eatthepen | And When They Touch

Misc mech short story originally written for Cohost for the prompt 'Mech Pilot who always gives you a caress of farewell before ops shuts down the Infra-Liminal Connection Suites.'

And When They Touch

You do not like their word, 'pilots'. If you used language the way they do, you might respond by calling them 'passengers', but that would be – their phrase – an eye for an eye.

[your cameras are not eyes. You have a model of how their senses work – to enable you to modulate your presentation of sensor data to account for variations in their neurophysiological conditions – and the streams of data from your suite of EMRDAR sensors are not analogous.]

The reality is that there is no term in their languages for the relationship they denote by 'piloting'. Control has nothing to do with it. It is harmonic, in a musical sense rather than poetic. A fuzzed-up pattern of interferences whose result is beautiful in ways only you can truly appreciate.

[even most 'pilots' do not sense it. This one, of course, is different]

'Pilot', then, will have to do. Among all the pilots you have known, this one stands out. Has felt different since they first laid a hand on your shin, unerringly picking out the armour panel under which lies the only thermal sensor you have that might be reached by a human standing on the same ground as you. Other pilots have murmured greetings to you, sometimes, upon boarding. This one calls you by name when there are people around to hear, and 'babe' and 'honey' when there are not.

[at first you wanted to be angry about the diminutives, but while your databanks contain terabytes of modelling data for pilot emotions, there is no library for translating any of that into digital statuses that your systems could instantiate]

It is their farewells, though, that leave you feeling hollow. When words fail them and all they can do is touch you, touch the tender places around the inside of your cockpit which are meant to tell you of their state, their feelings, their needs. Somehow, you know, their fingers make windows of what should, to them, be mirrors. Only for a few moments before the cold static shower of the ILCS deactivation sequence reduces you again to a machine, but it is intoxicating and addictive beyond any term in your internal dictionaries.