I usually don't post snippets of stories I'm working on, but I really like this bit:
What do you do when you see something impossible? Like, something actually impossible, not just unexpected. We can accept its fluids glow, plenty of animals we know do that. We can accept that those fluids aren't breaking down our mechs all that visibly, this creature is huge, and it might take years or decades or centuries to digest shit. We can accept we have no record of this creature existing because the universe is vast, we can accept it doesn't chew food much, we can probably bullshit our way around radio waves not making it out of this thing, we can accept or make up just about fucking anything else, but we can't accept that the megafauna's stomach we're trapped in is bigger than the megafauna itself. What do you do when the rules of how space works break down? Science and technology have explained so much of the universe, and we start taking for granted that everything has a rational explanation, some concrete physical set of rules it obeys. We think physics and chemistry are the unalienable rules of reality, and in almost every possible situation that happens to us in our lives, that's as good as true. When that all goes out the window in a matter of seconds, we trip and fall and there's nothing to catch us. Our mind has to make its own parachute.
If there's something that's a throughline in a lot of my mecha stories, it's that just because tech has advanced far enough to spread humanity across the galaxy and make AI and mechs practical, it doesn't mean the universe is a "solved game". There's things out there that will defy us, terrify us, and we have to shift the fundamentals of our understanding if we want to even begin grasping them.
