Flatline Girls

Nothing could make Adriane Rosencrutzk feel more self-assured than a ride in her custom chassis. Of course, what else would? She used to have an easy-going respectable life, full of doting lovers, where she never would have thought of stepping into a cockpit. Now, her towering steel body is her only refuge from a lonely existence of dwindling control in the face of ever-surmounting disability challenges and medical needs. She has been a corpse walking since one terribly fateful day, and her new non-combatant position only gives her dread at the thought of having the time to ruminate on her pitiful circumstances. Soon, however, the new riders she has been instructed to train—rejects from a secretive program which seems to have cost them their reason and moral faculties—begin to foster in her a new envy. The spectacle of their sadistic sweetings upon each other reach into the heights of agony and ecstacy, while pushing the envelope of what's even survivable. She can't bring herself to care they live as societal refuse, not when every embrace of theirs suffused with amor fati abundant curses her to be reminded of all she has lost. So why then, is a face that looks like hers staring back at her from their past photos? Who is this unsightly doppelganger of hers that they called their former ace, and how is this spectre from the past so possessed the confidence and connection she lacks that it feels as though it's taunting her? Who is this loathsome black mirror called Nisha Delacroix?