Mecha System: Harem in The Cockpit

Mother

I didn’t know where to start. 

Well, I knew exactly where to start, but it was precisely where I didn’t want to start. 

I needed to start with the fact that the life I knew before the ship had crashed in front of me and gave me the exo suit was over. 

I’d lost my job and by the sound of it, my Mum thought I’d done a runner or I’d died, one or the other. 

I needed to get in contact with her. That was the first thing I really needed to do. 

With a sigh I thumbed through to the call screen on my phone and navigated to the call now button. With a heavy heart, I pushed it, and let the phone ring. 

And ring. 

And continue to ring… 

That was odd… If someone had called me out of the blue after days of not being around, and it was someone that I had been trying to get a hold of, then I’d probably jump at the chance to answer the phone when they eventually did come calling. 

It was still ringing. 

A tear tracked its way down my face, I rubbed it away stubbornly. 

I wasn’t going to start crying. That would be ridiculous. Crying because someone wasn’t answering the phone? Who did that? Not me. 

Another tear. And another. I couldn’t get them all. 

Damn it all. 

The phone stopped ringing, but it was just the answer machine. 

“God damn it!” I screamed, throwing the device across the room so hard it cracked the wall and shattered on impact. 

Yeah. I was a little unstable, and I wasn’t liking the vibes that lack of an answer was giving me. 

I needed more information, and I needed it now. 

I clambered back out of bed and walked through to my living room, my fingers tapping a nervous rhythm on my upper thigh. That was something I always did when I was nervous. 

Tap tap tap. I grabbed the remote to the TV. Tap tap tap. Flicked over to the news channel. Tap tap tap.

“-Is still in turmoil as more and more unidentified flying objects come crashing down across the globe, exploding and spreading unknown radioactive contaminants across the impact sties,” The news anchor, a young woman I didn’t recognise, said from behind her desk. “Let’s go now to our reporter in the field, Sam Rogers.” 

The camera switched. 

The reporter, presumably Sam Rogers, was standing atop the roof of a building in London city center, behind him was a scene of utter devastation. 

Buildings had collapsed, fires were raging, and in the far off distance I was sure I could hear the sound of screams floating on the wind. 

All this was going on, and my boss had still fired me? 

I shook my head, that wasn’t what was important right now. What was important was finding out what had happened to my mum. Finding out if she was even alive anymore, or if she had been caught in one of these blasts. 

I turned the TV off and summoned the suit. 

The liquid metal of the suit seeped out of my skin and wrapped itself around my body. Before while the icy cold of the suit had felt cloying and uncomfortable it now felt… like I belonged inside of it. 

“Yeah, that’ll be the psychokinetic bridge that we’ve been building over the last couple of weeks, prepping your body so that prolonged exposure doesn’t fry your synapses,” came the voice of the AI. 

I was just about ready to snarl at the robotic presence in my brain to shut the hell up again. But that wouldn’t be fair. I was wearing the suit, after all, it had a right to get involved now of all times. 

“Cool, well can your psychokinetic whatever do something about how we look?” I said, taking a glance at myself in the mirror. 

The liquid metal suit was… way too tight around areas that I had never wanted to show off, though I had to admit that my abs looked… different, way more defined than they had been when I went under. 

It just wasn’t really what I thought of when I thought of a mecha suit. It was too smooth. It looked like I was wearing the spandex suit of a superhero like Spider-Man or the Power Rangers. 

The metal began to shift, extruding itself in different ways and suddenly seeming harder instead of softer. After a few minutes of change, I was much happier with the design. 

My suit now looked much more like power armour, the sort that Tony Stark would have worn in Iron Man, not the bulky kind that you’d find in something like Fallout. 

Nimble, easy to move in, and yet somehow menacing enough that I definitely wouldn’t want to deal with it if I were stuck in a dark alleyway. Quick enough to get me to my mum’s block of apartments without wasting too much time, anyway. 

“Give me the address, I’ll cross-reference with satellites and plot you the optimal course,” The AI said helpfully. That was strange. It hadn’t exactly been helpful so far. 

“Sure,” I said, before relaying the address to the artificial intelligence, “Though I’m not sure why you’re being so helpful all of a sudden.” 

“You’re having a rough time of it, don’t need me piling things on as well,” The AI said, “Besides, we’re like bonded now or whatever. That’s one of the reasons you were passed out for so long. Sorry about that, by the way.” 

Well, small positives I supposed. Maybe the AI wouldn’t be such an asshole from this point onwards, though I wasn’t exactly hedging my bets in that department. Asshole seemed to be part of its base algorithms. 

Nevertheless, a set of arrows flashed up on my hud like a video game, leading out of the front door of my apartment. 

I was going to find out what had happened to my mum, even if that knowledge broke me.