When you've been a handler as long as I have, you eventually end up learning more about the fshing process than you'd probably like to. You have to; if you're going to serve both the UGS and your pilot, you need to understand how they're made. Without knowing how indoc and fshing works, you'll never be able to unlock their full potential, you'll never know their boundaries, and you'll never be the handler they need.
The key to it all is the MCIS and NLS combo. They're installed fairly early on during the training pipeline, because they have to be. Of course, it's not done immediately; candidates need time to think about what they're signing up for, and they're given ample time to let the details of the augmentation process settle in their minds. It's telling that even with these extra precautions to prevent anyone from walking away from the surgical ward with regrets, the pre-augmentation washout rate is under ten percent.
MCIS impnts don't do all the work on their own, and they weren't perfect right out of the gate. It took a few iterations to find candidates whose bodies actually took to them properly; a dozen more to find a way to make the machine accommodate the user rather than relying on the inverse to happen naturally. The immunosuppressants are part of that, sure, but the actual secret sauce, the component that the Free States, the Chartered Systems, and most certainly the fucking Archdiocese refuses to integrate, is fshing their pilots.
As it turned out, the real incompatibility between candidates and the MCIS wasn't the man-machine interface. It was a personality one. Don't ask me how they figured this out, or how it works, because I don't know. What I do know is that the project leads eventually noticed that people with certain personality types, certain aspirations, certain mindsets, were more amenable to prototype MCIS augmentation than those who weren't. These "archetypes" were used to calibrate the receptors and transmitters on the mass production MCIS, but they still needed compatible human minds.
The way they got them was with the fshing process. The archetypes were patterned out, their personalities transted into hard data, and sorted by MOS. These days, when the MCIS is impnted, the neural ce is used to "fsh" parts of these personalities onto the pilots, like pushing a firmware update on a data tablet. It effects change on the pilot's personality itself, subtly nudging it towards a more optimal profile for their MOS while also helping them rapidly develop the training skills that would otherwise take years to obtain. It's not brainwashing, contrary to what the AGD will cim. In fact, most of the pilots I've worked with in my career have told me that it felt less like they were being "overwritten" and more like they were being enabled to be the best versions of themselves, suddenly unshackled from their own preconceptions of what they could be and what they could do.
As an aside, this is apparently also why there's such a high incidence of transgender pilots. Nearly of the archetypes were female or transgender themselves, and while there's no evidence that MCIS instaltion causes gender dysphoria, it certainly appears to encourage those who might have it to act on it when they otherwise wouldn't have (especially volunteers from former AGD colonies, whose government forbids it). It's a perfectly logical outcome; we've already made them post-human, what harm is there in shedding the gender they were assigned at birth as well?
That being said, I would be lying if I said I didn't find it morally questionable at some level. Outside of their frames, when they're not "anchored" in the moment, some pilots will get fshbacks to a life they didn't live, or dissociative episodes they don't remember afterwards. It gets worse after they ETS and they know it. It's why so many handlers try to support their pilots in civilian life, and why so many just end up re-enlisting, this time as instructors.
We've tried to minimize the ethical concerns, but at the end of the day, we're creating individuals who, despite how strong the process makes them, would be demonstrably better off if they didn't have to go through all of this. Fshing their minds might leave them with their sense of identity intact, but they'll never be able to go back and be who they were before they had an archetype's quirks and memories stapled onto their own, putting a thumb on the logical scale for every decision they make. They can stop being pilots, but they can't undo the lived experience of being a pilot, becoming a pilot. For better or worse, it'll always be this imposing feature on their mental ndscape, casting a long shadow over everything they do, with everyone they interact with, everywhere they go.
I wish there was a better way. My pilots deserve better. They all deserve better.
-Maj. Randall BarkerARMR Handler, 72nd ACR
