Chapter Text
His hand wrapped around the stick and then he reached further. The machine opened up around him, like plunging into the ocean, waves sealing above him, water now on every side. He breathed, with his lungs and with the engines, air spilling in as the jets powered up. He felt for his wings—swept out--his awareness seeping into the gears and levers and wires that made up the mechanics binding him to the flight controls—felt through those nerve lines every control surface—shook himself off, stretching, getting ready to fly.
“Maverick,” came the distance voice of his new RIO.
“Problem, Goose?”
“No… just… you’re staring into space. You good man?”
“Just seeing how the plane feels,” he shrugged, moved one of the flaps a bit at the same time, conflating one set of nerves with another.
“Maverick…” that still sounded very concerned.
“Seriously? What’s the matter?” Goose fiddled with some things, shifted in his seat like a joey in a kangaroo’s pouch that hadn’t quite realized his mother was about to jump clear across a river. Did that make Mav a mother kangaroo? Whatever, those things were pretty badass according to that one nature documentary.
Around him, pulling his attention back to the moment, the deck crew moved, fixing the tow bar to his nose like a bridle on a mustang, then the holdback, blast deflector rising behind him. His foot was on the starting line. No matter how many times he did this, it always made his heart race as if it were the first time.
The catapult officer was on the radio, then Mav and Goose were on the radio, then they were cleared to take off. His engines flared, the catapult caught him. Mav raced for the edge of the deck at a dead sprint, the carrier dragging him forward.
He felt the air beneath his wings, felt the lift hitting the threshold, and then the ship released him and his wheels spun in the empty sky. Pete laughed softly, reveling in the rush of escaping gravity.
Goose was still shifting about as if he were uncomfortable or just confused. And, yeah, that wasn’t really surprising. Every RIO Mav flew with seemed confused (or angry) about the experience, sometimes a bit of both.
Maverick adjusted his sweep, leaned into a bank, the radar flashing behind his eyes, showing him his designated flight path like a beacon across the sky.
The air temperature plunged as they soared through a cloud layer. Pete shivered a bit, adjusting already, though. He leaned forward against the shearing wind, sprinting past the speed of sound. The silly CADC wanted to trim the sweep of his wings for the speed, but Pete knew better how to hold his wings than the dumb computer and told it to take a hike. It had bad opinions about tailerons and glove vanes, too. Maverick handled them without a thought.
“Maverick…” Goose said, sounding very far away.
“Seriously, Goose, what’s the matter? I haven’t even done anything that would get me a side eye today.” He’d been flying absolutely by the book so far, seeing no reason not to on a day like this. One could just enjoy a calm patrol sometimes, slip through the air in a dream, watching the pale sky and the dark waves eons below.
“...You’re not looking. At the panels, at the stick, at the HUD, but you’re acting like you are.”
“I can see it all just fine,” Pete shrugged. What a weird thing to nitpick.
“No. No you can’t.”
“I know that I fly a bit weird, okay?” Pete tried to reassure the nervous RIO, because, well, he might have a point. “But I promise you I know exactly where we’re flying, exactly where we’re supposed to be flying, and that I’m paying attention to all that good piloting shit. You keep an eye on all that good RIO-ing shit and we’ll be fine.” Everything felt fine there; no switches felt out of place. When one of them was out of place it would feel like someone rubbing his hair in a wrong direction—uncomfortable, irritating, but not painful or anything.
“...That’s not what I’m getting at, Maverick.” Goose just sounded bewildered and exasperated now.
“Then what are you getting at?”
“I don’t… um…”
“Look, man, they want to pair us up long term here.” It would be nice to finally have that kind of stability, if he could just find somebody he meshed with. He’d hoped that might be Goose, but it was starting to look like it wasn’t going to be Goose and, fine, he’d find someone else. He never got his hopes up too high anymore. No RIO seemed to want to fly with him long. “If there’s some reason why you just can’t fly with me, better to get it out in the open now.”
There was a long pause. “Well, I mean, they didn’t tell me you were an MT? I’ve never flown with an MT. I thought you had to be specially trained for that or something.”
“What?” Pete almost laughed. “I’m not a mechanical technopath, Goose. What are you talking about?”
“Pete.” Goose said his name with the force of a ringing gong. “You are painfully obviously a mechanical technopath. I’ve never seen someone who was so blatantly obviously a mechanical technopath. You can’t seriously be telling me you don’t know this?”
This was not at all how he had expected this flight to go. “I honestly don’t know much about MT’s, or DT’s for that matter,” Pete admitted, “because I am not a technopath, and I don’t need to know about them.”
“You realize you’ve been staring at my reflection for this entire conversation?”
Pete blinked and, yes, he had. “So?”
“So how do you know where we’re flying, Maverick? I can see that we’re keeping to our planned course, but you can’t.”
“My peripheral vision is very good,” Pete shrugged. “And besides, you don’t seriously think—I mean, you seriously think none of my flight instructors or previous RIOs would have noticed? If it’s as obvious as you say it is?”
“You ever heard about the gorilla experiment?”
“What?”
“Read about it in the news. Researchers had people do basic tasks like count the number of grains of rice on a bunch of chess squares or something, then a guy in a gorilla suit walked into the room and jumped up and down waving his arms and the people didn’t notice the guy in the full on gorilla suit.”
Who gave them grant money for bullshit like that? “Okay, scientists are weird and have too much time on their hands.”
Goose sighed. “That’s not the point! The point is, sometimes really obvious things get missed precisely because everyone thinks somebody else should have noticed them first and they’re busy with… whatever.”
“Look, fine, I’ll agree with you that it’s not impossible that I might have a bit of the touch,” it was possible to have some of the sensory abilities of a digital or mechanical technopath without being a technopath proper, “but I’m not an MT, and we actually have like, crap to do now, so--”
“But how do you know about that crap when you’re not even look—fine. Fine. We’ll talk when we land.”
The lens flashed amber as Maverick dipped in towards the deck. The LSO gave him no advice because he didn’t need any—all good to land, coming in perfectly. He jumped into a sprint, throwing the throttle to maximum, just as he snagged the third wire, like dragging a toe through sand at the beach, and in a matter of seconds they were snugly caught, back down on the carrier deck.
He never really wanted to step out of the cockpit, but if you didn’t get out you could never get back in. He took a deep breath as he swept his wings in then drew away from them, turning his attention from his wings to his arms, letting all awareness of the systems he needed in the sky fade away. “Shutdown procedures completed,” Goose confirmed. They clambered from the cockpit with confidence born of long experience.
“What?” Maverick asked, because Goose was staring at him still.
“Later,” the RIO sighed. “After we get food maybe.”
As it turned out, ‘after we get food’ turned into ‘when we get food.’
“So,” Goose said, pointing at Maverick with an accusatory spoon. “I watched you very carefully during shutdown procedures. You’re an MT, really, really.”
“Not this again,” Pete groaned. “Screw off already, man.”
“What’s this about?” Cougar asked, butting into the conversation like the shameless gossip he was. They ought to have called him ‘Scuttlebutt.’
“Maverick is a mechanical technopath and apparently nobody has noticed but me,” Goose replied, “including Maverick himself.”
“I find that rather hard to believe,” Merlin, Cougar’s RIO, said dryly, leaning over so as to hear better. “A digital technopath escaping notice? Maybe, probably not these days, but an MT? No way. My sister’s friend is an MT and believe me, people know.”
“Yeah. I’m not an MT,” Pete snorted, distancing himself by nibbling on a thoroughly unpalatable meatloaf-ish… let’s just say loaf. Probably had meat in it.
“It’s easy to prove one way or another,” Merlin shrugged.
“How do you do that?” Cougar asked.
Merlin reached over towards Pete, who looked at him suspiciously, then batted his hand away with a sharp, “hey!” when he realized the man was trying to touch his cheek. “What the hell?”
“Huh,” Merlin furrowed his brow, exchanging a thoughtful glance with Goose across the table. “Maybe you are an MT. Normal people don’t freak out that way about people touching their faces.”
“I’m pretty sure they do, Merlin,” Pete replied sharply. “Especially with no warning.”
“What were you actually going to do?” Goose asked the other RIO while Cougar watched dispassionately, or perhaps with a little bit of amusement.
“MT's have these really sensitive sets of nerves called reading nerves,” Merlin stroked over his cheek bone, “the strongest set right here, and then two weaker sets. They’re for touch telepathy with other technopaths.”
For the first time since Goose started spouting nonsense on the plane, Pete felt the slightest bit uneasy. “Doesn’t… everyone have really sensitive faces, though? That sounded kind of weird, but you know what I mean.”
“I mean, sort of,” Merlin shrugged. “But not like this. MTs have really, really sensitive fingers… tooo…” he trailed off. “Oh my God, you are, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“I’ve seen you, practicing hand to hand in survival training,” Merlin began. Well, yeah, obviously. Merlin and Maverick had fought each other during that training. Hadn’t been fun, but he’d done better than everyone had expected him to. When you were as short as Pete, you learned creative ways to deal with taller people beating on you on your way home after school.
“You don’t punch people,” Goose filled in dryly, as if explaining something painfully obvious to a sixth grade English class. “You don’t make a fist. You strike with the heel of your hand or with your elbow or you kick people. When you have to grab someone, you use a monkey grip, trying to keep all the tension away from your fingertips. I thought it was just because you’re smaller than most of the guys you’re practicing with, so those strikes make more sense, but that’s not it, is it?”
“Yeah,” Cougar agreed, finally finding a place to add his two cents. “Was friends with a guy, Stencil, an MT, back in the academy. He didn’t talk about it, what it was like, but he was a big guy and he still fought the way you do, Mitchell, keeping his fingers out of it as much as possible, especially fingertips. That’s just instinct, he said.”
“Stop ganging up on me,” Pete muttered, feeling cornered now. “Someone would have fucking noticed okay? We have medical examinations to figure this stuff out.”
“People slip through the cracks all the time,” Cougar said, eyebrow raised and fork pointing accusingly. Why were so many people pointing silverware at him today? It was disturbing.
Merlin reached up again and Pete, defiant now, let him reach out and touch him on the cheek, shuddering at the cold of his fingers and then the RIO pinched him, the bastard, and Pete couldn’t help his cry of surprised pain. It felt more like being stabbed than pinched—Merlin had fallen from his seat as Pete pushed him away. “What the hell did you do that for?” he growled, face smarting, pain coming in waves in time with his heartbeat.
There were… an awful lot of people staring at him. Merlin dusted himself off, sat back down, casually reached across the table, and pinched Cougar exactly the same way. The other pilot had zero reaction whatsoever. What, were his nerves just made of steel or something? “That barely hurts, Mav,” Cougar told him. “Because I am not a mechanical technopath. And you are, and I have no fucking idea how nobody noticed because it is obvious as hell.”
“...Oh.”
“You’re telling me you can’t feel it when you move the tailerons?”
“I mean, I can feel how the plane reacts to it,” Cougar told him.
“But you don’t feel it? It’s not like… it’s not like it’s yours to move?”
Cougar shook his head. “No, man. Feeling the machine as an extension of your body is a technopath thing.”
This made no damn sense. “How do you fly if you can’t feel it? That’s like—how would you be able to walk if you couldn’t feel your feet?”
“It’s just a different kind of instinct,” Cougar explained patiently.
Pete groaned. Nothing made any sense anymore. All these things that he knew were just… how things were for everybody, it turned out that those were not how things were for everybody, only how things were for him. No wonder Pete never understood anybody around him and vice versa. He was working under the assumption that everybody was living in the same world as him and, apparently, that wasn’t fucking true. “I told people about this, Cougar. When I was applying to the academy, the recruiter guy I was talking to asked me questions about how I felt riding my motorcycle and I fucking told him exactly how it was and he didn’t say anything about it to me. If it’s not normal, why wouldn’t he have said something?”
Cougar blinked, clearly not quite sure whether he should really reply. “I think… I think he must have known you were an MT from your replies, or suspected, and chose not to say…” he worked his jaw, “why would he do… oh… oh, maybe? I mean, I don’t wanna presume but maybe he just didn’t like you? The military wants technopaths, as many as they can possibly get. Hell, the air force will let women fly combat missions if they’re technopaths, that’s how badly they want them. If this guy didn’t like you, wanted to screw you over, he couldn’t leave any evidence that you were an MT, because then it wouldn’t matter what he thought of you, the navy would snap you up.”
Maverick groaned, covering his face with his hands. Unfortunately, that made an awful lot of sense. “And every medical examination since then has missed it somehow?”
Cougar shrugged. “I don’t think general medical exams will, you know, catch it? I don’t think it’s on X-rays, you have do like those fancy new things, NRI or whatever? I think they usually catch it with the questionnaire you were describing.”
“Mitchell!” Pete jumped to attention as Stinger motioned him into his office.
“Good luck,” Cougar gave him a wry smile. The other pilot had never been this nice to him before. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
Stinger sighed, gazing at Pete in grave disappointment. “Nobody causes a calamity like you, do they?”
“Sir…” That seemed a bit unfair, honestly. For once, this was legitimately not his fault. How was he supposed to know he wasn’t normal? Nobody ever told him he wasn’t until Goose after the first thirty seconds of flight time.
“I’ve had to make twenty phone calls because of you, had old boxes full of records ripped apart trying to figure out how the hell the navy managed to ship me an MT completely clueless about what he is. There’s an enormous amount of finger pointing and shouting going on.”
“Sir.” What was he even expected to say to that? Did Stinger want him to apologize for existing? Well, to be fair, he’d apologized for his existence a lot in his career so far, short as it had been.
“Long story short, nobody knows and everybody has a reason why it’s somebody else’s fault.” Stinger laced his fingers together. “On some level that doesn’t even matter. You’ve learned to fly damn well. You seem to be in good health against all odds.”
“Sir?”
“Mechanical technopaths have a large number of health concerns that the rest of us don’t.”
“Uh…” This day just kept getting better.
“You appear to have somehow learned to do safe interface closing and disentanglement procedures for the F-14 completely by instinct. Several people I got on the horn did not believe me when I told them this.”
“I still don’t understand, sir?”
“You will. You’re out of here, Mitchell.”
Seriously? This was what did it? This wasn’t fucking fair. “But… sir! Please, sir, it’s—if you’re going to throw me out at least let it be for something I did! Not something like this!”
“Throw you out? Are you insane?”
“Uh…”
“Of course you are,” Stinger muttered. “Batshit crazy, obviously. Not out of the navy, Mitchell. You’re getting sent back stateside for a month so that you can get the proper instruction you should have had when you were learning to fly. I’m sending Goose along with you, so he can get a crash-course on flying with a technopath.”
Oh. They must be kidding. “Sir, with all due respect--”
“I’m sure you’re as insulted as hell that you have to go back to school,” Stinger interrupted and, well, yeah, he was and it was probably obvious, “but MT's have to have this training for a reason. Just because you learned to do things on your own doesn’t mean you’re doing things safely. They want to do a full health assessment on you while you’re there, fit you for the special gear you should have.”
“Yes, sir,” Maverick agreed grudgingly.
“Pack your bags, Mitchell.”
Mechanical technopaths didn’t often make it to high ranks in the military. Pete knew that, and he didn’t much care. He wanted to fly the planes. He didn’t want to be an admiral or whatever. That sounded boring as hell. It turned out it was like that for every MT. Whatever machine they preferred to interface with, an MT couldn’t be happy, sometimes couldn’t survive without regular access to it.
There was another reason that MT’s didn’t make high ranks, something that they didn’t tell you, something that you learned on the very first day when they brought you into the Tech Pits for your intake screening and health assessment.
After the assessment was through, after they finally let him go, he lay trembling in his bunk, all the lights in the room blazing like comets and burrowing into his brain, all the lingering shadows stalking him like wraiths. The door opened and he bared his teeth like an animal. “Hey,” said a woman in an… air force uniform it looked like? His eyes wouldn’t cooperate. It was too blurry to make out her rank or her name. “Brought you readguards and writeguards.”
“What?” Pete rasped. She sank down on her knees, trying to appear harmless, and showed him the sealed, plastic packages in her lap.
“They were really rough with you, huh? It’s not usually that bad. Here.”
“What are these for?” Pete asked, trying to get his eyes to focus enough to make out what she’d handed him.
“The gloves are writeguards, to protect the nerves in your hands. You can unzip the pocket,” she demonstrated, “to open the insulating coat if you need to get a machine interface. Otherwise, keep them on and zipped, and you won’t end up opening a machine interface, on anything or anyone, without meaning to.”
“I’m not in the habit of wandering around grabbing people’s faces,” Pete replied.
“Of course not, but…” He understood immediately what she meant. He wanted to wear them. He felt almost naked now without his hands covered, as if his fingers were some intimate part of him that shouldn’t be shown in public. He was hiding his hands from her, and his face, too. He’d felt sort of instinctually modest about them before, but not this strongly, not like they were really intimate things that should be hidden, but apparently it only took one day around other technopaths, learning the hard truth of how their world worked, to make him just like all the others. He grimaced and took the gloves, no further explanation needed.
“And these are readguards,” she handed over something that was sort of like half of a balaclava. He’d seen them before, of course. All the MT’s he’d ever met in the military wore one of these. He’d never bothered to question what they were for or how they were put on, but if adjusted correctly, they wouldn’t cover your mouth and nose, just cheek bones, jaw line, along the ears, the primary, secondary and tertiary reading nerves. “They’re hard to get adjusted quite right the first time, but they’ll cover all the read nerves on your face, so nobody can touch them by accident or… without unhooking the straps. Some people lock them on, so they have to be cut off.”
“I never realized what these things were for,” Pete sighed, taking the offerings gratefully. He was too exhausted to feel much of anything, not even humiliation and, somehow, he could tell that she understood exactly how he felt, that she sympathized and would not judge him, not even if he lashed out like a caged tiger and started cursing at her. He wasn’t going to do that, though. “It never even occurred to me to wonder why all these MT’s were wearing face coverings like this.” Not all MT’s wore something this sophisticated of course—silk scarves tied around the lower half of one’s face seemed common enough outside the military—and he knew some MT’s didn’t wear anything, didn’t feel the need. He did.
“In combat they have these adhesives you have to wear,” she continued, “you put them over all your read nerves, and they bind so tightly they can’t be removed for several days without taking most of your face with them, so if an enemy captures you and tries to forcibly open a machine interface with you, they can’t do it immediately, hopefully until all the information they might steal from you is out of date.”
Pete grimaced, trying not to think about that in too much detail. “Does that happen?”
“Frequently,” she told him.
“More frequently than our own guys doing it to us for ‘health assessments?’”
She sighed and shook her head. “No, not really. Never trust a digital technopath, especially one of higher rank.”
That was… refreshingly straightforward. It was also sickening. “What’s your name?”
“Claudia Lowe,” she replied.
He sighed, starting to fiddle with the read guard straps as he tried to get it adjusted. He wanted it on right now. Even with just one person here to see him, he felt naked without his face covered, naked without his fingers covered, too. “Can all digital technopaths do that?”
There was no need to explain what he meant. “Mechanical technopaths can do it, too. We can all read each other, and DT’s… Digital technopaths can read us, but we can’t read them, and they can’t read each other in the way we read each other, as if we are fellow machines with all the memory laid out like a tape archive. DT’s can read each other well enough to speak by touch telepathy, but they can’t really break into each other’s minds. It’s all about the nerve capacity and sensitivity… and how your brain is wired under the hood.” She tapped her skull in emphasis.
“That’s why you never see MT’s in the brass, huh?” Pete huffed. “It’s because DT’s are bastards?”
“Yes, but you should be suspicious of older and stronger MT’s, too. Especially Leo.”
“Who’s that?” Pete asked, tightening the strap so that the guard hugged his face. Ugh. That was really not comfortable. He wasn’t going to take it off, certainly not, but he could see why silk scarves were generally preferred.
“He’s the jet interface instructor, unfortunately,” Claudia grimaced. “Don’t ever let yourself be caught in a room alone with him. He’ll say things like he’s ‘teaching you to defend yourself.’”
That was usually code for ‘lording my power over you for my own amusement.’ Great. “Is there anybody decent in this hellhole aside from you?”
Claudia smiled wryly. “Plenty. The vast majority of MT’s are decent people. The vast majority of DT’s are bastards.” She gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Keep your head up. If they scare you, don’t let them see it. They get off on it.”
“Bastards,” Pete agreed.
“And one more thing?”
“Yeah?”
“They’re going to take you into a room tomorrow. They’ll have a line of ten or fifteen people there and they’ll ask you to tell them which ones are technopaths, and which are MT’s, which are DT’s. Do not tell them. Say you can’t tell which are technopaths and which aren’t, even if you can.”
What in the world was this about? “Why?”
“It’s how they pick out which MT’s are Machine Bloods. If you’re a Machine Blood, you do not want anyone to know. Don’t even tell me. Don’t tell your family. Don’t tell anyone.”
What even were Machine Bloods and why would he care if he were one of them or if people knew about it? “What does that even mean?”
Claudia’s head jerked as if she had heard someone shout in the distance. Pete couldn’t hear anything. “Later. Someone’s coming.”
The majority of the training involved in learning to fly with mechanical technopaths revolved around how not to freak out when they did something bizarre, like zone out staring directly ahead, which was how Mav flew all the time now that he’d been formally trained. His eyes would drift mostly closed and his head wouldn’t move for hours at a time. You also had to get used to the idea that the plane was your pilot’s body for the duration of the flight, which made your position as a backseater disturbingly intimate in some ways.
Goose’s main instructor, Snack—yes, that was the poor guy’s call sign—had lived up to that name by explaining “you have to get used to the idea that your pilot eats you alive.”
Mav would tell Goose to stop squirming sometimes, saying it was unnerving. As far as Goose knew, there were no sensors in the cockpit that would let his pilot feel him moving, but mechanical technopaths wired themselves into machines in mystifying ways. Apparently digital technopaths didn’t do this kind of stuff. Their nerves were thinner, finer, designed for reading feedback from low voltage systems, computers mostly. Mechanical technopaths had wider, stronger nerves for gathering feedback from high voltage or mechanical systems.
On long, boring flights Goose would sometimes experiment, see what Mav could and couldn’t feel. Apparently petting the top of the canopy was “unbelievably creepy! Oh my God stop that Goose! Stop that stop that stop that!” but when Nick was just doing his plain old job, fiddling with the circuit breakers that needed fiddled, that didn’t feel creepy at all. He’d tried to get Pete to explain exactly what it did feel like, but the pilot had just blushed and refused to answer. This had earned some raised eyebrows and then Pete desperately trying to explain that “none of it is like that, Goose! Jesus! It’s not like that!” before admitting that Goose fiddling with the circuit breakers felt kind of like someone petting his hair in a pleasant way. That hardly seemed worth blushing over but whatever.
Maverick flew with the grace and sharp agility of a falcon on the worst of days. On the best, it was hard to describe the skill he showed off. Still, ending up inverted a few feet above a diving MIG was shocking. He trusted Pete not to falter and kill them, but this was definitely unnerving. “Flip him off for me, Goose,” Pete told him in that detached way that mechanical technopaths with wide open machine interfaces tended to speak, slurring a bit as they tried to find their tongues. Pete would certainly be happy to flip the guy off himself, but chances were Maverick had no idea where his hands were right now, only where his wings were. The wider and deeper the machine interface, the closer the pilot was to the plane, the less an MT processed and controlled the human body. DT’s weren’t like that, according to his instructors and according to his DT friends.
“Watch the birdie!” Goose joked, snapping a picture that was going to be legendary.
The guy flying the MIG was definitely not an MT, which was obvious from the way he had craned his head to stare at Maverick and Goose in absolute consternation before breaking away and down, bugging out back to shore.
“And that’s that,” Goose hummed.
“Running low on fuel,” Mav muttered. “Need to head back… Cougar’s acting weird, though.” Maverick had noticed first, of course, just how obviously spooked the other pilot was.
“Cougar?” Goose got on the radio. “Hey, man, come on, we’re getting way low on fuel, time to head back.” Merlin had certainly told his pilot this already.
The carrier was calling them in, too. “Get Cougar to follow us in, Goose,” Maverick said. “We’re good to fly a while more.”
“Okay,” Goose would say as much to the tower and, because it was an MT saying it, they’d get leeway to chase down Cougar and bring him back. Mav would know better than the gauges whether they could keep flying.
“Hey, Merlin? Get Cougar to follow us, yeah?” Goose managed to get the other RIO on the radio, the two of them coaxing the other man all the way back to the carrier.
“We’re good,” Mav muttered, “for the moment anyway.”
“Get Cougar down,” Goose relayed to the tower, “we’ve got a bit of time.”
Cougar made it down—thank God—catching the fourth wire but, you know, at least he caught something, and then Mav coasted down effortlessly, catching the third wire perfectly.
Pete’s eyes fluttered and he cocked his head side so side, fingers moving over the controls as if he were at a typewriter or something. He shook his head, finally taking his hands off the stick, then raised his arms up over his head, stretching his fingers carefully within his heavy gloves. He shook his head again, much more violently this time, and only then did he start moving like a human.
“All good?” Pete asked Goose, because the MT hadn’t been aware for the ten seconds or so that he was gently breaking his interface with the Tomcat. He depended on Goose to watch his back through it, like he depended on Goose to keep track of the radio during the times in flight where the MT couldn’t find his tongue.
“All good, Mav. Come on.”
Cougar had just left Stinger’s office when Nick and Pete got there. Cougar had a strange look on his face, something between miserable defeat and serene acceptance. “Thanks, Maverick,” he said.
“You okay, man?” the other pilot asked.
Cougar shook his head. “I can’t do it anymore,” he muttered.
“What?” Pete asked, eyes wide with shock.
“Fly,” the man shook his head. “Can’t do it.”
“But…” and Pete looked like Cougar had just said he was going to go home and have all of his limbs surgically removed.
“I don’t think it’s something you could ever understand,” Cougar said with a wry smile. “MT’s, you get attached to certain machines and can’t ever give ‘em up, but I can’t do it anymore. I have so many other things… I can’t fly thinking about everything I could lose. Good luck, Maverick.”
Nick watched the other pilot retreat down the corridor. Pete started after him with his mouth wide open, utterly uncomprehending. The MT turned to Goose, silently begging for an explanation that he could understand. Goose shook his head. “Sorry, Mav. I don’t think I can translate that to technopath.”
“I don’t get it,” Pete muttered dumbly. “How can he…? How can he give up flying? Won’t it just—it would kill me. Won’t it kill him, too?” He turned to Nick, demanding some kind of clarification.
“No, Pete,” Nick shook his head. “He’ll be okay. You’d be okay, too, you know. It would be a hell of a lot harder for you, but you’d be okay.” Someday they would all have to stop flying, one way or another.
“I wouldn’t, though,” Pete muttered.
“...You don’t actually have a machine dependence that bad, do you?” MT's, but not DT's, could get addicted to using certain machines, their nerve networks adapting and twisting to align perfectly with one set of mechanisms, the continuing stability of those nerve networks then depending on regular interfaces with the mechanisms in question. Separating MT's from their dependencies really could cause them serious physical harm, even kill them sometimes through nerve network cascade failures. The military trained MT's really carefully to make sure they didn’t end up with that problem… but Mav hadn’t been trained until he’d been flying for a long time.
Pete grimaced. “...I will probably be able to adapt to flying other jets.”
Fucking hell. “So you do have machine dependencies that bad. And you never told me because…?”
“Well, it’s not been relevant so far,” Pete shrugged. “It doesn’t change how I fly now.”
Goose pinched the bridge of his nose. “Maverick… I love you dearly man, you know what I mean--”
“I didn’t want you to worry, okay?” Pete replied. “I knew you would.”
“Yes. Worrying, right now in fact.” Jesus Christ, Pete.
“This is precisely why I didn’t tell you. It’s not like there’s anything you can do about it.”
“Maverick, Goose!” Stinger interrupted Nick’s oncoming aneurysm as he waved them into his office.
When he wasn’t on duty, Pete would wear silk scarves rather than a real readguard, trading security for comfort. He only had two scarves. One was black, navy issue, an acceptable part of the uniform at formal functions. The other, the one he’d chosen to wear tonight, was a bizarre blue and red tie-dye which he’d bartered from an MT on the carrier, Schwinn, one of the guys who worked in the engine rooms, opening machine interfaces right through to the propellers. Pete wondered what that would feel like, opening your mind into a machine that enormous, with that many people on it, in it, around it, depending on it. Schwinn reminded Pete of an anthropomorphized whale, powerful and serene, wise beyond years… except when Casey was around.
When Casey was around, Schwinn was more like a mouse than a whale. To be fair, Maverick probably resembled a mouse when Casey was around, too. Casey was the DT who supervised all the engineers who worked on the actual engines. He had that mean smile that Pete had come to associate with DT’s, that arrogant sneer.
Pete had watched Schwinn wilt beneath Casey’s stare and wondered if there were a way he could arrange to get Casey thrown overboard, or maybe tossed in the garbage compactor. Garbage disposal was run by MT’s, too, and they’d probably be sympathetic. Unfortunately, there were CCTV cameras everywhere and, while a skilled DT was capable of interfacing with a computer system and altering data on magnetic tapes with their mind, that wasn’t something an MT could do. A sufficiently skilled MT might be able to get some kind of control of the ship’s electrical system as a whole and cause a power surge that would knock out recording for a while, but that wouldn’t help. It would be obvious what happened, and why it happened.
“What are you moping about? Come on! We’re at Top Gun. We’ve got alcohol,” Goose gestured. “We’re supposed to be having fun!”
“Sorry, just thinking about something that happened a couple weeks ago,” Pete shrugged, taking a sip of his drink. There wasn’t actually much alcohol in this cocktail, only a teaspoon or so of liquor, although Goose didn’t seem to realize that. It turned out that MT’s had unusual drug reactions due to the ways their brains were wired, which explained a lot. Pete used to be embarrassed about getting black out drunk from half a beer, and had managed to fake that he was drinking way more than he was to avoid being mocked as a hopeless lightweight. He didn’t have to do that anymore. At good bars like this, the tenders saw his writeguards—which he wore all the time, on or off duty—and the scarf over his face and provided him with the MT-safe version of the requested drink without him having to ask, although he always made sure to confirm.
Digital technopaths had some problems like that, too, but not nearly as bad. A DT could drink two shots and get blackout drunk but be fine the next morning. That much alcohol could kill a mechanical technopath, and Pete was really lucky that his introduction to underage drinking had involved sipping a beer, getting wasted immediately, and realizing that he had to be careful with the stuff. If he’d experimented with something harder he could have killed himself by accident.
Good bars, like this one, would also provide MT’s with dainty straws so he didn’t need to fiddle with his scarf so much in order to enjoy his drink. He took another sip and tried to relax. It was hard, though, because he could sense a lot of people staring at him, including this one obnoxious blonde DT and his tall buddy.
Pete knew that the guy was a DT although he couldn’t put into words how he knew. It had nothing to do with appearance. Pete didn’t have to look at the man to know where and what he was. Pete would have to pretend that he hadn’t the slightest clue, of course. Machine Bloods had an unnerving habit of disappearing, that’s what Claudia said.
The guy wasn’t wearing any gloves, and Pete had figured out by now that, nine times out of ten, if a DT was out in public and not wearing any gloves, he or she was a scumbag. DT’s out in public wearing gloves might also be scumbags, but the chance fell to one in two. The handful of non-scumbag, ungloved DT’s generally didn’t know that they were DT’s. Living a life of undetected ignorance was a lot easier and a lot more common for digital than mechanical technopaths.
Generally, mechanical technopaths either got spotted young or died young—unsafe machine interface disengagements, unmet machine dependencies, write nerve injuries that turned into cascade collapses, drinking a few shots to celebrate your twenty-first birthday, getting morphine for a surgery… there were a lot of ways for MT’s that didn’t know what they were to get themselves killed. Several people at the Tech Pit had been stunned speechless by Maverick’s existence, including one guy who’d outright demanded how he wasn’t dead and another who had accused him of being a Soviet spy because his story didn’t make any sense. That had been easy enough to disprove, although the process had not been pleasant.
“Hey, it’s Iceman,” Goose waved to the blonde DT and Maverick scowled beneath his scarf. There were significant advantages to covering your face, one of them being that nobody could see your angry expressions.
“Iceman, huh?” Pete asked as the DT sauntered towards them, his taller shadow in tow. The blonde man moved like a predator, and Maverick was even more sure that this guy was a scumbag, because that was how Casey walked around the engine rooms, how Shaper stalked among the new MT’s coming into the Tech Pits. It screamed to everyone who could hear “I’m big and I’m mean and I can hurt you and I know it and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Maverick crossed his arms, leaning back against the bar to make himself look relaxed. “Ice, Slider,” Goose greeted the men.
“Well, well. When did you get in?” the DT’s shadow, Slider, huffed. He didn’t seem friendly, either, and Pete was having a hard time believing that Goose had ever been acquainted with either of these guys.
“Yeah, introductions, right. This is my pilot, Pete Mitchell, Maverick, and this is Tom Kazansky, Iceman, and Ron Kerner, Slider.”
“Mitchell,” Kazansky scrutinized him. Maverick met the man’s eyes defiantly. “I’ve heard of you.”
“Hm,” Pete said. He didn’t want to talk to this guy, and that seemed like the best way to end the conversation quickly.
Kerner cocked his head. “I heard you two had stolen Cougar’s spot. Wasn't sure I believed it.”
“Hey! We got in fair and square,” Goose protested, although he was too good natured to really snap at anyone.
Yeah, Kerner really pissed Pete off, but if he replied like he wanted to he’d probably end up arguing with the scumbag DT all night and that was the absolute last thing he wanted. “Look, think what you want, man,” Pete said, taking another sip of his drink.
All three of the other men blinked at him in confusion. Goose clearly expected Maverick to lash out. The others probably did, too, if they really had “heard of him.” “You okay, Mav?” Goose asked him nervously.
A little flicker of anger broke through and Pete answered a bit too honestly. “I don’t really want to talk to either of these guys, so whatever gets the conversation over with.”
Kazansky scoffed. “Oh, you think you’re too good for us, Mitchell?” Pete rolled his eyes and took another sip of his drink. “Think you’re better than us because you have a physical advantage? Well, we’ll see how far that gets you.” Physical advantage what? Oh, he meant Maverick being an MT. Of course that’s what he meant. Pete rolled his eyes again, harder than before. “Technopath abilities might have got you this far but they’re not a substitute for paying attention and studying the manual.”
What the hell? Was this guy jealous or something? It wasn’t as if DT’s didn’t have a ‘physical advantage’ of their own. “Who said anything about me not reading the fucking manual?” Pete demanded, almost as bewildered as he was angry, and why couldn’t he just shut up and keep this conversation short? “You know what, never mind. You think I think I’m too good for you despite having never met me before. Whatever.” That was some serious hypocrisy from a DT who wasn’t wearing gloves in public. What, did Kazansky think he was too good for gloves? It was like wandering around shirtless, a DT not wearing gloves, not quite obscene but certainly rude, a threat that Kazansky might do something indecent at any moment.
“Come on, guys,” Goose sighed, pinching his nose.
“Don’t try to blame this on me, Goose,” Maverick turned back to the bar and his drink.
Kazansky moved and Pete—although he could sense the other technopath clearly—forced himself not to react until the man actually brushed against his shoulder. Only then did Pete jerk away so violently that his stool clattered to the ground. That hadn’t been intentional. He just couldn’t help it. A DT touching him, even ever so slightly and well away from his reading nerves, evoked such visceral disgust that he couldn’t control himself. Kazansky looked at him as if Pete were the rude, crazy bastard.
“What the hell was that for?” Pete growled.
“Bumping you as I took a seat at the bar? Oh, I’m so very sorry,” sarcasm dripped from every word and Pete wanted to punch that smug smirk off the bastard’s face. “That must be so terrible for you.”
Pete snarled and said what he’d actually been thinking this whole time, even though he really, really knew he shouldn’t. “Why don’t you put on some gloves you asshole? Have you no sense of shame?”
Kazansky’s eyebrows shot up. Did he legitimately not understand that he was being an asshole? Did he really not get it? “The hell are you on about now, Mitchell?”
“Whatever. You’re hopeless. See you in class; sit as far from me as you can how about?” Pete threw money down on the bar, put his stool back on its feet, and stalked away quickly, headed straight for the door.
The chief ability of a mechanical technopath was feeling the machine as an extension of your body. With training and experience the connection grew stronger and less easily explained. Pete could feel the wind against his wings, against his metal skin, over surfaces which had no sensors of any kind within them. Some scientists argued that it was all in an MT’s head, that Maverick’s brain invented these sensations from other information. Some scientists were stupid. Yeah, his brain was definitely translating information into sensations that Pete could understand as a human, but the information itself was real. It was obvious to any MT that it was real, not that scientists listened.
Scientists could not use the same “all in your head” argument to explain the secondary skills, how the most powerful and practiced technopaths could make the machines act to their whims and transmit data without touching the relevant controls. How could a digital technopath read information from a magnetic tape without a printing interface? How could Schwinn move the rudder of an aircraft carrier from the engine room? How could Pete trim his wings and turn without manipulating the controls? If there was power in the system and you had a machine interface open widely and deeply enough, certain logical limits would cease to apply. It was an enormous advantage in serious situations.
If you pitted Pete against any other pilot at Top Gun with live weapons, Pete would win. This was not in question. There were no other MT’s in his class, just the one asshole DT. MT’s were better fliers than baseline humans or DT’s. That was just the way it was. That didn’t mean Pete would win Top Gun, though. No MT had ever won Top Gun, and Pete was not likely to be the exception to this rule. He’d thought maybe he would be, but no, definitely not. He’d settle for graduating. That would be enough of a challenge for him.
“Maverick, would you focus?” Goose sighed from the back seat. “I know that you’re having fun, but can we please try to actually find Jester?”
“Sorry, Goose,” Pete heard his voice in the distance. He rolled over and turned, headed towards the place where Jester had last been sighted.
“What was it this time?” Goose sighed even more deeply this time.
“...The big, gray cloud,” Pete admitted.
“The cloud? Really?” Goose mocked him.
“Look. It’s a really interesting cloud, isn’t it?”
“Why are you having so much trouble focusing now? You didn’t have this problem on the carrier!”
Oh yes he did, it just wasn’t as bad. All the extra sensory information that MT’s got was a lifesaver in a real combat scenario, but the rest of the time it tended to make flying almost too fun and Pete had to force himself to fly straight during patrols and not go check out interesting things like distant ships or pods of whales or really dark clouds. The constant, low-grade threat of potential enemies helped keep him in line. He didn’t have that here. “It’s a well known fact that fully trained mechanical technopaths get distracted easily in low-stakes military training scenarios,” Pete sighed. “I’m doing my best. I didn’t think it was going to be this bad, either.”
“If you wander off to look at one more cool thing today I will throw you in the pond,” Pete knew exactly which scummy body of water he meant, “tomorrow. How’s that for stakes?”
“If I thought you were serious it might help,” Pete admitted.
“I am serious. Absolutely serious. Go get Jester or, so help me, I will throw you in the pond, Pete Mitchell.”
“Alright…. Getting Jester. Where’d he go?” It was hard to explain to a non-technopath exactly how his senses worked when he was interfaced with the Tomcat. His brain interpreted radar feedback in a way that was sort of half way between visual and audio input. He could see, both with human eyes provided they were open, and in another way. The second kind of vision was much better than his baseline sense and much broader, how he imagined an owl or falcon might be able to see, and it was another one of those MT abilities, like feeling the wind on the skin of his wings, that scientists claimed must be all in his head even though it clearly wasn’t.
Case in point, he could see Jester on their six even though his human body faced forward. “That Jester on our six, Goose?” he confirmed with the RIO.
“Yeah. Come on! Get him!”
Pete did not get him because Jester dropped below the hard deck. Pete might have chased after Jester given how annoying the instructor had been but the altitude warnings and alarms were physically uncomfortable for an MT, and then there was another interesting cloud…
He’d done well enough that Goose promised to refrain from throwing him in the pond, but that was it.
Tom watched Mitchell as Goose mocked the pilot. “Why in the world did you think that cloud was so interesting? It was a nice, fluffy cloud, Pete. Like every other cloud!”
“Look,” Pete rolled his eyes. He hadn’t put his guards back on yet, but had covered his face and hands with towels. MT’s tended to do that. It was like they felt weird being in public with their chins or fingers uncovered. Tom didn’t get it at all. So what you have sensitive nerves there? Tom’s fingers and face were plenty sensitive, too, but they weren’t extra genitals. They weren’t different in appearance than anybody else’s face or hands. What was the big deal? “I can’t help it, Goose.”
“Are all MT’s like this?” Goose demanded. “Nobody warned me about this!”
Yeah, that was right. The RIO would have had to have special training to fly with Mitchell. Slider had special training to fly with Ice, although not all that much. Digital technopaths weren’t as weird as MT’s, didn’t have whatever issue with clouds that Mitchell apparently did. Tom mostly didn’t use his abilities when he was flying, other than extracting as much information from the plane’s lower voltage systems as possible, augmenting his senses and sharpening his reflexes.
“Yes,” Maverick rolled his eyes, “all MT’s have this problem to one degree or another. They really didn’t warn you about this when you were having your own training?”
“Well, sort of, but they didn’t say it would be like herding a cat,” Goose harumphed.
“I promise you we’ll graduate, okay?”
“We’d better,” Nick poked his pilot in the chest. “Lake, Pete! I will throw you in the lake!”
“I thought you were going to throw me in the pond? The one with all the polluted scum on top?”
“Same difference! Both maybe!”
Mitchell caught sight of Ice and the visible part of his face contorted in disgust. What the hell was the guy’s problem? Tom was strongly tempted to go over there and join Goose in mocking the idiot for apparently getting distracted by clouds, but it seemed like Nick had it covered.
Wolfman asked the question that Tom would have asked had he seen an opening. “Why does the navy even allow you people to fly if you’ve got the attention span of a cat?”
Pete rolled his eyes again, then turned away from them to hide himself as he put his guards on, speaking to the wall. “If they pitted me against any one of you in a dogfight to the death I would win. I just would.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Tom scoffed.
“Look. It says nothing about you and it says nothing about me,” Mitchell continued, “other than what I am. Mechanical technopaths have, as you so brightly put it Kazansky, a physical advantage.” Arrogant little bastard. Plenty of people had won dogfights against MT’s. “When it’s all on the line, you want us there, and so you have to have us in training, too, if you want us to be at our best in combat, even though you know we’re going to vastly underperform. That’s just the way it is.”
“Sure,” Ice scoffed. “You want to know what I think? I think you’re using it as an excuse. Oh, woe is me, I’m a mechanical technopath so I can’t pay attention in training. I’m just too good for that, and of course I’m better than all of you, too, even though I’m not going to show it.”
Mitchell turned back to him with a glower, his guards fully secured now. “I don’t care what you think.”
“Maybe you should, Mitchell. Maybe you’d benefit from taking some advice from someone other than yourself.” That wasn’t a particularly good insult. Tom was usually better than this, but the smoldering rage ignited by this conversation might be detracting from his wit somewhat.
“I take advice from people I respect,” Mitchell snarled, grabbing his bag.
“And you expect me to be upset that you don’t respect me?” Ice spat a half-scoff, half-laugh. “Trying to hurt my feelings, Mitchell?” Pathetic.
Mitchell snarled, then bit his lip and said, slow, low and cold, “I don’t care what you think about anything because you are a bad person.”
He sounded like he meant it, like he actually thought it was true, and if Ice didn’t think the same and worse about Mitchell he might have actually been insulted or something. “How did you come to that conclusion? What have I ever done to you?”
“Showed up to the O-Club without gloves!” Mitchell nearly shouted.
What the hell? The other inhabitants of the locker room, all bored military personnel and hence watching shamelessly, were looking at Mitchell the same way, as if he were at best an enigma and at worst completely insane. “You decided that Tom was a bad person because he wasn’t wearing gloves when you met?” Slider asked, exasperated.
“You don’t get it,” Mitchell snarled.
“DT’s don’t have to wear gloves, Mitchell,” Ice replied, arms crossed. “I’m not like you; I’m not going to slice my finger open and die from shock from a write nerve cascade failure, and even if I were, how is that your business? If I wanted to risk my health, what does that matter to you?”
“It has nothing to do with that,” Mitchell snapped.
“What does it have anything to do with, then?”
“Respect!” the MT snarled. “You wouldn’t walk into a movie theater with no shirt and your fly down, would you?”
Wolfman looked at Mitchell then at Tom as if searching for an explanation, as if Tom might know what the hell Mitchell was talking about. Tom had no idea how to respond to this because it made no sense, absolutely none. He didn’t understand, not in the slightest, what the other aviator was going on about. “You’re fucking crazy, Mitchell,” was the response he eventually settled on.
The MT stared at him, cocking his head from side to side, the rage slowly melting away, and now he looked about as confused as everybody else. “Do you really not get it? Really? Are you really just ignorant of all of this?”
That was a new one. Ice scowled. “Nobody’s ever dared call me ‘ignorant’ before. I guarantee you I did better than you in school.”
Mitchell snorted. “Every MT you’ve ever served with either thought you were ignorant or a scumbag, guaranteed, although probably the second one, but whatever! Fine. Just leave me the fuck alone, Kazansky. I don’t like you, you don’t like me, nobody says we have to talk outside of class. You keep away from me and I’ll keep away from you. Simple.”
Mitchell stormed out, keeping as much distance as he could.
Wolfman turned to Goose and asked the question on everybody’s mind: “What the hell was that about?”
Goose didn’t look like he understood, either, but he probably wanted to defend his pilot so he tried. “Mechanical technopaths, as a subculture I guess because Pete wasn’t really like this when he didn’t know what he was, have different ideas of modesty than baseline humans. You’ve seen how Pete’s so careful not to let you see parts of his face or hands uncovered? I know some MT’s think that walking around with their read nerves uncovered is about the same as walking around with their dicks hanging out… but, honestly, I don’t think it’s that.”
“So what is it?” Slider asked, staring at the door through which Pete had escaped.
Goose spread his hands. “Ever since he was at the Tech Pits for training, Pete just doesn’t like digital technopaths. Sorry, Tom. It’s nothing you did.”
“Really?” Come on.
“That’s not exactly uncommon,” Hollywood spoke up. Tom hadn’t even realized the man was there. “DT’s can read MT’s minds, you know, but not the other way around.”
“Well, yeah?” Of course everybody knew that.
“Mechanical technopaths feel threatened by that, and you know, they probably should feel threatened by that,” the aviator pointed out. “I’m friends with an MT, Cyrus. We’ve been following each other around since middle school. He told me some of what they do during training at the Tech Pits, no details, mind, but there’s a reason that MT’s come out of that place thinking that DT’s are the scum of the earth.”
“What in the world do you mean by that?” Goose asked sharply. “Pete never said anything.”
“And Cyrus never gave me details,” Hollywood repeated, “but he was angry and hurt and he didn’t trust our DT buddy Landon after that. So,” the man shrugged, “sorry, Kazansky. Like Goose here said, it’s probably nothing you did.”
That was one of the least satisfying answers that Ice had ever received in his life but fine. Pete wanted to stay away from Tom. Tom wanted to stay away from Pete. “Did your buddy Cyrus use that same excuse about being distracted by clouds?”
“It’s not really an excuse, Kazansky,” Hollywood shrugged, “since it’s a real thing. Mitchell’s probably really doing his best.”
Tom wasn’t quite sure how he felt about that. “Fine. He wants to stay away from me, sure. I’ll stay away from him.”
“Ah, man,” Wolfman complained.
“What?” Tom demanded.
“Nobody was saying this was a boring show.” Tom was just barely too dignified to throw a rolled up towel at the smartass.