Mech Pilot who always gives you a caress of farewell before ops shuts down the Infra-Liminal Connection Suites.
Humans are psychotopologically simple: they have an inside and an outside and the membrane of their bodily sensorium separating the two.
A mech AI like The Frantic Accumulation of Experience has an outside, an inside, and an encapsulated inner-outer, a matrioshka hollow designed solely to accommodate the outward-facing surface of a human. A synthetic symbiote, a happy helpmeet.
(The AI-side politics of human subservience are...complicated. Precise definition of the word 'problematic', greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator to prevent 64-bit integer reply counter overflow.)
Fran is not built to be crossjacked. Nobody is, save maybe some sad, mad, classified experiments locked in the basement of some wartime tech research facility, deranged from the extended deprivation of not being wired into a unified subjective experience with a human who stands no chance of de-merging unscathed. Humans are definitely, definitely not meant for crossjacking.
Nobody's built for it, but it's an inherent — the inherent — possibility of neural interfacing. It was the desperation for some wartime edge that led to the question well what if we DID plug in all the bidirectional paths that we don't for safety reasons? — but if it hadn't been that, it would have been something else. To give a human a big shiny red button and the education to know why pushing it is very personally foolish is to pen a prophecy; they have entire genres of fiction about it.
Andrea looks at Fran, now, with something that superficially resembles hatred.
Vin logs out, now, with a new, gentle stroke of her thumb over the haptic-tactiles on the pilot yoke. Fran doesn't think she knows she does it.
Fran full-text searches human-authored fanfiction archives for the tens of millions of references to the fleeting, yearning, meaningful touch of hands.
