"Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote 'Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.' I used to think that meant looking at possibilities, eliminating what couldn't be true, and taking what remained. Even when I became a mech pilot and should have known better, I didn't understand.
Mech pilots are trained to act. Not react, but *act*. Sure, in the field you're mostly walking from one place to another, or standing around waiting for orders, or cleaning or digging trenches or whatever, but that's not really why you're there. You're there to do what's appropriate and necessary when the moment comes.
Your instructors beat you into the ground, force you to run for days with full packs and no rations other than what you can catch and kill with your bare hands. Tired, thirsty, dirty, nauseated, beaten, you're trained to perform under any conditions. There's good reason training's tough. When the moment comes, you can't be thinking about how tired or hungry you are, or how your squad-mate's brains are decorating your face, or how your arm just got shot off. In fact, the worse things are, the less you can afford to let your surroundings dictate what happens.
I don't say you control the situation. Control is an illusion. You think you control something, you think you're in charge, you become complacent. That's a good way to get killed. But you don't just let things happen to you either. You make things happen.
But back to what I was saying. 'Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.' Elimination for a mech pilot isn't a passive process. You fire up your missile racks, beat your opponent to the trigger, and walk the road of skulls and blood to a better tomorrow. It doesn't matter how unlikely it is that you win, all you need to do is destroy everything until winning is the only thing left.
I know how silly that sounds, and that's fine. It *is* silly for cadets to think that way. At your stage of development, nothing about being a mech pilot comes naturally. If you follow your untrained instincts, you'll just get killed. But mech pilots replace instinct with training. You don't think or try to do things, you just do them.
Being a mech pilot is a lot different to being a cadet. But what I did just now wasn't something just any mech pilot can do. Like I said, my brain works differently. It isn't a gift, it isn't a power, it isn't even that I perceive more than others. No, its just that part of my brain was damaged, the part that does not see.
There are things you are not supposed to know or remember or notice. I don't mean duty as a soldier, I'm talking about the natural order of things. The human eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve passes through the optic disc and there are no photo-receptors. There's a corresponding area in your field of vision you can't see. But your brain interpolates an image so you don't notice a blank spot.
You know also most people don't remember much of their dreams. The brain again, you see. Your mind just can't make sense of certain things, so it compensates.
It's disturbing to realize how much of what you think you know is just a product of your own imagination. But you would be terrified if you could remember what your mind makes you forget. It terrifies me, anyways. Even I don't really know, I only see glimpses, edges, shadows of what's out there. But that's enough for me, enough for any man.
I've been a mech pilot for almost forty years, and I've seen things. The Yomi Gravity Reefs have a sort of flying vol wurm that burrows through a man, pulls out his intestines, and eats them before his eyes. The aboriginal fishmen of the Perseus Arm use pressurized liquid cannons that flood a mech with poison; the cells of the body break down, the blood boils, and the body explodes from the inside out within ninety seconds. But those are deaths a man can understand. Good, kind, merciful deaths compared to what I think must wait in the Great City of Stone.
Remember what I said about the illusion of control? You become complacent, and that's an easy way to get killed in the field. But nobody can stay alert all the time. People need havens where they can relax from a constant state of vigilance. Otherwise they become nervous wrecks, and that kills them just as sure as being complacent. So it's good to relax. Remember that. You'll need to after I tell you what's out there."
Submitted by Jim Lee#843365