One of the most common rumors civvies like to spread about the mech corps is the idea that nobody actually wants to be a mech pilot. According to them, the UGS preys on its own meekest, weakest recruits during intake, selecting the ones who would be a waste of time trying to acclimate to grunt work or zero-G ops, or who aren’t smart enough to cut it in fleet. I mean, it makes a perverse sort of sense, right? What else do you do with the waifish kid who always ends up on the outside of his peer groups but wants to serve his nation? Turn ‘em into augs, toss ‘em in a mech, dispose after use. Done.
Too bad it’s bullshit. We’re not the fucking AGD.
Sure, UGS does select for mech pilots before basic even starts, but it’s always the recruit’s choice to stick around or not, and they almost always do. Truth is, you don’t even have to do a psych screen for good, willing candidates. All you gotta do is have a couple of pilots and their handlers pass by the formation a few times. Surveilnce cameras track the recruits’ faces and their gaze. The ones who watch the pilots, whose faces don’t immediately scrunch up in disgust. Pull ‘em aside, offer them a chance to see if they have what it takes. The ones who are just horny will back right down; they know what that future holds. Everyone else? Perfect candidates.
Those recruits, the ones who aren’t just itching to take out their pent-up energy on a pilot when the handler isn’t looking, those are the ones we want. Those are the ones who came here for this.
We tell them up front what augmentation means, what it’ll mean to spend all their time in the field in what they’ll eventually feel is a second skin, how they’ll have to be given neural port augmentations at minimum and be injected weekly with an immunosuppressant cocktail to keep their body from rejecting the changes. We show them what it’ll do to their body, how it’ll tilt their physiology towards a form they might not have developed into had they not chosen this. We tell them how, when they get out, it’ll be hard to connect with normal people again, how so many people will be unable to mentally process our existence, and how they’ll probably just end up living with a bunch of other ex-pilots because they’re the only people who’ll understand and accept them.
If you’re not cut out for this life, the informed consent process will make it abundantly clear to you. I can count on one hand the number of recruits I’ve processed who got to the end of that talk and didn’t sign the contract. Half of 'em came back ter!
Not every recruit who becomes a pilot is completely happy when it’s all said and done. Life just doesn’t work out that way; sometimes you get an ANGL or INF-S slot, sometimes you get stuck being a basic bitch INF-C. But, I will tell you this: they’re all happy they did it anyway.
See, the thing that civvies don’t get, that non-pilots don’t understand, is that we knew the risks inherent in signing on the dotted line and handing over our minds and bodies to the UGS. We knew what we were getting into, we knew it might not be perfect. But we also knew it was our only chance to slip the surly bonds of our own humanity, the only way we could escape the gravitational pull of a life that would eventually tear us apart. We knew it was our only chance to be something greater than what we had been born into, to be what the universe demanded of us.
I once had a mother call me after she ran into her kid on shore leave. Complete accident; should’ve never happened, but it did. She was absolutely livid, went on this whole goddamned tear about how we’d corrupted her kid, ripped the soul out of her son and how she could never get him back. I don’t remember everything she said, but I remember what I told her before I hung up:
“Ma’am, I hate to be the one who breaks this to you, but your son was never going to be what you wanted him to be. We made your daughter into what humanity needed her to be.”
-WO4 EW “Siren”
77th Training Squadron, Date Unknown
