The Nightmare Begins

...

I don't know what to say about the kaiju. They changed everything. I don't know whether to thank God or curse him that the first beast walked through San Francisco instead of Los Angeles. It might have been better to die in that first attack, before we really knew what they were like and what life was going to be like for us.

Anyone will tell you that the only way to kill a kaiju is with a jaeger. I don't know how true it is, but that's what we've come too. Humanity survives by fighting Godzilla style monsters with giant mecha suits. It's straight out of some of the most worn out anime plot lines, but it's life... the only one we have or rather the only way we have one.

What the public knows about the jaegers is limited. They want to keep you confident, they want you to think we can win, so they don't tell you who's really behind the wheel. They dress their rangers up in suits and ties and have them memorize lines they think will work with the media and do their best to limit access. Why? I'll tell you why. When the Jaegers were built they discovered it took more than a willing pilot, it took a special kind of mind... not the kind we generally place a lot of faith in.

The special kind of pilot they needed wasn't as readily available as they would've liked. The first pilots, the mark one pilots, they came from the military ranks. Later though when the soldiers had all been tested and there weren't enough viable candidates, they had to turn to the civilian population to fill their ranks. That's where my story begins.

I didn't bother trying out, I didn't need to... I already knew I didn't have what it would take. That didn't matter though, I didn't need to try out. I was drift compatible with one of their best candidates, my younger sister. I told you that a jaeger pilot needs a special kind of mind, more specifically an autistic one. The human brain has thousands of possible neural connections, we all have unique pathways that determine the course of our thoughts. The average person, the 'normal' person works within a limited scope, there are of course no two minds the same, but on a macro scale they all have a similar fingerprint. Then there is everyone else, the rest of the population who has those one or two connections that give them a different level of insight or way of thinking. Those connections, that unique perspective... somehow it translates into a connection with the jaeger.

My sister fit those requirements perfectly. She's not autistic, but somewhere along the line some doctor or another tagged her with a disorder somewhere on that spectrum and they weren't wrong... she does think differently, but there's nothing wrong with her. At least I keep telling myself that. She has plenty of tics, she hates it when you sniffle or if she can see your feet moving it drives her through the roof. But none of that is going to be obvious on a few promotional videos and that's what made her perfect. She had a plenty of tics but none that made her too difficult to air on TV and her mind connected perfectly in the jaeger simulations.

What she needed though was a drift compatible partner, and that's where I come in. The jaeger still needed two pilots, no matter how perfect my sister's mind was there had to be a second one. So they built the system for a primary and secondary pilot. My sister's mind processes just about everything needed for piloting, and all I have to do is stay in synch with her and keep her on target. Like a babysitter.

They outfitted us with the first and last Mark 6 to come off the assembly line, an improvement on the Striker model it sacrificed some speed for a greater maneuverability. This girl was an engineering marvel, the robotic march of the earlier models was replaced with a more responsive system, this beauty could dance. I couldn't tell you who named her, that was all the PR department, but I could say they had it right, she was Graceful Havoc.

...

Our first assignment was to a more experienced combat pair. I pushed for the new mark five in Australia, they had a good record and Australia is just beautiful. An American made machine though? Yeah... we were staying stateside. They stationed us in Anchorage with the Gipsy Danger.