"Don't that picture look dusty?"

- Brad Pitt

"*screams while aliens eat his brain and his nose bleeds*"

- Descartes Shaman

RITA HAD A FEELING SHE SHOULDN'T PRESS THE RED BUTTON. She had relied on it countless times before, but something was giving her second thoughts in this one specific moment. Nothing on the mobile suit's cockpit screens could explain her sudden strange feelings: Every system appeared to be operating normally and the bogies on her IFF were all tagged. She was struck with a feeling like weak butterflies waking up thousand miles deep in the pit of her gut, something her Newtype perception could sense just enough to leave her with slight unease. Her apprehensive breaths made foggy condensation appear and fade on the inside of her glass helmet visor.

Running out of time, she pressed the button anyway. Under normal operational parameters, this would activate the Phenex's Newtype Destroy mode. The unit would shed its armor camouflage and turn into a proper Gundam controlled entirely through Rita's brainwaves. The entire mobile suit would become an unstoppable projection of her own mind and amplify her every thought. She would become temporarily invincible, bending the very laws of physics to her whim and deflecting every attack made on her until she exhausted her mental stamina.

Rita wound up treating herself to an instant total neuron eradication instead. The process was swift and humane, considering the intense brutality it entailed. An unregistered comms signal that had been lying hidden in a backdoor in the NT-D software was triggered the instant the Gundam began to transform. The invading uplink systematically took over every onboard module in a matter of seconds. Cockpit alarms went berserk, drowning the glittering black and silver cosmos surrounding the pilot seat in bright electronic red. On the outside, the Phenex finished its transformation into its Gundam mode and fell into a slow dead drift in space.

The pilot flinched only one time as if she had been struck by a sudden g-force. She limply rolled back in her leather seat with her arms slowly swaying off the armrests in anti-gravity, matching the relaxed motions of her Gundam. All she ever felt was a pinch of a split second migraine before blacking out. The words "ACCESS VIOLATION" flashed in emergency lettering on the wall to the left of Rita's unconscious form.

The unidentified mobile craft required a special type of pilot to control. A female operator was usually the best option for its cramped cockpit interior due to the advantages of her more slender frame. A female operator who happened to be a Cyber Newtype.

She was sitting in a 360 degree control cabin lined with wall screens that rippled in electric blue and magenta. Her hands at her console as weaving a secretive spell of magic and technology. The ceiling cables plugged into to the shoulders of her normal suit and swarming down the sides of her seat made her look like she was nestled at the bottom of a neon seabed. The glass dome of her space helmet was tinted opaque black and glowed with lines of constantly scrolling readout data on the inside, effectively giving her a curved LCD screen with backwards-printed digital text for a face.

The human pilot seemed more like a living computer monitor than a woman. She was commanding a highly experimental mobile unit designated as the X-1 Myrddin a safe distance away from her current ace rival. Her artificially enhanced consciousness managed everything caught in the net of an expansive piloting system called the Newtype Immersion Nexus.

Floating in front of the electronic sea reeds and the faceless pilot was a pale blue bubble. The spherical hologram was no bigger than a Haro and contained a virtual 3D view of Rita as a scaled down glowing naked blue model floating in empty suspended space. Suspended so her physical privacy could be lifted away and the Myrddin's pilot could coldly watch her and inspect her pure isolated consciousness as she slept. Suspended until the pilot decided what to do with her.

Black gloved hands rested on the controls underneath the slowly rotating examination sphere. The pilot raised the Myrddin's NT-IN system to full power and focused all her thoughts on Rita's pristine virtual form.

Rita's fingers twitched inside the padded gloves of her normal suit. She slowly pulled herself out of her slouched position and adjusted back into her pilot seat. She disabled the blaring cockpit alarms and entered a rapid string of console commands that replaced all the error messages with dim diagnostic panels.

Rita sat with her head angled slightly downward, causing the glare from the cockpit panorama to reflect off her helmet and hide her face behind a shadowy void. The appearance suited her well, since she wasn't Rita anymore. She was Laura.

The covert enemy pilot used her remote-controlled Newtype access point to open an encrypted channel in the Phenex's comms bank. Rita's voice muffled through her helmet as she contacted an unknown mothership.

"I've got everything secured on my end. I'm ready to start reeling her in."

A soft snicker escaped the confines of her normal suit.

"I didn't think the penetration signal would go through that easily. This thing's practically a brainwave sponge with half its dampeners missing. Guess they'll think twice next time they decide to rush another Unicorn model into production."

Laura was part of a private alliance that specialized in salvaging and trading items of military interest that sometimes slipped between the cracks. While certain other groups pursuing the vanishing Phenex may have prioritized capturing Rita alive so they could pry information out of her under the most extreme modes of interrogation, this particular task force only saw her as a small complication that got in the way of gaining control of the unit. Whatever intel she had been keeping hidden away in her head had been nullified with the rest of her mind and was now of no concern.

Static echoed from the Phenex's open comms receiver. Then an anonymous voice clicked through.

"How's the hardware look in there?"

Laura quickly skimped through the diagnostic windows with Rita's sharp green eyes. She didn't spot anything out of the ordinary on her first pass.

"Weapons systems are all online. Audio-visual, communications, and navigation look clear. Reactor output is stable. This thing's been pretty well maintained for being AWOL for four months."

Her blank visor incidentally stared downward. Her tone changed from formalized military reporting to gentle pleasant surprise.

"Oh. Looks like we have one extra piece of cargo that wasn't on the scrap list."

"What's that?" the voice from the home ship asked.

The pilot unsealed her flight helmet from her neck and tossed it to nowhere in particular. Rita had her blonde hair done up in a quick blonde bun on the back of her head to kept it out of the way inside her helmet, which Laura picked apart and shook out so it fell to her shoulders in wavy golden fluffs. Still feeling a little stifled, Laura found the pull tab underneath her chin and unzipped the front of her pilot suit until it was open halfway down her torso. She let the middle of her bare chest air out and lounged back into her seat with a cheerful sigh.

"The cupcake I caught piloting this thing," she said with Rita's soft unfiltered voice. "I figured someone a little rougher on the edges would be commanding a stolen Newtype Destroyer. Guess the Feddies finally figured out some of those bridge bunnies know how to hop around on the field. I almost wish the psychic ones didn't have to worry about bad old witches like me."

"Lt. Zed, it's not safe to compromise the bio-receptor's normal suit until they've landed in the airlock," the voice on the cockpit radio firmly instructed. "If the unit takes any damage that exposes the cockpit-…"

Laura blew a puff of hot air through her wavy bangs as she rolled her eyes.

"You want me to relax and concentrate long enough to steer this thing back to the ship, don't you? Newtypes need to become one with their body. A girl needs some breathing room to stay cool."

Her hands slowly grasped the Phenex's control throttles as her ankle got used to the play on the accelerator.

"She's just raw hamburger anyway. Nobody's home if she winds up getting cooked."

Laura carefully turned the Phenex around, then pushed it straight into full ignition. Her calculated flight path only needed to be a smoothly arching line, but she spent the trip testing the Gundam's mobility and her body's response by constantly combining sudden turns, intricate loops, hard brakes, and repeated boosts. She quickly became impressed.

"If she does make the whole trip back and the med bay gives her a good check-up, I'm thinking I'll keep this one as one of my Spares," she said into her radio partway through her flight. "She's got that new feel I've been looking for."

Laura instinctively saw her less artificial Newtype kin as a source of hostility. It had been part of her lab upbringing for as long as she could remember. She already had close to dozen ex-regulars like Rita was soon going to be enhanced into Cyber Newtypes and lined up in a cryogenic wardrobe for when she wanted to try someone else on or the mission called for specific abilities. To her, the best way to curb the rivalry between original Newtypes and Cyber Newtypes was to turn all of them into Cyber Newtypes. Or at least the roughly half of them she could easily sync into and still feel like she was swimming in familiar territory. She could just kill all the other ones.

"Should we get the 2-inch hard tap ready as a preliminary measure?" the voice from the home ship asked in an indifferent tone.

It was idle chatter for anyone on the technologically aggressive side of society. Adapting a captured empty shell into a permanent Cyber Newtype vessel was a touchy scientific subject that seemed to involve an unlimited number of complex variables, but it was really just an option of how much brain tissue Laura wanted drilled out before she had a solid data socket bolted on. Destroying more tissue meant more cybernetic implants were needed to replace the brain's basic functions, and the body could wind up staying in the workshop for weeks while it recuperated. The most extreme cases forced Laura to control her host more on software emulation than actual neural pulses, and they were prone to… "glitches." Drilling in less deeper meant the recovery time would be faster and Laura would have better access to the brain's natural abilities, but it left a slight risk where fragments of the patient's original consciousness could come back and vie for control if they had an extremely high willpower.

Rita seemed like the quiet type. There was no way of knowing for certain what kind of rejection, if any, her neurons would go through from turned into a fixed cyber brainwave outlet, but Laura had a pretty good idea it would be a smooth transition. The worst part (sending her into complete Newtype overload so her mind collapsed and left her body as open-channel living microwave receiver) was already over and done with.

"Naw. I think this one will be fine getting jacked in with the quarter-inch," Laura replied in a thoughtful voice. "I don't want to mess up her cute hair."

Author's note: Damn, Rita. You got your stars rung, child.

Author's note 2: It's basically the same thing that happened to that Ayako Kawasumi character in that one Gundam Evolve episode, only more provocative and she doesn't randomly turn into the goddess Shiva at the end. Between that whole incident and Chidori's biology adventures from Ayashi no Ceres, I'm not sure why Ayako Kawasumi characters canonically keep having weird stuff happen to them.

Author's note 3: Rita seems like a nice gal. The kind you'd like to take home. But why does she look like a 25-year-old value menu-sized version of Anne from Persona 5?