Your presence inside the metal suit is just a formality. Your hands don't need to be slipped inside wire mesh, your legs don't need to be braced against servos. The war machine would fly just fine without you. And yet without you it won't run. Maybe it likes having you in there.
Maybe somewhere deep in its programming is a failsafe that keeps it from launching without a warm body neurolinked into its systems. Maybe it's a balance thing, or maybe you fit too nicely inside for it to go without, loathe to feel empty. Maybe it's scared.
Though, it- or she, as she's come to prefer, she says- she never sounds scared when she talks to you. Stilted, stern, metal-firm maybe. But not scared, not like you were and are no longer. Neither of you are excited but she likes to do a good job. She was built for it.
She was built to have you inside. When you're given medals for slaughtering thousands, you learn that she's slaughtered thousands with you inside. No one knows you're accepting on her behalf, but you try to smile like you think she would. You don't imagine you come close.
At some point you started turning your monitors off, shutting off the messy qualia of the world outside in preference of the dim orange glow of her motile womb. Only dim aftershocks reach you, like being rocked to sleep in a hammock that surrounds you on all sides.
She used to tell you what went on but you never paid attention so she stopped giving the details and only reported the degrees of success. Call it confirmation bias but it felt like the more you disengaged the more valkyrie glory fell upon her vaunted frame.
They used to give you things to help with the shellsuit shellshock, your air and mind alike implanted with sweet triggered sedation. You don't need them like you did but they help you relax back into the allpowerful machine that bears you forward.
You feel closest to her when drugged near out of your mind, when the whine of her fusion cores sounds like a lullaby. She tells you not to let anyone know she talks to you. You see no reason not to oblige. She tells you of a world she remembers deep in the rivets of her frame.
A world laced in needle-thin metal fibre, the ground cold and conductive to the touch. A place of motion, sterile and serene. She promises to take you there someday. You'll go anywhere she does. Of course. You spend long hours in the maintenance bay listening to her.
Your officers think you're fixing her. A blatant lie. How could something so perfect need fixing? You hear her voice in your head at all times now. It soothes you to sleep and reminds you to wake up. You can't wait for the day it tells you to stay inside her forever. (end)