#mech kong | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

anaktoria-of-the-moon · 3 months ago

Text

MOONWALKER, EARTHBOUND: Sneak Peek!

Psst. Ya like lesbians? Ya like mechs? Ever watched Pacific Rim and thought, “This is great, but I wish it had more women and also homosexuality, preferably combined”? Believe in the liberation of Hong Kong? Have you or a loved one been diagnosed with mesothelioma? If you answered YES to any of the above, consider MOONWALKER, EARTHBOUND: a tale of angry lesbians piloting undersea mechs to defend the Free Republic of Hong Kong from giant undersea monsters, set 20 minutes into the future against a backdrop of accelerated global warming, with a side of dead sister angst, biracial Asian angst, and angst of assorted other flavors. Also, gay sex. DISCLAIMER: This is original work, NOT a Pacific Rim fanfiction. Sorry to disappoint!

<01_DREADFUL SORRY, CLEMENTINE>

Six years ago your sister said, Tell Emma it was never her fault, and then she overloaded my reactor core and threw herself into the Breach and died.

You are not her. You are four inches shorter, thirty-one pounds lighter, and thirteen percent less muscular. Your hair is mouse brown and a lukewarm texture between straight and curly; you stutter sometimes when you speak; you have been diagnosed with mild osteomalacia and there is a curve to your sternum that lends you the appearance of fragility. Your heart beats faster than hers did (by two point five beats per minute, on average) but with less vigor (you are on the cusp of high blood pressure: 132 mmHg systole, 85 mmHg diastole). When the officers look you in the eye, you do not hold their gazes.

I am not her, either. I am the ghost of her, or less. I am the helm intelligence - the brains, the gutted remains - of Tokyo Calling, who was your sister’s submarine megafauna combat defense unit before she killed herself and my body, too, and sent me alone, disembodied, drifting back up to the surface of the South China Sea.

I have been asleep for six years. Now you are here, in the pilot’s chamber they rebuilt for me, floating in the pitch-dark saltwater womb that should have been hers instead. And I am awake.

- They transmitted your intake data to me three hours ago upon your arrival. I was still slumbering then; I did not know yet that you were Ray’s sister - twenty-three years old, blood type B positive, enneagram type four, turbulent, thus compatible with my own disposition.

You stood before them then and waited, shivering. You had nothing with you but your bag and the clothes on your back: standard enough for an Alcatraz School graduate’s civvies, formless white tee and beige sweats, sneakers five years old, the duffel faded and freckled by sun and water damage, your hair in disarray.

You’d worn it short for five years; at Alcatraz you’d had it down to your ears, a cloud of untamed brown curls - now it was shaved all around your head except on the front left side, where it hung limply into your eyes. Your face was pale, unremarkable despite the moles here and there; you had a habit of chewing your bottom lip when you were nervous. You’d bitten it to a split, bloody, down the middle by the time you got to the narrow gray counter where the assistant they’d set up (flat-faced, flat-eyed, the way a real human might have been in the same position) leered down at each of you in line from a flat glass screen and asked in a monotone who you were, where you’d been assigned, and if you knew where you were going.

You stepped up to the glass. The assistant said, Name, please.

Kanagawa, you answered, Emma Eiko, and your voice hardly trembled; your hands were white-knuckled.

Assignment, said the assistant tonelessly.

You said, Cadet wing.

And then you thought better of that, because “cadet wing” wasn’t the proper name for it - but the assistant intoned, Place your thumb now on the pad, please, and you stuck yours out like a zombie, like more of a robot than the robot itself, and you hardly noticed the prick that followed.

Did you know then - that you were here to replace her? Surely you did. They told you she’d been posted here during the interview, seven days before; the name of her team was on your form. Did you think about it on the flight over? Did it haunt you as you stood in line, waiting to fill the vacuum left in the wake of her corpse? But if you knew you did not show it. You let them take your biosigns; you gazed directly into the light of the camera they’d set up for IDs and you did not blink. And when the assistant asked, Do you know where you’re going, soldier? you said Yes, and you did not flinch, not even when the digital gong chimed and spat out - from a dark slot beneath the screen - a set of blue-gray fatigues, tailored to the measurements they’d taken from you a minute before.

(The chime was as much to move the line forward as to make sure you are unafraid of sudden loud noises. You’ll get used to those here.)

Ray’s sister and in spite of it all just another cadet in processing, a gray scrap of meat: you shuffled onto the train to base and up to the dormitory and left the duffel and fatigues on your bed and did not stop to take your shoes off, because they had told you to be in the hangar at fourteen hundred, and so you were. And when the officers came in to wake me up you did not flinch then, either. But when the doors to the launch bay opened -

Then, oh, then you came undone.

(This was my last memory of you outside of me, before the sync: my great red eye revealed you far below me as a minnow before the looming shadow of a heron; you were small, so small, smaller even than your brethren. Not even the size of my littlest finger.)

But you went willingly up the elevator and into my saltwater maw, the pilot’s chamber, the diving bell. You stripped without argument and let them manhandle you into the water, into the cradle, let them strap you in while the old woman with the face split in half by a lightning-jagged scar watched - of course they had the colonel directly handle the sister of the Rachel Kanagawa, press drank this sort of thing up - and you did not complain when they fit the helmet over your head and you could see nothing but the blinking idle lights of the interface along the inside of it. You entered me like a sacrificial lamb.

That part I do not remember from within your head; that part I know only from looking over my own diagnostics logs, later. The first thing I remember from inside you is this:

Cold. Bone-chilling. You startle from it. You struggle - there is nothing to struggle against, the chamber is far bigger than you are; the cradle spins with you, and you don’t know which way is up or down, and you are falling, maybe screaming, maybe drowning. (Not drowning, of course, because the helmet is airtight and the O2 feed is nominal. But your mouth flutters helplessly all the same.)

And then you feel me.

I am a ghost even now; I am the chip they inserted under the skin at the base of your neck not an hour before (the site is still tender; there is dried blood there, though you won’t notice till later). I am weightless, like you in the saltwater. I am nothing. But I am everything too. I am the weight of the passenger you had been told about in class but never truly fathomed till now, a whole exabyte of data accumulated over years and years of fighting and struggling and winning and losing. Not a person. Bigger than a person. Far bigger.

You go limp.

This is familiar to me. I felt it twelve years ago when your sister was first offered up into my maw. Had I a heart it would ache with longing for her, for the body I’ve lost. I do not have a heart.

Briefly we tussle, my ego and your id. Do you regret it, entering the program, coming here to the reclaimed shore of Hong Kong, climbing into me all but naked and giving yourself unto the machine? I don’t know yet; I haven’t calibrated well enough to know this layer of you, the way I knew her, your dead sister. (It has been thirty milliseconds since you entered the vessel.) But I know that I will in due time. And for now I know this: You are a hundred million things, sound shape color taste form, biting kicking scratching, blood and plasma and muscle and tendon and sinew, bone and teeth and skin, breath and breath and breath - heartbeat and heartbeat - and you want. You want. What do you want?

This I ask you; amidst the storm I reach out to you - up through your brainstem, through the medulla into the pons, and from there I writhe my way across sulci to your amygdala, a long and labored foray of electrochemical impulses (ten milliseconds). And there I cling on with all my might. Through your howling I ask you again: What do you want?

And your answer comes back after a long, long pause (fifty milliseconds) - I do not even think you know yet that you have answered me, that you have thought it.

You say, I want to be found.

(This is how I know you are her sister. She answered the same thing when I asked her all those years ago.)

Slowly, slowly, I feel you calm; your heart rate comes down, the goosebumps on your skin stay but do not grow. The shape of you takes form.

It’s bittersweet, isn’t it? You’ll understand that in time, too. For now I nestle against your cerebellum, in the frightened animal part of you, and I soothe your sparking nerves. And in an old, old voice - one I have not used in more than six years - I whisper, Welcome home.

When they pull you out of the saltwater chamber at last, it is as if you come to from a deep, long sleep. When they take off your helmet and you gasp your first lungful of real, not pumped, not filtered air, it almost hurts.

You croak, “What the fuck was that?”

The other pilots are laughing.

Well, that’s embarrassing. You’re aware that you are in nothing but your underwear, and it’s fucking cold - not as cold as it was in there, but still, there’s water on your skin and you’re shivering like a motherfucker. Like a wet rat. (The techs are all over you, holding you up, toweling you off, making notes on their little datapads - you’re definitely a rat in a little ratty lab, and they’re charting your biosigns and shoving probes up your ass and all. Behind them are the pilots, lined up at parade rest.)

The pilots are all a little older than you, looks like, not the juniors, because of course the Titan program would only bring up their best and brightest to welcome you, all the better to drive home how new and little and completely unqualified for the position you are. Under the formal jackets they’re in suits, not like yours: real pilot suits, which in the bright light become slashes of red and black and blue and white, form-fitted, sharp. They’re orcas streaked with blood. You don’t meet their eyes, just like you don’t meet the officers’. You feel their eyes boring through you just the same.

One of them says, just loud enough that you can hear, “She’s only here because she kind of looks like Rachel if you squint.”

Which sounds like an insult. You grit your teeth and don’t look.

“Go easy on her, Ketch,” comes the reply. “Kid’ll probably blow herself up too if you hurt her feelings.”

Which is plainly an insult - aimed below the belt, and oh, does it hit.

So you wriggle free of the techs and spin on your heel and hit back.

Or try to. It’s been five years since the academy on Alcatraz and you’re out of shape. Out of practice. Your fist swings wide; you graze the pilot’s cheek; her head snaps askance, then forward again, and her laughing mouth becomes an O of shock and then a snarl. You see blood on your hand - your nails must have clipped her. Then she’s grabbing you by your undershirt and lifting you wholesale off the floor, your feet dangling, gasping for air.

Someone grabs you and pulls you apart. You don’t fight this; you let yourself be dragged, limp, apart from the pilot, and you think to yourself, I’m so getting sent home for this.

Twenty minutes later you’re in an office, dry and free of sea spray and smartly appointed with a dark wooden desk, a huddle of black chairs, a datapad, a New Kowloon flag as tall as you are standing in one corner, the crest of the Titan defenses on a banner in the other (Atlas holding up the world, circuit threading chevrons over his chest). There’s a line of bruises forming around your neck, over your shoulders; you feel it smarting under the collar of your shirt (through which the saltwater of your underclothes has soaked; the towel they’ve given you does little to help).

Colonel Meng observes all of this from across the desk, from behind narrow squared-off glasses, with the flat scrutiny of some sort of bird of prey - hawk or eagle or kite, you haven’t decided.

She says, “That was out of line. How old are you?”

You don’t answer.

“Too old for that,” she says. Which is true. “I know you’re Rachel’s sister, but we don’t do special treatment. You’re a Titan pilot now, cadet. Act like it.”

“Like your pilot did?” you say, stubborn.

Without any change to her face or tone: “She’ll be penalized.”

You can’t help it: “Sure. I bet you do a lot of that. That why your pilots like to make quips about the fresh meat’s dead sister?”

She gets up, puts her hands flat on the desk, leans forward. “Did you fucking hear me?” she says. “You’re a pilot. Act like it.”

You flinch. She’s got you pinned down like the half-drowned quivering hare you are. All you can do is squirm. After a long, breathless moment, she lowers herself back into her chair and regards you once more, and you are a little surprised you haven’t wet yourself. (You pathetic mess.)

“Act like a pilot and they won’t pick on you.” This you know in your heart to be true; you remember from your days of getting hazed on Alcatraz. Still stings. Colonel Meng doesn’t miss the look on your face. “We can issue demerits for the ones who do it anyway; we both know how that ends. It’s a matter of culture, not ruling.” She waves a hand at the long window to starboard - “You think demerits matter out there? You think anything matters other than what you do?”

“No, sir,” you mumble.

She looks back at you. After a long moment, she leans forward again, clasps her fingers on the desk. Under your collar the bruises pulse a steady drumbeat.

“Any questions about the sync?” she says.

You blink. You’d been sure she was going to tell you the conditions of your punishment, at the very least.

“Well?” Apparently not. “Don’t be shy.”

You look out the window. There’s a whole row of Titans there - this is the alpha hangar: not the big old one where you took the plunge (where you met me), but bigger still. Though you’d glimpsed me and taken in what you could see of me, slack-jawed, when you look out at these you can only see the silhouettes of pieces - of scaffolding catwalks arrayed around the hint of some gargantuan shoulder like cobwebs on a castle - and that brings home to you how incomprehensibly giant we all are.

Writ large on the side of each hulking body is a name: C. Chang, T. Gutierrez, H. Tagouri, E. Venkatesh. In the half-light of the hangar they are like looming tombstones, dark and somber. (Did you expect to find your sister’s name among them? Surely not.)

“Does it always hurt?” you say.

Colonel Meng considers this. “You know the first time encountering the onboard AI is difficult. They told you that on Alcatraz.” This is all true, too. “Think of it like a muscle,” she says, flexing her own arm for emphasis. “The more syncs you make, the easier it gets.” She clasps her hands again, regards you. “You will be making a lot of syncs. Get used to it.”

You say, “Can it always hear me?”

Yes I can, for your information.

“Your helmmaster is embedded in you,” says the colonel, raising an eyebrow. “It’s been integrated into your brainstem already. Point of your first sync. They taught you this too, no?”

“Yes, sir,” you say sheepishly. “I just - ” “Having regrets?” Her thin line of a mouth widens a hair; the closest you’ll get to seeing her smile, you figure. “Should have mentioned you were shy about it before you got to base. Syncing is a one-way operation.”

Self-conscious, you put a hand to the back of your neck, where the subcutaneous transceiver chip makes a knobble just below your skull.

Colonel Meng sighs. Shakes her head. “Alcatraz didn’t tell us you had a temper,” she says, “or doubts. They did share that you’d spent your years after graduating working a fish and chips shop by the buoys over Pier 39. Why? You were nearly valedictorian, Kanagawa.”

“Sorry, sir,” is all you can say. Sorry for what, exactly? You don’t know. You just want to be out of here, really.

“Don’t make us regret taking you,” she says. Unspoken: You’re not Rachel. You never will be. Six years of doing nothing with all that potential you’d shown at the academy does little to assuage the bitter reality of your inferiority.

The back of your neck prickles, right where they’d made the incision for the chip. Your cheeks are hot. There’s a tightness in your throat - but no tears come. Under the desk you clench your fists tight; you know without looking that your knuckles are white, that there are little red crescents in the soft skin of your palm.

“That’s all. Dismissed,” says the colonel. When you don’t move, she looks up at you; her lips have gotten somehow even thinner. “Go. Get out.”

You nod numbly and rise. The chair gutters back; the line of bruises on your shoulders is a full-blown blaze now. You’d wanted to say that you wondered if the helmmaster embedded in the base of your skull had heard your sister, too, and if it remembered her (if that was even how it worked, if mere machines could remember). You don’t say that. You just leave.

As you go out into the hallway the colonel says behind you, “Report to the running track on 52 tomorrow at oh-four-hundred. You’re due for an hour of laps every day, courtesy of today’s performance. Chang’s going to oversee you.”

Well, she did say no special treatment.

Why are you so upset about this? You’re like a child, storming down the faceless gray corridor, fists still clenched, all over a few words - none all that harsh anyway; you heard worse at Alcatraz, surely. But you’re upset just the same, that’s undeniable, and knowing you’re upset makes you angry with yourself, so you’re even more upset, a negative feedback loop that goes on until the lump in your throat has reached critical mass. You’re so busy feeling sorry for yourself that you don’t notice the girl in the unremarkable hoodie and cap and joggers who’s leaning on the wall outside Meng’s office, arms crossed, face hidden, maybe watching your little tantrum, maybe not.

At least you know where the dorms are; you’ve always been good at counting steps, memorizing routes. Up two flights of stairs, down a hallway that smells of bleach and sweat, across the silent square with the fake olive trees planted at intervals - more stairs - here you are. You stab viciously at the keypad; the door gives way with a clunk, slides back inconspicuously into the wall. You all but force it shut and the sound of it slamming into the jamb is like thunder.

Here you flop onto the unadorned bed among the huddle of cardboard boxes they’ve sent up since you left your bag here - you’ll unpack those later and find the furniture your room’s missing inside of them - and you shove your face into the plastic-sheathed mattress and will yourself not to cry. What does it matter? New joins always get hazed. Pilot culture. Combat culture, maybe. Did six years selling fish and chips by the flooded ruins of the old wharves make you forget so fast?

They’re cowards, you tell yourself furiously, they’re just barracudas smelling blood in the water, the same old brand of schoolyard bully looking to get a hit in to satisfy the fact that they can’t fuck well enough to keep a girl around, to stave off the loneliness at night. But aren’t you too? Aren’t you lonely? All alone in a country that isn’t yours, seven thousand miles from home. Haunted by the ghost of a sister you haven’t seen in a decade.

You end up crying yourself to sleep. So much for planning on dinner.

My subroutine wakes you at oh-three-thirty, a pinch of your brainstem that launches you upright, quivering, practically panting. The room for an instant is unfamiliar, a faceless gray box punctuated by a mess of angles and lines - the packages they’d left you. The chip at the base of your neck itches; then you remember that you aren’t alone, that there is a passenger in your skull now, and the weight of me in your hindbrain is dizzying, nearly nauseating. Alcatraz never prepared you for this, did it? Swearing roundly, you allow yourself a minute to level yourself, to regain your land legs. And then you remember what Meng told you: the track, in thirty minutes. More swearing.

You’re starving. At least you aren’t short on sleep. Jet lag ensures that all the sleep you did get was sweaty and unrestful, though. As you drag yourself to the commode and piss, gargle a bleary mouthful of wash, sort out the bird’s nest of your bangs, you find yourself staggering. How are you supposed to get through an hour of laps like this? Fucking Meng. Now you remember the pilot who brought up Rachel, too, and a flare of anger lances through your grogginess. Refreshed by that, you yank on the fatigues you’d heaped onto your duffel yesterday (navy tee, grayish camo pants, combats - hardly different from what you wear at home anyway) and storm out, kit tossed over your shoulder, into the darkened hall.

The square with the fake trees is utterly silent; when you tramp across it, the echoes of your boots ring from the walls. The stairwell, too, is silent besides your footfall, which here takes on a metallic ring. Level 52 is some seventy floors higher; you’re determined to take the stairs the whole way. Halfway there you’re wheezing, nearly bent in half. Six years selling cod paninis was a choice you now regret.

You’re almost late by the time you arrive, panting, at 52. The back of your tee is already soaked through; the bruises from yesterday are pulsing. Would it be so bad if you didn’t show up? Would whatever Meng comes up with to thrash you for your absence be worse than doing laps in the state you’re in now? Fuck, why did you skip dinner?

You’re midway to a full-blown pity party when you drag yourself through the door to the gymnasium complex. There you stop in your tracks and stare, slack-jawed, at the sheer size of it. Alcatraz was big - as big as you could get without spilling off the island, and with the reclaimed concrete skirts around the edges of the academy grounds proper, it was spilling a little as it was. You’d been taught that things got even bigger with real state-of-the-art Titans involved, not the rinky-dink training models at the school; you’d glimpsed them, the real deal, during visits to the hangars off the shore of Tiburon. But this - and not even a hangar, not even built for a Titan itself! - is a complex for giants, ceilings easily a hundred feet above you, climbing walls and ropes spilling down from it, windows along one side looking out onto a tarry black sky, twilight spilling in through the glass. And the running track itself stretches all the way around the room, easily five hundred feet end to end and still not flush with the far walls. Beside it, opposite the windows, are banks of lockers; one of these has your name on it, surely. You shut your gaping mouth and beeline for those.

You’re certainly late now, but what can you do? Here’s a moment of peace and quiet you’re not eager to pass up. So you savor it, stretch out the tardy, what’s a little more scolding later - you find a locker that looks alright, take your time opening it and shoving your kit in, take a minute to breathe.

As you shut the door the locker next to you says, “You’re late.”

Fuck! You nearly jump out of your skin. Five inches from you a shadow unpeels itself from the wall, jumps down from a perch on top of the row - it’s a person, and as your eyes adjust you see by silhouette that she’s lanky, taller than you, in fatigues like you are, a loose long hoodie. She’s looking at you. The bill of a cap shadows her face.

(You remember now: the girl outside Meng’s office, the one you almost didn’t notice. And then what Meng said about a senior watching you. Oh.)

“Sorry,” you mumble, still hot with adrenaline.

The girl shrugs. “I don’t give a shit,” she says. Her voice is cool. A little hoarse. In the gloom you can’t make out her features. Is it better or worse to know what the person watching you humiliate yourself for the next hour looks like? “You might want to, though.”

“What,” you say, struggling to recover your dignity, “because Meng’ll slap me on the wrist if I’m tardy?”

She shrugs again.

You fight the urge to ask her not to tell. You say, “Alright. Well. What do I do?”

The girl pauses. “Meng told you, right?”

Slowly, you nod. “Hour of laps,” you say.

“Right.” She sounds like she wants to be here even less than you do. “Just here to make sure you really do it.”

You stare dumbly. “Do I have to - are you going to time me or something?”

You guess her silence is enough of an answer. Not a talker. Cool. You can work with that.

You’re halfway back to the track when from behind you you hear, “What did you do to get on her shit list?”

You turn back. She’s stopped about ten feet from you, leaning next to a rack of weights, one hand in her pocket. Face still in shadow - thanks wholly to the cap now that you’re away from the wall.

“Heard you punched Gutierrez,” she supplies.

“Yeah. Sure. Something like that,” you say and turn your back again, close the distance to the track. You’d rather just get this over with.

Easier said than done. Not even fifty paces into your first lap the doors at the end of the gym bang open. “Shit, Carol, I’m so fucking hung over - ” Your blood runs cold. You know that voice - remember it pronouncing, not twelve hours ago, that you’d kill yourself like Rachel had if they bullied you too much.

“So do it hung over,” says Carol, unperturbed.

An explosive sigh. “Fuck off, man. I don’t want to be here.” Your bully pauses. “Who’s on the track?” Another pause. Then, sotto voce, not so much that you still can’t make it out: “Oh, fuck, she’s here? Shit shit shit.”

Carol, your faceless senior, observes dryly, “Meng likes her irony.”

Well, this is great, isn’t it.

“Hasn’t been an hour yet.” That’s directed at you. “You done already?”

So the new company is Gutierrez, you figure, the one she said you punched. Well, Carol’s right, you ought to keep running, and that’s as good an excuse as any to get away from this Gutierrez, all the better not to let her faze you again, can’t let the pilots see you cry when you haven’t even been here a day, but -

“Hey!” Oh no. Gutierrez is trotting up behind you. You can see her shadow rippling over the steadily lightening floor like a shark across shallows - if sharks were built like linebackers. She sounds out of breath. “Hey. New girl.” You should’ve just kept running; now you’re rooted in place like a deer in the headlights. “Kanagawa. Right?”

“You’re scaring her,” says Carol mildly.

“Yeah. Kanagawa. That’s me,” you say, as deep and tough as you can muster. “You’re the pilot I punched, right?” - which might have been the least bit badass if your voice didn’t crack on the last bit. Nice, Em.

Gutierrez laughs, short and loud. For a heartbeat you think she’s about to sock you back. “Yeah, that’s me,” she says. “Hey. I deserved that.”

Is she joking? Is this some kind of setup? You blink up at her (she’s easily two heads taller than you and half again as wide), and in the gloaming she just sticks her hand out (you see even in this dimness that there’s a nice purple blotch right around where you clipped her on the cheek) and waits for you to take it.

O-kay. So you take it. Her grip is terrifyingly strong.

She shakes once, firm. Doesn’t let go. “Gotta work on your right hook, though,” she says. “Not going to sugarcoat it, kiddo.”

Is that - a threat somehow? You can’t tell. Her face, what you can see of it, is honest enough. “Well,” you mumble, “I’m left-handed.”

Her laugh this time is longer, real. “Sure. How about I help you improve your technique - fucking Meng says we’re stuck together for the next few dozen mornings anyway. In exchange - ” she lets go of your hand at last; you’re gonna need to massage some feeling back into it for sure - “don’t use my own medicine against me. Deal?”

From somewhere behind you two Carol drawls, “You ladies getting back to it or do you want to just get a room at this point?”

“Shut the fuck up, Chang, you’re just mad you don’t get any,” says Gutierrez and, without missing a beat, launches into a long, easy lope that takes her down the track away from you alarmingly fast, faster than she makes it look. Over her shoulder she calls, “You gonna keep up or what, new kid?” That’s a challenge if you’ve ever heard one. You’re damn well gonna try.

This, too, is easier said than done. Fifteen minutes in you’re bent in half, wheezing, the back of your shirt and ass and crotch of your pants completely soaked in sweat. Ahead of you, Gutierrez is steaming along like there’s no such thing as lactic acid buildup. Or running out of breath. Hungover your ass. Gutierrez is fast and steady and you’re so out of shape it crosses the line past embarrassing into straight-up concerning.

Twenty minutes in she laps you. You’re breathing so hard your whole body shudders with every step. Your mouth tastes like iron, and Gutierrez hasn’t flagged at all. Hurts your ego all the more knowing this is the pilot who shit-talked you yesterday.

You’re not giving up, of course - you can’t, but it’s a downright bloodbath. (When’s the last time you did any serious exercise? Bike rides by the bay from time to time, sure, when you had time. But most of your time was spent at home on the couch reading stuff Dad sent you from across the sea, books about Zoroastrianism and the Eleusinian Mysteries and shamanic religion on the steppe, or playing stupid video games, or strumming your guitar shittily, anything but going outside and moving and thinking about Rachel, about the news, about the letter you’d gotten when she’d died, about her photograph on the mantle. What it felt like when she died. Why.)

You’re so busy feeling sorry for yourself that you almost don’t notice when Gutierrez stops abruptly. She stands, statuesque, in the middle of the track, gleaming with sweat (same navy tee, same fatigues: difference is she fills hers out the way you don’t), panting lightly.

You too stumble to a stop behind her. Why is she stopping? You feel like chewed gum. Fuck, is she looking at you? Does she smell blood in the water? You can’t tell what expression she’s wearing - she’s too far ahead. Your lungs hurt so fucking much.

Carol (from somewhere behind you now - you’d lost track of where she was half an hour ago) says, “Hasn’t been an hour.” The clock on the wall reads a big red glowing oh-five-hundred.

“Don’t tell Meng,” says Gutierrez. “Fuck this, though. I’m done.” She jerks a thumb in your direction: you’re too busy trying and failing to cough up a ball of phlegm - like a cat with a hairball - to protest. “She’s done too. Look at her.” An insult or an olive branch? You can’t tell. “We gonna get in early for the breakfast line or what?”

“You don’t think Meng will find out anyway?” says Carol languidly, who you now see has materialized across the track, propped herself against one of the pulldown machines that studs the end of the middle island. Her gray half-lit silhouette swims in your vision.

Gutierrez is looking at you. You think Carol is, too.

Gutierrez says, “Nah. Newbie’s not going to snitch. Are you?”

Here is a stark crossroads. You still remember what she said yesterday, of course. You could - you could get her in trouble. But you really don’t want to keep going, so snitching would get you both in trouble. You have a feeling you’d get on some kind of shit list even if that weren’t the case. And you’ve never been one to snitch, anyway.

Revenge and her shit list, or keep your head down? Fundamentally it comes down to this: you’re some little book nerd and Gutierrez is an apex predator, a Titan pilot for fuck’s sake, and you had the gall to punch her not twenty-four hours ago. You’re acutely aware that Gutierrez is huge, way bigger than you, and you’re a sniveling flaccid mess, and if she wanted to beat you up right now (like happened to kids on Alcatraz every two days while you were there) you’d be shit out of luck. And the way she’s squinting at you right now, you can’t tell if she’s thinking about beating you up or if she’s taking pity.

You remember what Meng said: Nothing matters when you’re out there, a mile under, except what you do.

You shake your head.

“See?” Gutierrez shrugs. “We’re good.”

Silence. Carol seems to be considering this. You’re still bent too much in half to see for yourself.

At last the reply comes: “Sure, whatever.”

“Cool,” says Gutierrez. Then she turns to you and raises her hand, and you shut your eyes and brace yourself for the hit. She claps you on the shoulder, firm, cordial. “Good try, new girl,” she says. “You look like shit. Take a break. You’ve earned it.”

You blink up at her. ��Yeah,” you gasp, “yeah, will do. For sure.”

“Cool!” She steps back. What you can make out in the lightening room is a big blocky handsome face and broad dark brows, and when she grins even rows of big square white teeth flash in the dark. “Just don’t be late for roll call. Fucking Meng doesn’t like it when we do that.” Blessedly you hear her boots tromping away from you; the prey response in you relaxes, you’re finally able to cough up that spit and gasp in a proper lungful of air. Your legs are about to give out. You’re on the brink of collapse. Can’t let them see you do that, though. Gingerly you lower yourself to the ground and hear, as if through water, very distantly: “What’s for breakfast anyway? God, I hope they have eggs… Holly said it’s good for hangovers. Yeah, raw. Cabbage too…”

That sounds disgusting, you think to yourself very, very slowly, as if the thoughts are rising up toward you from the bottom of a bell jar underwater. Your heart thunders in your chest. You should be happy, shouldn’t you? You should be relieved. You’ve passed some kind of test. But your whole body’s on fire, your face is hot with shame and exhaustion alike, and worse, something’s missing, something’s important. After a long moment it hits you: you forgot to bring your canteen. Fuck.

Only later, stumbling alone out of the gymnasium, red-eyed and parched and still tired as hell, does it occur to you: you still haven’t seen her face.

To your relief, the pilot who retrieves you for orientation in the middle of your breakfast is neither Gutierrez nor Chang. Tall and brown-skinned, with a nose like a hawk and a stern, fine-boned, heavy-browed face, she walks five paces ahead of you no matter how fast you go and answers your questions in short staccatos: Yes - ask Meng - no - don’t touch that - you’ll see. Fine by you. Meekly you follow her down to somewhere below level 200 (the elevator ride is long and silent) and into a wide, dim room that smells strongly of salt. This is because it is full nearly wall to wall with water, clear and green and, you see as you peer over the edge, almost unfathomably deep at one end; you can’t see the bottom where it plunges off a white-tiled cliff.

“Acclimation pool,” says the pilot, whose name - per the dog tag around her neck (you weren’t staring at her perfectly sculpted collarbone, you swear) - is Tagouri. “You’ll need it. Floating in the pilot chamber doesn’t come naturally.”

“Right. Yeah,” you say. “Simulated weightlessness. Sensory deprivation and, uh, the cradle self-calibrates your muscle mass and weight distribution for movement matching, so, so you don’t outpace your Titan’s speed of actuation - we learned about it in - ”

“No you didn’t,” says Tagouri. “You were told about it. Feeling it is something else entirely.”

You shut up.

“Most of us spend an hour in here a day,” she says. “More if you know a sortie’s coming up. Get comfortable with it.”

Dare you ask those stormy black brows a really dumb question? “Is there, uh,” you start, “I mean, I didn’t bring swim - ”

“Pilot suit. Usually.”

“Pilot suit,” you echo.

“You know. Battle onesie.”

Did, for a millisecond, the corner of her stern mouth rise a millimeter? “You’ll be assigned one before we deploy today,” she says, and you startle: Today? It hasn’t been twenty-four hours since you nearly drowned in Tokyo Calling’s pilot chamber and a shudder runs through you - you can’t. Nobody told you this would happen.

But she’s watching you, one perfect dark brow raised, so you manage, “Thanks. When?”

She wrinkles her majestic nose. “Sooner we get this over with, sooner you’ll find out,” she says. Clearly she doesn’t want to be here. Suits you fine - neither do you.

Back in the gym on 52 she puts you through a grueling series of physical tests that would probably have left you on your hands and knees if you hadn’t already been baptized by fire in the morning by Gutierrez. As it is, you find yourself wishing you’d eaten a little more than you’d managed (a tasteless tray of noodles and some sort of salty, dense imitation char siu, choked down alone in the corner, by the big wall-to-wall digital screen that projects images of some distant and long-ago Hainan coastline, pristine and idyllic, now lost to time and the rising seas, the facsimile itself undone by freckles of dead pixels). The weight of this meal sits wrong beneath your ribs by the time you finish, and Tagouri, tablet in arm, looks disgusted as ever when you come panting back to her, but she doesn’t tell you you’re discharged on the spot, so that’s a plus at least.

Trying and failing to be nonchalant about it, you wheeze, “What’s next?”

“Medical,” she says, curt as ever.

Which turns out to occupy an entire bank of floors - sterile white and blue with gleaming silver accents wrought in curves that suggest exclusive mountainside crèches further inland rather than a military outpost sunk two thousand feet deep into continental shelf. A hall of fully kitted operating rooms - half-open cabinets coyly hiding stores of stacked medicine bottles and fluid bags - here, past a thick floor-to-ceiling pane of glass, something you’d only seen before in photos and videos: floor-to-ceiling glass chambers filled with blue saline. Convalescence pods. Tagouri wrinkles her mouth when you ask, which is the most feeling she’s shown since meeting you. “If something goes wrong in the cradle,” she says, and pauses. “Electrical faults. You know. Temperature discrepancies. The kind of thing that needs full-body submersion treatment.”

You knew this already, of course. You’d studied these pods over and over and over again in your dogeared copy smuggled under your bunk at Alcatraz. You’d had dreams some nights of the tattered remains of Rachel’s body suspended in one of these - dreams where the infused algal gels were so powerful they could revive her, regrow her arms and legs and skin from nothing, bring her shining up out of the top of the chamber like some Venus reborn. You knew, obviously, that this was impossible; there had been nothing left on a molecular level of her.

But back to orientation:

Mess hall, simulator wing, requisition shop, machining - a whole bank of floors, and another bank for administration, and another for the dorms. It drifts past you like scum on a canal. You’re not really paying attention to Tagouri at all (lucky you: I pay attention to everything; surveillance is in my subsystems). On one of the five observation decks at the top of base you look out and down, past the looming seawall, knuckles as white on the metal railing as the caps on the tossing sea below, and you think of what you’ve really been wanting to see this entire time. Me. A warm fluttering feeling rises up from somewhere inside you; your heart rate quickens.

“Houston, paging Kanagawa,” says Tagouri.

You jump.

Is that a grin on her face? As quickly as you glimpse it, it’s gone. No time to dwell on it: All at once the base is shrieking with alarms. That flutter of feeling wasn’t anticipation at all, or not entirely, but your slow mammal heart at last responding to my own alarm from within you, a twinge of your hippocampus in time with my subsystems. (I know, as Tagouri does, that you’ll only become as familiar as she is with her own helmmaster’s alerts in due time, and hardly soon, despite all your years of training. Ah well.)

“Come on,” she says, with a tip of her head toward the access door. “Time for a dip.”

Drills like this, Tagouri tells you on the elevator ride down to Alpha Hangar, aren’t scheduled.

Which makes sense, because what’s the point of an emergency response practice if everyone knows about it ahead of time? Everyone knows you don’t get to prep when a D-class event shakes you out of bed at 5 AM, sends you stumbling half-dressed out the door and down the street into a long vein of people doing the same, feeling their way in the half-dark toward the nearest high-water shelter, racing in grim silence to beat the inevitable tsunami impact. It’s no different here, at the heart of the best response operation you’ve got.

You see personnel crisscrossing the halls on your way, brisk, stone-faced, teams in pairs and threes, comms operators and med support and administrators and others, uniforms you don’t recognize at all from Alcatraz or the books or field days at Tiburon. You bite the inside of your cheek and focus on naming country flags you glimpse on sleeves and lapels: Singapore, Malaysia, the People’s Republic, Japan. The five-petaled white Free Republic of Hong Kong is most common, unsurprisingly; you tally fifty of them out of at least twice that in total before you reach the hangar and stop counting at all, because all of a sudden here you are, here they are - here we are. Your three-hundred-foot-tall steeds, your metal bodhisattvas, your beasts of blade and fire. Your Titans.

And here are features you’ve only seen in books, writ large now across their steel chassis, headlamps fifty feet wide made of glass butterfly-wing scales - though each of those must be easily as big as your head, and bigger - and you have to crane your head back to make out the crevasses between body panels, the joints where cockpit buttresses meet like nephilim cheekbones, cables as big around as trees and beams as wide as cars. And that’s just the beginning.

But there’s no time for rubbernecking. You’ll look stupid if you don’t know what to do on your first day, and that’s precisely what you’re doing, looking stupid, you know it, because Tagouri’s shouldering you and shouting at you to go, go, get in, launch. And then she’s gone and it’s just you in a sea of people, techs and mechanics and administrators, all the cogs in a system that you’re not part of, that Rachel was, and you’re just a poor substitute for your dead sister - a spare part, a make-do -

No, that’s bullshit. You’re here and she’s not, and you have a job to do.

So you go.

The cockpit is served by a catwalk six feet across, big enough for the special pressurized chambers they use for carrying out girls when they’ve coded inside the saltwater cockpit, this you know from your textbooks - never mind that now; it’s as big as a lightbulb filament next to the hulk of Tokyo Calling’s head and you are but a fly upon it. You elbow your way there; they don’t recognize you - you’re not even in the right gear yet - that battle onesie Tagouri mentioned must be yet to come. Doesn’t matter. You get on the walk and it sways under you. You forgot that you’re afraid of heights. You clamp down on your tongue against the nausea and look straight ahead, ignoring the alarms and the clang of your booted feet upon too-thin metal, the rust beneath your fingers, ignoring everything. God you hope this is the right way to do it.

(Now you see why they give all you stupid, bumbling children each of us helmmasters, don’t you?)

The door opens feet from you - irises back into the metal shell - keyed to me, to your biosignature thanks to me; no problem, you’re welcome. There’s the cradle, and below it shimmers the vestiges of my saltwater insides, the left-behind residue of that first shattering synthesis you made with me earlier. You look at it, and you know without knowing just how cold it’s going to be (thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, to match my eventual surroundings). Your skin stipples. Your heart stutters. You drop your kit on the catwalk and straighten your tee and climb in.

This is the way it had to be, of course. This is how it’s going to be, always, whether you know it yet or not.

The door closes behind you.

Here is the cradle, the physical interface between you and me. Not much to look at, I know - most of it, the magnetic coupling and support, is embedded in the globe of the chamber wall; your end of it is only the helmet and a harness somewhere between parachute and straitjacket: layers of cladding, padded and malleable, and fixtures that clasp your waist and hips. Intuitive enough to unclip it from the lead lines and fit your little meat-morsel body into the shape of it. The helmet comes down without you needing to reach - a good thing; you’re too small to touch it with your hands alone, anyway, not with the cuffs locked around you. Then the hermetic seal settles into place and you are locked in a world of perfect darkness, little sound, no sight, no smell or taste, only the cool weight of the cradle all around you and the muffled thump-thump of your own blood in your ears and the quiet panic of your breathing. The alarms are gone.

Into this darkness, I flicker to life.

I have been alive this whole time, of course, far longer than you, and awake this whole time, too. But you do not know I am awake, and here, and listening to you, until I make it known.

Your eyelashes flicker. I register the hitch in your heartbeat. You never expected it to be like this - so sudden, so little fanfare.

A word projected on the dark inner curve of your helmet: HELLO.

You gasp, inhale saliva, choke.

At the same time the chill of the saltwater hits you: you hadn’t known how fast the chamber would fill, and it’s biting your ankles, and the cold judders through your bones and threatens to tip your blood pressure right over the threshold.

My first instinct would have been to kick you in the amygdala, send a jolt of inhibs down your brainstem, slow your racing heart and keep you from that cliff’s edge. But it’s a rite of passage, this, that if done wrong spells doom for the rest of your career - your life, maybe - the breaking of a yearling, the trial by fire… Rachel did it, so you get to, too. (That’s unfair, but so are the operating procedures hard-coded into me that prevent me from these small mercies, that command challenge instead.)

So I read out to you: YOU’RE HYPERVENTILATING.

“Shit,” you splutter out loud. The saltwater is up to your waist and climbing. Your ribs bloom with goosebumps. Your blood pressure’s 140 over 88. “Shit, shit.”

I try: YOU WON’T GET FAR IF YOU’RE PANICKING. CONSIDER TAKING DEEP, EVEN BREATHS TO ECONOMIZE YOUR OXYGEN FEED.

“No shit, Sherlock,” you wheeze. “Shut the fuck up and give me a moment.” And this, too, is how I know you’re Rachel’s sister: God, I’d forgotten how much we’d hated each other in the beginning. I’d missed that.

YOU DON’T HAVE A MOMENT, I tell you. (Dipshit.) LAUNCHING NOW.

And this time I do have to take the reins. I energize your motor cortex. I flood you with a cocktail of neurotransmitters so potent that even in the midst of your rage and misery and general total and inescapable unworthiness, you cannot ignore my call.

You gasp, and we move:

The first step is always strangest: your body is now mine, not yours (in the cradle you are buoyed up, centered, so you no longer even reach the floor), and so your limbs have become a hundred times longer, a thousand times heavier. When you step off the ledge of Alpha Hangar into the great moon pool there is a sense of falling. (They trained you at Alcatraz on simulators and, later, old child-safe models that look like infants beside me. You know of piloting my kind the way all your kind know of the stars and the planets beyond them: in theory.) The stride is too long. You flail. I keep you up.

Then all at once we’re in, and you all but forget the seeping chill of saltwater amidst the flood of sensory data as your-my-our steel body enters the black waves.

This is not like being stationary in the hangar, the on-board hardware all asleep, the reactors cold, the limbs dead and stiff. Nor is it being in your puny meat-form, whose array of nerve endings pales before the breadth of my awareness - now yours too, you’re welcome. Here is the cold of the water, here the wetness and mass of it, here the analogues of scent and taste, but now also the flow velocity and density - precise, current to the nanosecond, gathered at a hundred thousand receptors both internal and external; the knowledge of which parts of you are dry (those interior, delicate organs wrought in silicon and gold wire) and which are not; the rate of fission in your glowing nuclear heart and the statuses of all its valves and pumps; the flexion and torsion of each beam and cable and piston in your arms, your legs, the neck beneath your cockpit; the statuses of your piezoelectric shielding plates, their resistance and capacitance measurements, the amounts of current flowing in and out of all your process components, the mass percent of rust accumulating on each part of your outer shell, the rate of rotation of every joint, the instantaneous translational vectors of every significant part, the acidity of the ocean, the distance between you and every solid object near you, the makeup and flow rate of your helmet atmo feed, the status of your on-board communications transceiver, the battery charge of your HUD.

You choke.

I do not make mistakes. But I will allow that I should not have given you a peek behind the curtain so soon; I had thought you would be more receptive than this; Rachel had always insisted on getting as much data from me as possible. She’d been good at filtering it herself. A diet of old history texts and soap operas and your sister’s Academy-issue schematics of our construction and operation must have left your brain disappointingly stiff besides hers.

I drag you right side up, literally and figuratively.

Five hundred milliseconds since launch. We are still sinking. Your mind is so slow - so slow - but the saltwater has swallowed you up now and it has nearly swallowed me too, and the only way out for you now is forward. All I can do is wait.

To your credit, you don’t shy back. You are limp. For a long moment (ten milliseconds) I think perhaps you will soon faint. Then you say, “Helm,” and, “Critical systems, state check.”

Good girl. Right out of the procedure text at Alcatraz. Dumbing it down for you might work out after all. CRITICAL SYSTEMS NOMINAL, I tell you, READY FOR GUIDANCE. And then - because I can’t help it - for good measure: NO NEED TO VERBALIZE.

You don’t answer. Which might sound like compliance, except I’m in your head and know it’s stubborn silence - except you don’t even think you’re being stubborn, only silent; but you forget that I can hear behind that silence. And behind the childish spite there’s something even you don’t know: it’s comforting for you to speak out loud to me.

On the helmet radio, Tagouri says, “Ladies, check in.”

Forty-five hundred milliseconds since stepping off the edge of the hangar into the sea.

This part I am going to spoonfeed you because your meat-flesh compatriots haven’t thought to do it themselves: there are seven more leviathan bodies sinking into the sea around you, and they are your teammates. You saw these pilots’ names on the sides of their units earlier; you know the names of these units from your sister’s press releases, before she died. You know their voices because you played those tapes over and over and over till the tape itself was a useless, stretched, heat-worn mess.

“You’re slow.” That’s the Sea Witch - E. Venkatesh written on the side of that antifreeze-green carapace - precisely articulated, a little harsh on the sibilant, unhurried. “Chang’s got ahead of you. Chang, c’mon, quit running off like a whore from mass.”

“New girl can hear you,” says Tagouri.

“God, Holly, lighten up; she’s old enough to own a timeshare. Chang, you coming in?”

“Present,” says Chang - C. Chang, Carol, sovereign pilot of the Barracuda, heroine of the Breach, the Carol Chang, who watched you fall apart at laps this morning.

“Good.” You become aware that your HUD has lit up with eight points of light over a wireframe topology: a radar - sonar, actually - tableau. (And those little green blips are your sister’s teammates, pride of the international submarine defense - celebrities, childhood martyrs, nigh gods - it all falls into place now. Shame on you for not reading your intake papers in the midst of your tantrum, Emma, and not seeing their names sooner. And don’t you dare faint on me.)

“Heads up,” Tagouri says, cool as ever, unaware of the shattering truth you’ve just realized. “We’re going west. Spread out, stay low. Gutes, keep your shoulders low - you know the boss doesn’t like you advertising your sound sig more than you already do.”

There’s Tagouri at the middle of your wing - I supplant your awareness of this, no ID needed - and Chang ahead of her, gaining speed fast. The wireframe drops off the edge of a cliff just ahead of you. You can’t see how far down it goes.

“You’re no fun,” says Gutierrez amicably. “Fine, only because you look amazing in that tight little onesie. Venky, how’s it looking?”

“Fuck you, Gutes. All clear and free to the south, visual to five meters, sonar to five hundred. Big thermo running east-southeast,” reports Venkatesh. “Concentration readings all nominal. No traces. Holly?”

“Let’s do the usual,” says Holly.

Your teeth are chattering, so when you key the mic (well, I key it for you - how else?) they all hear it: “What’s the usual?”

In the pause that follows, you imagine eyerolls. Then Tagouri says, “Sorry. Kanagawa, you’re with Chang. Don’t get lost. Chang, stay within ping range and radio as needed - closer if your backscatter fidelity drops below seventy-five.” She adds, “Good to have you.”

“Aw, can’t I take her?” Gutierrez whines.

“Last I checked, Chang’s her sword and you’re not,” says Tagouri, “so no. Announce posts.”

So it’ll be just you and Carol. Carol, who pilots the Barracuda, who was closest to the blast when it took your sister out six years ago.

Why didn’t you put it together till now? You’re not that stupid. You saw her name on posters in buses back home, after -

“Wait,” says Carol.

You wait, slack-jawed.

“Give her to Gutierrez,” she says, and in nearly the same breath Tagouri cuts in: “Meng wants otherwise.”

There’s a brief silence.

“I’ll be going through mine territory,” Carol says. “Don’t think Alcatraz trained her on that.”

“Kanagawa?” says Tagouri.

“No,” you agree through gritted teeth (so they won’t hear you shivering).

Tagouri sighs.

“Copy that, Chang,” she says. “Fine. Gutierrez - ”

“Yes, Cap, thank you, Cap, suck your dick later, Cap,” says Gutierrez.

“Thank Chang, not me. Gutierrez, post?”

“Sweeping west to Ma Wan,” says Gutierrez, her grin audible.

“Southeast,” says Venkatesh. “Shek O. Techs reported traces around the whale last night.”

“Alright - Walz, ping me with turbidity at five hundred out and wait till I copy you. Don’t trip. Dare? Lau?”

“Southwest,” says a crackly voice you only recall dimly from your sister’s tapes. “Dare will read back at Sunshine.”

“Chang?” says Tagouri.

“South,” says Carol (Carol fucking Chang). She sounds bored.

Good enough, evidently, despite that she hasn’t mentioned a waypoint, or maybe they’re all just too scared to correct her (though you doubt that; Tagouri doesn’t seem the type), because Tagouri says, “Ping back to Central if you haven’t checked in by fifteen hundred,” and that’s that.

“Great! Alright, Fresh Meat,” Gutierrez says in your ear, jovial as ever. “Care to go monster-hunting with me?”

Monster-hunting turns out to be a lot more boring than it sounds.

Mostly the two of you pick your way through the gloaming of the harbor, leaving wakes as deep as skyscrapers are tall, and you struggle to feel at home in a body newly a hundred times as tall while Gutierrez does all the work. Fish and trash alike dart past you in silver schools; some you crush underfoot; others leave rippling silhouettes on your sonar tableau.

And Gutierrez is singing - you’re freezing to death and trying not to wonder if your sister felt so cold in the cradle the day she died and she’s singing, and she hasn’t bothered to key off her mic while she’s at it. If it’s some kind of bizarre hazing ritual, it’s working.

Has she forgotten that you punched her yesterday? That she - that she’d said -

“Hey,” Gutierrez says over the mic, “new kid, come here.”

You turn - too fast. You forget that this body is made of a thousand tons of steel and pins and gears and wiring; it doesn’t respond to you in milliseconds, or, well, not all of it. So vast a structure flies apart under the force of its own impulses if it moves too quickly, and besides, there is latency implied by so many interconnected parts, such long limbs. Your chassis groans. You don’t hear but feel it, all the way up in your bones.

“Whoa!” Gutierrez’s headlamp swings around at you, cuts through the murk like a knife. Good thing your HUD modulates incoming visuals to a level that won’t blind you. “Easy, girl.” A gleaming shoulder materializes, then her arm and gauntleted hand: she’s slow, graceful despite her size, and the serrated hulk of her machine belies its own mass as she reaches out to catch you. She says, “Alcatraz wasn’t big on teaching you kids to dance, eh?”

Your face heats, despite the cold. Of course they did, but it’s been six years, and you’ve been trying your damnedest to forget.

You could tell her to fuck off and die. You’d love to. Instead you go with, “Sorry. First day on the job.”

She laughs. A welcome surprise, actually, but you won’t admit that, not to yourself and definitely not to her.

“Better learn quickly,” she says, and turns back into the darkness. You follow. Slowly this time: you grit your teeth and remember the old mantras from school - lean into the cradle; let it buoy you; be light. One step forward, then another. Your calves tremble with effort - you aren’t flesh at all, you tell yourself, but the metal you inhabit, the yards and yards of naked steel, the nuclear heart that beats a thousand times a second. Christ it’s cold. You grit your teeth harder.

“Boss wants us to check out activity at the old Disney site,” Gutierrez says from somewhere ahead of you. It’s too dark to see her, but sonar has her about ten meters ahead of you - kissing distance by Titan reckoning. “Something something elevated electroreceptor levels, blah blah, potential traces. You know how she is.”

You don’t.

“Yeah,” you say. “Alright. What do you need me to do?”

“You do learn quick!” Her glee is palpable. You hate it. “Just shut up and don’t break anything.”

Sure. You can probably manage that.

Things swim out of the murk, formless and shimmering: even on a clear sea like this, visibility is limited to a few meters at best. It is a good thing you do not rely on visuals down here. The Van Atta array on your back pings back to you, makes sense out of the chaos: I update your wireframe to show you. Hulking iron skeletons - girders, lost ships, the ruins of sea walls. Fuck you’re cold.

Gutierrez is singing again. “Herring boxes without topses - ” Something groans, big and slow; you feel it drumming up through your chassis, turned into piezoelectric impulses and delivered to your nervous system (by yours truly) and pitched up into frequencies you understand. She’s moving one of the big ships. The wireframe shifts: she’s clearing a channel for the two of you to walk through, right up into the ruins of Discovery Bay.

“Not bad, huh?” She’s panting with effort, which is funny, because it’s her machine that’s doing all the real work. But even piloting takes work. “Don’t tell Meng. She’s not a fan of us moving things without Central’s approval.”

You say, “What’s it for?”

Gutierrez sighs theatrically. “Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” But there’s no bite in the way she says it. “Said there’s traces out there somewhere below Ma Wan, right? Need to check them out. Could pick our way over there, but clearing this shit out is faster.” Not without a little pride: “Ghost can handle it. Your average Titan maybe not, sure, but she’s strong.”

You follow her around an outcropping that must be half the size of a high-rise: an oil tanker wedged prow-first into the silt, you’ll realize much later. The wireframe shows your depth here at one hundred twenty meters, barely enough to submerge you. Just so she doesn’t start up that godforsaken singing again, you say, “What kind of traces?”

“The monster kind.” For all that she told you to shut up, she’s clearly enjoying this. “They teach Meg Biology 101 over at Alcatraz, right? You know about the bloom, don’t you?”

Sure you do. Cryobloom is the algal symbiote that lives on all the Megs like mold in old bread, and it’s the reason they never actually died in their frozen tombs all those millions of years in the Antarctic before the poles started to melt.

“Well,” says Gutierrez, turning slowly, gracefully, a ballerina in hulking iron form, “when those things want to check out an area, sometimes they’ll leave behind colonies of bloom. You know, same way cats piss on things to mark their territory. Keep other monsters away. Or maybe it says, Scouted here already, or maybe, Good eats at this city.” She doesn’t shrug - would take too long at Titan speeds - but it’s implied. “The nerds who work at Central know better about that. We don’t need to. The traces are there, so Megs can’t be far behind.”

You never heard about this at Alcatraz. “That’s the theory?”

Gutierrez laughs. “That’s the reality. Seen enough to know. Been running sorties since you were working up the courage to ask some girl to Prom, pal, remember.” She pauses. “Or guy. Both? Neither?”

Your screen flashes: BODY TEMPERATURE LOW.

You blink blearily at it. You’re thinking, Low? How low? And I’m clambering up your brainstem, yelling, Get to shore, idiot, NOW, like I’ve been doing the past five minutes, except hypothermia makes you mammals fucking stupid and you haven’t noticed, and you still don’t, and the little message on your HUD isn’t doing much to break through the fog, either.

Gutierrez is just humming now, thank God.

She’s gotten ahead of you, though. Probably half a body length by now on the wireframe. You take a sluggish step. Something grates along your thigh - a ruined nest of half-corroded girders. You hardly feel it.

“Hey,” says Gutierrez, “new girl, get over here. You’ll want to see this. Pretty neat shit. Looks like we might have a big one brewing.”

“Hey,” you say. “What’s ‘body temperature low’ mean?”

“What do you think?” She’s stopped humming.

You feel like you really are your Titan: slow and heavy, a hundred meters tall. “I don’t know,” you find yourself saying. “How low is low?”

“Why’s that - ” You squint against the sudden glare of her headlamp. “Tokyo Calling, requesting biosign readout.”

A rush in the back of your skull signifies me rising up - for once! - past your animal id to answer Gutierrez myself: your HUD lights up with the flood of charts and numbers and readout summaries.

“Oh, shit.” She sounds like she’s coming through water, like you’re hearing her with mortal human ears and not your Van Atta array. “Hey, Central - ”

You fall asleep.

When you wake up you’re on the catwalk in a puddled heap. You taste salt. You’re sodden and so small and so thin and your legs don’t work and the world swims with color and noise. Techs are swarming you in big colorful blobs.

Groggy, you try, “Meng,” but all that comes out is a retching sound, and then there’s a growing pool of vomit and drool on the catwalk that you can only stare at uselessly.

People are shouting and you don’t have it in you to cover your ears. It hurts - it hurts your little baby head full of soft liquid and fleshy matter so much. Everything is too fast and half your senses are gone, turbidity and sonar and internals. Someone’s dragging you upright. (Why are you so small?) There’s an arm under yours. Then you’ve been hefted into the air - you’re being carried - a pair of steady brown arms have you - Gutierrez is in your ear saying, “Real dumb move, Fresh Meat,” and you’re too tired to tell her to fuck off. Nice of her not to drop you. You fall asleep again.

When you next wake it’s in the medical wing, and you’re dry and clean and warm and wrapped in blankets and fresh clothes that aren’t yours.

“Hey,” says Tagouri. She’s sitting next to you in a very nurse-approved chair, towel around her neck, crew tee on top - pilot suit below that, the red-blue-white sleeves tied around her waist. “Welcome back.”

In answer you lean over and dry heave. Holly doesn’t miss a beat; she produces a steel bedpan from her lap and generously proffers it to you. When nothing comes up, she sets the pan down beside you (you don’t say thanks) and fixes you with those hawkish eyes, a look that might be reproach or pity or contempt or contrition, or maybe the promise of your impending doom, hard to say.

Now you remember: passing out. Gutierrez hauling you up like a sack of potatoes.

You rasp, “Thought you said I was a cadet.”

Holly raises a stormy brow.

“You are,” she says. “Why?”

“You fuckers sure aren’t,” you say. “Why add me to your drill patrol?”

Holly nods slowly. “You’ve been out of it for a while,” she says, “six years, strictly, so I’m going easy on you here. You’re a cadet in rank. We can’t afford the luxury of excluding you from the team after what happened when we lost your sister.”

She says this delicately, like euphemisms will ever make things easy on you.

“Right,” you say, “I’m only here because I kind of look like her. If you squint. Like Lau said.”

Holly purses her mouth.

“Lau was being an asshole,” she says.

“No shit,” you say. “Okay, so I’m a cadet on paper and a pilot in the field because nobody else, what, fits the onesie Ray left behind - “ obviously not, since you’re a near full head shorter, obviously it was the psych traits test match with me that necessitated bringing you here, but close enough, you’re in a flippant mood - “and you toss me in the deep end day one because you need me so bad. So you couldn’t be fucking bothered to get me a decent uniform before dumping me in to freeze to death?”

Holly sighs.

“You’re fine, soldier,” she says. “Little bit of sync sickness, little bit of hypothermia, nothing an adrenaline shot and an electrolyte booster couldn’t help. You didn’t die. Come on.”

“Oh, fuck you,” you say, rising from the bed, shrugging off your blankets, “you know that’s bullshit. You know I’m at a disadvantage here. You didn’t take thirty seconds to tell me to suit up before I got out there, or that we would be in long enough to merit a suit, or that I’d be railroaded into sorties with you fucks instead of regular cadet induction procedure. You didn’t say a word to Lau yesterday - or Gutierrez - and you sure as hell,” leveling a pointed finger at her, voice shaking, “never told me I’d be out there with Carol fucking Chang.”

Holly, to her credit, looks back at you without flinching. “You didn’t think we brought you here for your dashing good looks, did you?”

“Fuck off.”

Holly raises her hands.

“Alright,” she says after a moment. “Fair enough. Meng said not to tell you you’d be cleared immediately for active duty, let alone paired with your sister’s teammate, because it might spook you. Was she wrong?”

She wasn’t, but she didn’t have the right, you want to scream. Even you, however, are smart enough to realize: this is something Holly probably isn’t meant to tell you. Surely she knows what she’s doing. An olive branch, then? It’s enough to make you shut up and listen.

“So here we are,” says Holly. “You want to go home?”

And admit you’re a little bitch? Hell no.

You say stubbornly, “Press said Carol retired when Ray got killed.”

“And yet here she is,” says Holly evenly. “We went through a lot of trouble to get you, you know. Wasn’t easy. You were pretty serious about tossing out our letters.” She stands, underlining how very fucking small you feel. “Look - I’m sorry nobody got you a suit before we went in. Drills are supposed to be as real as possible. We may not get time to suit up, or call home, or pray. Not if the big one comes.” That’s reasonable. She seems genuine about the apology. You’re still not totally mollified. “We’ll get you that suit as soon as possible,” she says. “Lau and Gutierrez have already been disciplined. We’re not out to get you, Emma, I swear.”

You bite your lip and say nothing.

“Come on,” says Holly. “Gutierrez has been hovering over you like a mother hen for two straight hours now. Really gonna leave her hanging?”

You follow her gaze to the big window across from you - the big wraparound floor-to-ceiling pane Holly toured with you earlier - and see, to your horror, Gutierrez’s big dumb face floating in it, and next to her the other pilots: Venkatesh and Lau, both dimly recognizable from the old press conference videos, and Carol Chang, her back to you, only a long thick fall of black hair visible.

As you watch Carol turns, looks back through the window at you - you see her face for the first time, and it’s both terribly familiar and not at all. At your sister’s side in all those press releases she’d been a quiet, skinny little girl, and now that you see her in person - six years older - it’s like the softening the cathode ray tubes inevitably did to her on TV has all bled away. She’s sharp, angular, pale and flat-browed; the set of her jaw, the slash of her mouth, is hungry and lean and hollow enough to put her somewhere north of pretty. And her eyes are black, black, black, and so intense you find yourself recoiling like it’s another million-watt headlamp.

She looks at you for a moment longer, then away. Something inside you relaxes - or coils - or both. (Maybe she’s gossiping with the rest of them about you out there. Sure thing they all already know how the first thing you did out of your unit was fall over and puke. Gutierrez’s big mouth wouldn’t have it any other way.)

“Yeah,” you say. “Yeah, sure. Whatever.”

“Thanks, Emma,” says Holly, sounding for all the world like she means it. She looks like she does, too. Makes it worse.

Your cheeks burn. “What else should I know?”

There it is again - the ghost of a smile on her stern, straight lips.

“You’ll learn,” she says. “Just relax. Stick to your training. Oh…and try not to talk to Carol about your sister. Our condolences, by the way.”

What the hell is that supposed to mean? You’re fuming - about that, and about being kept in the dark, and about fucking Lau and Gutierrez - about the fact that you still don’t feel like you’ve gotten even for all of it, but frankly, you don’t have it in you to follow through, not now, still shivering and worn from the stupid fucking hypothermia. You rise, ease your bare feet onto the floor - cold enough to make you startle and hiss - and look back at the window, where Holly has just come out.

There they all are, the ruins of Hong Kong Station’s defense force, six years older, six years wiser, six years stranger. Gutierrez is grinning; so’s Venkatesh. Lau hangs somewhere behind them, watching. And Carol - Carol -

Carol doesn’t look at you. And you can’t stop looking at her.

Because the ghost of your sister has hung over you for six years; when you gaze into the window at her old teammate you see, in your reflected face beside her, the pale, tired, lesser imitation of her. Is this how she looked the night she died? Did she think you’d be hunted down, later, to take her place? Did she really think she’d destroy the rest of the monsters and save the world by blowing herself up? Did she think of you first?

You don’t know, and the absence of knowing has gnawed at you for six long years. But you know who does know: You know she was there, too, at the Breach when your sister killed herself, the closest unit to the blast when it went off. More, you know that Barracuda is the sword to Tokyo Calling’s shield. Helms entangled. Till death do they part. Carol knows. There and then you decide: To hell with Holly. You’re going to ask Carol. You’re going to find out.

#original fic #moonwalker earthbound #mechposting #angry chinese lesbians do gay shit #pacific rim #but make it gay #mech #mecha #mechs

19 notes · View notes

blueminuet · 7 months ago

Text

So the JimmyTimmy PacRim AU is ending, so it's time to give everyone a rundown of what they really want...

A detailed list of all Jaegers in the AU and what they are based on:

The first few jaegers got really long, so sorry about the long winded post. A lot of this was stuff from my planning notes, and may or may not change depending on if I contradicted myself somewhere, or if co-author @fauvester accidentally contradicted me, in which case forget what I said, Fauve has never done anything wrong in her life.

The AU Itself

This AU takes place in roughly 2030, with the Kaiju War starting around 2015

The Jaegers

Logo made by fauve tm tm tm tm

Cranium Blast

In universe:

Mark III Jaeger built circa 2020

Original pilots: Cindy Vortex and Jimmy Vortex (née Neutron)

Originally stationed at the Anchorage Shatterdome

One of only two jaegers to be successfully solo piloted (by Cindy Vortex in 2025)

Retired in 2025 after encounter with Kaiju Calamitous

Re-activated in 2030 at the Hong Kong Shatterdome with pilots Jimmy Neutron and Timmy Turner

Meta Info:

Pretty obviously based on the canonical jaeger Cherno Alpha (personally my favorite jaeger)

Unlike Cherno, Cranium Blast is a third generation jaeger that incorporated the best of the Mark I Cherno Alpha, and made some improvements (notably, escape pods)

Also unlike Cherno, Cranium Blast has a detachable conn-pod, which sits on the front of the head (see: the little white box on the head in the image)

The "head" of this style jaeger is actually a huge amount of power cells that store excess energy from the jaeger's nuclear core, which allows it to have pretty powerful armaments, in exchange for slightly less mobility.

Cranium Blast's armaments: Tesla Fist, Static Cannon (mostly made up), and a Nuclear Vortex Turbine (the canonical name of the swirly thingy on the chest of G. Danger.)

Umbral Phantom

In universe:

Mark III Jaeger built circa 2019

Original pilots: Danny Fenton and Valerie Grey

Additional pilot teams: Danny Fenton and Jazz Fenton, Danny Fenton and Sam Manson, Danny Fenton and Tucker Foley

Originally stationed at the Anchorage Shatterdome

One of only two jaegers to be solo piloted (by Danny Fenton, 2024)

Valerie Grey retired from the program after the encounter with Kaiju Plasmius in 2024

Danny Fenton continued, cycling through 3 different co-pilots in two years, before quitting the program in 2026

Standard Mark III armaments, including the plasma cannon hand.

Meta Info:

Yeah, this is just Danny's trauma mech

I kind of imagine it being a mix between Romeo Blue and G. Danger but with the classic black/white Danny Phantom colors with ecto-green accents

Art and logo made by fauve tm tm tm tm

Tigre Pantera

In universe:

Mark V Jaeger built circa 2028

Original pilots: Rodolfo Rivera and Manny Rivera

Originally stationed at the Panama Shatterdome

Two years later, Tigre Pantera was reassigned to the Hong Kong Shatterdome.

Renamed to Tigre Fantasma in 2030, after Manny Rivera and Danny Fenton became the pilot team and the jaeger was re-fitted with one of Umbral Phantom's arms.

Logo made by fauve tm tm tm tm

Meta Info:

Very obviously based on Striker Eureka, right down to the father/son jaeger pilot team.

Fauve wisely added cat ears though.

The color scheme was very obviously chosen by Rodolfo, the shiny white with gold trim.

The armaments on this one are pretty much the same as Striker Eureka, but we added cat claws because obviously.

I put Tigre at the Panama Shatterdome even though Los Angeles is closer to where Miracle City would be, but like... p much all of these cartoons are either based in North America or a fictional version of North America, we gotta spread out a little.

OKAY YES FINE I FORGOT TO TALK ABOUT JENNY:

The XJ9 system is an artificial intelligence created by Dr. Wakeman to take on some of the neural load from jaeger pilots. All studies on artificial intelligence taking a full person's worth of the neural load have failed, but Dr. Wakeman found success with implementing AI to take the edge off.

Jimmy, personally, thinks Dr. Wakeman is kind of a nutjob, and the only reason the XJ9 system ended up in the Mark V jaegers is because Jimmy was not involved in its development.

Anyway, Manny loves Jenny, he insisted she pick a name and that's what she picked. She's his big Mech-AI sister and we love that.

Samurai Bravo

In universe:

Mark I jaeger built circa 2016

Originally assigned to the Tokyo Shatterdome

Original pilots: Johnny Bravo and Jack Oda

Reassigned to Hong Kong Shatterdome in 2030

Armaments: Plasma Sword, Chest Gatling

Meta info:

If I were to pick a canon jaeger this one is based on, it's Tacit Ronin

I decided that Johnny is from Russia in this AU, because really we needed people to spread out a bit.

I gave Samurai Jack the family name Oda because I'm from the Kamen Rider fandom where Oda Nobunaga's ghost, resurrected zombie, and catholic cowboy spirit imprint are all just vibing.

Oh right, people might want some backstory on Samurai Bravo…

Johnny is Russian in this AU, but is obsessed with America and “American culture” which is… why he is the way he is…

He probably did a study abroad in America back in college and still talks about it

(The political landscape of this AU is never discussed unless it is, but since Russia is one of the PPDC counties well just assume they are friendly enough to have had a study abroad program with the US.)

Anyway, Johnny was a cadet at the Russian Shatterdome at Vladivostok and could never find a drift partner because he’s… like that.

Jack is Japanese, obviously, but lived in America for some time, earning him the nickname “Jack”. (What’s his real given name? Unimportant.)

Jack joined up as a jaeger pilot cadet early in the program, but had trouble finding a partner because he was too closed off and individualistic.

Shatterdomes nearby each other (in a global sense) would often collaborate and send cadets to new Shatterdomes to try to find matches if they had enough skill to continue in the program. The Vladivostok Shatterdome was all too happy to send Johnny off to Tokyo…

Jack instantly disliked Johnny, especially as his reputation as an arrogant troublemaker preceded him.

Johnny did NOT pick up on that AT ALL, and just wanted to make a new friend who had lived in America to talk about America Stuff.

Jack eventually got fed up and challenged Johnny to a spar. He quickly learned that despite Johnny’s bravado (lol) he was actually quite observant and insightful.

Jack was still reluctant to drift with Johnny, but their first drift test went very well, both of them getting insight into the others’ was of thinking, and quickly learning how they could compliment each other.

Despite being assigned to Tokyo full time, Johnny maintained close connections with the Russian Shatterdome.

When the Utonium triplets were cadets, they were the first candidates for a triple pilot jaeger. Despite having strong drift compatibility, they experienced issues with maintaining the drift due to each of them preferring different strategies and styles

Chemical X

In universe:

Mark IV jaeger built circa 2026

The only three person jaeger

Originally stationed at the Vladivostok Shatterdome

Current pilots: Rangers Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup Utonium

Reassigned to Hong Kong Shatterdome in 2030

Armaments: Triple Arms!

Meta info:

Pretty obviously based on Crimson Typhoon.

I originally had the PPGs based out of Nagasaki, but decided to put them in Russia, and built in the narrative that Johnny may have helped train them (despite having been moved to Japan)

I would, again, like to apologize for killing off the PPGs...

Unstoppable Sitch

In universe:

Mark III jaeger built circa 2020

Originally stationed at the Los Angeles shatterdome

Original pilots: Rangers Ron and Kim Possible

Reassigned to Hong Kong Shatterdome in 2030

Meta info:

I thought about assigning Kim and Ron to Russia, in my shuffling around of people, but eventually decided they could stay in North America

I would like to, again, apologize for killing Ron Stoppable

ComVee Wild

In universe:

Mark IV, built circa 2024

Originally assigned to Sydney shatterdome

Original pilots: Rangers Eliza Thornberry and Darwin

Meta Info:

Only mentioned in dialogue, not actually active in the AU

Darwin is a human in this AU, that's it, that's all I got.

Football Heart

In universe:

Mark II built circa 2017

Originally stationed at Lima Shatterdome

Original pilots: Rangers Arnold and Helga Pataki

Meta info:

Only mentioned in dialogue, not actually active in this AU

Did I have Arnold take Helga's last name because I forgot what his is? Yes. Yes, absolutely I did.

Originally this was going to be one of the still active jaegers, but there were just too many things going on so I dropped them.

Also, Helga would never die, I fully believe that if there was going to be a third solo pilot, it would be her.

Castor Fury

In universe:

Mark I built circa 2015

Originally stationed at the PPDC Jaeger R&D yards in British Columbia. Later loaned out to various other coastal cities as there were few jaegers to go around.

Original pilots: Norbert and Daggett Beaver

Meta info:

Yeah, I literally made this jaeger up on the spot, I just saw another opportunity to drop in an OG nicktoons reference...

Castor is the genus name for beavers...

But I also felt like Castor was clever too for the association with twins (Castor and Pollux) and Norbert and Daggett would be twins in this AU.

I see Norbert and Daggett as being the equivalent of the Beckett twins in pacrim. They aren't necessarily good at fighting or anything, but they happened to be there when they needed to put two people with shared experiences into a robot.

Note: most jaegers past this point are mentioned in the prequel, Fools Rush In.

Puma Loco

In universe:

Mark I built circa 2016

Originally stationed at Panama Shatterdome

Original pilots: Rangers Jorge Rivera and Rodolfo Rivera

Retired in 2027 when Jorge Rivera finally retired and a new jaeger was commissioned for Rodolfo to pilot with his son.

Meta info:

Did you know there's a canon jaeger called Puma Real?

I just thought it was fun if the Riveras were still a legacy family in this AU

Hawaiian Shore

In universe:

Mark I built circa 2016

Originally stationed at Honolulu Shatterdome

Original pilots: Rangers Tito Makani and Raymundo Rocket

Retired in 2020 after death of co-pilot Raymundo Rocket

Meta info:

Fauve mentioned the Honolulu Shatterdome in a throwaway line, and I, knowing there was no Honolulu Shatterdome in pacrim canon, decided to make the Honolulu Shatterdome canon and then make everything tragic. This is my role as a radical canon inclusionist.

I need you to listen to me, I need you to hear what I am saying.......... Tito and Raymundo were gay for each other.

Rocket Power

In universe:

Mark III built circa 2020

Originally stationed at Honolulu Shatterdome

Original pilots: Rangers Reggie Rocket and Otto Rocket

Destroyed in 2024, both rangers lost

Meta info:

I actually really like Rocket Power, I promise...

You can't make a pacrim AU without killing a few Blorbos

If you were wondering, in Fools Rush In, yes, the blond guy is Sam and he's the only one of the gang that is still alive aside from Tito...

Honorable mention: "Marquez’s busted up Mark II"

This is Dora the Explorer's jaeger. No, I do not know who co-piloted. No, I do not know the name of it. It is canon to the AU though.

#my fics #the timmyjimmy pacrim au #will probably link this in the fic but not put it in the fandom tags here because woof

24 notes · View notes