Mutual Machines

The Wastes

You realise now that you probably view buildings differently from most of the world's population. Even the corporate overlords hundreds of miles away cannot buy this sensation — they would have to experience it for themselves. A shopping centre or a house is almost like a hill to someone. It is immovable, almost inviolable. They perceive it as something stable and secure, but to you such structures are like the small branches on a hiking trail — a minor nuisance, easily swept aside by your mass. You crash through a building much like that now, simply because to path around it wasn't worth the effort. The sixty-odd tonnes of advanced machine at your fingertips has better things to do with its time.

It is a humanoid thing, all bevelled angles and sturdy joints, each lone section reminiscent of a man's body but collectively proportioned wrong. The waist cannot roll like a human's hips; instead it stomps, unless in road traversal mode, where the whole frame crouches and skates on heavy-duty, high-impact wheels. Your back breathes, venting heat in hot exhalations and launching missiles like acidic spit. Your movement is tightly restricted, but your speed is greatly enhanced. Inside this grand device you will never flex your neck for the release of stress, but you can leap forward on a burst of rocketry as a supplement — a way to slake the thirst for freedom.

The shoulders are the broadest part of all, their axles needing the bulk to carry the load of weaponry and to enable the fine manipulation of the mechanical arms and their expertly wrought hands. Each one could pick up a person and effortlessly squeeze them like a tube of toothpaste. You know, because you have done it. You had to — the order had been given. You obey those orders because your brain now has different chemistry from those blunt civilians. Cables turn you into an electrical medusa, a thousand fibre-optic snakes of information that feed you ghost-haptic feedback, telling you where the mech is being hit so you can return fire as though your own body were under threat. But those insidious threads also mean you now feel a new pseudo-pleasure from the destruction of enemies and the completion of mission sub-objectives. To kill a foe is to know pleasure in the same register that tasting fruit is to eating a boiled sweet — you know it to be an artificial facsimile, but you crave the unhealthy sugar regardless.

The main weapon you carry is something a bystander might call an assault rifle. If they stood near it, they would see that was a trick of proportions. It was closer to four main battle tank cannons in stopping power. It did not fire bullets — it accelerated shells. You accelerated shells. A squeeze of the tiny trigger inside the cockpit and the outside world would roar with biblical rage. It was like magic, a thaumaturgy: a small ritual performed here to produce something large and deadly there. A pin in a voodoo doll to slaughter a man miles away.

Your real skin is not muted armed-forces green — but your mech's is. Sometimes you look at your own and it reads as the wrong colour, though that is happening less often now. You can even sleep without chemical assistance, as a normal person should. Anyone could be trained to operate a mech, but it took willpower to maintain a proper sense of self. You went through stages. First, you sat in the cockpit, surrounded on three sides by a double-decker horseshoe of controls in all sizes and shapes. Then you swam in the haptic sea, driving the machine as a man rides a horse — by instinct and the occasional nudge. Now you are at the far end of the bell curve, doing both at once. This is a vital skill. It means you can take your hand off the control stick and reach for the thermos flask wedged between the fuse boxes.

One of the speakers buried in the console attempts to say something. You had thrust a combat knife into it earlier to prevent whatever was coming out from being coherent, and for a moment it had worked. This was because of O'Donnell — that bastard of a hare. Both of you had immediately blocked each other's communications, but his mech had some device installed since your last encounter that was directly actuating the speaker's magnet rather than passing through the antenna like a proper signal should. Unable to prevent it, you shanked the treacherous thing and made a mental note to get it refitted back home.

O'Donnell's mech was functionally identical to your own. Both corporations had cheated off each other's homework, and so whilst the specs differed on paper, in aggregate they amounted to the same machine. His was slightly faster and a little more nimble, owing to less armour and worse fuel economy. You can see it now as it passes between the buildings — a matt-grey thing, less hunched than your own but still bulky.

The sky is the red of dawn, the clouds thick with the threat of acidic rain. In a few hours both machines will share the same red-primer colour once the weather strips the paint off. This place was a town of some sort once, if the ruined shopping centre was anything to judge by. You kick your speed up a notch, feeling a faint feedback in your own legs to match the thumping stride that cracks the old tarmac underfoot. The speaker attempts to talk again. Clearly O'Donnell had his usual threats and taunts prepared and wanted you to hear every one of them. Outsmarted again, hare.

You release a reflexive snapshot, having anticipated where the enemy mech would appear between two residential houses. The round glances off a hefty armour plate, ricocheting with an almighty spang into the air before detonating in the clouds and leaving a vapour trail behind it. In response, a single dumb grenade the size of a mini-fridge sails lazily over the rooftops, where one of your shoulder-mounted point-defence turrets promptly detonates it mid-air. The explosion sends bricks and roof tiles in every direction. Three houses slowly begin to fold inward and an old car erupts into flame.

You fire into the open space ahead, knowing O'Donnell would use it to charge you. Your fleshy body can feel the thumps of his footfalls drawing closer in a way the sensors in your faux-head simply cannot match. One side of your brain — the half co-opted by the machine — sees only smoke and fire. The other, the primal side, can practically taste the steel.

You bowl into each other, both guns firing and scoring hits on ablative plates before the proximity forces both sets of arms upward. For a few scant moments you are both shooting into the air, puncturing clouds far above while spent casings rattle off one another's shoulders. Your left hand becomes a single-edged knife of roaring exotic plasma; his becomes a stiletto. Close combat is not preferred, so this is only ever meant to buy a few quick, hateful shanks before breaking apart again.

Except this time is different. Beneath the residential road you have both been standing on runs the sewer line, which has left the surface thinner than either of you anticipated. The combined weight of two closely spaced mechs causes the road to crumble underfoot — not by much on any meaningful scale, but enough to make retreating far less viable. You stab. He stabs. Your mech fails first, but it is a moot point because his fails a moment later. The electrosteel fibre bundles of false muscle are severed in both melee arms, neither ranged weapon can be brought to bear after burning out the servos like tired arm wrestlers, and neither of you are stupid or suicidal enough to fire back-mounted artillery at point-blank range.

Something groans. Metal begins to ping with ever-increasing rapidity as stress failures cascade. Your mech may have seized first, but his has ignobly toppled forward and crunched into your own. Both of you have the same idea at the same moment and pop the cockpit hatches. The urge to kill O'Donnell has been nagging at you for half a decade, and suddenly the chance to satisfy it is closer than it has ever been. The sensation fades like waking from a nightmare as the cables disconnect, but the momentum of it carries you forward all the same.

Cold air rushes in, cut through with the occasional waft of heat from a burning car below. You have never seen O'Donnell in the flesh before. You know his face from every angle — grainy satellite images, full true-colour holographic reconstruction — because the corporation had to be certain their rival's chief asset was dead before they would pay. He is a head shorter than you, lanky in build, with fur around his face that lends him a permanent smug sneer. He twitches his nose, steps from his own machine onto the front of yours, and draws a handle from the side of his flight suit. A blade telescopes out until he flourishes a nano-rapier before you.

"At long last, Anon," he grins, showing the teeth his species is infamous for. "The dance ends here." The tip of the rapier comes up under your chin, tilting your head back so he can look down its length and gloat properly. Then smug becomes fury as he reads what your eyes betray. Levelled at his chest, held low at your side, is a blocky heavy pistol — the Mark 8-b Thunderbolt, designed to punch through two walls and kill whatever is standing behind them.

The moment arrived and ended before either of you could fully inhabit it. You fired; he flicked the blade at the gun. A single burst of shots miraculously clears the two of you and strikes the insides of both cockpits instead, and electrics and feed lines catch instantly. You lunge for his throat before he can find his footing. The nano-rapier snags on the cockpit lip, bends under your combined weight, and snaps — sending you both tumbling down onto the road below.

Both of you immediately suffer system-shock release. For the past several hours your brains had been occupied with piloting tens of tonnes of corporate-backed war vehicle, and now you didn't even weigh one measly tonne. You wouldn’t fire your main gun at anything less than fifteen. It was like stepping off a rocking boat onto solid land — or off a trampoline onto hard concrete. The hare landed better, and your sidearm is kicked away before you can use it. You watch it skitter across the road as he straddles you and begins choking the life out of you. He has a sinewy strength to his grip, but his body is lighter, and a punch to the side of his face forces him off. The straps and ports on both of your flight suits make it easy to grab hold of something but tricky to find anything vital. Every time one of you makes progress it is swiftly reversed, and it's back to square one.

Neither of you was trained in the martial arts. You were trained in the kind that encourages gouging out eyes, biting off fingertips, and absorbing a punch to the kidney. A long and intense minute passes, and at some point the fighting becomes something closer to just mutual endurance. A further two minutes in and neither of you has risen from your knees, panting and hurting in equal measure. One of the mech's missiles cooks off and you both dive away from it on instinct. Now you are lying face down on the road, heads less than half a metre apart, too utterly exhausted to finish the job.

"Five…minutes?" you wheeze.

"Five…minutes…" O'Donnell agrees, then plants his forehead on the ground and groans.

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Pub: 16 Apr 2026 23:31 UTC

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