Now Boarding
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Preface: this is another Dire Machine fic focused on mawplay, so it will be a little strange. All the same, I hope you enjoy.
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Alexander had never known a time when the machines of Earth weren't living, breathing beings of their own. The time before the 'Calamity', as they called it. He was alive then, but he was only a child, too young to remember anything.
So unlike some who used to call his town home, he had never feared or hated the Dire Machines. They were bizarre, alien, familiar yet totally unusual, taking the guise of machines once designed and built by humans, but internally, had become something more, after their nanomachine colonies overtook their shells and gave birth to something new.
They thought in strange ways, not totally dissimilar to humans, but quite distinct all the same. They were simple, crude little smart cars, they were fearsome jet fighters, they were mighty warships.
Their 'fangs' grew back, internal weapons 'regrowing' if removed, disarmed weapons repairing themselves. As long as enough remained of the machine, it would return almost as it was, just as some strange new creature.
Every single one of them was the friendliest and most genuine sort of person he'd ever met. Ravenous with a desire to learn, always delighted by pleasant company, and eager to share stories of their own. They may have rightly hated the humanist movements, but anyone who accepted them, they embraced in return merrily. Sometimes quite literally, owing to the many tentacular mechadendrites they sported, providing them with the means to manipulate the world around them without a humanoid body.
Such was Alex's exposure to these machines as friendly and generous people, he eventually got a job as an assistant maintainer at the local airport.
Even now, Dire Machines needed maintenance, though for them, when their nanites couldn't quite do it, it was more like a doctor's appointment.
Some of them seemed to do it just for the company, since they equated rooting around beneath their panels as much the same as getting beneath one's skin, so it wasn't necessarily something oddly pleasant to them.
Still, he'd gotten to know many Dire Machines in his time at the airport, and they him.
One in particular was particularly close to him.
He heard her coming, her turbofans issuing their characteristic whining scream, followed by the harsh squeaking of rubber wheels on tarmac as she landed.
The C-390 Millennium slowly came to a stop, the green paint along the top sides of the fuselage glinting in the sunlight, the grey underbelly darkened by the tarmac's reflection, sporting the colours of the old Brazilian Air Force.
She herself was not what any could consider 'active service' anymore. She worked as a courier craft, carrying freight to and from large transit centres and more remote communities.
The town he lived in was no city, but it was hardly a 'remote community', the airport he worked at more than capable of accommodating planes much larger than her.
She slowly wheeled off the runway, making her way over to the hangar he was waiting at, her turbofans still whining.
Even now, it was strange seeing something like her; the design was familiar, at least as far as he learned from pictures and videos from the decades before the Calamity. A transport plane with over-mounted wings and two turbofan jet engines close to the wing roots. There was nothing else particularly special about it.
But where the cockpit should've been, all he saw were the front canopy panels overtaken by biomechanical eyes, almost bestial in nature, giving him a sideways glance, the rest of the panels opaque with a grey film beneath.
Below her 'nose', the front landing gear was deployed, but directly in front of it was a slightly pursed maw, claiming the frontal hatches for the forward landing gear. Behind strange 'lips' of metal, were rather large teeth, almost shark-like in their shape, though hardly as numerous as what sharks sported.
He didn't get a good glimpse as she pulled into the hangar, but he knew of the slippery, silvery tongue within.
The hangar was just large enough for her to enter, her engines finally turning off and winding down, allowing Alex to take off his ear-pro, though his yellow high-vis jacket remained on, as was company policy, along with the navy blue uniform shirt beneath, the long, thick light-grey work pants, and the heavy duty black work boots.
"Hey, Ana," Alex greeted warmly as he walked up to the large Dire Machine with a smile.
Her mouth twisted into a grin of her own, the biometal corruption of her outer shell affording limited flexibility to help them with these expressions.
It also made them strangely warm to the touch.
"Hey, Alex~" she answered in return, almost playfully, slithering a mechadendrite from somewhere above to ruffle his short black hair.
He laughed, and stood before her; compared to some other planes of her role, she wasn't that big. But still, she loomed large, and had an impressive presence that he appreciated.
Of course, his eyes kept glancing down at her mouth... something about it was fascinating.
"What can I do for you this time, Ana?"
"I'd like for you to check around my landing gear wells. See if there's anything caught in them I haven't noticed," she asked.
He nodded, and got to work, starting with the front landing gear first.
By all measures, she could've easily checked herself, since Dire Machines had all sorts of Mechadendrites, including ones tipped with cameras. It let them see in places they otherwise wouldn't be able to poke their faces into. Or usually, around their bulk if they didn't have integrated optics to see their blindspots.
But Ana liked his company. And his scrawny frame did make it easy to slip into confined spaces when necessary.
He flipped a torch in his hand and turned it on, shining it into the cavity of the landing gear well, making sure to observe every nook and cranny.
It was clear to anyone the extent of the biometallic conversion of these beings; though the landing gear itself seemed largely normal, as did the hatches, the inner surfaces of the well were warped and covered by organic growths, grey or silver in colour, seemingly moist, and occasionally pulsing like a heartbeat.
But its synthetic nature was evident in the way the twisting 'veins' often looked like cables and conduits in texture, and often merged with existing wiring. More than that, the smooth nature of it, and its colour, really sold the idea that it was some sort of biomechanical phenomena.
He could also just see into her mouth from behind, a rather strange angle, but it wasn't a clear view, an opaque and flexible membrane growing across the space to divide the landing gear well from her maw, though when the landing gear needed to raise, that membrane would flex and allow room, sporting gaps - of which one Alex was currently looking through - to aid with this.
It was all very strange and surreal, and yet he found it fascinating.
He still took lingering glances at her mouth... wondering what it was like in there, if he ever had to do anything remotely similar to 'dental work' or something like that.
He shook his head to dismiss those thoughts, and crawled out from her frontal well, careful not to touch anything he didn't need to.
She didn't mind her fuselage getting touched, but Dires could be funny about internals.
As he walked to the rear landing gear, built into bulging cowlings on the sides of her underbelly, just below the wings, he felt the stare of one of her cameras tracking him, the observing tentacular eye shadowing him, as she usually did.
It wasn't rude, not for Dires. They had a means of always keeping their attention on whoever they were with, so they did. They only ever stopped if said person did find it uncomfortable.
Dire Machines could be intrusive, but they were nothing if not polite when someone made their boundaries clear.
He ducked low, and spotted his reflection in a particularly polished section of landing gear hydraulic, showing his olive-toned skin looking a little dusty here and there, blue eyes staring back at him, if rather warped by the curvature of the piston.
He smirked, and twisted around to get a good look into the wheel well, observing yet more strange, biomechanical growth permeating the very being of her airframe.
It was still a little strange, even for someone who had grown up around Dire Machines, to make that shift from thinking of their innards as just nuts and bolts and several hundred kilometers of wiring and cabling, to thinking of their innards as... well, innards. Their organs, their skeletons, their veins.
He was just seeing into the openings, nothing deeper or more invasive than that. Still, it filled him with a strange feeling, being inside of her.
It made some other thoughts fill his head again, thinking back on that smile of hers... so large, so predatory, and yet so pleasant.
He left that well, and checked on the last one, finding nothing out of the ordinary there either.
He decided to make a round of examination, walking about her to see if there was anything else that might've been a concern, though as he suspected, there was nothing.
Ana probably just wanted to talk to him again.
He walked back to her front, and placed his torch down on a toolbox against the back wall, wringing his hands and smiling up at Ana.
"Nothing unusual that I could see," he said.
"Really? I could've sworn I felt something rattling around in one of them," she said, feigning ignorance.
Alex gave her a lopsided smirk.
"Ana, I know you don't have anything wrong with you," he accused in good fun. "You just wanted an excuse to talk to me."
Her toothy smile broadened.
"Anything to visit my favourite mechanic," she joked.
"You could just come to visit, it's not like you
have
to show up as a job," he said, moving to find a chair and sit himself down upon it, crossing his legs as he sat before her.
"True, but I do like doing it this way," she admitted. "I don't know why. It seems more fun."
"I don't see how, but I can't say I'm upset with it," he admitted himself. "It's always nice when you turn up."
"Aww, thank you~" she said happily, her frame twisting just slightly to give the sense of an appreciative head tilt.
"So, what have you been up to?" he asked.
At this, she sighed in exasperation.
"Truthfully, I wish I wasn't; my last job was to deliver medical supplies to an isolated village somewhere in Columbia. Unfortunately, that village was full on humanist. Couldn't do an airdrop, so had to land at the airfield. It was suitable, but... I did not like being there. The villagers turned up, some of them had rocks in their hand. I think they would've thrown them if not for the pallets of supplies my team were unloading from my hold."
Alex frowned in sympathy, reaching out to grab a wayward dendrite and hold it tightly. The silvery tendril curled around his hand in turn.
"Sounds awful," he said.
