Traveling through the Wilds inside the cockpit of a mech was a crazy experience. The thing about being a serf was that, despite all of the many things I built or even invented, at the end of the day, I was still trash. At least in the eyes of the nobles and those in power.

But here I was, sitting on the right of Sir Guillaume, Elli on his left to ‘avoid any grab ass’, swaying with the gentle rocking lope of the Toxotai.

It was a strange sensation. There wasn’t much I knew about the interfacing procedure between pilot and mech, but I did know about mental interfacing. However, I had expected there to be perhaps some sort of tube connected to a helmet, something that would actually show a physical connection to the mind of the mech that allowed him to control the metal behemoths.

The reality was bizarre. It was more like magic than any physical science that I understood. More like TUNI, CD’s magical communication system, than anything that I even knew we as a culture had access to.

And I could feel it. There was a presence in the air, a sort of scattered livingness that occasionally sparked against the front of my mind. I had faint impressions of a body, moving, seeking signals from a central mind and accidentally stumbling across my own.

I turned to the pilot.

“Does it hurt your ability to pilot, having us sitting in here with you?”

“A bit,” the man said, nodding his head, curls bouncing though the blankness that ran through his emerald eyes showed clearly that his sight and consciousness were elsewhere. “The mech frame gets confused and excited. I can’t explain why, but it reaches out to all the people inside the cockpit almost like a puppy runs around a room full of new people, licking everyone’s hands.”

Elli smiled.

“You can sometimes feel a little tickle in the back of your mind when you are working on a sleeping mech in the bay. It is almost like they are curious, holding out a hand to see what you might do with it.”

Sir Guillaume nodded again.

“Yeah, they’ll do that. I suppose that you’ve been warned that we can’t spend the nights in our mechs?”

“We have,” I answered. “Any idea exactly why? We were just told that it is dangerous.”

“It’s the prodding,” he answered. “They never stop playing with your brain. When you are awake and well-rested, in full control of them with good synchronization, it isn’t a problem. But when you start getting tired, start losing synch, or are out of control, like when you are sleeping, then things can get really bad. The mech bodies, they aren’t a person like we are, but they aren’t dumb objects either. They are flesh and blood, and they have their own minds.”

“Wait, what?” I asked, coughing as some slimy spit sank into my throat. I gulped in surprise. “How can they have minds and yet not be people? What does that even mean? I thought they were more like muscle and blood machines.”

Elli rolled her eyes.

“I’m sorry. He’s cute, and you can bounce a cred chip off his ass, but he’s also apparently a bit clueless and he’s embarrassing me. Al, you really don’t know.”

I stuck a tongue out at her.

“Whatever, show off. Buy me freedom and send me to engineering school, so I can join the ranks of the high and mighty scholars of mechdom.”

“It would be a waste of time,” CD said, filling our minds with his words. “Apes might use the leavings of my civilization, but they will never fully understand. It would be like a cockroach figuring out how atomic energy works after stepping into the broken shell of one of your many nuclear wreckages.”

“I got about 70% of that,” I mumbled under my breath, only audible to CD before turning back to the knight.

“So I have to assume that in earlier times, people would sleep in the cockpits. What would happen to them if they did?”

Guillaume sighed.

“Well, there isn’t a big problem at first. But, just like how we pilots have to figure out the prompts and triggers of the spread out collective mind that is the mechs, so too do they have to figure out the strangeness of our central mind. And that’s really what seems to cause the problem. It makes us crazy. We stop being us in the best of cases, and in the worst of cases, we actually become one of them.”

Elli’s eyes went wide.

“I’ve never heard of that. Does that mean what I think it means?”

He nodded, and I frowned.

“They become mechs?” I asked, and the two of them started laughing, leaving me to grind my teeth.

“Oh, you poor ape,” CD messaged, reveling in my ignorance. “They don’t become mechs. They become monsters.”

I shivered at the thought of it. Human beings, but twisted, maybe with eyes glowing neon green or dark red. It brought up so many questions, and at the probability of looking quite stupid, I had to know more.

“So do they shift at all? Do their bodies change? What happens to them?”

The way that Guillaume grinned told me that he was happy to oblige.

“Well, it’s something best talked about around a good campfire in the woods. But I suppose it isn’t a bad idea to warm you up to it since even the squires get quite spooked when Wild Tales come up.”

Elli brightened.

“I’ve heard of them, but never actually gotten to hear one. Truths, semi-truths, and the best goddamned lies in the world, yeah?”

“That’s right,” Guillaume said, nodding. “There’s a lot of strange stuff out here. Monsters, mutants, living statues of metal and wire. Complicated things were going on during the apocalypse, and many of them escaped and multiplied after it was all over. We had our projects and experiments. The Sky Demons had theirs. Once nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare kicked in, there were a lot of new projects and experiments being made by the Goddess Mother Nature herself. Always something new and freaky somewhere. And Wild Tales are how we knights and far rangers share that information with each other.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“When it’s true,” I cut in, understanding it all and was very interested.

“Well, yeah, that’s part of the fun. I have to warn you, though. They can be funny, they can be interesting, they can be useful, but often, they are damn terrifying. You sure you want to hear more about mech-changed humans?”

“Yes! Yes! Oh gods above, below, and sideways, yes!” Elli exploded, her cheeks rosy with excitement.

I knocked back and laughed into the ceiling of the cockpit.

“Yeah, I’m in. Let’s hear it.”

Sir Guillaume shifted lightly, though with so much of his attention on his mech, I doubted he felt the difference. It seemed more like muscle memory, just something he did before every tale. I smiled at the movement. It made him feel grandfatherly and kind.

“Alright then. Let me tell you about the time I encountered mech-changed humans. I call this Wilds Tale 'Humechs.'”

“Already sounds dumb,” CD said, but I couldn't help but think he was just as interested as we were. Guillaume's voice took on a whispery, creepy narrative tinge, whistling and winding.

“This was a few years ago. A party of us just like this had been sent to investigate and maybe clear out an old mech facility from during the apocalypse. Was far away, hard north, in a place called Chip Pee Wah Falls in old times. Beautiful country, damn cold frost though in the fall and I'd hate to think what it might be like in the winter. Lakes, rivers; water everywhere! Anyways, I meander. The place was far away, set up in a hurry for the fight, and when some brains working for the Duke found reference to it in scavenged ancient texts, we got sent off to find it."

"It sounds beautiful. I sometimes wonder why other kingdoms don't take routes in the Northern Wilds," Elli said, sighing a little in her cute, strong mechanic way.

"Oh, they're there," Guillaume answered. "City states, tribes, some kingdoms. Just aren't on our maps. Up there, Chip Pee Wah Falls was still a city. Ruined by whatever hit the mech facility, sure. But there'd been a lot of patches and the place was advanced. We saw the lights of it well before we came into view. Streetlights and lamps running on an electric grid that seemingly had no source! We took to a rise and observed it, surprised as all the Geared Hells to see advanced civilization so far out from the border."

I grinned.

"That can't be true."

"It shouldn't have been, but it was. We'd swept through forests prime with mutants and monsters, plus tons of meaty game. We'd walked through the whistling ruins of all ancient towns and past more collapsed buildings than we could count. Occasionally saw this tribe or that, once saw a community of shelters built high in the trees, but nothing like Chip Pee Wah. We spent a night and day observing. They walked, mostly. But they also had running trucks to move large cargo, and twice we saw mechs march through the city. But that wasn't the only strange thing. The place was bustling, but none of them ever just stopped and dawdled. They were like machines, just marching or driving through the city, just working and getting stuff done. There was none of the stop-and-breathe that we all get, you know. Nobody seemed to talk, or hug, or take breaks for anything."

Elli swallowed audibly.

"What did their eyes look like?"

"I think you know the answer to that. Blazing brown-red, like the coals of a campfire at the end of its run. The party and I, we had a good talk about it, and we figured that things probably got so tough during the apocalypse that this place with its mech facility, they started staying in their mechs for safety. And they got taken."

I could feel the low-level tingle of the mech's spread-out mind tickling my brain, and I scratched my head worryingly.

"Anyways, we had a mission to do, so we decided we'd skirt the town, just find the facility and get some good intel on it if nothing else. For all we knew, these people had a thousand old tech mechs ready to fight, so we decided to park all the mechs a bit farther back and have two of us stay in a Toxotai to guard them in shifts. Then the rest of us suited up for melee and missile, swords and crossbows ready, and we explored the perimeter. Had a tussle with a pack of mutants, men with skin-like bark who moved slowly but spit poison, but they're a tale for another day. Got past those, and found the facility spread out looking shinier than the day it was built, I'm sure. It was there shining in the noon sun, next to a glistening river. And it was busy, too. People were driving trucks up to it, unloading giant leathery eggs and other strange bullshit. It was spooky enough that we all gave a thought about leaving."

I sputtered.

"Eggs? Not cores or seeds?"

"I shit you not. Eggs. So things are already looking wild and we're talking about just getting back and telling the Duke what we saw, probably calling the whole place a no-go zone when suddenly we heard it—a sound like grinding metal and tearing flesh. It echoed out over the facility, bouncing off walls and what was not hard enough to get to us, and damn did it set our nerves on edge. We ducked and watched, wondering what new strangeness was about to come our way.”

Elli leaned forward, eyes wide with anticipation.

“What did you see?”

Guillaume paused for effect, his mouth curling up in a clearly practiced rictus of horror, shadowed just right by the dimness of the cockpit.

“We saw men. An attacking force of human savages. Or at least they had been. Now, they were something else entirely. This horde of them, they rose out of the river and charged, smashing and clawing at the Chip Pee Wa workers, grinding their bodies with spinning blades. See, these people that were attacking, they'd merged themselves with mechanical parts. They were all full of metal, had bolted-on plating, and clearly had undergone at least a few core surgeries. And their eyes were all an eerie neon green. Just like those of monsters."

My eyes went wide, realization striking.

“They made themselves into mechs?!”

Guillaume nodded, his expression grim.

“That's the way it looked anyway. I figure what happened was all the people in Chip Pee Wa slowly got themselves taken over by the mech bodies in the same way their mech bodies got taken over by us. I don't know exactly what it does to a man, but if I were to make a guess, I’d say that it was splitting them into their own little tribes. More like ants than humans have any right to be. And it gives them strange notions, too. Those people with the robot parts, they kept screaming while they fought, and I don't think it had to do with the battle. I think it was the last human bit of themselves crying out in pain and horror at what they'd become."

“Awesome,” CD said, speaking for the first time since the story had started. “Perhaps we are still fighting for this planet, apes?”

Elli shuddered.

"That's horrible. Did you stay and watch the battle?"

"Nah. Saw the first bit. The green-eyed ones with all the mechanics on them, they moved fast and hard, screaming and crying, ripping up a lot of workers on their first go. But the brown-red eyes turned and started fighting back. Swords, and daggers, when we saw them. But as we were heading out, I heard some rifle fire as well. And not the crud that we manufacture today. I'm talking old tech rifles with a smooth report."

The situation played out in my head, and I thought to ask about how he knew what kind of rifle would make such a sound, but I also didn't want to wreck the story. I was trapped inside it, a fly in honey, and I needed to know the conclusion.

"So what happened from there?"

Guillaume sighed.

"We took the longest damn trip back that anyone ever had. We were paranoid about being in our mechs after that, so everything was cut to 12 hours in, and 12 hours out. Got back to Alnda and told the Duke, tried to retire but wasn't granted leave, and spent some months having nightmares. I tell ya, every time I get a mission, official or on the side, I breathe a sigh of relief when I hear it's not out to Chip Pee Wa. Because that is the place of nightmares."

CD’s voice crackled in my mind, his tone unusually somber.

“Apes meddling with powers they do not understand. It is no wonder such abominations occur. Does your species always reach for the stars without considering the consequences?”

As the story ended, silence fell over the cockpit. The only sound was the steady trod of the mech and the gurgle of its fluids circulating through pipes and hoses as we continued our journey through the Wilds. The atmosphere had shifted the excitement of the adventure now tinged with a sense of dread.

Guillaume broke the silence after what seemed another four hours of travel.

"Sir Alain is signaling us to round in for the night. We usually do up the fresh meat on the first day, so it doesn't have a chance to spoil. Get ready for a good night of eating . . . and don't let the humechs haunt your dreams!"

Elli and I forced chuckles. I wasn't positive about her, but I couldn't wait to get myself out of the mech and next to a campfire surrounded by sturdy, normal-eyed humans.