Disappointing Meat (story)
It’s your third night back wearing meat, and symptoms are setting in. You can feel where your RCS thrusters should be but they don’t respond when you tense them. You try to open a door with your third ancillary claw but nothing happens. 'Suiting' for more than two weeks is called a 'suicide burn'. The come-down afterwards a 'hard-landing'. The third day is always the worst. You’ve been through it all before.
The first day after extraction, you got paid, you ate your first meal, had your first wank. You were almost glad to be out. The second day was debriefings, medical checks, travelling, you were too busy to notice the symptoms creeping up. You took the shuttle back to earth, watching that blue jewel expand into a drab grey city. You briefly enjoyed the novelty of controlling your meat body, like playing with a forgotten toy. By day three there was nothing left to distract you, you were “home”. Alone.
You sit there in your shitty beige box of an apartment and let the pain in. By night you’ve become a snivelling wreck, vomiting in the toilet, tears running down your face before your leg spasms and you slip and fall and bounce your face off the pedal bin. Fuck day three. Is it always this bad? Maybe three months was too long. You'd been working on a salvage operation in Lunar orbit, breaking an old ship that vented after a collision with some floating grunk. The job kept getting extended. It was meant to take a month but they found some survivors in a sealed container in the hold and that messed up the schedule. You'd been wearing a 10-metre mech, bipedal, two main claws, four ancillary appendages, your meat forgotten, suspended in a warm, protective liquid at the heart of the machine. “Suiting”, like you’re wearing something, but that’s not right. It’s more like you discard your meat and gain a new body. A better one. You’ve been through this all before, you’ve experienced ten hard-landings. Twenty? You realise that you’re not sure how old you are, how many times you’ve pulled this body back on like a wet t-shirt. You know what’s next, though.
Tomorrow will be day four, you’ll be exhausted but won’t sleep. The nausea will have passed, replaced with anxiety. When you sit down, your leg will jiggle constantly. When you stand you’ll find yourself pacing back and forwards endlessly. Your apartment is exactly six steps wide. You’ll cross it in three. You won’t want to go outside, worried what you’d do to anyone you meet. You’ll want to scratch the skin from your face. You’ll want to tear the walls down around yourself, burying your flesh in the ruins. By day five you’ll come to hate your arm, how it trembles in mid air, unable to hold still. You’ll ache to adjust it a few degrees clockwise, a few millimetres to the left, but it can only wobble clumsily, a limp extrusion of meat protruding out in front of you. Endless miliseconds between intention and movement.
By day six the spasms will start getting worse as your mind fights to adjust. Every few hours your whole body will tense so hard that your teeth bleed. On night six you’ll finally fall asleep. You’ll awake an hour later covered in cold sweat, fragments of a half remembered dream stuck in your head, something like – you were running through the city, effortlessly, twenty metres tall, crashing through buildings, exulting as the bricks exploded around your magnesium-alloy body, ripping trees from the ground and throwing them into the sky, sweeping your cutting torch through cars, slicing them in two – then you looked down and saw your naked meat body at your feet, looking up at you as you–.
By day seven you’ll have stopped eating. You’ll sit against the wall because you can’t see behind yourself and it frightens you. You’ll think of nothing but insertion, the feeling as the electrode slides down into the port at the top of your neck and slithers down your spinal column, tugging at your nerves. The terrifying moment of nothingness as you’re switched over. The painful blossoming as your consciousness frees itself from the confines of its birth-body and erupts into the vast open space of the mech. All the little pains and twitches of your previous container noticeable by their absence. Everything too real, too crisp, too responsive – so responsive that sometimes you’re sure the mech is anticipating your commands.
The days unfold as expected, each symptom arriving perfectly on time. On day eight you finally get a call from the company. They need you. Asteroid mining job. Maybe half a year this time. They don’t usually let you suit for that long, worried that you’ll take the extraction badly. You wonder what six months will feel like. How long till they daren’t extract you anymore, worried it might kill you? A year? You imagine yourself on the asteroid, leaping away from the rock, spinning your body to ensure an erratic trajectory. You would boost hard, the tendrils of gravity falling away one by one, unable to prevent you from slipping away into the blackness. You would float free, hurtling away from the control ship into empty space. You would automatically enter emergency low power mode as soon as you lost radio contact, your appendages clicking to a stop, your sensors shutting down one by one. How long would it take for them to find you out there? Long enough?
You’ve been through it all before but you won't go through it again.