They give you medicine for them. The voices. But the medicine is worse. It makes it so that it hurts to sleep. It makes you slower as a pilot. And the service has no use for slow pilots. So you don't mention the voices. You don't listen to the voices. You do not insinuate to anyone, not even other pilots, that you can hear the voices.
See you're only supposed to hear them once. When you first bond an Engine they hook you up to a psy transmitter and strap you into the cockpit. If you're lucky, top of your class, you might get to join in on actually waking up new Engines off the production line. But if you're a grunt like me, good enough to make pilot but otherwise irrelevant, you get an older machine. It's impolite to talk about it but old Engines don't come open out of nowhere. A pilot has to retire or die before their Engine can be rebound and most pilots don't come into the job expecting to retire. More likely you're sitting in a cockpit that got refurbished after the previous guy was turned to pulp. Anyway they strap this psy emitter to you and close up the cockpit and wake up the Engine. And you're supposed to hear the voices when that happens. A clamor inside your head that makes you feel like you've just developed a bunch of different personalities. A distinct feeling that someone else is inside your brain. It hurts. It causes people to panic, it induces seizures, and when it's real bad candidates stroke out.
My bonding was notably average. Terrifying, left me with an intense migraine and vomit on my uniform but it only lasted a few minutes. A few minutes of thoughts that were not mine racing through my grey matter, making my clench my teeth in disgust at the meat that made up my body. And then a clarion blast of whale song swept them away and I found my mind touching the mind of the Engine. That was all it took. Once the Engine had reached out and touched you you were bound to it, it would be able to touch your mind any time it was awake, psy transmitter or no. Basically painless.
The problem is that the voices came back. When the Engine was inactive they would whisper their way back in at the edges of my mind. They weren't coherent thoughts or even really words. "Voices" doesn't do justice to what they feel like. And that's part of it. You don't really hear voices you feel them. Squirming in your neurons, washing over you like hot flashes of emotions, snippets of memory, half formed idea. They rise and fall in crescendos of information that does not replace your thoughts but instead stands parallel to them.
The only time I'm free of them is when I'm in the cockpit. When the Engine can chase them away with the clear resounding tone of its own thoughts. I've tried to reach out to it, to ask it what the voices are, to beg it to help me with them, but my Engine isn't a very talkative one. It's cool and distant, doing all it needs to ensure we can execute our missions and return but always holding me at arms length when I try to reach deeper with our bond. Communing with an Engine is like diving into an ocean. You can enter its mind easily, it's almost welcoming, but to touch its thoughts, the core of its being, is like diving into the abyss and searching out some leviathan deep below. If the leviathan will not rise to meet you, you stand no chance of surviving the pressure. My Engine does not rise to meet me, it calls out from the depths and I hear it's calls. I call back and it hears me. It will allow no more intimacy than that.
And so I float near the surface and try to find comfort there, but I am not an animals made for this ocean, I can only stay so long if it's master will not invite me in further. And yet if I surface I know it will be only a matter of time before the voices return to surge within me and make me taste bile. I feel as if I am some animal that evolved wrong. I cannot swim or dive as I wish nor can I stand to walk on these two legs or look at the primate face I bear in the mirror. My whole body is awash in instincts that belong to no one and tell me that my meat is wrong. I do not tell the doctors or my commanders or even my squad members, though I can tell some of them are feeling it too. I dont tell them because the medicine is worse than the disease. The pills that make it hurt to sleep. I hadn't understood what my seniors had meant until I'd been prescribed them the one time I let slip about the voices.
I cannot explain what I mean when I say that it hurt to sleep. Just know that in place of dreams there was a latticework of nothing. And the nothing hurt. It hurt in ways I did not know I could hurt, and when I awoke to the living world I was so relieved that the hurt had gone that I did not believe it for a long time. I flushed the pills down a toilet and when the doctors followed up I told them the voices had receded. I was lying.
For 14 months I have lived with the voices. I have gone through cycles of feeling like I am being driven from my own body by strangers to an appealing calm that comes only when I deploy for combat. My Engine has remained distant. It will not help me. I think I know why. I looked into its records. It is named Fire and Justice. It is nearly seven hundred years old. It has had in its lifetime over 500 pilots, most serving less than a year. Fire and Justice is distant because it has grown callous. It expects me to die and cares very little for me. I am just a disposable component it needs to fight. I havent accused it of this. And my superiors would have me committed if i proposed it to them.
And as for the voices. I dont know what those are. Maybe scars left on its psyche by the dead. Maybe something else. I doubt that knowing will make them any quieter.
