Hannah relaxed heavily into her chair as a big grin stole across her face. Selected. Finally. What a beautiful email.

She was going to be a mech pilot.

The details of the army’s mech program, described in official communications under the code name GRAVELPINEAPPLE, were kept extremely secret and compartmentalized, but there was a lot of information about the mechs that was public information. Mech combat was becoming the default method of military engagement, after all, and there was a lot you could learn from simply watching OSINT videos of fights in progress. With the proliferation of mech combat, the army was spending more and more resources on finding capable pilots for the giant exosuits. Complicating the search was that each mech pilot needed a “ground controller” that the mech pilot fully and intrinsically trusted from before the first moment the pilot started her mech for the first time. That meant married couples, mostly; close friends would sometimes do as well, but the army seemed to have a rule where it would focus only on married pilots without children, and would only broaden the search in times of desperate need for recruitment. (Luckily, while skirmishes over helium and aluminum were always happening, there was no all-out war, so there was not the demand for close friends that there had been back in ’48.) This “married couple” rule meant that the army couldn’t always pull from its own ranks; army recruits tended not to have strong connections of the sort needed, with the nature of the job generally ensuring that even married soldiers wouldn’t have enough intimacy with their partners to successfully get through the screening process.

Hannah, apparently, did.

Hannah had two loves in her life: her wife, Lara, and the Monarch-Class Integrated Combat System. She had a tattoo for each one, both nestled under her clothes so that they would not be seen in professional contexts; a heather flower over her heart to represent protection and a monarch butterfly on her shoulder to represent her eagerness to pilot a Monarch-Class mech. She hadn’t realized when she got a job as an imagery analyst that she would have an immediate advantage over other mech pilot wannabes, but when she’d realized the perks of the job she’s immediately applied both herself and Lara for the position. There’d been a variety of questionnaires, interviews, psychological tests, and physical exams that the pair of them had had to participate in (though Hannah wasn’t sure why Lara had needed to take any physical exams—and indeed, she hadn’t done well on them anyway, so maybe she hadn’t), so it was a relief to know it was all over.

Hannah felt a tap on her shoulder and spun her chair around to see Lara, eyes shining. “Did you see?” Lara asked.

Hannah stood and wrapped her wife in a big hug. “We did it,” she said. I can’t believe it. After all this time, we finally made it!” Lara hung onto her tightly. Hannah usually didn’t like big displays of affection at work, but she gave Lara a tender kiss on the forehead now. “How about, instead of taking me home tonight, you take me somewhere else,” Hannah suggested. Lara’s brow wrinkled cutely. “What do you mean?”

“How about a celebration at Roy’s?” Roy’s was their favorite restaurant, where they’d had their first date; a little expensive, but today was a day to splurge, after all.

“That sounds absolutely wonderful,” said Lara.

“You make the reservations,” said Hannah, “and I’ll see you at 5. I love you.” Lara turned to go back to her desk. Hannah watched her skip, grinning to herself. The way her curly hair bounced as she moved was so cute, she just wanted too—no, it was still work, Hannah still needed to focus. Not that she’d get very much work done today. God, this is nice, she thought to herself.

***

“Alright, starting the test now,” said Lara, her soft, gentle voice filling the cockpit of the sample mech. Apparently, they liked putting pilots in a special mech for their first sortie to get them used to the feel of it.

“Permission to power on, sir?” Hannah asked, already flipping the switch to do so. The mech didn’t power on, or do much of anything, really.

“Hannah, um, you can’t—” Lara’s voice suddenly shut off, probably because she was talking to Driller, who oversaw both the mech program as a whole and, a fact Hannah found somewhat embarrassing, the test sortie for new pilots.

“Pilot,” she said again, much more self-assured-sounding than before. “We’ll have to do that again. Wait for my commands.”

“But sir,” Hannah said, letting the title be a little tease. “I wanna feal this baby hum.”

“It’s two seconds, Ha—pilot,” Lara reproached. “You’ll have your fun.”

Hannah sighed dramatically and flipped the mech back to “off”. “It didn’t do anything, anyway,” she said.

“That’s because I didn’t let the initialization go through, silly. Also, Driller says you should have called me ‘sir’ just then.”

“Yes, sir,” Hannah said. She would have raised her arm in a mock salute, but here in the cockpit with the mech turned off, she was completely immobilized; every part of her body was held down by sturdy pieces of metal and attached to more wires than she could count. Many of them went into her like an IV of metal. Only the “off” switch and the “eject” button—both essentially panic buttons—were available to the very tips of her fingers.

“Permission to power on, sir?” Hannah said again, and this time, she waited until she heard Lara’s voice saying, “Permission granted, pilot,” before she flipped the switch. She heard a hum that got louder and louder, until—

Oh.

Oh this was new.

Hannah was wired into the mech’s systems. When it was on, she was the mech. Everything it saw; everything it processed from its sensors; every error and message and warning; Hannah felt every one as a part of her own body.

She’d known this would happen, but understanding the process on paper simply did not hold a candle to being it. She, her mech body, was still in the hanger, still strapped in and attached to the its bay, immobilized; she felt the action-cancellation messages spiking up her arm when she tried to move it. Even immobilized, however, she could see the entire hanger at once using the mech’s panoramic vision that human eyes could never mimic. With a thought, she switched to thermal vision, and suddenly she could sense heat not like she was looking at a heat map color-coded to represent IR response but truly like she was seeing how hot things were. Hannah felt so….big. Powerful. Even without moving, she knew she could take on anything.

“I’m going to let you into the field, pilot,” said Lara, clearly reading from a script. The words seemed to fill and resonate directly in Hannah—Hannah the mech—in Hannah’s heart. An alarm blared, and the metal restraints holding the mech in the mech bay started to open. “Edict 2: do not use your weaponry.”

Hannah’s body felt like it was gently, kindly set on fire.

“Pilots like to josh around sometimes. They don’t have all the same information that you handlers have, and they like to think they know best,” Driller had said to Lara. Hannah had been there as well—there were many handler functions that were useful for the pilot to know about, so she’d sat in on the training lecture. “Sometimes you have to just get them to do what you need, no fight no mess. You can do this in a couple of ways. You see those two dials? Yeah, ‘Edict’ and ‘Focus.’ You’ll see they both go from one to five. If you want to give an ‘Edict’ instruction, push that dial to the number you need and tell your pilot what you’re doing. You don’t want this kinda stuff to take her by surprise. Whatever instruction you say, you can be sure she’s gonna remember it. It’s gonna stay on her mind whatever you do. At level 1, she’ll still be able to disobey it, now; that’s good for stuff that’s good in general but may need to change in a pinch. It gets more pressing for her and harder to disobey the higher you go up; by the time you get to level 5, she’ll do almost anything before she obeys what you say. Oo, Hannah didn’t like to hear that. Hopefully y’all won’t have to give Edict 5 very often, but I’ve seen combat. It’s coming.”

At the time, Hannah had wondered what it would mean for the instruction to “stay on her mind.” Now, it became extremely clear. The words seemed to prickle and dance across her skin, up, down her body; not uncomfortable, but insistent, impossible to ignore. Okay, but now I want to use my guns, thought Hannah, and she lifted her arm to a firing position. She could send off a laser blast with a single thought. It would be so easy! But…it felt wrong. The words’ gentle caress turned into sharp pinpricks at her fingertips; NOW they felt uncomfortable. Sure, there was nothing stopping her, but with the order “Do not use your weaponry” wrapping around her and whispering into her bones, she knew she wasn’t going to do it. She let her weapon fall to a rest position, and was rewarded with a gentle massage on her hand and arm: Do not use your weaponry; do not use your weaponry; do not use your weaponry. On a human, it would have been distracting (both the words themselves and the…heat they sparked in her core), but Hannah was a machine, and it was simply one more input among many.

“Head to the testing area, pilot.” The hanger door started to open. Hannah used the wheels in her feet to launch herself forward. Oh, this is sooo smooth! More of this, please, she thought. Hannah the human hated running; she used the exercise bike for cardio, generally, because she simply didn’t love how janky the process of running made her body feel. Hannah the mech had none of that discomfort; she loved how easily this giant body sailed through the hanger. She started going in circles, did a quick spin, and slolemned back and forth across the large warehouse-sized area for good measure.

“The training ground, pilot,” said Lara.

“The training ground is terrain, Lara. Let me have this,” shot back Hannah. The wheels were for speed over paved ground; any kind of rough terrain would need to be navigated using her legs as legs.

There was a momentary pause. “Edict 1: refer to me as ‘sir’, pilot,” Lara said. The instruction trickled down Hannah’s back. “Sorry, Hannah,” Lara added apologetically. “Driller is really on my ass about it.”

The name “Hannah” really threw her. She was Hannah, of course, but it felt weird hearing it, being referred to with that name, when at that moment she was so much more. “No,” Hannah said, “actually, I get it now. Please don’t use my name either, sir.” Driller had told them not to, but she hadn’t realized why until just then.

Lara laughed. “Go to the training ground please, pilot.” And then, after another pause, Lara added, “Focus 1: head to the training ground.”

Hannah’s world adjusted itself.

“That dial labeled ‘Focus,’” Driller had said. “That’s for more immediate orders; when you just want her to do what you ask without comment, that’s what that’s for. Again, level 1 is for when you just wanna give her a little push, and higher levels are for when you really need her to do exactly what you say, but be careful, Lara. The higher levels start to make her really literal. At level 5, she has to do exactly what you say; she can’t put even a little bit of her own interpretation. Be ready to really walk her through everything.”

As Hannah heard Lara’s words, she felt, almost on a physical level, like she was getting forced out of her own being. Her sense of her mech body—the gyro updating as she spun, the speedometer tracking her race across the hanger, the air sensors telling her how fast the wind moved against her body…all of them faded. The sensations still came, but they meant less. At the same time, the light coming in from the hanger door was sharper now, more important. Hannah stopped her mech from spinning; what was the point anymore? “Yes, sir,” she said, slightly breathily, set the training ground as a destination in her mech’s in-built navigation, and took off.

“Focus 0, pilot,” said Lara as Hannah arrived. Hannah let out a shakey laugh as her world shifted again, adjusted itself back to normal. “Wow, um, that sure was something. Sir. We’re not doing that all the time, right? Sir?”

“Driller says I’ll be manipulating your Focus level near-constantly in the field, pilot. Sorry. We’ll be trying out Focus level 2 later. Also, Driller sa—” She paused momentarily. “You’re using your multi-spectrum sensors for vision. You have less fidelity at distance with those. Switch to panchromatic, pilot.”

Hannah felt both her prohibition against weapons and her need to call Lara “sir” slipping gently around her body; caressing her thighs, tickling her stomach. “Make me,” she said. “Sir.”

Lara sighed. “Edict 1: switch to pan vision.” Hannah let out a quick huff of satisfaction as she almost instinctively swapped to black-and-white vision in response to the instruction.

“Alright,” said Lara. “Here’s how this will work. We’re gonna go through three sections of training course. The first one you can navigate without my help. The second will have obstacles that only I can see. For the third, I’lll erase that E2 and let you use your weapons. Driller will fire fake missiles at you, and you’ll have to shoot them down. I’ll see them before you do, so I’ll take F2 and get you coordinates. You’ll just have to shoot. Understood, pilot?”

Hannah knew that some of the mech’s sensors required too much processing to be interpreted on the mech, and therefore that the information was delivered only to the handler and not to Hannah at all. It still grated that there were things that her mech could do that she couldn’t see. Becoming the mech made her powerful, capable, threatening; but this made it also feel like it was embedding intrinsic weaknesses in her; no matter what she did, she would always need a handler to help her. She wanted to be complete; she loved Lara, but it was weird to have no way to surpass her, to be in control of her.

“Yes, sir,” said Hannah, and started the obstacle course.

Hannah breezed right through the first phase, but the second phase took a few tries—it was simply not in Hannah’s muscle memory to dodge what she couldn’t see. But finally she made it through, obeying Lara’s surprisingly patient voice as she guided her wife through.

“Alright, I’m cancelling the weapon prohib,” said Lara. “Edict 0 for using your weapons,” and with those words the gentle heat suddenly vanished, leaving simply two light touches of orders behind. Hannah let out a breath—of relief or disappointment, she couldn’t quite say. Time to try this thing out, then, she thought, raising her weapon. Before she could fire it, however, she heard Lara’s voice in her ear, soft, excited. “Focus 2, pilot: fire at the locations I give you.”

If Focus 1 felt like a shift, F2 felt like a brief moment of freefall. When she came back to herself—but no, she hadn’t really come back to “herself.” The world around her felt drab, meaningless; when she tried to look at anything in particular, she had no problems, but it seemed that her attention tended to slide off things that she wasn’t paying attention to; without any indication from her handler, they almost weren’t worth observing. Her weapon remained ready-to-fire (she would need it soon) but she didn’t send out a laser pulse yet; why would she? She hadn’t been told to.

“Target sent; fire, pilot,”

A coordinate was sent to Hannah’s GPS tracking software; the mech automatically highlighted that location throughout all her sensors. The location (simply an unmarked region of concrete wall) seemed to shine seductively at Hannah. She shot her laser cannon almost immediately, laughing aloud as she did so. This was what she needed—what her handler needed her—to do.

“New target; fire.”

Another laser pulse shot out of her mech. It boomed against the target.

“New target; fire.”

The targets kept coming; they went from being static locations, to mech mockups, and then to being moving mech mockups. Then, her handler started indicating two, then five targets at a time. Hannah started firing wildly, spraying dozens of shots to random locations to cover every possibility.

“Hey, pilot, you’ve been firing at targets I didn’t ask for,” her handler said. “Accuracy, please.”

The bottom dropped out of Hannah’s stomach. She’d fucked up. She needed her handler to know she’d do better, but right now she had only one way to do that: follow instructions.

“Yes, sir. Understood, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”

“Good, pilot,” her handler said, making Hannah’s mech—her body—feel like it was singing with joy. “Now, Driller’s gonna fire some missiles at you. Those are your targets; shoot them down. He’s gonna send more than you can handle, though so do not try to shoot down more than would be possible, pilot. Dodge the ones you can’t shoot. Again, I am not ordering you to hit every missile. Not getting hit is your number one priority, pilot. Understood?”

Had Hannah not been in Focus mode, she might have commented on how she seemed to be being thrown in the deep end, or how it’d been a long day already; as it was, she simply said, “Yes, sir.”

It was weird: despite feeling faded, not quite present in the world, she felt more alive following her handler’s direction than she maybe ever had before. As she moved her large yet limber bod to dodge and weave around the missiles as she fired her laser cannon and shoulder missiles at one after another, she felt…wonderful. Warm. Content.

She had no idea how much time passed, but eventually the missiles stopped coming.

“Focus 0. Congratulations, pilot, that’s all for today.”

In a sudden, intense moment of clarity and loss, Hannah came back to herself. “Y—yes sir,” she said. It came out thinner, breathier than she’d meant it to. “Yes, sir,” she said again, steadier. She maneuvered the device back to its storage space and locked herself in. Permission to power of, sir?”” asked Hannah. “Permission granted, pilot,” said Lara. She flipped the switch. The remaining Edicts vanished first; then the various warnings that would pop up while running the mech. Then, one by one, sensor after sensor vanished, over a period Hannah knew to be two minutes but couldn’t judge the length of in the moment. Finally, she was back in the cockpit, human again, needles unplugged from her body, flesh held captive by cold steel. Suddenly, embarrassingly, she realized she was rhythmically rubbing back and forth against the seat. Shit, how long have I been doing that? The whole time? There are cameras in the cockpit. Lara could see me. Fuck, Driller could see me. God dammit. She stilled herself and waited for Lara to unlock the cockpit.

Hannah stumbled a bit as she started walking with human legs again; they moved very differently than the metal equivalents, despite the visual similarity. Then, once she got her legs properly under her, she started walking faster and faster, until she broke into a run. She wanted to see her wife. She left the hanger and maneuvered through the maze that was the attached office building, until she got to Lara, who was talking to Driller, and wrapped her arms around her.

“I’ll let you go, Lara,” the older man said. “Watch your email.”

As Hannah and Lara started walking to their car, Hannah asked, “What email?”

“He’ll send me the details of our first mission later. He liked what he saw—we’re field-ready!”

Hannah let out a small whoop of excitement. Then, her brow furrowed. “Why did he just tell you that? Why didn’t he tell me?”

“Apparently, he’s just gonna send all the info to me from now on. It’ll be my job to keep you informed.”

“He can’t put my name in the ‘To:’ line of an email? How hard could it be? He’s done it before,” Hannah complained.

“I dunno—that’s just what he wants. Driller is being Driller, I guess.” As they got to their car, Lara opened the passenger door for Hannah, and then leaned in for a kiss. Seeing the invitation, Hannah was on her wife almost before she realized it, kissing Lara passionately, hungerly, desperately, like they’d never touched before and like Hannah would die if she spent one more second without it. They kissed for a minute, and then Lara pulled away, gasping, still feeling Hannah’s hot breath caressing her face. “Alright, honey,” Lara said, laughing. “Lets get you home.”

Hannah could barely keep her hands off Lara on the drive home; they kept creeping over to Lara’s leg, until Lara would playfully slap them away. “Not while driving, Hannah. I know that sortie did something to you—oh my God, you’re flushing so hard right now—and damn if watching you didn’t do something to me, but we’ll be home soon, and we can do everything we want to then.”

“Oh?” Hannah asked. “Watching me did something to you?”

“Yeah, seeing you—” Lara started. Then she paused, clearly reconsidering her words. “Helping you maneuver something that big and powerful so effortlessly was really hot.”

“You can say that you liked to boss me around for once, Lara, I won’t be mad,” Hannah teased.

“You got me, that definitely is also true,” laughed Lara. “I can’t deny that, it was fun.” There was still a trace of unease in her words, but Hannah didn’t notice.

“It’s definitely weird for you to be the one giving directions,” said Hannah, although truth be told, it wasn’t. In the mech, it felt completely natural; even if a small part of her chafed against following orders, the vast majority of her body thought it was the correct way of things, and that was what Hannah found weird.

“Just you wait,” joked Lara. “Soon you’ll be following all of my orders like it’s second nature.”

It surprised Hannah what that sentence did to her.

When they got home, Hannah finally had the chance to get her hands on Lara’s bare skin—and to feel Lara’s on hers. Her hands brushed her arms, her back, her breasts as they kissed; Hannah let out a sound into Lara’s mouth as they brushed her nipples. She was so sensitive. The many pinpricks from where she’d been wired into the mech itched; but Lara’s gentle hands against them felt soothing and electrifying at once. Her hands went lower, under her waistband, down to—Hannah was embarrassed by how loud the moan that escaped her throat was when Lara’s fingers found her clit.

“Oh, you are ready for this, aren’t you?” Lara whispered as she moved her fingers. “I was gonna ask if you wanted to, like, tie me up, but—”

“I am absolutely not that patient right now,” said Hannah. “I need your tongue on my pussy immediately.”

They went to the bedroom before that happened, though. Somehow, all their clothes were off by the time Hannah fell desperately onto the bed, face (and other body parts) for Lara to see and touch. Lara’s tongue found her, an almost electric pulse spreading through her, and she screamed. “Oh, fuck,” she said. Lara kept her mouth on Hannah, sucking, licking. Hannah was still more sensitive than she thought she’d ever been before. “Shit, fuck, fuck, fuck me sir,” she gasped.

Suddenly, Lara stopped her ministrations and lifted her head to look at Hannah, a twinkle in her eye. A thin whine escaped Hannah’s throat. “’Sir’, huh?” Lara asked. “Today really did a number on you, didn’t it? Do you want me to call you ‘pilot’?”

The word tore through Hannah, and she couldn’t help herself. She let out a soft, embarrassed “Yes, sir.”

Lara ducked her head back down and started Hannah shaking once more. After a few moments, she looked up. “I’m going to need you to cum for me, pilot.”

Lara’s mouth had barely touched Hannah again when the orgasm started. She barely had enough breath left in her to scream out her pleasure.

Hannah didn’t know how long it took for her to come back to herself, but Lara had crawled further into the bed and slipped into her arms. “I assume you want something too?” Hannah said. “Can you get the strap?”

“I already got it, pilot,” said Lara, lifting it up so Hannah could see. Hannah shuddered with the weight of that last word and what it had done (and would do) to her. She put on the strapon and slipped into her wife, listening to her gasp and feeling her body—arms, belly, neck, shoulders, breasts—in her arms. Hannah fucked her until she felt her moment of release, and then simply held her, inside and around her, content with what they’d accomplished together.

When Lara came back to bed after cleaning her face and the strapon, Hannah was on Amazon. “Look at this, Lara,” she said, pointing at the screen.

“How is shopping what you want to do right now? Actually, that doesn’t even surprise me. What is it you’re showing me?”

The screen showed a large, elegant, beautifully carved chest with a flat top. “Isn’t this beautiful? Look over there,” she said, pointing at a side of their room that was relatively sparsely decorated. “Wouldn’t this look so good here?”

“Why do we need a big box, Hannah? What would we even do with it? And it’s, like, six hundred dollars? What?”

“OK, first off, we can afford to splurge! Both of us got pay raises when we became mech pilots. We can afford a pretty six hundred dollar box. And also, I dunno, maybe we can put our sex toys in there?”

“That thing’s big enough to put a whole person inside! We don’t have that many sex toys!”

“We could,” Hannah said, flirtatiously.

“I wouldn’t be able to keep track of them. That’s so many sex toys, Hannah.”

“Listen, I just think it’d be useful to have more storage space, and this is such a pretty box. Please, Lara?”

They talked about the box for a little longer, but Hannah managed to wear Lara down. “Yeah, it definitely would look quite good. Sure, buy it.”

“Yay! Thank you sweetie!” Hannah said, kissing Lara’s cheek. Hannah had everything she’d ever wanted in life—her perfect job, her wonderful wife. She couldn’t wait to see what happened next.