The Mech Touch

Although Cormaunt Hempkamp only conducted a single experiment, the results exceeded Ves’ expectations!

It was one thing to accelerate the training of a rookie mech pilot and speed up his familiarization process with a specific mech.

It was another thing entirely to achieve the same effect on a veteran mech pilot!

Ves had read the profile of the Ylvainan mech pilot carefully and understood that while the fellow did not possess excellent talent, he made up for it with diligence and devotion.

The mech pilots of the Eye of Ylvaine had always stood out for their dedication to their holy service, but the test subject who volunteered for this test had already mastered the Transcendent Punisher to a high degree.

Common sense dictated that it took a disproportionate amount of time and effort to achieve further incremental improvements. Ves had already been certain that the pilot had approached his skill ceiling!

Were his assumptions wrong, or did Hempkamp’s mysterious procedure involving an add-on to the Transcendent Punisher’s neural interface open up a possibility that did not exist before!

As Ves accessed the data logs and studied the numbers and graphs, he tried to determine what exactly happened.

By comparing the data from the two separate practice runs, one conducted before the procedure and one conducted afterwards, Ves was able to compare the results of both.

Since the two simulated battle scenarios were almost identical to each other, Ves easily picked up a lot of clues by looking at where the data sets contrasted with each other.

His first preliminary conclusion was that the biggest area of improvement was the skill of the mech pilot.

The Ylvainan soldier had somehow broken through the ceiling that he had never been able to surpass until today.

Indicators such as hit rate, target prediction, tracking accuracy and so on had all improved by a small but significant degree.

These were aspects that were notoriously difficult to improve in leaps and bounds!

To the vast majority of mech pilots, it took weeks, months and even years of training to achieve measurable improvement in these areas once they already attained enough proficiency!

“There’s more.”

As Ves studied the data further, he noticed that the mech pilot improved in many other areas as well. These concerned areas that were a lot subtler, to the point where many mech pilots didn’t even know they could manipulate these areas!

For example, he noticed that the Ylvainan mech pilot had become a bit better at juggling the energy management of his mech.

As a heavy artillery mech, the Transcendent Punisher was both massive and powerful, but that also meant that it needed to be fed with a lot of energy!

It was anything but simple to supply the right amount of energy to the right part at the same time.

What made this factor even more complicated was that all of the activity also generated a lot of heat. No matter how many heatsinks the heavy mech possessed, its heavy positron cannons generated so much waste heat when it was firing at maximum capacity that the machine practically turned into an oven!

Therefore, every mech pilot assigned to the Transcendent Punisher had to learn how to manage its energy consumption and heat buildup while at the same time keeping its damage output as high as possible.

While Ves knew enough about the Transcendent Punisher to know how to best juggle all of these changing variables, he was not a mech pilot so it was impossible for him to demonstrate what he could accomplish in the cockpit.

The mech pilots assigned to the Transcendent Punisher did not know any of the science or the exact tolerances of every part or system, so their ability to control their mech to such a fine degree was limited.

Until now.

When Ves swept his gaze away from the data, he came up with an answer that explained much of why the performance of the Ylvainan mech pilot had improved so rapidly.

“The test subject understands how the Transcendent Punisher works on a much more profound level, is that correct?”

Hempkamp grinned and nodded. “That is one of the changes that my process has produced. Much more has taken place than that. This is because my procedure is much more profound than what is apparent on the surface. Look at how much better the mech pilot is able to get along with his machine.”

Ves turned and observed the mech pilot. Even as the test had come to an end, the Ylvainan pilot was not in a hurry to leave the cockpit.

The man remained in his seat but closed his eyes and concentrated towards his mech.

He was actively communing with his machine outside of a man-machine connection!

While it was theoretically possible for any mech pilot to interact with a living mech, in practice the two had to be quite close. The mech in question also had to experience a lot of growth before it was capable of reaching out on an independent basis.

For both the mech pilot and the mech to reach this level of intimacy and mutual understanding was remarkable!

The degree of synergy between them had approached the level of a pairing between an expert pilot and expert mech!

Ves grew a lot more interested at what exactly Hempkamp managed to do with his odd addition to the Transcendent Punisher.

“Please explain what you tried to accomplish and what you have managed to realize.”

“Let me wrap up this experiment first, sir. I will be glad to explain my full layout to you once I have summarized the data from the latest test.”

It took half an hour for Hempkamp to wrap up the experiment and analyze the data. This was the first time he had tested his new tech on a Larkinson mech pilot, and the results were better than he expected.

Once Hempkamp sat down in front of Ves, the neural interface specialist finally presented the full scope of his recent work.

“Do you recall what I am trying to accomplish?”

“I do. You want to increase mutual understanding between mechs and mech pilots.” Ves spoke. “You want to leverage the more direct neural interface technology developed by the biotech industry to facilitate a deeper exchange of information and knowledge. One of your goals is to make the mech pilot understand the properties and operation of a mech to a much finer degree than is possible through conventional training and learning methods.”

“That is correct, more or less. I have discovered that I can attain additional goals when the mechs in question are alive. Since living mechs have more in common with exobeasts than other animals, I can essentially treat the machines that you have designed as living animals in the form of mechs.”

“How does that change the equation, exactly?” Ves curiously asked.

“It changes everything. In the biotech industry, there are specialized researchers who bond with interesting exobeasts with the assistance of specialized neural interfaces. By connecting their minds with the minds of non-human organisms through a special channel, they can do more than pass on information about themselves to each other. They can also pass on a portion of their biases, attitudes and even instincts!”

“What is the point of this? Isn’t this dangerous?”

“It is not without risk.” Hempkamp admitted. “However, when done correctly, the biotech researcher gains so much more clarity of the exobeast that it is as if he has spent half of his life living as the creature in question. What is also interesting is that the exobeast has also benefited from this exchange. The animal has absorbed human thinking patterns, habits and other elements that are typically associated with our kind. This means that the beast has not only grown tamer, but might even gain sentience when its species originally was not capable of developing its intelligence to this degree!”

The biotech industry tended to attract a lot of crazies. Ves was not surprised at all that certain researchers were so extreme in their pursuit of knowledge that they even invented a risky procedure that not only caused them to be contaminated by beastly instincts, but also turned their exobeast subjects into much more intelligent monsters!

Ves could easily imagine how this could go wrong! It was a surprise that the Big Two hadn’t shut down this crazy line of research!

“I completely understand that you feel unsettled by the act of bringing humans and exobeasts closer together, but my work is different.” Hempkamp claimed. “What I have done is bring mech pilots closer to their mechs, which is much less controversial!”

“Are there any downsides to this process?”

“I will need to conduct further studies on that, but from what I can say so far, there are no negative consequences that I can detect. You can see for yourself that the test subject has not changed for the worse. The Transcendent Punisher has not degraded either. In fact, I can vaguely feel that it has grown stronger and more defined. Both sides has benefited from their brief exchange!”

“Hmmmm…”

Though Ves was skeptical of Hempkamp’s optimistic claims, if his words turned out to be true, then this was definitely a procedure that could quickly raise the battle effectiveness of all of his mech pilots!

“Have you tested the same procedure with non-living mechs?”

“I did, but the results weren’t nearly as dramatic.” Hempkamp admitted. “As I have mentioned before, since living mechs are truly alive in a sense, they can not only share more information to the mech pilot, but absorb much more for the human as well. It is as if my invention is made for your mechs!”

“Can this process be repeated in order to achieve better results?”

“No. Unfortunately not, sir. A single deep exchange is enough to conduct the ‘trade’, as it were. Activating the procedure again when the mech pilot and the living mech are exactly the same as before will result in relatively little new exchanges. The only instances where it is useful to perform it again is if the pairing is different or if the mech pilot and the living mech have changed significantly over time. For example, if you ever upgrade the Transcendent Punisher in the future, it will be useful to conduct this exchange again.”

As Ves asked more questions and found out more details about this strange new improvement method, he eventually understood the gist of Hempkamp’s new solution.

It was not a new systematic training method nor a different form of mech piloting. It was a cheat that temporarily removed a number of barriers between the mech pilot and the living mech so that they could essentially borrow elements from each other!

“Although I do not know how literally you should take this, I believe that my solution can eventually blur the lines between the mech pilot and his mech.” Hempkamp ambitiously claimed. “I have heard that high-ranking mechs and mech pilots are already trying to move in this direction on an individual basis, but I am convinced that ordinary mech pilots can enjoy the same benefits by developing better and more specialized neural interfaces! The tech already allows man and machine to connect with each other. What I am trying to do is nothing more than to expand upon the capabilities of this tech so that the two parties can truly merge with each other one day!”

Ves was quite impressed with this ambitious goal!

Though he was not certain at all whether Hempkamp could establish a new form of empowerment that was normally exclusive to high-ranking mechs and mech pilots, the benefits to the mech community were enormous if the neural interface specialist was truly able to realize his dreams!

Of course, the difficulty of making such an ambitious and impossible-sounding goal come true was an entirely different matter.

Ves didn’t mind too much. Even if Hempkamp came up short in the end, the advancements he could make during his career would doubtlessly be useful in different ways!

One of those advancements was the new tech that he had long been working on but could never put into practice due to all kinds of restrictions.

His desire to prove his work was viable along with the need to demonstrate his value to the Larkinsons allowed Hempkamp to succeed in his first practical implementation of his ideas!

Ves directed an appraising gaze towards the neural interface specialist. He wondered what else Hempkamp might have in store.

“Do you have any follow-up research in mind?”

“Oh, plenty, sir. What I have just shown to you earlier is a process that I have called First Stage Man-Machine Deep Exchange. It is the easiest and most superficial exchange that I could make. Once I have extensively studied and refined this application, I will start working on the Second Stage version of my exclusive tech. I never thought it was viable for me to develop an even deeper exchange with ordinary mechs, but your living mechs are so much more relevant to my specialty that I think I can achieve actual results!”

“What does this Second Stage of yours entail?” Ves curiously asked.

“Have you ever heard about the notion of establishing Unity of Man and Machine on command? What if I can tell you that I can develop a system where the mech pilot only has to press a single button to enter this extraordinary state of mind?”