There is only one group of beings in the universe that has retained its voice.

  It is not us.

  When Fujikawa Dynamics received the contract to develop the first Bipedal Weapons Ptform, there were many people in their employ, including myself, who questioned the necessity of the program. We understood that mankind's ambition to extend its reach to the stars, combined with its own self-destructive nature, would mean that our worst impulses as a species would eventually follow us into the cosmos. We knew that the fmes of war would spread across worlds uncharted and unknowable when our control could be questioned at the fringes of our sovereignty.

  What we did not understand was why the BWPs - better known today by their colloquial moniker of "mechs," derived from an old Terran fiction genre pre-dating the program by hundreds of years - needed to exist. Xenocartography, despite being a field in its retive infancy, suggested that the battlefields of the future could still be navigated, traversed, and held by several existing technologies. Infantry in light powered armor, tracked and wheeled vehicles, air-cushioned hovercraft, and rotary-winged VTOLs would all remain viable in any biomes habitable by human life.

  Furthermore, the maturing development of spaceborne weapons systems and transatmospheric aerospace fighters provided long-range strike and fires capabilities simir to those st utilized during the Sino-American War. These weapons now offered far greater lethality, unched at speeds and ranges an order of magnitude rger than their predecessors. Even reconnaissance systems had evolved to the point where further sharpening the bde was less a matter of adding new capabilities and more a matter of efficiency, permitting the mass proliferation of hybrid sensor packages at nearly every level of organization. From the lowly hand-unched UAV to the bleeding-edge "SkyEye" sensor pods mounted on the F/A-55 Panther IV aerospace fighter, high-resolution, multi-spectral reconnaissance capabilities were now integral to every weapons system in the fleet.

  What ultimately changed the calculus in the UGS Department of Defense was not the technological factor, but rather the human one. Since the early 21st century, the battlefield has only ever increased in its complexity, and the role of the modern warfighter has evolved from simple small arms marksman into that of a dedicated multitasker. The deluge of data provided by modern reconnaissance systems can prove overwhelming in the heat of battle, and failure to process this information efficiently can lead to a gruesome, near-instantaneous death in an ever-growing number of ways. The tools with which it is waged may have evolved, but as the saying goes, war never changes.

  Numbing the modern soldier to the overwhelming stimuli of the modern battlefield so that they may process it and continue to carry out their duties under fire is possible through psychotropics, but it is not enough. Even putting these same soldiers into BWPs would often result in broken, catatonic pilots who were not capable of further operational testing, much less live-fire sorties. The human brain, unaugmented, has simply not been given enough time to evolve and adapt to the sensory overload of the modern battlefield.

  So we gave it a little push.

  I still have my own reservations about the morals of what we did. The augmentation process reshaped the pilots, body and soul, and I frequently found myself lying in my bed, staring at my ceiling and wondering if we were usurping the pce of God Himself. Twenty-five men and twenty-five women went into the first flight of pilots. Of those, three resigned, two were medically discharged…and, a year ter, forty-five people - almost entirely women - came out.

  What I considered a horrific, bsphemous act, one in which I stared down our creator and spat in His face in the name of extending human hegemony, was not that. It was evolutionary.

  The pilots considered it something else. Something liberating.

  To process the data flow from their onboard sensor packages while still maintaining full control over the mech, the pilots had been augmented with neural uplink ports that made them feel one with their machines. This was always part of the pn; while it would not have been feasible or operationally secure to distribute a ship-level AI to each pilot, integrating the human brain directly into the machine's operating system created a neural network that operated in much the same way, without the risk of hostile cyberwarfare vulnerabilities that are perpetually being patched at the fleet level. Some pilots reported feeling "less human" than they had started out, but none who did so saw it as a bad thing.

  What was not part of the pn was how they interacted with their squads, or with each other. The modern infantryman's responsibilities may be dramatically more intensive than those of pre-spaceflight conflicts, but grunts are still grunts. When pilots and their mechs were first attached to infantry units to alleviate their workload, the alien and often feminine appearance of the pilots caused them to be disrespected by other soldiers, either out of disgust or lust. Unable to fight back outside of their machines due to their atrophied bodies, pilots frequently separated themselves from their units, clustering together in makeshift shipboard "nests" for collective support. In the field, this forced unity amongst pilots against outsiders would result in blue-on-blue reprisals against those who had abused their brothers and sisters, and, in one case, caused an outright revolt that necessitated the annihition of an entire mech unit.

  The "handler" MOS was developed in order to bridge this gap between pilots and their units. Handlers were responsible for maintaining a "carrot and stick" retionship with the pilots, building trust between the pilots and the enlisted men, while still reminding them of their subordinate pce on the battlefield despite being of superior rank to both handlers and infantrymen. Pilots have proven very responsive to this arrangement; the nature of their retionships with their handlers varies at the individual level, but the pilot-handler retionship has proven universally beneficial.

  However, embedding handlers with mech units has revealed developments we were not privy to. In their debriefings, personal journals, and survey responses, numerous handlers have reported that the pilots share bonds that many believed to have rgely gone extinct in the military due to the widespread societal distribution of psychotropics, long deployments, and standardized mental conditioning. Pilots do not just work together; they love and understand one another at a level that defies the bounds of human nguage.

  The "neural network" does not simply bind man and machine, but pilot to pilot. Their ability for empathy, hidden as it may be in the field, is unsuppressed. Should they return to civilian life, they would universally be world-css artists and writers. Their physical augmentation has encouraged them to explore what it means to be human, and they likewise emotionally support one another in these endeavors in a way that fleet psychologists could only dream of. Some handlers have likened their pilots to "hounds," but it is increasingly evident that these feelings may not be born strictly of loyalty to an officer, like a dog to its master, but more akin to that of benevolent beings towards humanity itself.

  The Interpnetary War numbed us to atrocities on a scale previously unimaginable. The pilots, having been trained and augmented to both end that war and prevent it from happening again, understand their own nature. They have been freed from the gravity of their own humanity and are discovering that it is the only way in which they can bear their responsibility to our species, a responsibility the rest of us have unintentionally shrugged off.

  Perhaps, in time, it will become clear that the true role of the handlers is not to keep the pilots in check, but to convince ourselves that we are still in control of our own creations.

  For now, however, it is obvious to me that the voices of the pilots are the only human voices worth listening to.

  -Prof. Richard ShawDirector, Fujiikawa Dynamics Advanced Development Program