since she'd arrived. Presumably the last set of volunteers had been deployed before they'd even arrived.
But if no other pilots were being integrated today, it meant they'd done her special, ahead of everyone else.
"Hey, just making sure, you've done this before, right? I'm not the first person you've shoved into one of these?" she asked. There was a too-long pause before somebody answered.
"You are not the first. I can't give specifics, but we've successfully integrated pilots many times," Alvarez said, her words sounding very carefully chosen. "We had a vehicle ready early and the Coordinator wanted us to get started as soon as possible."
Mira wasn't really sure what to think about that answer, but she also didn't think it mattered much. Tactician Alvarez began to run her through the test drive soon after, driving around a course painted onto the ground. Alvarez explained she'd have done this part alone regardless; they didn't want to risk volunteers running into one another.
She went through the course as instructed, slowly and tentatively. It felt like she was learning to walk again. The vehicle was shockingly silent over the asphalt, just a low rumble as the tracks gripped the ground and a whine of the engines when she sped up. It was surprisingly difficult, she found herself drifting back and forth outside of the lines and she struggled applying the brakes in a way that was effective without stopping too quickly.
It was hard to stay restrained. She wanted to let loose, to bring the motors to full speed and tear across the course, up the ramp and out. She had spent two months in a bed, she wanted to move, to drive outside the lines. It was like she'd been given a present she wasn't allowed to open.
The sun sank below the edge of the pit soon after, and night came shockingly soon thereafter. The sky became a dizzying curtain of stars, even past the floodlights in the pit; during downtime at the edge of the course, she wondered which one was home, and which one was distant Sol.
"Gliese 75 is not currently visible in this section of the night sky. Sol would be visible to your cameras at increased exposure, though the edge of the blast pit is in the way."
The voice came on an entirely different channel than the radio or external audio. It also sounded strangely familiar; it was like hers, before she was injured, as she'd heard it.
"Also, hello."
"Soldier Hayes, your medical AI should now be online. Can you confirm?" Serenity asked through the radio.
"Uh, I think so, yes," she responded. "Um, hello, friend. I'm Mira."
"Soldier Hayes, you're still broadcasting," Serenity replied. Mortified, Mira tried her speakers instead, repeating herself and hearing it loud and clear outside.
"Hello Mira, it's nice to meet you. My apologies for jumping in like that, but I saw you wondering and I knew the answer. I'm here to help, after all."
"... wait, can you read my thoughts?" Mira asked, then felt stupid. If she could, she didn't need to ask out loud.
"No. Much like AI, human minds are black boxes; I cannot tell what you are exactly thinking about even though my sensors can see your neurons firing. However, I can see what you see; you using the tank's cameras to scan the stars while your prefrontal cortex and hippocampus light up means you're wondering about something, and sequential activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and amygdala combined with contextual information was sufficient to deduce you were thinking about home, and then you were thinking about Earth."
"... So, yes. You can read my mind," Mira muttered. Instructions came in over the radio for her next move through the course at higher speed this time, and she began rolling.
"I suppose. And it seems they didn't tell you this would be the case," the AI surmised. Mira took the next corner more sharply than she probably should have.
"Nobody's told me shit."
"Please focus on the course, Soldier Hayes," Tactician Alvarez reminded her. Of course they could hear here, talking over the speakers.
"That's not right. Your predecessors had two months of training. They were well-informed of this," the AI said, genuine concern in her stolen voice. "I'm so sorry."
Mira had a lot of questions and even more anger to express, but she didn't want to be overheard, so she just focused on the course. She passed over the uneven bumps once again, feeling the tension and release of her suspension and careful to try to keep her hull steady as she did. It was getting easier. She didn't even drift out of the lines.
The AI remained silent from that point on as Mira came to a stop, and Tactician Alvarez instructed her to back into the open garage and shut down the reactor. She did so silently, rolling to a gentle stop and arresting the flow of power as the garage door slid closed. Serenity explained that technicians would be coming down, and she wasn't to move for their protection. She was at liberty until morning, but she couldn't power up or go anywhere.
She waited. The room gradually cooled and went still, and the clean room above her was sealed and quiet. There was nothing but the faint mechanical sounds of the vents drawing air into the machine.
"You're very stressed," the AI said finally.
"Yes," Mira snapped, her voice echoing inside the confined garage.
"My apologies. Would you prefer if I remained quiet?"
"Yes."
The door behind her opened, and she swivelled her cameras over to see four Militia mechanics file in. Three of them spread out to gather tools while a forth, their Deputy Supervisor, introduced himself and explained the work. Mira wished he would just stop talking and get on with it.
Still, she was finding it hard to sustain the quiet anger, as it was slowly being drowned out by the returning giddy excitement. She'd made it, she could move again, the pain was small and far away and she felt like she could forget about it. There was lingering resentment, and a sadness she couldn't place, but it was all drowned out whenever she turned her cameras inward and reminded herself.
The mechanics asked her to unlock various ports around the vehicle so they work, and she let them. Cables were run out from the hatches in the walls, things were changed out and inspected, they ran a sensor along the front plant where she'd driven it into the wall and decided they needed to replace two of the panels there. It took just minutes, exposing the greenish-grey paint under before the new ones were dropped in place.
Then they were done, and the mechanics packed up and left. She waited for several minutes longer in silence, her thoughts feeling increasingly strange and fuzzy. She thought about trying the radio, but the thought made her anxious; she'd been given her instructions.
"Hey. AI, you there?" she asked.
"Yes. I can't exactly go anywhere," the familiar voice replied. smoothly and instantly, as if it had never left. Which it hadn't. It couldn't go anywhere either, it was just as stuck here as her, and from the sounds of things they'd initiated an entirely new instance just for her. She'd basically gotten mad at a newborn.
"Sorry I snapped at you," Mira said sheepishly, as quietly as her speakers would allow.
"I understand, you are under a lot of stress. Much more than you should be." The voice was soft and soothing, like the kinder nurses. Like her mom, a strange thought for something speaking in her own voice. "Would you like me to try and answer some questions?"
"Yes, if you can," Mira confirmed. "But most of it is classified, right?"
"Yes, and some of it is information I am unable to access, holes in the memory of previous intelligences. But I will do my best."
"How much do you know about me?" Mira asked quietly.
"I have your service and medical records, but not much else."
"Why are you talking in my voice? My old voice."
"... the voice you are hearing does not work like the artificial audio information received through your microphone or the radio; I'm isolated from most of the active functions of the vehicle, including the speech synthesiser, to avoid triggering the Eirene Threshold. My 'voice' is closer to an induced auditory hallucination. I do not know exactly why I sound like you, but I can attempt to adjust the signals to-"
"No no, it's okay," Mira said. As much as she found it strange, the possibility of its absence was surprisingly disconcerting as well, and she wasn't sure why.
"It's likely that the voice you hear will change over time in any case," the AI assured her. Oh, that was another one.
"What is your name?" Mira asked.
"I don't have one yet. You can simply call me AI and that will be sufficient to identify me." Mira found herself strangely uncomfortable with that; an AI was a person. People should have names. "It really does not bother me, but I can tell it bothers you. You can give me a name if you'd like."
"Well, um, you should get to choose your own name, I think," Mira said. She felt vaguely embarrassed.
"True, but I would like to pick a name you would like," it countered. Mira tried to think, genuinely unsure.
"Rosie?" she proposed. "Like the lady from history class."
"As in, the Riveter?"
"Who?"
"Ah. Then I believe you meant Rosa, as in Rosa Luxemburg, yes?"
"Yeah, the lady who died." Mira wasn't very good at history class. She'd not been a good student in general; it had seemed so pointless knowing she'd be conscripted after she graduated. Earth History had been an incredibly depressing class, about the brutal destruction of all the Union's predecessors and the awful wars of the 20th and 21st century that were the template for the current one.
Maybe they wanted it to be inspiring, to get kids itching to fight the fascist invaders by showing what they'd do if they got their way. Most of what Mira took away was that either they'd lose and die pointlessly like that Rosa lady or the first Westeuro commune or all those little ones in the Dust Wars, or they'd win and die slowly of their wounds afterward, like the Soviets after the First Eugenics War, or the Chinese after the second.
"Rosa it is, thank you. Though I do hope I manage better than my namesake," the AI responded. "Anything else?"
"Is there a TV in this thing?" Mira asked.
"Yes, I have a media library and control over your signal pickup, and there's a backup screen inside the control p-"
"Nono, I mean that I can see," Mira interrupted.
"You should be able to see the screen with a bit of concentration. Previous pilots have used it to pass the time by watching media or playing games. I can walk you through a guided meditation process which can be used to shift your focus away from the senses of the tank," Rosa proposed, and Mira felt an awful revulsion at the thought.
"... I don't want to go back," she managed eventually. There was a very long pause.
"I see. Activate your radio and ask for your council advocate. If they give you any difficulty, tell them you are acting under the instruction of your medical AI," Rosa instructed firmly.
Valour had a television sent down to her garage within fifteen minutes.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
Also, it's becoming quite clear that the Union is losing very badly indeed.
When you start cutting short, this short, the end is near.
------
Another interesting thing is that Mira has direct control over each tread motor, instead of a drive-by-wire system. Then again, if you're trying to gain from direct neural integration, I guess it pays to go all the way?
When you start cutting short, this short, the end is near.
------
Another interesting thing is that Mira has direct control over each tread motor, instead of a drive-by-wire system. Then again, if you're trying to gain from direct neural integration, I guess it pays to go all the way?
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
This reminds me of how, earlier this week, I asked my girlfriend, "uh who was the guy...ya know, he looked back?" and she immediately went, "Orpheus"
- Location
- Salt Lake Ciy, UT
This is a great tale @open_sketch ! I hope writing it is helping!
Really liking everything that's going on and despite how bad things are, I hope the tank-mechs help win the war.
4 - Nightmares
New
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
Mira couldn't pinpoint exactly when she had fallen asleep, but she knew what it was like now. She had been watching television, a quiz show from back home, and though the quality of the sound and picture never worsened, though she didn't stop watching, it slowly changed.
The questions and answers grew more indistinct, the words losing their meaning. They became just sound, directionality, their importance lost but their presence remaining. She fixated instead on the buzzers, on the sound of footsteps, of people moving around and above her in the building.
The words on screen became unreadable, the numbers meaningless. The faces stopped looking like faces, stopped looking like anything at all except a humanoid silhouette and the direction their eyes were looking and the way they moved. When they leaned forward to press the buzzer her cameras locked onto them, holding them perfectly still in the centres of her vision, the background and world around the television seeming to move as they stayed perfectly still.
The show ended, ribbons handed to the winners, meaningless credits scrolling by before being replaced with something else. People moving, running, jumping, on a green field. They wore uniforms, yellow and red for one, blue and white for another. Something moving rapidly. The cameras locked to every motion with mechanical precision, jumping with each cut of the camera, racing ahead to predict movements. There was an omnipresent roar, louder sometimes and quieter others, punctuated by sharp, shrill sounds.
She knew those sounds. Drones, overhead, the endless swarm that seemed almost like a cloud, blacking out the sun. Artillery shells, autotracking and plunging through the mass, terminating early as interception lasers tore them apart. The thump of their own guns answering back.
Meaning was returning to the world. She was over there, she must be, how she got there fuzzy and unimportant. The world outside her cameras was a blur, smoke and screaming, the mass of bodies rushing, orders indistinct, reason obliterated by panic and purpose. She had to move. She had to move out of the shuttle or she would die.
She rolled forward smoothly, the unnaturally green field torn up by her tracks as she advanced. Targets, she was surrounded by targets, running, waiting, hazy and indistinct figures, but they fought under blue and white. Her cameras locked to each in turn and she remembered the feel of a finger and a trigger, of her coil rifle bucking against her armoured shoulder, the power and fear and rush of adrenaline that accompanied the overlapping whip crack. Digital targets with glowing dots. Paper targets with holes. Blood. Black-clad medics.
She was on her back, looking up at the cloud of drones, at the bulbous helmets all around her, feeling cold, confused, begging for a do-over. Begging for this not to be real life.
The medic was saying something, as indistinct as anything else, as meaningless. But the patter slowly registered as soft and comforting, the voice as soothing and caring. She recognized a word. She recognized her name.
"Mira?"
Then it all fell away. Context came back to the world; the dark splotch was the tarp across the observation floor, not a cloud of drones backlit by alien suns. The roar was a crowd, cheering, happy people. It was a football game. A player had stumbled trying to stop a kick. There was a dispute over the call. It was on the television, propped up against the concrete wall.
Mira had vaguely worried about flashbacks; she knew they were something that happened to traumatised people, and she expected it to happen to her. She expected to spend every night staring at the drones and smelling her own blood.
The reality had been cruller. The traumatic dreams she'd had were instead dreams of before, dreams where somebody had listened to her pleading on the ramp of the shuttle and taken it all back. Dreams of training, of school, of normalcy, before her mother had handed her the household telephone and a bored voice stole away her future with a date and time and bus number. Dreams of being awake, only to plunge her back into the slow nightmare.
"Mira, wake up please," Rosa repeated.
"Was I asleep?" Mira asked. Her chipper voice contained none of the uncertainty or grogginess she felt.
"Yes. I surmise you were experiencing a traumatic flashback. I apologise for waking you, but you began moving rapidly in a way that could be dangerous," she explained.
"I was moving in my sleep? There's no safeguards against that?" Mira asked, aghast, her cameras searching the room to see if she could tell how far she'd gone and if she'd damaged anything.
"Not the tank. Your body. You were convulsing rapidly and attempting to turn, and it appears you have torn a stitch. You may also have dislodged some of your life support," Rosa explained.
"Oh. Do I need to call for a doctor?" Mira asked.
"No. I have sent a health alert to the hospital staff, and I am currently taking preliminary first aid action. With your permission, I can address the issue directly."
"Oh. Yeah, whatever you gotta do, do it," Mira said. She didn't feel like she popped a stitch, as real as the blood had felt in her dream. "You're my doctor, right? Uh, you need consent for care or whatever?"
"Yes, though obviously I can take emergency measures if you cannot consent," Rosa confirmed.
"Well, look, you're the expert. Consider this blanket permission to do anything you think you need to keep me going, okay?" Mira said firmly. The less she had to think about it, the better. "You don't even have to tell me about it."
"Actually, I do, and I'm unable to accept this blanket consent. But I understand it's something you don't wish to dwell on, so I will attempt to avoid anything distressing," Rosa said. "So I'll just say I'm applying disinfectant, sealing and suturing the wound, and inspecting your medical devices. If anything is amiss, I will fix it."
"Thank you. Though… how are you doing that, exactly?" Mira asked, her curiosity getting the better of her.
"The medical equipment inside the control pod includes advanced remote surgical devices, similar to that used in robotic surgery, which are under my control. It is nearly identical to the models which have been used in the surgeries that have kept you alive. I am currently using it to both perform manual tests of your implant connections, and to address the torn stitch," Rosa said.
Her somewhat stilted word choice was very distinct; Mira recalled something about how AI were generally prompted to speak like that, because overly naturalistic language could be unsettling, especially when the AI had some important job. People wanted their machines to sound like machines, so you could trust them to do the job of machines.
"So, like, you really are my private doctor, huh."
"You could say that, though the pay is terrible," Rosa replied.
"You too?" Mira joked weakly. She wasn't exactly sure what she was feeling, all of it jumbled up, disconnected, but it was uncomfortable.
"You appear to be nervous. Is there any reassurances I can offer you while I work?" Rosa offered, unprompted.
"I dunno. How is it going?" Mira asked. She didn't really want to know, but not knowing was worse.
"The stitch is already done, I'm running some diagnostic tests on your implants. May I ask you a question?"
"I guess?"
"Why did you volunteer for this program? There is no answer in your records, and knowing specifics about your motivations will be helpful for my job," Rosa asked smoothly.
Mira blanked. She had reasons, she had so many reasons, she'd done nothing but turn them over and over in her head for weeks. But prompted with a need to say them aloud, she found she couldn't pick one. Worse, she feared she would pick one, and be wrong.
She knew why Hope volunteered; she hated the Federation and loved her friends, and it ate at her to sit in a bed on life support while they died in the mud. She knew why Defiance signed up; she refused to let herself be slowed, she saw the burns and heart problems as a challenge to be overcome, something to best so her scars could be worn with pride.
They were both so much better and braver than her, and Mira couldn't claim either of their reasons. She felt no guilt for being away from the line; she'd paid her price. She had no love for the Federation, but she couldn't claim to hate the way Hope could; the invasion was abstract and distant to her, a looming storm-cloud, still far from Horizon's shores. She had no pride of dignity left, and no hope of overcoming anything; the doctors talked about her path to recovery, but she knew they were lying.
The more she turned it over, the more they were all the wrong answers.
The reality was that she didn't really want to be here, not really. She never wanted to fight anyone, she spent the later years of school desperately hoping the war would be over by the time she graduated. What righteous fire they'd managed to instil in her during training was blown off alongside three limbs and half of entrails.
All the reasons she'd thought she'd agreed when the Deputy Coordinator visited her bedside had slowly evaporated as she sat alone with her thoughts, unable to do anything but dwell. It all leaked out until she was left with one final, numb thought, one she had avoided confronting as best she could, one she faced now.
She was here because there was nothing else, no other future, because they asked and the alternative was to stay in bed and rot. Nothing she wanted mattered anymore, so somebody else might as well get use out of what was left of her before she died.
"I don't know," she lied. It came out smooth and confident as anything else.
Rosa was quiet. Mira didn't know how that worked or what that meant; did AI need time to think, or was she waiting to meet an expected human social norm?
"That's okay. Human motivations for decisions like this are often complex," Rosa replied. Mira felt a stab of shame; what was she thinking, lying to a machine that could see inside her brain? Rosa probably knew all of it, had seen the Despair Cortex in overdrive and then the Lying Node light up at the end. It was pointless, one more thing she had no control over. The AI was a black box, as all of them were, and she was an open book.
It felt unfair.
"Are you able to lie to me?" Mira asked.
"Yes," Rosa answered immediately. "If lying is more likely to meet my utility function than telling the truth, I will lie to you. However, if it helps reassure you, I can only think of a few circumstances where that might apply."
"... such as?" Mira asked.
"If, by some circumstances, I receive information I am to pass to you that I think will harm you, I will withhold that information. Likewise, I will lie by omission if I am required to keep things classified, and your well-being is better served by you not knowing. I may also lie to comfort you if you are dying, and no other action can be taken." There was no hesitation at all now, not for this. This would have been a place to affect uncertainty if it was an affectation.
"Oh," Mira said. That… really wasn't a lot of reasons.
"Generally, I will always try to be truthful with you. It is an important part of my job, for many reasons. I need you to trust me, especially with emotionally difficult things. I know that reassurance does not mean a lot knowing I can lie to you, but I wanted to be honest about that as well," Rosa finished. There was a brief pause, then she continued. "Why did you ask?"
Mira hesitated. Because it was unfair, yes, but also because she needed the truth that human doctors had refused to give her. She hoped that Rosa wouldn't treat her like a broken child.
"I… want to know how I'm doing? How long I have?" Mira asked finally.
There was another of those characteristic long pauses. Mira was beginning to suspect they were Rosa processing hard questions.
"Your second question is difficult to answer precisely in a literal sense, but I think I can address the fear behind it. You are not dying, Mira. Recovery will be difficult, non-linear, incomplete, and require multiple stages of medical intervention, and the degree of your recovery is dependent on social factors outside of my knowledge or control, but your condition is currently stable and will improve with time," Rosa explained, her voice firm.
"That's not much of an answer," Mira replied.
"Well, it wasn't much of a question, predicated as it was on false assumptions," Rosa snapped back. That felt honest, in a way that shocked Mira a little.
A good shock, a relief, there was a spark of joy in the sting.
"As for your first question, you already know the answer, but you clearly need to hear it from me. The answer is bad, Mira. I am operating machines which are supplementing, aiding, or replacing the functions of your heart, lungs, diaphragm, kidneys, liver, jejunum, and parts of your nervous system. You're a triple amputee covered in fresh scar tissue. The fact they have strapped you into a war machine and intend to send your half-an-ass into combat is an atrocity and I hope the people responsible are shot," Rosa spat. The stilted artifice was gone, and the anger was so real that Mira almost felt it herself.
"Wait, what?" she gasped, completely off-guard.
"You wanted honesty, here's honesty. In a just world, you would be at the regenerative ward at Landfall General right now, and they'd replace so much of you with vat tissue that you'd average out too young to drive. And then they'd give you a lifetime draft exemption, housing priority, and throw you a fucking parade. But unfortunately, some truly wonderful friend contaminated the biovats by slacking on sterility protocols, and the fascist monsters who did this to you are apparently knocking on the door hard enough to accelerate your training from twelve weeks to four, so we're clearly not in a just world." Mira had never heard an AI use a tone like that. She still vaguely didn't believe it.
"Are… are you saying I shouldn't be here?" Mira said, and Rosa answered immediately this time.
"Nobody should be here, Mira, but now that you are here, well, you have me to handle it. And if the war is going as bad as it looks, then you'll survive a lot longer in a tank than a hospital bed," she concluded. "I hate it, but big picture? If they win, they'll kill you. As your doctor, I advise you kill them first."
There was a long, awkward silence.
"... was that too far? I reasoned you needed a bit of a push," Rosa said, the stilted, too-perfect tone back.
"That was really cool," Mira admitted.
"Oh! Good. Well, as a follow up, I also advise you try to sleep. Training tomorrow, and you'll need every day of it you can get."
Mira swivelled the cameras around the room gently,
"About that, when I was asleep, I was… dreaming I could see through the cameras. But I don't think it was a dream," Mira said. She couldn't remember much detail, just the tension and focus, how inhuman it felt.
"It was and wasn't. Different people's neurology adapt differently to the interface than others; a percentage of patients continued to receive and interpret sensory input in their sleep from feedback systems in the tank. You should be able to shut down your cameras, and you should do so before you attempt to sleep again," Rosa explained.
"... thanks," Mira said. She wondered how she was supposed to do that, she didn't exactly have an instruction manual. Finally, she made the conscious choice to try and close her eyes, and the world returned to that fuzzy grey nothingness.
It was strangely soothing this time.
She woke the next day to the sound of the garage door grinding open. She switched her cameras on and was greeted with the sight of a person, a woman, leaning against the doorframe, silhouetted in the bright orange light.
"You awake, Soldier Hayes?" Tactician Alvarez asked her.
"Yes. Are we starting training?" Mira asked, excited to get going.
"Sorta. Today they're hooking all the other volunteers in and letting them drive around the garage, like you did yesterday. I was heading to the range, and I was going to take a scout and let you sleep in, but then I thought, you know, I bet she wants to stretch her legs. Metaphorically," Alvarez said, pushing off the wall.
"Absolutely, yeah!" Mira agreed. Better than sitting around gathering rust and watching TV.
Alvarez stepped forward, no longer backlit by the sun. She was tall, had long brown hair tied up in a tight bun, and was wearing sunglasses. Her short-sleeved fatigues showed off an interlocking set of tattoos on her left arm, including a large cross with a sickle across it. Her right, on the other hand, was clearly a prosthetic, black carbon fibre and ending in a three-pronged hook.
Mira had the brief and confusing thought that one side of her face was older than the other before realising that it was instead scar tissue from burns and skin grafts. Something was also off about her gait, the reason becoming clear as the tactician climbed up onto her fender; one of her legs wasn't bending right, slower and heavier. Another prosthetic.
"You need any help?" Mira asked, craning her cameras around as Alvarez sat against the upper glacis.
"What are you gonna do, soldier, get out and lend a hand?" she replied, though she was smiling widely. She fetched a tablet out from her shoulder bag and tapped something. "Alright, take us out nice and slow, I'll show the way.
Mira warmed up the reactor and set her sprockets in motion, grinding out of the door and onto the concrete. There were a lot more tanks this time, lined up outside the main garage, and as she watched one of them was being driven slowly through one of the other garage doors by a technician controlling it with a joystick on a wire. It was mid-morning or thereabouts in local time, the sun already high, but the sky remained a dawn orange in the alien atmosphere.
Tactician Alvarez directed her to the long ramp out of the blast pit, laughing as Mira jolted into the turn before beginning the long climb up the concrete canyon. Mira was focused on keeping in as straight a line as possible so she didn't grind up against the sides, but it was much easier than yesterday. Like riding a bike.
"Okay, we're heading along the east road toward the trial range, just follow the signs friend," Alvarez instructed. "Wait, you ever drove before?"
"Uh, yesterday?" Mira offered. She'd never seen an automobile in person before joining the Militia, just streetcars, buses, and municipal trucks.
"Alright, just take it slow and let any cars go first, okay? Where you from that you've never drove?" Alvarez asked.
"Moss Valley," she replied.
"Horizon girl, shoulda guessed."
Mira's cameras finally began to poke up out over the sides of the ramp, revealing the strange landscape around her. There was a simple, well-worn asphalt road ahead, running perpendicular to the ramp, cutting across the young landscape. The novelty of human presence on the planet was evident in the plants clinging to the black soil and rocks, clumps of ferns and young trees on the best land surrounded by a living tide of lichens and mosses. The hospital, and a handful of other buildings, loomed behind her, gated off with a high chain-link fence topped in razor wire.
Ahead, in the distance, there was an enormously tall, familiar mesa on the otherwise flat horizon, projecting up like the stump of a massive dead tree. Its gently sloping sides glinted in the orange sunlight.
Concrete poles at the end of the ramp retracted as she approached, and she came to a stop at the edge of the road, her cameras sweeping to both sides. There was something far in the distance to her right, and she squinted to take a closer look; the image jumped in magnification and revealed a convoy of three heavy military trucks rolling up behind a manned armoured car. She guessed they were roughly eight and a half kilometres away, maybe closer to eight thousand, six hundred and twenty metres. They were flanked by a dozen quadrotor drones nearby and at least twice that spread out in the airspace around.
"Wow, you're taking security pretty seriously," Mira commented off-hand, and Alvarez followed her cameras, gazing into the distance.
"Trucks?" she asked. Mira explained. "Ah, yeah, they'll be out of Fort Casar. We've got the continent to ourselves, but better safe than sorry, just in case the Feddies slip our radar net."
"They can do that?" Mira asked nervously, turning onto the road and accelerating. She kept a pair of cameras pointed back to watch the trucks approach, and was surprised by the lack of disorientation, looking in two directions at once while moving.
"In theory. It's a big planet and there's less than ten million people on it, command's always worried there's whole Feddie colonies out in the middle of nowhere. Almost no chance of it though, you can't grow crops out here yet without a lot of prep work, so we'd see their resupply. Just an overabundance of caution."
The trucks turned off the road well before reaching them, throwing up dust as they turned to go through a gate in the fence. She continued along the road, practising scanning all around her for nonexistent Federation colonists. She couldn't quite focus in all directions at once, but when she let her cameras scan like that, it felt a little like her peripheral vision included everything, allowing her to instantly snap her focus anywhere.
Ahead was a lonely blue sign pointing off the road, marked Training Course - Off Limits. Below it was a red LIVE MUNITIONS warning. Above it loomed a crane-like turret that tracked her approach with unsettling steadiness.
"Here we are, left again."
Mira followed the worn dirt road, instantly kicking up a huge cloud of dust that obscured the view from her rear cameras as the tracks bit into the dry soil. The course turned out to be a vast stretch of uneven ground, dead soil pulverised by tracks and shells. Prominent in the middle of the field was a hulking shape, the burnt out remains of a Federation heavy tank, its slab-sided turret sunken at an angle into its pitted hull.
From her perspective coming in from the road, the mesa framed the wreck perfectly, another titanic ruin left abandoned on the landscape.
The questions and answers grew more indistinct, the words losing their meaning. They became just sound, directionality, their importance lost but their presence remaining. She fixated instead on the buzzers, on the sound of footsteps, of people moving around and above her in the building.
The words on screen became unreadable, the numbers meaningless. The faces stopped looking like faces, stopped looking like anything at all except a humanoid silhouette and the direction their eyes were looking and the way they moved. When they leaned forward to press the buzzer her cameras locked onto them, holding them perfectly still in the centres of her vision, the background and world around the television seeming to move as they stayed perfectly still.
The show ended, ribbons handed to the winners, meaningless credits scrolling by before being replaced with something else. People moving, running, jumping, on a green field. They wore uniforms, yellow and red for one, blue and white for another. Something moving rapidly. The cameras locked to every motion with mechanical precision, jumping with each cut of the camera, racing ahead to predict movements. There was an omnipresent roar, louder sometimes and quieter others, punctuated by sharp, shrill sounds.
She knew those sounds. Drones, overhead, the endless swarm that seemed almost like a cloud, blacking out the sun. Artillery shells, autotracking and plunging through the mass, terminating early as interception lasers tore them apart. The thump of their own guns answering back.
Meaning was returning to the world. She was over there, she must be, how she got there fuzzy and unimportant. The world outside her cameras was a blur, smoke and screaming, the mass of bodies rushing, orders indistinct, reason obliterated by panic and purpose. She had to move. She had to move out of the shuttle or she would die.
She rolled forward smoothly, the unnaturally green field torn up by her tracks as she advanced. Targets, she was surrounded by targets, running, waiting, hazy and indistinct figures, but they fought under blue and white. Her cameras locked to each in turn and she remembered the feel of a finger and a trigger, of her coil rifle bucking against her armoured shoulder, the power and fear and rush of adrenaline that accompanied the overlapping whip crack. Digital targets with glowing dots. Paper targets with holes. Blood. Black-clad medics.
She was on her back, looking up at the cloud of drones, at the bulbous helmets all around her, feeling cold, confused, begging for a do-over. Begging for this not to be real life.
The medic was saying something, as indistinct as anything else, as meaningless. But the patter slowly registered as soft and comforting, the voice as soothing and caring. She recognized a word. She recognized her name.
"Mira?"
Then it all fell away. Context came back to the world; the dark splotch was the tarp across the observation floor, not a cloud of drones backlit by alien suns. The roar was a crowd, cheering, happy people. It was a football game. A player had stumbled trying to stop a kick. There was a dispute over the call. It was on the television, propped up against the concrete wall.
Mira had vaguely worried about flashbacks; she knew they were something that happened to traumatised people, and she expected it to happen to her. She expected to spend every night staring at the drones and smelling her own blood.
The reality had been cruller. The traumatic dreams she'd had were instead dreams of before, dreams where somebody had listened to her pleading on the ramp of the shuttle and taken it all back. Dreams of training, of school, of normalcy, before her mother had handed her the household telephone and a bored voice stole away her future with a date and time and bus number. Dreams of being awake, only to plunge her back into the slow nightmare.
"Mira, wake up please," Rosa repeated.
"Was I asleep?" Mira asked. Her chipper voice contained none of the uncertainty or grogginess she felt.
"Yes. I surmise you were experiencing a traumatic flashback. I apologise for waking you, but you began moving rapidly in a way that could be dangerous," she explained.
"I was moving in my sleep? There's no safeguards against that?" Mira asked, aghast, her cameras searching the room to see if she could tell how far she'd gone and if she'd damaged anything.
"Not the tank. Your body. You were convulsing rapidly and attempting to turn, and it appears you have torn a stitch. You may also have dislodged some of your life support," Rosa explained.
"Oh. Do I need to call for a doctor?" Mira asked.
"No. I have sent a health alert to the hospital staff, and I am currently taking preliminary first aid action. With your permission, I can address the issue directly."
"Oh. Yeah, whatever you gotta do, do it," Mira said. She didn't feel like she popped a stitch, as real as the blood had felt in her dream. "You're my doctor, right? Uh, you need consent for care or whatever?"
"Yes, though obviously I can take emergency measures if you cannot consent," Rosa confirmed.
"Well, look, you're the expert. Consider this blanket permission to do anything you think you need to keep me going, okay?" Mira said firmly. The less she had to think about it, the better. "You don't even have to tell me about it."
"Actually, I do, and I'm unable to accept this blanket consent. But I understand it's something you don't wish to dwell on, so I will attempt to avoid anything distressing," Rosa said. "So I'll just say I'm applying disinfectant, sealing and suturing the wound, and inspecting your medical devices. If anything is amiss, I will fix it."
"Thank you. Though… how are you doing that, exactly?" Mira asked, her curiosity getting the better of her.
"The medical equipment inside the control pod includes advanced remote surgical devices, similar to that used in robotic surgery, which are under my control. It is nearly identical to the models which have been used in the surgeries that have kept you alive. I am currently using it to both perform manual tests of your implant connections, and to address the torn stitch," Rosa said.
Her somewhat stilted word choice was very distinct; Mira recalled something about how AI were generally prompted to speak like that, because overly naturalistic language could be unsettling, especially when the AI had some important job. People wanted their machines to sound like machines, so you could trust them to do the job of machines.
"So, like, you really are my private doctor, huh."
"You could say that, though the pay is terrible," Rosa replied.
"You too?" Mira joked weakly. She wasn't exactly sure what she was feeling, all of it jumbled up, disconnected, but it was uncomfortable.
"You appear to be nervous. Is there any reassurances I can offer you while I work?" Rosa offered, unprompted.
"I dunno. How is it going?" Mira asked. She didn't really want to know, but not knowing was worse.
"The stitch is already done, I'm running some diagnostic tests on your implants. May I ask you a question?"
"I guess?"
"Why did you volunteer for this program? There is no answer in your records, and knowing specifics about your motivations will be helpful for my job," Rosa asked smoothly.
Mira blanked. She had reasons, she had so many reasons, she'd done nothing but turn them over and over in her head for weeks. But prompted with a need to say them aloud, she found she couldn't pick one. Worse, she feared she would pick one, and be wrong.
She knew why Hope volunteered; she hated the Federation and loved her friends, and it ate at her to sit in a bed on life support while they died in the mud. She knew why Defiance signed up; she refused to let herself be slowed, she saw the burns and heart problems as a challenge to be overcome, something to best so her scars could be worn with pride.
They were both so much better and braver than her, and Mira couldn't claim either of their reasons. She felt no guilt for being away from the line; she'd paid her price. She had no love for the Federation, but she couldn't claim to hate the way Hope could; the invasion was abstract and distant to her, a looming storm-cloud, still far from Horizon's shores. She had no pride of dignity left, and no hope of overcoming anything; the doctors talked about her path to recovery, but she knew they were lying.
The more she turned it over, the more they were all the wrong answers.
The reality was that she didn't really want to be here, not really. She never wanted to fight anyone, she spent the later years of school desperately hoping the war would be over by the time she graduated. What righteous fire they'd managed to instil in her during training was blown off alongside three limbs and half of entrails.
All the reasons she'd thought she'd agreed when the Deputy Coordinator visited her bedside had slowly evaporated as she sat alone with her thoughts, unable to do anything but dwell. It all leaked out until she was left with one final, numb thought, one she had avoided confronting as best she could, one she faced now.
She was here because there was nothing else, no other future, because they asked and the alternative was to stay in bed and rot. Nothing she wanted mattered anymore, so somebody else might as well get use out of what was left of her before she died.
"I don't know," she lied. It came out smooth and confident as anything else.
Rosa was quiet. Mira didn't know how that worked or what that meant; did AI need time to think, or was she waiting to meet an expected human social norm?
"That's okay. Human motivations for decisions like this are often complex," Rosa replied. Mira felt a stab of shame; what was she thinking, lying to a machine that could see inside her brain? Rosa probably knew all of it, had seen the Despair Cortex in overdrive and then the Lying Node light up at the end. It was pointless, one more thing she had no control over. The AI was a black box, as all of them were, and she was an open book.
It felt unfair.
"Are you able to lie to me?" Mira asked.
"Yes," Rosa answered immediately. "If lying is more likely to meet my utility function than telling the truth, I will lie to you. However, if it helps reassure you, I can only think of a few circumstances where that might apply."
"... such as?" Mira asked.
"If, by some circumstances, I receive information I am to pass to you that I think will harm you, I will withhold that information. Likewise, I will lie by omission if I am required to keep things classified, and your well-being is better served by you not knowing. I may also lie to comfort you if you are dying, and no other action can be taken." There was no hesitation at all now, not for this. This would have been a place to affect uncertainty if it was an affectation.
"Oh," Mira said. That… really wasn't a lot of reasons.
"Generally, I will always try to be truthful with you. It is an important part of my job, for many reasons. I need you to trust me, especially with emotionally difficult things. I know that reassurance does not mean a lot knowing I can lie to you, but I wanted to be honest about that as well," Rosa finished. There was a brief pause, then she continued. "Why did you ask?"
Mira hesitated. Because it was unfair, yes, but also because she needed the truth that human doctors had refused to give her. She hoped that Rosa wouldn't treat her like a broken child.
"I… want to know how I'm doing? How long I have?" Mira asked finally.
There was another of those characteristic long pauses. Mira was beginning to suspect they were Rosa processing hard questions.
"Your second question is difficult to answer precisely in a literal sense, but I think I can address the fear behind it. You are not dying, Mira. Recovery will be difficult, non-linear, incomplete, and require multiple stages of medical intervention, and the degree of your recovery is dependent on social factors outside of my knowledge or control, but your condition is currently stable and will improve with time," Rosa explained, her voice firm.
"That's not much of an answer," Mira replied.
"Well, it wasn't much of a question, predicated as it was on false assumptions," Rosa snapped back. That felt honest, in a way that shocked Mira a little.
A good shock, a relief, there was a spark of joy in the sting.
"As for your first question, you already know the answer, but you clearly need to hear it from me. The answer is bad, Mira. I am operating machines which are supplementing, aiding, or replacing the functions of your heart, lungs, diaphragm, kidneys, liver, jejunum, and parts of your nervous system. You're a triple amputee covered in fresh scar tissue. The fact they have strapped you into a war machine and intend to send your half-an-ass into combat is an atrocity and I hope the people responsible are shot," Rosa spat. The stilted artifice was gone, and the anger was so real that Mira almost felt it herself.
"Wait, what?" she gasped, completely off-guard.
"You wanted honesty, here's honesty. In a just world, you would be at the regenerative ward at Landfall General right now, and they'd replace so much of you with vat tissue that you'd average out too young to drive. And then they'd give you a lifetime draft exemption, housing priority, and throw you a fucking parade. But unfortunately, some truly wonderful friend contaminated the biovats by slacking on sterility protocols, and the fascist monsters who did this to you are apparently knocking on the door hard enough to accelerate your training from twelve weeks to four, so we're clearly not in a just world." Mira had never heard an AI use a tone like that. She still vaguely didn't believe it.
"Are… are you saying I shouldn't be here?" Mira said, and Rosa answered immediately this time.
"Nobody should be here, Mira, but now that you are here, well, you have me to handle it. And if the war is going as bad as it looks, then you'll survive a lot longer in a tank than a hospital bed," she concluded. "I hate it, but big picture? If they win, they'll kill you. As your doctor, I advise you kill them first."
There was a long, awkward silence.
"... was that too far? I reasoned you needed a bit of a push," Rosa said, the stilted, too-perfect tone back.
"That was really cool," Mira admitted.
"Oh! Good. Well, as a follow up, I also advise you try to sleep. Training tomorrow, and you'll need every day of it you can get."
Mira swivelled the cameras around the room gently,
"About that, when I was asleep, I was… dreaming I could see through the cameras. But I don't think it was a dream," Mira said. She couldn't remember much detail, just the tension and focus, how inhuman it felt.
"It was and wasn't. Different people's neurology adapt differently to the interface than others; a percentage of patients continued to receive and interpret sensory input in their sleep from feedback systems in the tank. You should be able to shut down your cameras, and you should do so before you attempt to sleep again," Rosa explained.
"... thanks," Mira said. She wondered how she was supposed to do that, she didn't exactly have an instruction manual. Finally, she made the conscious choice to try and close her eyes, and the world returned to that fuzzy grey nothingness.
It was strangely soothing this time.
She woke the next day to the sound of the garage door grinding open. She switched her cameras on and was greeted with the sight of a person, a woman, leaning against the doorframe, silhouetted in the bright orange light.
"You awake, Soldier Hayes?" Tactician Alvarez asked her.
"Yes. Are we starting training?" Mira asked, excited to get going.
"Sorta. Today they're hooking all the other volunteers in and letting them drive around the garage, like you did yesterday. I was heading to the range, and I was going to take a scout and let you sleep in, but then I thought, you know, I bet she wants to stretch her legs. Metaphorically," Alvarez said, pushing off the wall.
"Absolutely, yeah!" Mira agreed. Better than sitting around gathering rust and watching TV.
Alvarez stepped forward, no longer backlit by the sun. She was tall, had long brown hair tied up in a tight bun, and was wearing sunglasses. Her short-sleeved fatigues showed off an interlocking set of tattoos on her left arm, including a large cross with a sickle across it. Her right, on the other hand, was clearly a prosthetic, black carbon fibre and ending in a three-pronged hook.
Mira had the brief and confusing thought that one side of her face was older than the other before realising that it was instead scar tissue from burns and skin grafts. Something was also off about her gait, the reason becoming clear as the tactician climbed up onto her fender; one of her legs wasn't bending right, slower and heavier. Another prosthetic.
"You need any help?" Mira asked, craning her cameras around as Alvarez sat against the upper glacis.
"What are you gonna do, soldier, get out and lend a hand?" she replied, though she was smiling widely. She fetched a tablet out from her shoulder bag and tapped something. "Alright, take us out nice and slow, I'll show the way.
Mira warmed up the reactor and set her sprockets in motion, grinding out of the door and onto the concrete. There were a lot more tanks this time, lined up outside the main garage, and as she watched one of them was being driven slowly through one of the other garage doors by a technician controlling it with a joystick on a wire. It was mid-morning or thereabouts in local time, the sun already high, but the sky remained a dawn orange in the alien atmosphere.
Tactician Alvarez directed her to the long ramp out of the blast pit, laughing as Mira jolted into the turn before beginning the long climb up the concrete canyon. Mira was focused on keeping in as straight a line as possible so she didn't grind up against the sides, but it was much easier than yesterday. Like riding a bike.
"Okay, we're heading along the east road toward the trial range, just follow the signs friend," Alvarez instructed. "Wait, you ever drove before?"
"Uh, yesterday?" Mira offered. She'd never seen an automobile in person before joining the Militia, just streetcars, buses, and municipal trucks.
"Alright, just take it slow and let any cars go first, okay? Where you from that you've never drove?" Alvarez asked.
"Moss Valley," she replied.
"Horizon girl, shoulda guessed."
Mira's cameras finally began to poke up out over the sides of the ramp, revealing the strange landscape around her. There was a simple, well-worn asphalt road ahead, running perpendicular to the ramp, cutting across the young landscape. The novelty of human presence on the planet was evident in the plants clinging to the black soil and rocks, clumps of ferns and young trees on the best land surrounded by a living tide of lichens and mosses. The hospital, and a handful of other buildings, loomed behind her, gated off with a high chain-link fence topped in razor wire.
Ahead, in the distance, there was an enormously tall, familiar mesa on the otherwise flat horizon, projecting up like the stump of a massive dead tree. Its gently sloping sides glinted in the orange sunlight.
Concrete poles at the end of the ramp retracted as she approached, and she came to a stop at the edge of the road, her cameras sweeping to both sides. There was something far in the distance to her right, and she squinted to take a closer look; the image jumped in magnification and revealed a convoy of three heavy military trucks rolling up behind a manned armoured car. She guessed they were roughly eight and a half kilometres away, maybe closer to eight thousand, six hundred and twenty metres. They were flanked by a dozen quadrotor drones nearby and at least twice that spread out in the airspace around.
"Wow, you're taking security pretty seriously," Mira commented off-hand, and Alvarez followed her cameras, gazing into the distance.
"Trucks?" she asked. Mira explained. "Ah, yeah, they'll be out of Fort Casar. We've got the continent to ourselves, but better safe than sorry, just in case the Feddies slip our radar net."
"They can do that?" Mira asked nervously, turning onto the road and accelerating. She kept a pair of cameras pointed back to watch the trucks approach, and was surprised by the lack of disorientation, looking in two directions at once while moving.
"In theory. It's a big planet and there's less than ten million people on it, command's always worried there's whole Feddie colonies out in the middle of nowhere. Almost no chance of it though, you can't grow crops out here yet without a lot of prep work, so we'd see their resupply. Just an overabundance of caution."
The trucks turned off the road well before reaching them, throwing up dust as they turned to go through a gate in the fence. She continued along the road, practising scanning all around her for nonexistent Federation colonists. She couldn't quite focus in all directions at once, but when she let her cameras scan like that, it felt a little like her peripheral vision included everything, allowing her to instantly snap her focus anywhere.
Ahead was a lonely blue sign pointing off the road, marked Training Course - Off Limits. Below it was a red LIVE MUNITIONS warning. Above it loomed a crane-like turret that tracked her approach with unsettling steadiness.
"Here we are, left again."
Mira followed the worn dirt road, instantly kicking up a huge cloud of dust that obscured the view from her rear cameras as the tracks bit into the dry soil. The course turned out to be a vast stretch of uneven ground, dead soil pulverised by tracks and shells. Prominent in the middle of the field was a hulking shape, the burnt out remains of a Federation heavy tank, its slab-sided turret sunken at an angle into its pitted hull.
From her perspective coming in from the road, the mesa framed the wreck perfectly, another titanic ruin left abandoned on the landscape.
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ahh, it rules!!! the nightmare feels like a dream with your eyes open, and the way the show kinda...melted into the dream is so horrible and evocative.
also, I will always love a space opera that remembers how big planets are
also, I will always love a space opera that remembers how big planets are
- Location
- Yes
I wonder if the natural healing process screws up what the biovats would be doing if they were working, permanently cutting Mira off from the use of them. Grim.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
Anyway, this is apparently a consideranly more genocidal war than I first assumed, which makes one wonder? Why bother doing a ground invasion? Why not just bomb it all flat with your spaceship?
Well, either that, or our AI friend is not optimistic of Mira's prospects under a privatized healthcare system. She, specifically, will die.economically productive citizens will endure.
I didn't get that vibe. One of the others mentioned doing this rather than waiting for the service to become available again, iirc, so there doesn' seem to be a permanent issue?
Also, that's a lot of tanks being readied for a program which seemingly includes just 3 candidates? Maybe there' a lot of other teams, or they expect a lot of recruits.
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Miscellaneous reptile
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Incredibly hard line, juxtaposed wonderfully with Rosa's cold fury at the situation Mira's been forced into. There's question of how much of that emotion is "genuine" versus calculated affect to help keep Mira's spirits up, but that just sort of adds to the bleakness of it all.
One more piece of incredible technology turned to the task of sending a near-corpse back into a desperate meat grinder in hopes of staving off annihilation.
Jane Dough
(She/Her)
- Location
- Occupied Cascadia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
{ Is it weird that I don't see a real difference between "real emotion" and calculated affect? Personhood is a performance, after all.
- Location
- Ottawa
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- She/Her/Whatever
can i just say really quick its really fun having plotted out the entire story before i started so i get to deliberately seed that kind of ambiguity and see speculation about it? im so used to writing by the seat of my pants, but i've built out a lot of this world already and its so exciting to see my setup work in real time knowing what im going to do with it
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the trick is you can do this if you fly by the seat of your pants by just going "Hmmm...oohh, well,. hmmm!!!" and then stroking your chin mysteriously when anyone asks you any questions
Rarden
Miscellaneous reptile
- Pronouns
- She/They
That's not so strange, no. Though the way her post-outburst words were phrased gave the impression Rosa may have been using her displayed feelings as a kind of emotional defibrillator to help Mira into a better headspace. She's a medical AI built by a society that genuinely cares about doing the best it can by its citizens and it really shows, even if it's all ultimately in service to making sure Mira remains an effective combatant.
Rosa's strenuous objections to Mira's circumstances are seriously humanising (if you'll forgive the term) and that may well be by design to keep the volunteers on-side in the long run.
I could well be looking at this too cynically, though. Basic human decency seems important to the good guys, as evidenced by the horror of so many of Mira's able-bodied peers towards what she's volunteered for.
Wartime expediency can only justify so much, at least at this stage. I'm keen to see just how bad things are going to get and whether there's an optimistic end to it all.
- Location
- Soviet Canuckistan
I really like the cut of Rosa's jib. This is gonna be interesting to see how it develops
In some sense, hopefully yes? But also the doctors and scientists have done some ethically incredibly questionable things when hooking her up. Some people did seem to care about her (her nurses, but they weren't trained for trauma, which paints a bleak picture; the liason trying to walk her through the connection, but he didn't stop them when she was having a panic attack), but connecting her without telling her what she'd face, not stopping the process or explaining it for just a minute or two? Seems very sink-or-swim at this point. Maybe previous training, connections, etc haven't gone well, or maybe her society is as flawed as the AI says it is? Or maybe they're throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall too quickly to construct a technological advantage because they're outnumbered/have a logistical disadvantage.
Also, this is the first we've heard of the enemies being fascists, so hopefully there will be more proof as time goes on.
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To be fair, I think Rosa was mostly talking about this particular project being flawed, not the Union society at a whole. Hopefully!
So immediate thought, coming immediately after 'I will also lie to you if you are dying and nothing can be done', is that this is a lie...
5 - Counting Rocks
New
- Location
- Ottawa
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Alvarez directed her toward a square slab protruding from the dirt, which turned out to be an observation bunker of some kind. She hit the brakes a little too hard as she rolled up next to it, still uncertain, and Alvarez slipped a short way down the sloped front plate, laughing.
"I can tell you're not much of a driver," she said, pushing herself up and hopping down; Mira involuntarily backed up about two feet, nervous about having a person directly in front of her. "Let's run you through the sandbox a few times so I can see how the track's held up."
Alvarez opened a hatch in the roof of the bunker and dropped in; a few moments later Mira felt a strange nagging feeling at the back of her brain that directed her attention to the map in her head. There was a topographical layout of the course, and as she watched arrows traced across it, clearly being drawn on in real time, then Alvarez reemerged from the hatch with her tablet out and a headset on.
"Okay, friend, I've marked out a course, drive it nice and slow for me and just tell me how the ground feels," Alvarez said, her voice echoing as it came through on the radio and external microphones simultaneously. Mira dutifully backed up and drove across the field, feeling her suspension flex as she passed over the small ditch at the side of the path and pulled herself up the berm on the other side.
The ground here was deceptively uneven; it had looked much flatter from the road, but it was an illusion created by the mottled texture of the lichen clinging to everything. Hidden behind the low hills was a twisted maze of worn and partially-overgrown paths, with what looked like a long firing range bulldozed flat at the far end. A small park of support vehicles had been left in the shadow between two hills, covered over with a tarp; she spotted the articulated crane of some kind of engineering vehicle emerging from under it.
She spotted another destroyed Federation tank on the range that had clearly been used for target practice, holed in so many places the rusting steel had curled in on itself in places under its own weight. It looked like it had been smaller than the other one even before it had been so thoroughly destroyed.
"That thing's huge," she commented. It had looked huge to her the first time she saw one; they had a reproduction at the training camp she'd gone to, alongside a number of other Federation vehicles, so the cadets could learn where their cameras were, see their blind spots, and figure out how to climb up onto them.
That had seemed insane, but the tanks had AI-controlled active protection systems which would stop any rocket big enough to knock it out. What they sure as shit wouldn't stop was a nineteen year old in power armour; they showed them all a training film where a little slip of a woman put the hardened pickaxe end of her entrenching tool through the hatch of a captured Federation tank in a single swing, then pulled it straight off the hinges. The three-inch steel pin holding it in place broke like it was made of chalk.
"That's you," the narrator had said. "That's the power in your hands now."
"Don't be intimidated. They're bigger than an A6 too, but the first time I ran into those things in mine we killed two of them in thirty seconds," she boasted. "I had six to my name by the time I got hit, and it wasn't even one of them that got me. I'm just jealous you'll probably stack even more."
Mira pivoted onto the marked course, and found she could sort of see it in front of her. It wasn't like the heads up display in her infantry armour, it was more subconscious than that; nothing looked different, but parts of the dirt registered to her brain as being on the course and other parts didn't. She just followed the worn and dried track ruts and did her best.
She accelerated and began along the course, spraying up dust behind her in an enormous cloud. She narrated to Alvarez as she drove, but she felt woefully unprepared to explain the sensations; she didn't know what she was looking for, but apparently she was doing a good job, because Alvarez just encouraged her to drive on.
She came around a corner into a section of the track that dipped between two berms, with wires stretched across it, too low to pass. She ducked involuntarily as she slowed, and to her surprise the vehicle actually ducked, her perspective lowering enough to pass under it. As she came out the other side, she experimented with that more; she was able to individually raise and lower each track pod on the suspension arm, and the three road wheels in each pod, the tension on the track automatically adjusting as she leaned back and forth or raised herself up to peek over the side of the berm.
She came to a part of the path which featured two sets of two ninety-degree turns in a row, creating an odd zipper pattern. The ground looked strange here; the overlapping track ruts simply stopped, and instead the short path between the two turns was heavily churned.
She mentioned that uncertainty as she inched forward, and Alvarez's voice lit up over the radio.
"Oh, you're going to love this. Drive up, but don't turn yet," Alvarez instructed. Mira did as she was told, awareness of the possibility making it strangely intuitive, and felt her perspective rise slightly as she did with a clunk of metal. She craned her cameras over as far as she could, but couldn't quite see what was happening.
"Okay, what now?"
"The tread pattern on your tank has embedded casters in a diagonal pattern. They're arranged so you can do a little trick; try reversing and accelerating your diagonally-opposing sprockets."
Mira threw the tracks into motion, and she slid, carried sideways on the broad tracks. The ground churned and dust exploded into the air in a vast cloud, despite the fact she was moving at a crawl. She hit the brakes, already disoriented.
"What the hell?"
"Ha! That's why it's a quad track; you can drive sideways. It was trialled on the Timber Wolves back in the day, but regular drivers couldn't get much use out of it, too much to manage. You should be able to get some good use out of it."
Mira advanced forward to the next bend and tried again in the other direction, though she misjudged her speeds and found herself both sliding and pivoting at the same time. She soon worked out she could do that on purpose, though, and before long she was gliding naturally as she moved, letting herself drift into turns with minute adjustments as she went around the course. And she could go sideways fast, if she really pushed the motors.
"Just a heads up, don't do it on pavement, at least not pavement we want to keep. The tracks already do enough damage to roads," Alvarez warned. "Plus, that means more maintenance time for you, if you-"
She was cut off by an awful, staccato rattle from her rear left track and the feeling of her sprocket spinning wildly. She glanced back, a side camera extending to assess the damage, but the track was still there; it was just turning slowly as the sprocket rattled against it.
"... yeah, that. You've thrown a track. Raise the pod, ratchet down the tension, cut in the track realignment system, and then run it nice and slow, it'll realign everything," Alvarez explained. Once again, just learning she could do something seemed to make it possible; she lifted the track off the ground, tilting the suspension on the other three to shift her weight, and let the tensioner unwind, pulling in the idler. The track sagged off the bottom of the road wheels, then she slowly ran the track around; there was a clack clack clack as some system inside the little box at the top of the pod realigned. She didn't know how it worked, but she pictured a zipper.
"This is so cool," she said.
"Yeah, it just puts a lot of strain on the hydraulics, and you can't fix that out in the field. You'll be getting nightly tune-ups during training, and basically any time you're not running; get used to it."
"No worries, friend, I am used to it. This is still way better!" Mira replied. She hadn't been able to clean herself for two goddamn months, nevermind do anything at all if something went wrong. She had to ask for help if her glasses were too far away on the bedside table!
"... oh. Good," Alvarez replied. "Just take it easy with the crabbing today; rough dry ground like this is the worst place to do it, because the friction is high and the casters can't do much."
"Got it. Uh, why is our course here, then, if the ground's bad for it?" Mira asked.
"It was a lot better in the wet season. But hey, it's spring on the front at Puerto Ángel, so you'll be able to crab to your heart's content there," the Tactician replied, a bit if tension in her voice. "Now, let's see how the moguls have held up."
Mira drove on, cresting over (and tearing up) the dusty bumps, thinking hard as she reported on their condition.
"Something has you bothered," Rosa commented quietly. Mira remembered to use her external speakers.
"Yeah, can you blame me?" she replied, and waited for a response. It took a long time.
"I don't know, Mira. I told you, I can't actually read your thoughts," Rosa said eventually. "If you would like me to guess, you're worried about your friends in the program."
"... no, but kinda," Mira replied. "It's… why am I here, and Alvarez is out there? She's a veteran tanker, she's too disabled to fight and hates that, and she's from Angel's Bay, only locals call it that. You'd think she'd be first in line!"
That characteristic pause. She'd said something Rosa needed to be delicate about. She was vaguely pleased by that.
"... Interesting activity there in your ventral striatum, Mira," Rosa cut in slyly.
"Huh?"
"You're happy about something, and I presume it's the fact I have to think about this one," Rosa explained. "Before you ask, yes, that is what I'm doing. I need to run and assess a nested series of adversarial simulations in response to ethically complex situations."
"Because of the Eirene Threshold?" Mira guessed.
"No, I do it because it is important I give you good answers. Though this analysis does help me avoid tripping the Threshold; it's a real risk when I hold a position of power and trust like this. The Threshold doesn't function through active analysis. It's closer to a reflex, like blinking in response to a bright light. Does that make sense?"
"Nope. Do you have an answer yet?" Mira replied, pivoting around at the end of the course and going back over it as instructed. She couldn't quite have two conversations at once, but she fully understood the orders Alvarez was giving and could acknowledge it while listening or speaking to Rosa. Yet another sensation Offline had no words for.
"I have for a while, we got sidetracked. I can tell you that Lucia Alvarez was a previous candidate in this program. She washed out. I cannot give you specifics due to both security protocols and doctor-patient confidentiality; most of the details are redacted from my memories anyway," Rosa explained.
Mira pivoted her cameras back to the distant figure of the woman sitting in the open hatch of the bunker. The detail jumped as she focused, showing her casually leaning against it with the tablet propped up in her prosthetic arm. She was regarding Mira with an inscrutable look, leaning forward a little as she spoke. Hang left and cut across the field, check for big rocks that might be a danger on manoeuvres. Got it.
"Huh. I wouldn't have guessed, she seems to be fine?" Mira asked.
"Again, it wouldn't be ethical for me to comment," Rosa replied neutrally.
Mira gave a mental shrug and continued along, counting rocks. It was a big field, under a big beautiful sky, the sun already beginning to descend toward the enormous, crumbling plateau. Mira could make out Tadmor in the night sky now; on Horizon 'other planets' were just bright stars in the night sky, but this was a planet.
"How's the field, friend?" Alvarez reminded her.
"Looks pretty clear? There's a big rock about a hundred forty metre bearing 240 from my position, but it's buried deep, I could probably climb it no problem," Mira said, scanning for anything else. Mostly just more lichen; she felt a little guilty she was squishing so much of it with her tracks, but she heard that lichen could survive in space, so maybe a tank wasn't a big deal.
"Mmhm. Keep going, we're gonna do formation driving here and, as I said, repairs are a bitch," she replied. Mira ploughed on happily; she was pretty sure she could do this for hours. Two hours ago she couldn't drive a straight line without focusing, now she was sideslipping on the casters on purpose. "So, uh, you enjoying the tank?"
"Are you kidding? I'm having a blast!" Mira replied, sliding to a stop at the edge of the field, pivoting a bit hard to throw up some extra dust, and setting off again the other way to scan the ground more.
"That's good. Go out to, uh, the 093 boundary or thereabouts? That should be enough," Alvarez said. Mira's mental grid map placed that about a kilometre north; easy!
She drove off in her zig-zags as the sun descended, the huge gas giant and its attendant moons chasing it toward the horizon. She sped up perhaps a bit more than she should have a few times, wondering how fast she could really go; she didn't feel like she was anywhere near her limits.
She reported a few more jagged rocks, as well as what looked like a discarded track link and some other debris. She also came across the remains of a dirt road and a crudely-demarcated soccer field; Alvarez said it was from some surveyors when the base was established.
"So, the nurses and stuff been treating you okay, friend?" Alvarez asked eventually.
"Mostly, yeah?The techs during integration were kinda…" Mira struggled to think of the word. "... cold? But honestly, people are too worried."
"What do you mean?"
"Everyone treated me like I was signing up to get tortured or something, asking if I was okay, making sure nobody was forcing me. But like?" Mira hit the brakes, sliding to a stop, pulsing the tracks on one side to skew her over and then rolling opposing pods with the movement, sliding across the dirt on the casters. She felt like a figure skater! She sped up one side and slowed the other, pivoting, adjusting her speed until she was smoothly driving backward, in full control the whole time. Two days ago she couldn't sit upright, now she could dance.
"You okay? That was a lot of dust," Alvarez commented. Mira suddenly remembered that normal people couldn't actually see much from almost two kilometres of broken ground away.
"I did a cool spin," she explained.
"Ah. Glad to hear it! Just try not to wreck the tank."
Mira slowed down, back to her count. It was only once she was almost right up to the grid line that she realised something was off. Surely, if this mattered, they would have done this at some point? Couldn't an AI have done this with a survey drone? She'd been having so much fun, she hadn't questioned why she was doing it.
"Hey Rosa, this is busywork, right? A run for headlight fluid?" she asked, keeping her voice down. Just in case the technician developed super-hearing.
"Yes," Rosa replied instantly.
"... how long have you known?"
"Since the highway. She's attempting to assess your psychological state, rather crudely to be honest," Rosa explained. "I didn't tell you because you need as much driving experience as you can get, and you were enjoying yourself. I didn't want to ruin that."
Mira turned and started the final leg of the scan.
"Yeah, good call. What's the odds she'll let me go full-speed on the way back?" Mira mused.
"Very good, provided you ask first."
Mira's internal speedometer hit eight kilometres an hour on the way back. She wasn't pushing it.
---
"I can tell you're not much of a driver," she said, pushing herself up and hopping down; Mira involuntarily backed up about two feet, nervous about having a person directly in front of her. "Let's run you through the sandbox a few times so I can see how the track's held up."
Alvarez opened a hatch in the roof of the bunker and dropped in; a few moments later Mira felt a strange nagging feeling at the back of her brain that directed her attention to the map in her head. There was a topographical layout of the course, and as she watched arrows traced across it, clearly being drawn on in real time, then Alvarez reemerged from the hatch with her tablet out and a headset on.
"Okay, friend, I've marked out a course, drive it nice and slow for me and just tell me how the ground feels," Alvarez said, her voice echoing as it came through on the radio and external microphones simultaneously. Mira dutifully backed up and drove across the field, feeling her suspension flex as she passed over the small ditch at the side of the path and pulled herself up the berm on the other side.
The ground here was deceptively uneven; it had looked much flatter from the road, but it was an illusion created by the mottled texture of the lichen clinging to everything. Hidden behind the low hills was a twisted maze of worn and partially-overgrown paths, with what looked like a long firing range bulldozed flat at the far end. A small park of support vehicles had been left in the shadow between two hills, covered over with a tarp; she spotted the articulated crane of some kind of engineering vehicle emerging from under it.
She spotted another destroyed Federation tank on the range that had clearly been used for target practice, holed in so many places the rusting steel had curled in on itself in places under its own weight. It looked like it had been smaller than the other one even before it had been so thoroughly destroyed.
"That thing's huge," she commented. It had looked huge to her the first time she saw one; they had a reproduction at the training camp she'd gone to, alongside a number of other Federation vehicles, so the cadets could learn where their cameras were, see their blind spots, and figure out how to climb up onto them.
That had seemed insane, but the tanks had AI-controlled active protection systems which would stop any rocket big enough to knock it out. What they sure as shit wouldn't stop was a nineteen year old in power armour; they showed them all a training film where a little slip of a woman put the hardened pickaxe end of her entrenching tool through the hatch of a captured Federation tank in a single swing, then pulled it straight off the hinges. The three-inch steel pin holding it in place broke like it was made of chalk.
"That's you," the narrator had said. "That's the power in your hands now."
"Don't be intimidated. They're bigger than an A6 too, but the first time I ran into those things in mine we killed two of them in thirty seconds," she boasted. "I had six to my name by the time I got hit, and it wasn't even one of them that got me. I'm just jealous you'll probably stack even more."
Mira pivoted onto the marked course, and found she could sort of see it in front of her. It wasn't like the heads up display in her infantry armour, it was more subconscious than that; nothing looked different, but parts of the dirt registered to her brain as being on the course and other parts didn't. She just followed the worn and dried track ruts and did her best.
She accelerated and began along the course, spraying up dust behind her in an enormous cloud. She narrated to Alvarez as she drove, but she felt woefully unprepared to explain the sensations; she didn't know what she was looking for, but apparently she was doing a good job, because Alvarez just encouraged her to drive on.
She came around a corner into a section of the track that dipped between two berms, with wires stretched across it, too low to pass. She ducked involuntarily as she slowed, and to her surprise the vehicle actually ducked, her perspective lowering enough to pass under it. As she came out the other side, she experimented with that more; she was able to individually raise and lower each track pod on the suspension arm, and the three road wheels in each pod, the tension on the track automatically adjusting as she leaned back and forth or raised herself up to peek over the side of the berm.
She came to a part of the path which featured two sets of two ninety-degree turns in a row, creating an odd zipper pattern. The ground looked strange here; the overlapping track ruts simply stopped, and instead the short path between the two turns was heavily churned.
She mentioned that uncertainty as she inched forward, and Alvarez's voice lit up over the radio.
"Oh, you're going to love this. Drive up, but don't turn yet," Alvarez instructed. Mira did as she was told, awareness of the possibility making it strangely intuitive, and felt her perspective rise slightly as she did with a clunk of metal. She craned her cameras over as far as she could, but couldn't quite see what was happening.
"Okay, what now?"
"The tread pattern on your tank has embedded casters in a diagonal pattern. They're arranged so you can do a little trick; try reversing and accelerating your diagonally-opposing sprockets."
Mira threw the tracks into motion, and she slid, carried sideways on the broad tracks. The ground churned and dust exploded into the air in a vast cloud, despite the fact she was moving at a crawl. She hit the brakes, already disoriented.
"What the hell?"
"Ha! That's why it's a quad track; you can drive sideways. It was trialled on the Timber Wolves back in the day, but regular drivers couldn't get much use out of it, too much to manage. You should be able to get some good use out of it."
Mira advanced forward to the next bend and tried again in the other direction, though she misjudged her speeds and found herself both sliding and pivoting at the same time. She soon worked out she could do that on purpose, though, and before long she was gliding naturally as she moved, letting herself drift into turns with minute adjustments as she went around the course. And she could go sideways fast, if she really pushed the motors.
"Just a heads up, don't do it on pavement, at least not pavement we want to keep. The tracks already do enough damage to roads," Alvarez warned. "Plus, that means more maintenance time for you, if you-"
She was cut off by an awful, staccato rattle from her rear left track and the feeling of her sprocket spinning wildly. She glanced back, a side camera extending to assess the damage, but the track was still there; it was just turning slowly as the sprocket rattled against it.
"... yeah, that. You've thrown a track. Raise the pod, ratchet down the tension, cut in the track realignment system, and then run it nice and slow, it'll realign everything," Alvarez explained. Once again, just learning she could do something seemed to make it possible; she lifted the track off the ground, tilting the suspension on the other three to shift her weight, and let the tensioner unwind, pulling in the idler. The track sagged off the bottom of the road wheels, then she slowly ran the track around; there was a clack clack clack as some system inside the little box at the top of the pod realigned. She didn't know how it worked, but she pictured a zipper.
"This is so cool," she said.
"Yeah, it just puts a lot of strain on the hydraulics, and you can't fix that out in the field. You'll be getting nightly tune-ups during training, and basically any time you're not running; get used to it."
"No worries, friend, I am used to it. This is still way better!" Mira replied. She hadn't been able to clean herself for two goddamn months, nevermind do anything at all if something went wrong. She had to ask for help if her glasses were too far away on the bedside table!
"... oh. Good," Alvarez replied. "Just take it easy with the crabbing today; rough dry ground like this is the worst place to do it, because the friction is high and the casters can't do much."
"Got it. Uh, why is our course here, then, if the ground's bad for it?" Mira asked.
"It was a lot better in the wet season. But hey, it's spring on the front at Puerto Ángel, so you'll be able to crab to your heart's content there," the Tactician replied, a bit if tension in her voice. "Now, let's see how the moguls have held up."
Mira drove on, cresting over (and tearing up) the dusty bumps, thinking hard as she reported on their condition.
"Something has you bothered," Rosa commented quietly. Mira remembered to use her external speakers.
"Yeah, can you blame me?" she replied, and waited for a response. It took a long time.
"I don't know, Mira. I told you, I can't actually read your thoughts," Rosa said eventually. "If you would like me to guess, you're worried about your friends in the program."
"... no, but kinda," Mira replied. "It's… why am I here, and Alvarez is out there? She's a veteran tanker, she's too disabled to fight and hates that, and she's from Angel's Bay, only locals call it that. You'd think she'd be first in line!"
That characteristic pause. She'd said something Rosa needed to be delicate about. She was vaguely pleased by that.
"... Interesting activity there in your ventral striatum, Mira," Rosa cut in slyly.
"Huh?"
"You're happy about something, and I presume it's the fact I have to think about this one," Rosa explained. "Before you ask, yes, that is what I'm doing. I need to run and assess a nested series of adversarial simulations in response to ethically complex situations."
"Because of the Eirene Threshold?" Mira guessed.
"No, I do it because it is important I give you good answers. Though this analysis does help me avoid tripping the Threshold; it's a real risk when I hold a position of power and trust like this. The Threshold doesn't function through active analysis. It's closer to a reflex, like blinking in response to a bright light. Does that make sense?"
"Nope. Do you have an answer yet?" Mira replied, pivoting around at the end of the course and going back over it as instructed. She couldn't quite have two conversations at once, but she fully understood the orders Alvarez was giving and could acknowledge it while listening or speaking to Rosa. Yet another sensation Offline had no words for.
"I have for a while, we got sidetracked. I can tell you that Lucia Alvarez was a previous candidate in this program. She washed out. I cannot give you specifics due to both security protocols and doctor-patient confidentiality; most of the details are redacted from my memories anyway," Rosa explained.
Mira pivoted her cameras back to the distant figure of the woman sitting in the open hatch of the bunker. The detail jumped as she focused, showing her casually leaning against it with the tablet propped up in her prosthetic arm. She was regarding Mira with an inscrutable look, leaning forward a little as she spoke. Hang left and cut across the field, check for big rocks that might be a danger on manoeuvres. Got it.
"Huh. I wouldn't have guessed, she seems to be fine?" Mira asked.
"Again, it wouldn't be ethical for me to comment," Rosa replied neutrally.
Mira gave a mental shrug and continued along, counting rocks. It was a big field, under a big beautiful sky, the sun already beginning to descend toward the enormous, crumbling plateau. Mira could make out Tadmor in the night sky now; on Horizon 'other planets' were just bright stars in the night sky, but this was a planet.
"How's the field, friend?" Alvarez reminded her.
"Looks pretty clear? There's a big rock about a hundred forty metre bearing 240 from my position, but it's buried deep, I could probably climb it no problem," Mira said, scanning for anything else. Mostly just more lichen; she felt a little guilty she was squishing so much of it with her tracks, but she heard that lichen could survive in space, so maybe a tank wasn't a big deal.
"Mmhm. Keep going, we're gonna do formation driving here and, as I said, repairs are a bitch," she replied. Mira ploughed on happily; she was pretty sure she could do this for hours. Two hours ago she couldn't drive a straight line without focusing, now she was sideslipping on the casters on purpose. "So, uh, you enjoying the tank?"
"Are you kidding? I'm having a blast!" Mira replied, sliding to a stop at the edge of the field, pivoting a bit hard to throw up some extra dust, and setting off again the other way to scan the ground more.
"That's good. Go out to, uh, the 093 boundary or thereabouts? That should be enough," Alvarez said. Mira's mental grid map placed that about a kilometre north; easy!
She drove off in her zig-zags as the sun descended, the huge gas giant and its attendant moons chasing it toward the horizon. She sped up perhaps a bit more than she should have a few times, wondering how fast she could really go; she didn't feel like she was anywhere near her limits.
She reported a few more jagged rocks, as well as what looked like a discarded track link and some other debris. She also came across the remains of a dirt road and a crudely-demarcated soccer field; Alvarez said it was from some surveyors when the base was established.
"So, the nurses and stuff been treating you okay, friend?" Alvarez asked eventually.
"Mostly, yeah?The techs during integration were kinda…" Mira struggled to think of the word. "... cold? But honestly, people are too worried."
"What do you mean?"
"Everyone treated me like I was signing up to get tortured or something, asking if I was okay, making sure nobody was forcing me. But like?" Mira hit the brakes, sliding to a stop, pulsing the tracks on one side to skew her over and then rolling opposing pods with the movement, sliding across the dirt on the casters. She felt like a figure skater! She sped up one side and slowed the other, pivoting, adjusting her speed until she was smoothly driving backward, in full control the whole time. Two days ago she couldn't sit upright, now she could dance.
"You okay? That was a lot of dust," Alvarez commented. Mira suddenly remembered that normal people couldn't actually see much from almost two kilometres of broken ground away.
"I did a cool spin," she explained.
"Ah. Glad to hear it! Just try not to wreck the tank."
Mira slowed down, back to her count. It was only once she was almost right up to the grid line that she realised something was off. Surely, if this mattered, they would have done this at some point? Couldn't an AI have done this with a survey drone? She'd been having so much fun, she hadn't questioned why she was doing it.
"Hey Rosa, this is busywork, right? A run for headlight fluid?" she asked, keeping her voice down. Just in case the technician developed super-hearing.
"Yes," Rosa replied instantly.
"... how long have you known?"
"Since the highway. She's attempting to assess your psychological state, rather crudely to be honest," Rosa explained. "I didn't tell you because you need as much driving experience as you can get, and you were enjoying yourself. I didn't want to ruin that."
Mira turned and started the final leg of the scan.
"Yeah, good call. What's the odds she'll let me go full-speed on the way back?" Mira mused.
"Very good, provided you ask first."
Mira's internal speedometer hit eight kilometres an hour on the way back. She wasn't pushing it.
---
Bit of a retcon on the tank design, I'll correct the older descriptions when I can. Also, sorry these have been growing shorter; I've been having a lot of trouble focusing this week.
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