Self-Reliance

We got wiped out in our first round of the Clan War. I'd gotten so used to having the Synthmen for help that I'd neglected one of the basic pillars of the Mecha Bushido.  We stress daily training because essentially a Mecha functions only as well as its pilot.  It'd make sense I wouldn't be the only genetic engineer floating around the factions.  As I fought a handful of lanark clones and we fell further and further behind it dawned on me that the Death's Destroyers had to have something up their sleeves.  It was obvious with how well those clones functioned that the only way they could have gotten them was from access to someone with high biotechnical skill. In their clan.  The Synthmen cybernetic copilot protocols were running nearly unbelievably sluggish,  Much slower than the speeds I'd clocked them at in the hangar preceding our battle.

My curiousity getting the better of me I decided to run another diagnostic on what was left of the lambda generation batch... as much as could be salvaged from our damaged mecha.  Could it be a bug in the natural programming? No, I'd triple checked everything prior to installation and then double checked after installing them to reassure everybody all was in working order before we set out too.  Something was off though.

Aha! these had a somewhat different genetic profile than the genomes I remembered coding in the other Synthmen.  C'mon... analyze quicker! I kicked the diagnostic machinery and swore at my computer. TcTt asked me what was the matter.  I tore the printout as it spooled from the machine... "This is the matter. The Synthmen copilots were infected! As in sabotage." He patted me on the shoulder and reminded me that basic principle of the first pillar to the Mecha Bushido.  Skill of a mecha is related to skill of its pilot. There's no quick technological way around it.

I've got to hand it to that biohacker from Death's Destroyers though... putting a retrovirus into the growth vats when I wasn't looking was very sneaky.  I would be angrier but for that I couldn't help admiring the technique.  Basically they'd isolated and engineered a genetic timebomb by rendering the virus invisible to detection up until it was already too late.  The effects were subtle too.  Rather than a full on blow up style virulent infection all at once the pathogenicity to this worked a lot more gradually.  First the bioptic neural network slowed down so that it did not process as quickly.  Then a secondary set of instructions coding out a prion got read, which then turned infected cybernetic brains into mush.  It specifically targeted only the uniquely hybridized technology used in the Synthmen.  Which was fascinating... as much as the task of scrubbing artificial brain goo from everybody's cockpits was a pain in the ass.

Submitted by Mycobacter#712744