Stomper
"They put medals on my chest. My chest has never seen combat. My brain... my brain has seen men shot to pieces, stomped into slime, burned by lasers... and I did it. I did it all. And I liked it. It feels so powerful, being Cracker... and so much more real. I can feel this flesh rotting on my flimsy bones. Every breath I take... I wish more and more that breath was through the iron grill of Cracker."
What?
A Stomper is a legged machine piloted by either a CCM or more often a human being with a BJ implant. The isolated brain, be it digital or organic, is removed from its normal housing and slotted directly into the Stomper.
Why?
At around 12 to 18 feet tall, stompers are big, but not nearly as big as a Cataphract. They are able to field mounted weaponry like any vehicle, but with a smaller profile that's can fit in a typical hallway or starship corridor, albeit as a tight squeeze at a crouch. In less militant roles, they can be used as loaders, extreme-environment workers, and even for entertainment in Stomper derbies.
The benefit to using a BJ implant as opposed to simply cramming a Pilot into the machine, other than comfort, is that the implant can preserve a brain for an extended period of time without external life support, even in the vacuum of space or in most harsh environments. This means that if there's an accident or the Stomper is destroyed, recovery crews have about eight hours to recover the brain. In the meantime, without a life support system, the brain is put to sleep, preventing the horror of being buried alive or choking to death on your own blood in a battlefield.
The stoic phrase, "I'm not dead, everything else can be fixed," is popular with Stomper pilots.
As mentioned, sometimes a CCM is used with an on-board Shackled AI or Ghost Mind Emulation instead. Of the two, the latter is often more effective, as they are arguably more trusted than AI. AI tends to perform poorly in the role, as there are too many subsystems and AI has difficulty running background processes, IE: humans can 'rewire' their mental pathways to use the guns as arms, to use the legs as normal, to operate the entire device as a whole. An AI has to focus on every individual subsystem to operate it in much the same way that they can't generally crew a starship by themselves without being able to copy their programming and working in tandem.
Who would do this?
Most often, Stomper pilots are already veterans. They've been wounded, blown apart, or otherwise replaced by enough Cybernetics that they're already used to the idea that most of their bodies are artificial anyway. A Stomper requires A full ten slots of Cybernetic Adaptation for a human mind to slot into without risking Cyberserkergang. It's possible to gain the necessary acclimation to Cybernetics through sheer training, of course, and there are plenty of little boys who dream of being a killer robot when they grow up.
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