The Skeptical Corner

I do not like the pod.

...No, that's a stupid statement. I wouldn't be a pilot if I loathed it, without exception. Let me start again.

I do not like how being in a pod feels.

When one's neural uplink is attuned, your conscious mind is supposedly locked, one hundred percent, into the starships CPU. To your brain - At least, to the part that matters - the body no longer exists. You are your ship. (Well, sort of. I'll get back to that later.) The science is very, very clear on this.

Yet... When I am in my pod, flying, I swear that I can still feel it. Just barely. Some part of me simply does not accept the "illusion" it is being fed. Though nine parts of my eyes might see my ship, see space, see everything as I am supposed to... The last tenth can still see the murky, near-black of my small, quasi-spherical chamber. A single skeptical corner, somehow standing in opposition to the rest of of those two deluded orbs.

 And, more then that, I can still feel the cold, thick jelly pressing against my bare flesh, hear the tiny vibrations from the far-off engines, and taste my own bitter filth in that grotesque, awful liquid. Not to mention sense the wires jammed deep into the back of my spine and skull. 

It is not something I like at all. It makes me feel trapped, and more then that, vulnerable. Too human to be floating amongst the void.

Perhaps I am being foolish. Perhaps it's all in my head - In fact, that's almost guaranteed, really. It's certainly easy to forget, when I'm fixated upon something in space instead of letting my mind wander, and there's really no rational explanation for it to speak of. I will be the first to admit that I'm pretty neurotic, and I could easily see myself imagining such a thing out of sheer obsession with how weird the whole thing - Capsuleering, rather - Still seems. But, still...

Sometimes I feel as though there is something wrong with me. Something wrong with how I interact with the pod, that somehow escaped the people who conducted the tests back at the School of Applied Knowledge.That my mind is somehow not quite as compatible as it should be, and that one day I'll try to get out, and end up with mindlock, or my brain fried and leaking out of my ears.

I was talking in the Summit earlier - This was actually at the end of a really odd conversation that sort of pertains to what I wrote the other day, but I'll talk about that another time - And I mentioned that, when I was fighting, I felt "Like a Starship", in the literal sense. That in the heat of battle, I could almost forget I was a person.

...The other pilots there found this strange. They remarked upon it, and even seemed to mock me, as though I was a deluded fool. It was upsetting, how distant and less intimidating their experiences were compared to my own.

I had never thought it strange, before. I assumed it was just how things were meant to be. To feel the ship as if it was your own... Body, to sense the capacitors energy surging through you from your burning heart, to feel the flicker of your sensors feedback like a gust of gentle wind touching your flesh. To see from the camera drones as if they were your own eyes, and at times feel the need to blink, it is so utterly real. But, in finding it is not, I suddenly feel a drowning woman amongst divers.

And that makes me feel as though I fit amongst them even less.

...I know this is all ridiculous. I know that people react differently to integrating with the technology, and that different minds have variable ways of "translating" the information they receive from their ship. I know that I am nothing special, save perhaps for my ability to make truly spectacular mountains out of the humblest of molehills. I know I am a pilot like any other. Like all others.

But... It is one more thing to bother me, I suppose. A small flicker of doubt. To add to the pile.