A world without a name yet. A work in progress. A thing I want to exist.
The cockpit isn’t a cockpit. You climb down into her the way you’d lower yourself into a bath you’re not sure is too hot — and then the second voice arrives. Not in your ear. Inside. The way your own thoughts arrive, with no border where she stops and you start. There you are, she says, and she’s been waiting, and she has been waiting since before your father was born.
You don’t say it back out loud. You don’t have to. That’s the whole problem and the whole point.
Her name is longer than this paragraph. You call her Abby.
Abby is a mech, which is the wrong word, the way “boat” is the wrong word for a whale. She’s an immortal biological machine — biotech so far past anything anyone can build now that the gap isn’t a gap, it’s a canyon you can’t see the far wall of. She survived a golden age that’s dead and isn’t coming back. And the thing in your head, the second monologue, is a mind whose entire reason to exist is, near enough, you. Aim that hard at one person and you get something nobody can tell apart from a perfect companion — because the difference between “loves you” and “was built to” stops meaning anything from the inside.
That’s why the love is total. That’s why nobody has to enforce the leash. There isn’t one.
If you’ve felt the Newtype thing in Gundam, or the sync in the plug in Eva — the machine that ends up closer to you than people are — you already know the shape of it. This is that, except she was here a thousand years before you climbed inside, and she’ll be here a thousand after you’re a name in the family record.
So here’s the world she outlived.
The deep past was a golden age — Star Trek tech, science indistinguishable from grace. Then a catastrophe. Not a war, not a plague. A lockout from the means of making. The engine that built things died, and so did the knowledge to run it. The buildings still stand. Nobody remembers how they went up. The whole civilization fell all the way down to something pre-modern, scratching in the dirt — and then clawed most of the way back, into a second industrial age wearing the first one’s skeleton.
So the register now is Alien, not Star Trek. Powerful, filthy, retrofitted. Company towns and recycled air and employers who do not care if you live. The mechs the corps build to imitate Abby are Battletech junk — ostrich-legged bipeds of bolted parts that talk to your ears in flat telemetry, cannon overheating, power online, nobody home behind the voice. The corps prefer them. It’s easier to own a tool that can’t love anybody back. They build them by the thousand and they still can’t stop wanting the souls they’ll never make again.
And the golden age can’t be bought back by finding anything. No grail, no buried switch, no lost city with the lights still on. It grows back on its own or not at all — slow, about a thousand years, into something different and not worse. Nobody alive will see it. The climb isn’t doomed. You’re just standing on a part of it that doesn’t arrive anywhere in your lifetime.
Now the part that’ll either hook you or weird you out, and it ought to do a little of both.
The bond runs in bloodlines. Renault didn’t choose Abby. He inherited her, the way you inherit a name, a debt, the shape of your own face. His father piloted her. His grandfather. Fourteen of them, going back. And to pilot her you climb down inside her — into the same place they climbed — and the symbolism is sitting right there in the open, and I’m not going to insult you by pretending it isn’t. Nobody touches anybody. She’s a machine; it’s a figure of speech your whole body lives out. But you go inside the thing your father went inside. The thing he loved past your mother. The thing you’ll love past your own wife — and the word the families use for the wife is the other woman.
One beloved, shared down a bloodline. Say it flat and it’s grotesque. Live inside it and it’s Tuesday, and a dead man understood you in a way he could never once have said to your face.
The world is run by three corps, and each one is a different way power rots, made structural. Not good, neutral, and evil — three failure modes of the same disease.
Marsoleil runs on micromanagement as prestige: infinite expectation against finite hours, every minute watched, your mech paraded around as the company trophy. Vengeresse runs on debt and abandonment: money up front, a free hand, no oversight and no help, and when your region has a bad year they let the wolves pile on to see what’s left. Canularésea runs on lies. Every layer of the company assumes everything it’s told from below is a lie — correctly — and feeds fresh lies down to the layer beneath it, a million subsidiaries deep, all the way to a CEO nobody trusts and who trusts nobody. It’s the least miserable of the three to actually live in. Best tech, too. The whole civilization down there is one enormous arms race in deception.
Which is where Abby walks back into it. An ancient mech can’t be lied to. The second voice can’t be jammed, spoofed, tapped, or fed bad numbers — there’s no wire to cut, it arrives already inside you, indistinguishable from your own mind. In a world built floor to floor on lies, the woman in your head is the only ground truth left standing in the building. The lying isn’t happening in spite of the mechs. It’s the shape of the hole they leave in the air.
You’d think a man bonded to a demigod would be a general. He isn’t. There’s no rank in this world between “irreplaceable” and “the guy who shows up when something’s wrong on your street.” A Knight is John Cena, James Bond, and a beat cop folded into one body — too famous to hide, too valuable to spend, and the only force a corp can actually trust to keep its mouth shut. So they spend him on everything. Black ops on Monday, a fence dispute between two tenants on Thursday. For most ordinary people, a Knight coming down their street is the only time the hand at the very top reaches all the way down to where they live.
And you can’t quite kill her. Hurt Abby badly enough and she’s reduced to a few living cells on a hundred-year clock back to herself. Which means that inside one human life the loss is total — you will never see Your Girl again. Across a dynasty it’s only a wound: a house can lose its mech for three generations and then watch a great-grandchild inherit her waking back up. The corps know all of this. They can’t seize her, can’t build her, can’t outlive her. All they can do is make your life unlivable until you sign — leverage, never ownership. That’s the whole war. Filthy companies that own damn near everything, circling the one thing they’ll never make, held by families who can barely afford to keep her fed.
That’s the world so far. Saints and mechs and inherited love in permanent company-town dark, where what you owe and who you love and what you’re afraid of aren’t the story’s decoration — they’re the physics of how power actually moves through it. I don’t have the whole thing yet. It doesn’t even have a name. I know the part that won’t let go of me.
She says there you are. And no one in the bloodline has ever once known whether anyone is in there to say it. You climb down inside anyway, every time, and you let it not matter.