Operator B by Edward Lee

It’s only logical that the OEV is fitted with some sort of integrated velotic envelope that counters forward inertia with reverse inertia, precisely in time with acceleration. Who cares how it works? It just does.”
    “All right, fine. So how fast is it… out  of the atmosphere?
    “Again, unknown. All we do  know is that the propulsion system is capable of producing velocities that seem to be exponentially faster than—”
    “No, no! Don’t even say it!” Wentz nearly yelled.
    “—the speed of light. Farrington’s longest range flight was to Alpha Centauri. It took him four days instead of four years.”
    Shit,  he thought. How could he object?
    “Let me put it this way, General. Everything you’ve ever believed before today…is wrong.”
    Frustrated, Wentz combed his gaze around the cockpit area. “Where are the controls? Where’s the stick?”
    “Keep cranking that rubber band, sir. There’s no stick.  This is a para-orbital, hyper-velotic, self-contained intragalactic transport unit. It’s founded on technologies that are virtually unknown to the human race.”
    Wentz was getting pissed. “I don’t care if it’s a goddamn Good Humor truck! How do you fly it without controls?”
    Ashton’s tone moderated. “The controls are…integrated.”
    “Integrated with what?”
    “With the operator—the pilot…”
    Wentz squinted at her like a caveman glimpsing the ocean for the first time.
    Ashton touched the brushed-silver surface of an angled ledge in front of the port-side flight chair.
    A seamless panel hummed  open.
    “What in the holy hell?” Wentz asked.
    The opened panel revealed two narrowly outlined indentations. Outlines like two bizarre hands possessing only two fingers and a thumb.
    Ashton audibly gulped. “Those are the controls,” she said.

CHAPTER 8

    “Those things,” Wentz said, “those outlines. They’re handprints, aren’t they?”
    They’d left the hangar and now sat in a brightly lit in-briefing room, Jones behind a standard industrial-gray military desk, Wentz and Ashton in opposing armchairs.
    “We don’t call them handprints, General,” Major Jones explained. “We call them operator detents.”
    Ashton, then: “Synaptic activity in the brain is processed into and out of the detents by way of the median and ulnar nerves in the arms and the collateral nerve branches in the fingers.”
    “You’re talking about thought, aren’t you?” Wentz figured. “I put my hands against those handprints, think,  and the thing flies?”
    Jones nodded yes. “That’s correct, General. It seems that thought conduction on the part of the operator is effectively converted to operational commands which are processed into the vehicle’s guidance system.”
    “Fly-by-wire, only the pilot’s nerves  are the wires…”
    “Precisely,” said Ashton.
    “And, hopefully, General, given what you’ve witnessed today, you’ll be canceling your retirement plans.”
    Wentz closed his eyes and heard a deafening silence. Behind the lids, he saw an insuperable void, a vastness like looking down from the highest places on the earth. He saw a pilot’s most fantastic dream come true, and then he saw the faces of Joyce and Pete…
    “I can’t,” he said. “I promised my wife and kid. I’ve been breaking promises to them for the last ten years, but I can’t  break this one.”
    A final tempt, a final image to maraud his pilot’s ego: he saw somebody else, some other pilot bestowed with this impossible honor. It’d be some punk, he guessed, probably some boner’d up hot shot Navy kid from Whidbey NSA or Miramar or, worse, a Blue Angel. Am I really gonna step down let some cocky F-18 PUNK fill my shoes?
    “Shit! God DAMN! ” Wentz bellowed.
    Ashton and Jones just looked at him.
    “Ain’t happening,” Wentz said through a painful grimace. Part of him could not conceive of what he was about to say. “I’m not going to fuck my family over again. Tomorrow at noon I retire.