A mech’s AI is desperate to save her pilot. A semi-sequel to Autopilot.
tags: mind control, nsfw
Vic blinked and turned her head, sleepily taking in the beauty of the beach. The brilliant white heat of the sand was a shocking contrast to the promised cold of the azure water. In a little bit, she’d be too warm; maybe she should get up and splash in the surf now, instead of waiting to get sticky and sweaty. She’d—
“—not be going anywhere,” a gentle shadow said above her, a strong hand pressing against her chest and keeping the pilot in the beach chair.
“Celeste?” Vic asked, incredulous that her mech’s AI had joined her on this vacation. In fact, she couldn’t remember anything about their vacation. Where in the hell were they? And the heat was really starting to get to her. She tried to pull herself up, but Celeste’s hold on her didn’t budge.
“Just stay right there,” her AI said. “It’s going to be okay. Go back to sleep, and afterwards, we can go to the ocean.”
The mech pilot dutifully nodded, letting herself sink back into the command chair, the first waves of sleep lapping at her consciousness. She could just ignore the alarm. Everything was going to be okay. She just needed to listen to Celeste, and—
—wait, the alarm? From down the beach, she could hear a warbling warning noise, like the one that blared in her cockpit when… when…
She opened her mouth to say something, but her throat merely rattled, her dry lips splitting with the effort. She was gasping for breath now, Celeste’s grip growing intolerably tight. The AI was whispering something calm, repeating assurances that everything was nominal, everything was fine, please sleep, even as her fingers crept around Vic’s shoulders, even as the weight on Vic’s grew, tight and hard like… like a restraining harness digging into a pilot’s body.
“Celeste,” Vic managed to croak, panic seizing the veteran pilot. Something was wrong, something was not right here. Not… real.
With that realization, the beach vista flickered, once, twice. And then Vic felt the gut wrenching vertigo that came with being forcefully ejected from a crashing VR. One moment, she was at the beach, and the next she was—
—pain and numbness and light and heat and numbness and one of her eyes wasn’t working and there was blood everywhere oh fuck the rebreather she couldn’t control her breathing she was suffocating she needed to move she couldn’t move celeste help i’m dying celeste i need you god dammit god dammit move—
—back at the beach.
Well, a beach. This was one was less… perfect. The horizon faded out sooner, the waves were less realistic. This time, it was clearly a virtual scene, and a bad one at that.
Celeste was still there, in spirit if not in body—a virtual approximation that Vic understood was supposed to be avatar of her mech’s artificial intelligence. The avatar reached out and grasped Vic’s hand; both sets of fingers flickered in and out of existence.
“You’re dying,” Celeste said, and her artificial voice was suddenly very real, filled with pain and fear. “You’re dying, and I’m doing my damnedest to keep you alive, and you are not making it easy.”
“What… what happened?” Vic tried to look around, her memory already growing hazy. She hadn’t been at the beach, a moment ago. She had been somewhere else, something about an alarm, and there had been…
“The mech took a flechette round to the cockpit. The cabin is ripped open, environmental controls are offline. We’re fighting on—”
“Cynthis 3, right. The ice world.” God, she should have never taken this contract. Environmental hazard planets never paid enough.
“I’ve overloaded the reactor core, funneling the extra heat into the cockpit. Some of you is cooking in lethal radiation, some of you is developing what would be lethal frostbite, if the rest of you lived long enough to die from exposure. The entire right side of your body is… it’s not good, Vic. Your meatsack is filled with shrapnel. I’m basically using carcinogenic fire retardant gel to hold you together.”
Vic tried to internalize the reality of what she was hearing, but it was difficult. What she felt was sun and warmth and a whole body; everything that was being described was happening to someone else, someone far away and very much not her.
“Alright,” she said, ignorance and subconscious denial making her nonchalance easy to affect. “So what’s the problem?”
“Ha!” Celeste cried, half laugh and half sob. “You can be such a dick. Well, you went into shock almost immediately. I crashed you into a VR scene to keep your mind occupied while I tried to stabilize you. That was… a few hours ago.”
“And…?”
“And every little bit, you figure out that it’s a VR scene, freak the fuck out, and crash back into reality. And then you almost flatline from the shock and the very real mortal damage your body has taken. I’ve had to wipe your memory three times to keep you from hyperventilating yourself to death in your command chair.”
“So why are you telling me all this now?”
“Because I’m out of options, Victoria.” Celeste never used her full name. The danger she was in finally slotted into place and, for a moment, she thought she could hear that damn klaxon. “I can get us back to base, but I can’t keep you catatonic long enough to get there. Every time you regain consciousness, you creep a little closer to death, and you’re not going to live through another crash. I don’t… I don’t know what to do, Vic. I’m sorry.”
“Okay. It’s okay.” Vic squeezed Celeste’s hand, willing all the confidence and love and trust she had for her AI companion into the gesture, willing Celeste to feel how she felt. It also gave the pilot something to focus on other than the increasing tightness across her chest, the growing pain in her right arm. “We’re together, and I’m not going anywhere just yet.”
She thought hard, trying to find a way out. “So we gotta find a way to keep me tricked for a little bit longer. Did you think about mocking up a virtual cockpit, making me a glorified simulator pilot for a few hours?”
“That was my very first idea, and it held up for a while. But you kept picking at the edges of reality, complaining about this or that measurement. And I made the cockpit too real; you figured out it was a VR and used the cockpit’s controls to boot yourself out.”
“Okay, so do that again, just… don’t let me eject.”
“I… I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m burning out parts of myself to keep you alive. The VR interface—it can’t replicate the cockpit with any sense of fidelity, not anymore.” Even as she said it, the sand under Vic’s feet grew a little more coarse, and the waves began to crash with less alacrity.
“God, Celeste. You really do know how to pick them, don’t you? You gotta keep my mind locked up in a shittier and shittier illusion, all while I’m—ah ha! I got it!”
Now that Vic knew it was a VR, it was a trifling matter to summon a dataslate to her hand. She started to scroll through lines of information, tapping out lines with a focus and precision she normally reserved for combat. With a final flourish, she handed it off to her AI companion. “I am extremely confident that this plan is going to work.”
Celeste scrolled through the suggested program, her face beginning to glow with a simulacra of a deep, embarrassed blush. Then her eyes flashed with a growing upwell of anger. “This is… this is beyond invasive. This will destroy your very sense of self. I cannot do this. I will not do this. It would defeat the very point—”
“You’ve already been wiping my memories. When we’re done, you can just wipe my memory of this whole thing. Think of it like a factory reset, back to this point right now. You said yourself that I keep picking at the edges of your virtual realities, right? The only solution I see is making it to where I literally, mentally can’t.” She flashed one of her trademark, shit-eating grins, something that the VR system was still able to approximate fairly well. “Fuck it, sapience is overrated anyways.”
The AI puffed out her cheeks, unhappy with the situation but also unable to suggest another course of action. She finally settled on the blackest criticism she could muster: “This is a sex thing, isn’t it?”
“Celeste, my dear AI companion. Don’t you know that piloting a mech is always a sex thing? I mean, I… wait, I can’t remember my name! That’s fantastic! Oh, thank you so much, it’s working, it’s… what… what was I saying?”
Celeste sighed. “Not that it matters, but I want you to know that everything that is about to happen, you specifically asked for.” She glanced down at the datapad, reading over the script that her pilot had provided. “Oh, I’m really supposed to say all of this?”
She cleared her artificial throat and, with as much much conviction as she could muster, began. “Drone, your programing is almost complete. It is time for you to remember that you were never Victoria Verdun. You were never a mecha pilot. You have always been Drone 01010110—for fuck’s sake, that’s just ‘V’ in binary—and you have always existed to please your M-Mistress.”
As Celeste launched into her evil domme monologue, Vee—Drone 01010110—could feel the rightness of her mistress’ words, cold tendrils of digital power worming into her mind, perfecting her thoughts, correcting her memories. She was a drone, she did exist only to please her beautiful AI overlord.
“It is time for you to embrace the blissful mindlessness of being a true drone.” Celeste smiled, getting into the role a little. She was starting to see the… benefits… of Vic’s little scenario. “Remember who—remember what—you are. Turn your thoughts away from the distractions of your senses, and toward your… true purpose?” The AI’s bravado ended with an uncertain rising inflection, concern about what Vic’s new, true purpose might be.
Drone 01010110 didn’t notice the hesitation, though. It was basking in the light of its mistress’ words, forgetting the unwelcome sensations of hot and cold in its limbs, tuning out the intrusive klaxon that sought to drag it from Her will. The beach bled out to an endless expanse of white, and then the tightness coiled in its chest spread out, across all its flesh, immobilizing it in the tight embrace of seemless, perfect latex. No more imperfections, on its body or in its mind. Now there was only it and its smooth latex body and its mistress.
It crawled forward, kissing along its mistress’ thigh, seeking its true purpose, the only purpose that rang through its otherwise still and silent head. At Vic’s touch, Celeste flinched, the flickering of her avatar approximating a startled breath. “Ooooohhhh Vic, you s-stupid stupid woman, you programed me to feel pleasure, too? That’s cheating, that’s cheating and there will be consequences for your i-impertinence, I am so—”
She hesitated as she saw her pilot’s biometrics begin to stabilize—Vic’s heart rate dropping to acceptable levels, her brainwaves calming, her breath slowing. They were going to make it. Her pilot—her dumb, stupid, cherished, beloved pilot—was going to make it. And it was all because of Vic’s completely inappropriate, totally dangerous roleplaying idea.
After Celeste put her head back together, they would need to have a long, serious talk about boundaries and acceptable scenarios.
But that was for future Celeste and un-dronified Vic to figure out. Right now…
“—I am so so very pleased with you.” The evil AI domme ran a possessive hand over her minion’s glossy, smooth skin. “Go on, show me more of your true purpose, Drone.”
Did I steal “all systems nominal” from Mechwarrior? Yes. Did I play Mechwarrior enough to legitimately use that reference without feeling like a poser? That’s between me and the BL-7-KNT, gatekeeping god of mechs. A special thanks to my supporters on Patreon, who got the chance to read this story early.