If there's one recurring "issue" I hear from civilians about the mech pilot program, it's that it's "dehumanizing."

  The very concept of military service is, itself, dehumanizing. We send men and women across the stars, armed with weapons worth multiple times what they or their families will make in a lifetime. We task them with securing pnets for resources, to be mined out and processed by companies who don't give a single solitary fuck how those resources are secured. We ask them to kill the people that we sent out there and decided they wanted something we didn't, and when they do, the dead are remembered as serial numbers and statistics. War's fucked. Always has been.

  I guess that whether or not war is a racket isn't really my space to say. I've got my own opinions about it, but obviously I'm a minority or the UGS wouldn't always be gearing up and preparing for the next one. Tragedy of human civilization and all that, but what can I say? We're good at it. I'm good at it. The pilots are good at it too, and it's why the UGS trusts me to lead them into battle and rein them in afterwards.

  The pilots themselves have a pretty broad perspective about the whole thing. You don't normally get their opinions until you've built a rapport with them. You have to build a connection that mediocre handlers often prevent from becoming a two-way street. A lot of their pilots also don't live long enough to build one. I've been lucky - all of the pilots that've passed through my care made it through in one piece. A couple of them even got to retire instead of getting refshed into the instructor program.

  A not-insignificant part of that, I think, is that at some point in our tours, I always talked with them about how they saw themselves. About what they wanted from me, from themselves, from others, from life itself. I got to know who they were before they got fshed, and who they think they want to be afterwards. I got to pry into the minds of these exceptional human beings at a level I think most ship psychs don't even think is worth doing.

  One of the most enlightening discussions I ever had with a pilot - "Fshback" is what we called her - was about how they felt about the fact that the pilot program in particur dehumanizes them further than any other MOS. They're the only UGS personnel who get a barcode tattooed on them, after all. Fshback was my first pilot, and I was still having my own doubts about my participation in this whole mess as a handler. I needed to know what drove her.

  We were on shore leave from a successful operation in the Barrens, chasing down AGD raiding parties that had been picking away at the fleet as we drove towards their core systems. Total zero-G combat environment, lots of rooting out hidden outposts in the asteroids. Lots of casualties. Fshback was the only pilot who lived through the whole thing, and a lot of Marines didn't make it back either. More than a few tried to take it out on her, because she was the only one left to take it out on. I tried to protect her from as much as I could, but abuse takes many forms, and even if I could keep them from ying hands on her, there were other things I couldn't stop them from doing.

  My way of making it up to her was to take her on a "date" of sorts. Oceanside dinner at the nicest spot on Tau Ceti. I even bought her a dress, this gorgeous, strapless thing that showed off all her curves in dazzling emerald satin.

  When I first showed it to her, she didn't respond. I asked if she liked it, and she told me she didn't understand what to do with it. She asked me, "why would I wear that?" I asked why not, and suggested she wear it out. She wore the dress to our dinner, though I could tell it was something she did out of habit of following orders rather than any personal comfort with the idea. When she saw herself in a mirror, I saw the corner of her mouth perk up into a smile for a brief moment, only for it to drop back down when she remembered I was watching.

  I asked if everything was okay, and she asked me what the purpose of this was. She said that she was a tool, that tools don't get decorated for their own sake. She asked if it was something that I wanted from her, if it was some kind of sexual fantasy she was expected to py a part in.

  I was left aghast. The idea had never crossed my mind. I had just wanted to do something nice for someone who'd brought me and countless others back from the jaws of hell.

  Fshback told me that she had never seen any value in herself beyond what she could do for others. It's why she had joined and volunteered the mech corps in the first pce. Her parents had made it very clear what they had wanted from her, to the point that they continued to pretend that was what she was actually doing to this day. Every time we were reconnected to the net, she'd receive backlogged letters and well-wishes from her family, celebrating how proud they were of their son for signing up to defend the UGS, just as her father and his father had before her.

  Reality was simply something for them to paper over; her life and identity left to fade to bck because her endgame didn't match what they wanted from her. To her, being little more than a firing pin with a mouth and the barest shred of dignity at least gave her an identity to call her own. Being an object, one that was valued and cherished if only for what it could do, still made her feel more human than the way her own family treated her. She was at least recognized for what she was, not what others wanted her to be.

  Expining how she felt was the first and only time I saw Fshback cry. All the trauma of the Barrens Campaign, the death and destruction she was both witness and participant to, all the abuse she'd endured from the survivors, she'd never so much as flinched. But this, talking about how the people who should have loved and supported her were instead making up a false reality rather than accept the one she existed in, brought her to tears. It brought me there too. She cried into my shoulder as we watched the sunset, and all I could do in the moment was be there for her and remind her how important she was to me.

  Fshback retired after her next tour. One of the first pilots who ever made it, and when she finally got her 214, she called to thank me, for being the first person to truly "see" her. She lives back on Terra now, running a halfway house for ex-pilots, giving them the support and purpose that they joined the mech corps to find and were adrift without, and giving them the unconditional love and recognition that so many of them never knew at all. Maybe some day I'll join her.

  I'll never be a father. Fshback will never be a mother. But we'll both py a part in shaping how future generations interpret what it truly means to be human.

  Funny how that works out, isn't it?

  -MAJ Atticus LeeSpecial Troops Battalion, 1st Orbital Marines RegimentHandler, EL014EW22 “Sparky” and RC011ANGL19 “Winchester”