#icl this is hugely inspired by @nyetalia on twt

[weird-homosexual-in-your-area]

Pilot B7C2AD, codenamed "Lovebird", was an interesting case. A neural pilot before the conditioning was perfected, before they were a dime-a-dozen, it was one of only 12 neural-sync-capable pilots in its age. Of course the higher-ups would take an interest in it. Of course they'd watch its every mission with almost fanatical attention, cheering at its every kill, gasping at its every wound, infinitely more emotive than Lovebird itself. Of course they'd give its suit priority for repairs, much to the dismay of the technicians.

Of course they'd notice when it grew resentful of its handler.

Of course they'd be watching as it went against her orders, blankly allowing the enemy to fire on its mech.

Of course they'd have to retrieve it from the wreckage of its mech, sensory input and nervous output wires training behind it like blood from a body.

After the incident, the higher-ups had to respond. They couldn't just kill it like they would with analogue pilots- it was far too valuable, both as training data and as propaganda. So instead they anaesthetised it, plugged it into cerebral analysis and peered into its life before the program, when it was still a person, not an asset.

They found, in fairly recent memory, a woman. A tall brunette, working as a re-educator for the state. With the woman came a voice, came love, came a past of happiness and mutual obsession. With the woman also came an untimely fate at the hands of an enemy pilot landing on her sector. With the woman came not only a burning need for revenge, hotter than any flame a rocket could produce, but longing, bereavement and mourning. Clearly, the analysts said, Lovebird joined the program to get revenge, to get a sense of closure for its late love.

The higher-ups soon instructed the comms team to develop a filter for handler comms, to change the grating voice of an unsympathetic, uncaring monster to a synthetic voice based on a real person- maybe a celebrity, or a fictional icon.

Or a lost loved one, their voice reconstructed through every memory of their voice a pilot has.

After this new filter was implemented, general pilot performance went up 21.3% on average, though Lovebird's performance spiked far higher. Debriefs recorded it as "more passionate", "devoted to the battle", and as "willing to do whatever was requested of it when on a sortie". It became the number 1 asset that the state had. Civilians fled the area when they saw it dropping from the atmosphere, a grim reaper by any other name, to avoid being caught in the crossfire like so many others had been. At base, technicians reported it was often unwilling to leave its cockpit, weeping madly with those unsettling dead eyes signature of neural-linked pilots, screeching until its throat was raw, begging to be put back in, sent back into the field, please, it could handle it, it just wanted to go back out and listen to Ena again, before its screeches devolved to desperate sobs, its sobs to pained whimpers, and its whimpers to resigned silence.

But none of that mattered, as long as results stayed on the up. It had signed up for this, after all.

As time went on, and technology advanced, the conditioning process became more and more consistent, and as such Lovebird began to lose its value as an asset. The higher-ups deemed, after much debate, that "on occasion of its failure on the battlefield, retrieving pilot B7C2AD would be more costly than it would be to train even ten new pilots, and as such, it is to be left to die."

*****

After coming up on two years since its first appearance, the monster nicknamed "Lovebird" for reasons unknown to anyone but the spies in enemy territory finally fell. Surprisingly, no extraction team came for it- it was left for the news teams to interrogate, to find out how it was so strong.

As the camera crew levered off the cockpit door, they were expecting a hardened, determined soldier inside. They were expecting the pilot to be frantically trying to restore power. What they didn't expect was a short, seemingly malnourished woman, eyes red with tears, wailing at the top of her weak lungs for the loss of someone called "Ena". What sense did this make? How was this Lovebird? Surely there'd been a mix-up. This must have been some new girl to the program if she was still attached to people from her previous life.

The camera crew shut off the film with a sincere apology for the mistake to the viewers at home who tuned in to see the removal of the leading soldier of the Stormcell forces from their cockpit. As the cameras stopped rolling, a single gunshot rang out across the wasteland, before fading away, leaving only the disgruntled chatter of the camera team. What a waste of their time.