einherjarvalk
Everyone always asks “why pilots?” But that one’s easy — the human mind has no cyberwarfare vulnerabilities, and with the MCIS and neural ce it’s as effective a data processor as any AI cluster. The real question, the one nobody asks, is “why handlers?”
Pilots have to be kept loyal. Mechs are nearly unparalleled engines of destruction — let loose against the enemy, they can reduce strongpoints once thought nigh-unbreakable to bloodied rubble. But that same havoc can be turned on friendlies with disastrous results, and indeed has in rare cases the UGS doesn’t talk about. Doesn’t matter how rare it is; the consequences are bad enough that you have to be sure your pilots will do as they’re told.
Loyalty’s hard to instill. You can’t brainwash people into it. The bastards in the Archdiocese try their best and yet the second their people get free of the camps they were thrown in for not hewing to some insane zealot’s idea of perfect, all that conditioning goes straight out the window and they’re looking to defect. Besides — we’re not theocratic fascists like them. The day we stoop to their level is the day the UGS dies, simple as that. It’s not on the table.
Loyalty to ideology is tricky, too. How do you get someone to give their life for “freedom” or “democracy”, vague terms with fuzzy meanings, when autocannon shells are flying past and the war's all too real? It’s easy to sign up for big ideas, easy to fight for them. It’s a lot less easy to die for them. The Greenies find that out real goddamn quick every time they act up and we have to force them back into the tin cans they call colonies.
Loyalty to money? That’s an old, tired joke. Even the Chartered Systems know that you can’t buy that kind of dedication. Why do you think they use so many AI-operated systems? Pilots are in high-casualty fights where up until the st decade or two, more probably than not the only way they were going home again was in a box. Why care about a paycheck you won’t live to spend?
No, the best kind of loyalty is personal loyalty. Not to a fg or an ideal but a person, flesh and blood. Someone trusted, someone who’ll stick up for you when you need it, someone you respect and whose praise you value. Someone you’d follow through the gates of hell themselves if they asked.
That’s why handlers exist.
Pilots are incredibly empathetic by nature. They’re also isoted by their circumstances, permanently set apart by the augmentations and Disconnection Syndrome and medical dependencies and the bad reputation they all have for no good fuckin’ reason. They’re adrift and they need something to tch onto. That used to be other pilots exclusively, but then the pilots all wound up loyal to each other and it took forever to unstick. So that’s the service we provide – giving pilots a new best friend. Sometimes something more than that.
Don’t get me wrong, we have other duties too — we handle paperwork for our pilots, we keep them in top fighting shape, we do all the liaison work with our supported and attached units, and so on. And pilots need to make friends with other pilots too; we do our best, but us “baseliners” will never understand everything they go through. There’s limits to just how deeply we can connect.
But when their crew chief is red in the face and screaming at them about broken leg actuators, they don’t call for other pilots. They call for us. When they’re twitching and shivering from Disconnection Syndrome as they try to control the steel frame they no longer inhabit, we’re the ones that pick them up and calm them down. We’re the ones that give them a pat on the head and a sweet treat after a successful training sortie. We’re the ones that help them in and out of the cockpit when they’re still borderline comatose from being unplugged. We’re the ones that make sure the maintainers keep their second body, the one they care for more than their flesh, in perfect condition.
We make sure our pilots know they’re loved. And in exchange for giving them all they’ve ever wanted, they’ll do anything we ask.
Pretty fucked up, isn’t it?
-CPT Eric PetrosianSpecial Troops Battalion, 75th Ranger RegimentHandler, RF041INFS18 “Firefly” and PH034INFS21 “Rosebud”
