Work Text:
"EVB-223 Desperate Contact, you are cleared for flight. Spin up secondary systems and proceed to slingshot five."
Your mech's reactor hums brightly as it ramps up output to power the AI core. The familiar sensation of it interfacing with you, ice water pouring into your brain via the cable socket in your skull, gives you an odd feeling of simultaneous tension and relaxation.
Welcome back, pilots, a synthesized voice whispers in your head. Initiating loopback link.
A second voice—a low, feminine, sultry organic tone—breaches the walls of your mind in the same way. "Hey, darling. Missed me?"
Even though you already know you won't find anyone else, you glance around the single-seater cockpit, hoping for a glimpse of your "copilot."
"C'mon, you know I'm not here like that," comes her voice from over your right shoulder. You hear a wistful sigh, accompanied by a phantom breath on your ear. "Gods, what I'd give to be out there though."
Something tightens in your chest as she says that. "Do you wanna fly today? Get a chance to move?"
"Could I, dear? It gets so quiet and cramped sometimes outside of Contact," she replies in a somewhat brighter tone as you settle the mech into its launch system.
"The controls are yours."
Desperate Contact's analogue controls, the ones your hands rest on in the dim light of the viewscreens, are just there as a fallback. What you're really handing over is control priority over the neural link, and she accepts it with joy as the unit's AI designates her the primary pilot.
"Hang tight, love."
Contact rockets off into the stars surrounding your parent ship, rapidly reducing it to another speck in the void. Out here, space isn't the cold dark that it seems from planetary colonies. There's no light pollution to drown out the stars, no atmosphere to distort their colors. The deep black that so many earthbound poets and writers have fixated on doesn't exist - it's filled with millions of flecks of light in thousands of colors, red and blue and orange and white, each beautiful in its own way. They're denser along the galactic plane, forming a thick band that almost seems solid in places, while the galactic poles are sparse, making you feel like you could almost count them all in those regions.
It's not the old false-color or light-amplified photos you'd see in the early days of space travel, all bright nebulae and glowing clouds, but it's arguably even more beautiful. The two of you soar, relishing in the freedom of zero gravity. You take in the universe as your copilot brings Contact into a slow spin. For a moment, it's like the tons of steel and miles of wire around you disappear, leaving just you and her, alone in the cosmos.
Some day, you'll be able to see this without needing to look through my eyes...
"Maybe some day," she replies, your thoughts apparently having been carried over the neural link. "but there's something special about living in your head, experiencing things through your senses. Knowing that we're seeing the same thing, looking at the world through the same lens, is something regular people will never get to do. It's our own little intimacy."
Your eyes mist just a tiny bit, the tears pooling on your eyes in the microgravity rather than dripping down your face. "I love you."
"I lo-"
A burst of comm static interrupts the voice in your head. "Contact, sorry to interrupt your practice flight, but we just caught a micrometeorite strike on the long-distance radio mast. Since you're already out, can you take a look?"
Damn.
The woman in your head sighs alongside you. "Yeah, we're on it, chief," you speak into your helmet microphone.
"Shall we?" prompts your copilot, rider-on, the love of your life.
With a nod from you, Desperate Contact sails home.