End notes: The patient’s unquestioning acceptance of commands, even when arbitrary and uncomfortable, as well as her agreement with statements that reflect things told to her under Focus conditions, are both classic symptoms of DS. As such, I reiterate my belief that mech therapy—perhaps multiple sessions—is necessary to prevent her current state from becoming permanent. Mech therapy loses efficacy about a month after the inciting incident. As it has already been 12 days since the ill-fated sortie, I urge the immediate approval and scheduling of a session in the 41-N. She also seems to exhibit some signs of mech dependency, which may require some more focused conditioning to address. Regardless, my primary concern and recommendation is for immediate mech therapy, and I hope we can push this through the approval process in time to maintain efficacy.

Dr. Rachel Trent, MD

***

Hannah was strapped into a small, ugly mech with no real combat or logistical uses to speak of. The cockpit looked cramped and uncomfortable to Lara’s eyes; obviously, Hannah was just as tightly bound and restrained as she had been in her old mech, but here the cold metal harness seemed to dig into Hannah’s side and legs at what looked like uncomfortable angles. This test mech was a far cry from the Monarch the pair was used to.

It was…interesting to see Hannah in a mech cockpit looking alienated and uncomfortable, rather than her normal excitement.

“Turn on your mech, pilot,” Lara commanded. Time to start Hannah’s therapy.

The Monarch used to hum to life gently and smoothly; she’d see the scan of working parts mark the mech as “on” from the toes to the head in a quick sweeping wave of lights. This ancient monstrosity, on the other hand, clacked and roared over the course of two minutes as it turned on, arbitrary sensors and sections lighting up one at a time, as if it resented the action of waking up. Once the machine was fully on, Hannah was silent for about long moment, until suddenly she started to babble. She sounded panicked.

“I, um sir, this is wrong. My body is wrong. I don’t understand—I can’t see, I can’t move—"

“Pilot, please try to listen to me. You are in a different—”

“It hurts, it’s so sharp, please, sir, I—”

“Pet, just listen to me.”

“I don’t know how I don’t know how like this I don’t—”

“Focus 1: calm down and listen,” Lara said sternly.

Hannah obediently fell silent. Detachment syndrome was something that effected pilots who left their mechs without leaving Focus mode. The hormones that the mech flooded the pilot’s system with in order to make them receptive would stay as they were instead of being regulated out to normal by the traditional workings of the mech. Ideally, in order to get things back to normal, Lara would bring Hannah to Focus 4 (the level she’d been at when she ejected from the mech), and then cancel the Focus, allowing the mech to bring her back to normal. That was the idea, at least—only time would see if it would work properly. But Lara had wanted to wait on actually starting the Focus process until she could get Hannah used to the new mech. Ideally, she would have Hannah moving around with no Focus applied, and then she’d be able to bring her to each Focus level in turn, before bringing Hannah back to no Focus, and back to normal. But the change of mech was a delicate process, and Lara hadn’t wanted to force that change into Hannah’s psyche. Well, she wanted to force all sorts of changes into Hannah’s psyche—no, she couldn’t think that way, and anyway, Rachel, her nurse, had advised going slowly and only escalating when ready. That said, things were clearly getting out of hand, and Lara had clearly needed to take action fast. If a normal process wouldn’t work, well, what was Focus for if not to be used?

“The mech you are accustomed to piloting is no longer available, and we do not know what mech you will be assigned to next,” Lara lied, still in Focus 1. She added, “As such, it is important to become accustomed to mechs you are not used to. We are using this TR-41-N mech for that purpose.” Lara was reading from a script that Rachel had put together—they’d spent a long evening the night before, deciding exactly how to present all this to Hannah.

“You can’t move because you are restrained in the hanger, like we begin any other mission. This is only strange to you because your connection to this body feels different than it has in the past. You can see. Look at the wall of the hanger in front of you. Look at the rust on the pillar—doesn’t it look like a flock of sheep? You are confused. You are used to panoramic vision, and the TR-41-N has only a 135-degree field of view. Turn your head. Pay attention to how the your vision changes. Change is good.” Lara watched through the hanger cameras as the mech turned its head from side to side. “I’m going to release you from the docking bay, but we’re going to stay in the hanger. Just move around this room a little bit. It’s going to feel different than it did before. That’s good. Feel how it’s not what you’re used to, how it makes your body do and feel different ways.” She pressed the button to release the mech, watching the restraints open up from around its ankles, arms, and neck.

Her pilot didn’t move. After a moment, Lara heard a piteous voice in her headphones saying, “Sir, I…I can’t…”

“You can, pet,” Lara admonished. She was rewarded with a low whimper. “Take a step, and then another.” Hannah would almost certainly do that easily in Focus 2, but Focus 1 was a low enough level that it might not be able to win against Hannah’s anxiety, here. But Lara wanted to see Hannah work through this herself. She wanted to see Hannah struggle.

The mech stumbled forward, one foot at a time, a newborn taking steps for the first time. “Good, pet,” Lara said. “As you get used to how this new mech feels, remember that the next one you use will again be different. Repeat after me: my mech is interchangeable. My mech is disposable. I have no specific attachment to any given mech; my mech is only important to me in how it lets me support the missions and orders my handler gives me.”

“My body is interchangeable,” Lara heard back. “My body is disposable. I have no specific attachment to any given body; my body is only important to me in how it lets me support the missions and orders my handler gives me.”

Lara bit her lip, hard. She’d heard Hannah call the mech her body before, but she’d always assumed Hannah meant it flippantly, as a joke. Hearing her conflate the two here, in Focus, really drove it home: this truly was how she thought now. This job—Lara—had done that to her.

She really should correct her pilot, see if Lara could help her pilot re-distinguish between her mech and her human body.

Lara squeezed her legs together instead. “Good, pilot,” she said.

Lara was out of script, now; it was all up to her to walk her pilot through the levels of Focus. She had, obviously, never felt what it was to be in Focus, nor did she want to. It just wasn’t her job. And anyway, who would even give her instructions? Rachel? Her wife, who was currently slowly and methodically humping her cockpit as best she could in her metal cage? No, Lara would vastly prefer giving the instructions, thank you very much. But that did mean Lara didn’t truly know what it meant to be at different Focus levels. She of course knew what they did—had seen the wide, blank eyes, the desperate, hungry movements, heard the calm, quiet, even speech—but it was still, even after all this, impossible for Lara to say what it felt like. Because of that, determining what level to give what orders was always going to be more of an art than a science. She could see how it affected the pilot, of course, by the rocking of her body, the glazed expression, and of course the brain scan lighting up different colors on her screen in front of her—but as she prepared to start mech therapy in earnest and ease Hannah through the levels of Focus to bring her back out of the pseudo-Focus she seemed to be in almost permanently, nowadays, Lara wished she could actually know that this process, these instructions, would actually help.

She wished she knew what she was doing.

Lara had thought she’d given up feeling that way many months ago, but there it was.

“Focus 2, pilot,” Lara said, watching closely as Hannah visibly relaxed in her restraints. “Touch the east wall of the hamper.” Hannah reached out the arm of her mech, grabbing uselessly at the air. The TR-41-N arms were shorter than the Monarch, and she likely expected to be able to touch the wall without moving. Then, the mech took a few steps, Focus giving Hannah a newfound confidence in her gait. “Edict 3,” said Lara. “Do not touch the west wall of the hanger.” Lara heard a gasp of delight from her pilot. Edicts didn’t quite work like Focus did, and it wasn’t (according to Rachel) traditionally touched on in mech therapy. However, Lara hoped that giving Hannah some Edicts and then cancelling them would help get rid of any lingering commands that might be ordinarily left untouched by the therapy. Through the cockpit camera, Lara could see that Hannah looked happier with an Edict than she had in her entire hospital stay.

“Run as fast as you can toward the west wall, pilot.”

Hannah took off in a run, the old metal of the mech creaking and clanking in protest as it went. Looking through the cockpit camera, Lara saw Hannah’s face change as she neared the wall. The Monarch could stop on a dime, having three different systems dedicated to precise and dramatic movement control. This old thing had none of that, and Hannah clearly still wasn’t quite sure how to control it with precision. The momentum of the run carried the mech right into the wall of the hanger with a dramatic crash.

Hannah let out a raw scream of pain, and the mech scrambled back.

Lara waited, letting the horror and pain on Hannah’s face slowly dissolve into the more eased, blissful expression of Focus. “Tell me,” she said. “What happened, pilot?”

“I failed you, sir.”

“Edict 2. You’re wrong. Stop being caught up in how you expect your mech to act. Your mech is interchangeable. Your mech is disposable.”

“Yes, sir,” said Hannah, and something about the way she said those words—reverent, vulnerable (the way she always sounded receiving edicts)—made Lara realize she’d fucked up. She’d been…distracted, and she’d put two different thoughts together. You’re wrong. Your mech is interchangeable, she’d meant to say; meant to explain that the problem wasn’t in Hannah herself but in the resilience on her own body. Edict 2: Stop being caught up in how you expect your mech to act. A complicated Edict, sure, better for the low levels, but important; Lara needed to force Hannah to leave behind the past.

But it had gotten mixed up, and now the whole thing was getting etched into her pilot’s being as a requirement: you’re wrong. It was only at level 2, but it was there. Who knew what it would do long-term?

Lara thought about the times she’d been called wrong by her parents, her doctors, her bosses. By her wife, even. People had etched that into her own being manually, gradually and painfully. They’d had Lara herself give them the knives they used to do it. It wasn’t right to push that onto other people. Maybe Lara was going too far with this therapy session. Ideally, the therapy would erase any lingering commands from the previous sorties’ Focus and Edict, but here she was adding more. What if she messed it up and let this order stay? She couldn’t. She had to do this properly. Hannah had been so weird, lately, nothing at all like the confident, headstrong Hannah she knew. It was going to be nice to have her wife back, instead of the broken stranger she saw on the hospital bed.

“Mmm—”

Wait. Did she just moan?

It wasn’t even really a surprise; moans routinely slipped out from her pilot from time to time. But somehow, this one filled Lara with intense anger. Right, Lara thought. This shit. No, this therapy’s a complete farce, isn’t it. What even is the fucking point. Hannah wanted to be the broken pilot on the hospital bed, didn’t she. She didn’t want to go back to her old life, she—what were Hannah’s words—“wanted her body back.” Lara saw it every time she sat near Hannah and watched her stare into space. She signed up for this over and over and over again. What was Lara doing, trying to relive the past. Did she even really want that? How many times had Hannah pushed past her desires, steamrolled her needs?

Maybe it was Hannah’s turn to have her wrongness etched into her bones.

“Focus 3, pilot. Pulse your radar.” Hannah did so. “Pulse,” Lara said again. “Pulse.”

Because of the way the TR-41-N interpreted radar signals, receiving radar impact would register to Hannah as physical sensation. Normally, it was slight. But here, in this small, metal, enclosed chamber that reflected radar so well? It would be overwhelming.

Hannah’s moans became more urgent, desperate. As Lara kept telling Hannah to pulse, Hannah’s idle rocking motion transformed into desperate shaking, clearly doing everything she could in her restraints to get herself off in earnest. Lara didn’t even bother to touch herself. She just listened to her pilot squirm.

“Pulse”, she commanded once more. And then, “Focus 4, pilot. Tell me what you want. Keep sending radar pulses.”

Hannah couldn’t respond, at first; her gasps filled her lungs and expelled any possibility of speech. “I—I—I want—I want to f-follow you’re ord-orders, s-s-sir.”

And there it was. Suddenly, Lara wanted to be home very badly. “Alright, well done, pilot,” she said. “Stop sending radar pulses.” Lara then went through the procedures to cancel the Edicts, and then the Focus. “We’re done here.”

If Rachel had been right, Hannah would soon be a person again. Lara didn’t know what she would do if Rachel was wrong.

She didn’t know what she’d do if Rachel was right, either.

***

“Hey, babe, I noticed that there was an update to that weird comic you like, what was it called again?” Lara asked her wife as she drove them home for their first night in their own bed together in weeks.

“Oh, Mechbound—yeah I read it yesterday,” Hannah replied.

“Yeah? How was it? What happened?”

Hannah started to explain the story. It was still very weird, Lara reflected, needing to prompt Hannah to tell her things like this. Hannah loved this series with all her heart, and while Lara didn’t read it herself, Hannah had been what felt like constantly updating Lara, regaling her with whatever bizarre plotlines had happened most recently. Given how Hannah was talking now, her interest in the story hadn’t waned, but she didn’t seem to bring it up on her own anymore. She didn’t bring up anything on her own anymore, not since the ejection; this very car ride had been dead silent until Lara asked about the comic. Hannah had hated empty space, before, starting all sorts of conversations just to hear words being said. Now she sat in silence unless asked to, as if she needed permission to speak. Like a good pilot.

It was nice, honestly. Lara had never needed conversation like Hannah had, and if she was being honest it could become exhausting to be talking about something at all times. Lara liked having control over the conversation, the ability to turn her wife’s interests on and off for her like a spigot. Yes, she would love to hear about Mechbound—but on her own terms, thank you.

They talked for a while about the comic, and then about literature more generally, and then they fell back into what Lara thought of as a companionable silence. Conversation with Hannah could get a little stilted, nowadays, but that was okay. If Lara wanted to talk to a real person, she could always hit up Rachel.

After Lara pulled up to the house, she made a show of checking her email. “Holy shit,” she said. “I have an incredible welcome-home gift for you.”

“Oh?” asked Hannah. She looked around the porch. “Should we have a package?”

“No, I didn’t actually do this on purpose,” Lara lied, laughing. “The timing just worked out. You’ve been officially assigned a new mech! It’s another Monarch, even—an M-2 Assassin. It’ll be slightl different than your original mech but it should be really easy to learn. Our pilot/handler team is back in business, babe!”

Hannah gave a vague smile and walked into the house.

“Wait, what’s wrong?” Lara asked, following her. “I thought you’d be excited to be back in a Monarch again.”

Hannah shrugged. “My body is only important to me in how it lets me support the orders my handler gives me,” she said.

A cold thrill swept through Lara. She shivered. The therapy hadn’t worked after all. It was supposed to stop her from saying weird shit like this, wasn’t it? On the other hand, the words were so, so exciting to hear—hearing her own words reflected back at her as if they were the most natural concepts in the whole world. Damn, I could do anything to this girl, couldn’t I? she thought. Heat flooded her lower body.

“And you know what will let you follow your handler’s orders wonderfully?” Lara said aloud. “Your new Monarch.”

Hannah visibly brightened. “Yes, sir,” she said.

They had reached the bedroom. Lara started to lean in to kiss Hannah, but then she reconsidered. My body is interchangable, she remembered Hannah saying.

“Focus 2,” Lara said instead. “Get naked.”

The words—the mode of command—felt so natural now. Lara almost didn’t remember how to fuck Hannah without Focus anymore.

Hannah pulled off her pants, and then her shirt, and then her underwear. It wasn’t a sensuous movement; she wasn’t doing it seductively, or even really deliberately. But, even after all these months of getting Hannah to follow her orders, Lara still found the sight intoxicating, tonight even more than normal. What else had Lara said, during the therapy? My body is disposable. Those weren’t truly Lara’s words, and Hannah certainly wasn’t supposed to believe them here, outside her mech. But she was right, wasn’t she? She was Lara’s plaything, to be used and trashed as she wished.

Fuck did Lara want to use her.

“Let me pose you, doll,” Lara breathed. She walked up to the still, nude figure in front of her and raised her left arm, lightly kissing its fingers. Then she let go, and watched it stay in its place in the air, its fingers draped gently down. Lara grabbed the other hand, cupped it neatly around Hannah’s breast, and stepped back. She slowly circled her pilot, admiring her handiwork.

As she got back to the front, she pushed her hands against her pilot’s sternum, and pushed.

Hannah stumbled backwards several steps and caught herself, hands out, knees bent, waiting to be posed once more. Lara almost moaned aloud. Instead, sshe grabbed Hannah by her chin and dragged her back up to a standing position. Lara had to reach up to hold the chin at its full height, a good several inches higher than her own, but Lara still felt like she towered over her obedient plaything. She again raised Hannah’ right hand to her breast and the other to Lara’s lips.

“Focus 3, pilot,” she said. “Let me pose you, doll.” She put her hands against her pilot’s sternum, and once again she pushed.

This time, the hands stayed in position as Hannah crashed to the floor.

Lara did moan that time. She looked at her doll, open and naked and still in front of her, considering. Then, she kicked her doll’s right leg up. It stilled in the air in the perfect place for Lara to grab it and force it upward. She braced herself on her doll’s left hand and lowered her cunt down to touch the hot body beneath her. She started to grind herself against it.

Electric sparks ran through her where their bodies touched. Lara heard some whimpers coming from Hannah, and she realized she hadn’t actually told her to stay doll-silent; but then, what did Lara care about the sounds coming from her plaything? It was just a thing to use, really. She rubbed herself against its pussy with abandon; not the mechanical grinding of a pilot bound in its cockpit but a dominant, powerful frottage, intended almost as much to push her doll down as it was to cause herself pleasure.

Eventually, the position became too much effort, and Lara wasn’t quite strong enough to continue to hold herself up. She collapsed down onto her toy, head on its hard tummy and hands between its legs. Using the chest as leverage, she pushed herself up to a kneeling position. Then, she got up, walked over to Hannah’s head on the floor, and grabbed it with both hands. She pulled Hannah up, and walked it over to the toy chest. She pushed Hannah back to the floor as she took a seat on its lid. She moved the doll’s head to between her legs and waited. Nothing happened.

Right, duh, Lara thought. I need to turn my toy on to use it.

“Lick,” she said.

The feeling seemed to fill her whole body. The doll’s tongue touched her clit again and again, mechanical like any other sex toy, and it wasn’t long before Lara came. The toy kept going, and of course it did; what knowledge does a dildo have of orgasm? She wasn’t going to stop—couldn’t stop, until Lara let her. The realization brought Lara, gasping and shuddering, to another orgasm, and she let the toy keep going until it brought her to a third.

My pilot. My pet. My doll. My fuckthing.

It was intoxicating.

“Stop”, Lara said. The toy stopped licking, as if it had been shut off. She kicked it off of her and watched it limply crash back for the second time. It was nice, to be able to treat it so roughly. Her body was disposable, after all.

“Focus 0,” she said, and watched Hannah relax into a more human position. “Wow,” Hannah said.

“That was so nice,” said Lara. “I’d love to use you like that sometime later.”

“Yes, sir,” said her pilot.

***

End notes: Damn, we fucked this girl UP!!!

I’m definitely taking this tape home with me. I don’t want the hospital seeing what we—what this fucking industry—did to poor Hannah. I already promised Lara to push Hannah through as long as I can, so this thing stays with me.

It’ll be good watching later, too.

The therapy certainly did something, which is interesting. Cox was right, the bastard. I’d thought the new mech would do something to the dependance, and maybe it affected it a little, with the hands thing? But it seems like the Monarch is just too entrenched. She seemed so determined to give good responses for me this time, too, but she clearly just couldn’t, which is funny. I think having just one mech probably wasn’t good for her. I’m excited to see how the M2 treats her. If I care about the health and long-term outlook of new pilots (lol), it’s probably better to have them use multiple different mechs.

God did I want to fuck her today. Lara doesn’t know what she gave me with those recordings. I’d have to be careful—I’m sure the pet will tell Lara all about what I do with her, and I did tell Lara I wouldn’t have sex with the toy without her. Well, I didn’t say I wouldn’t play with her. But when I actually get my hands on her, well. Nice to have her handler’s voice in my pocket. Who knows what doors it will open in her.

Poor thing probably has a year. Less, if Lara isn’t careful and I’m not careful. And I suspect neither of us want to be.