It's been over ten years since I signed that contract that sealed me in this body, and I've quickly grown to find that an aeroframe cannot quite live fully independently of humans. Like any of the most reliable of machines, something will eventually break down from wear and tear, and depending on the construction, it may rust or show signs of stress over time. These nanomachines within our bodies, of which their nature is still a mystery to engineers, they can repair certain bits of damage and prevent some corrosion, but some components within our bodies still need proper care and maintenance, particularly our engines and avionics. If say, a fan-blade is bent, it will eventually correct itself, but if it breaks, what grows back will not be of a uniform shape with the others, and the density will be off from the other blades, resulting in inconsistent airflow or compression, and likely failure.

Aeroframes are typically assigned handlers and ground crews, with some sharing the other. Us spying types, usually working so close to intelligence require special crews that HAVE to travel with us, and because I'm a rather unique case, there is no argument to who who can and can't work on me. These men have been with me since the day I first awoke, and our friendship has been rock-solid ever since. Wherever my mission took me, they'd be on the first flight out that way.

To my left is Colonel Lamont "Monty" Washington, my "handler" and chief medical officer. A hard-working man hailing from Biloxi, he's a doctor in neurology and secretly (at the time) the leading expert with the unique life support systems keeping my brain alive. He often jokes about me being the "other woman" in his life apart from his wife. I never met his family, but I've heard that his son is off working at Los Alamos.

The dork with the bullet-proof spectacles is my primary mechanic, 2nd Lieutenant Tony Bryce. If there's anyone who's seen me inside and out in more ways than one, it would be him. He literally knows how to press my buttons in all the right ways. A chatterbox from Chicago who wanted to be a pilot in Vietnam, like his daddy was in WW2, but was relegated to mechanic on account of his eyesight, and that he didn't really keep his trap shut, but he did know how to keep secrets. He found that he enjoyed working with frames, mostly fighters, as he liked to listen to their stories as he worked on them.

On my thigh there is Captain Jesse "Flipper" Wu, my "chaser" and Tony's backup mechanic. Other pilots gave him a hard time because he was Chinese. His family suffered under Mao's "Great leap forward", enduring forced labor and starvation when he was a child. His father literally worked himself to death to give him and his mother a means of escape here to the states, coming with nothing but the rags on their backs, $20 and a seething hatred for communism. He exacted some of his revenge in Vietnam against Chinese pilots, and earned seven aerial kills to his name.

Last but certainly not least, the well-dressed cyclops down there is Patrick Kaiser, my liaison with the CIA. Pat comes from a family with big money up in New York, but he still elected to fly for the Wild Weasels in Vietnam. However, a close scuffle with an SA-1 in `67 cost him his good eye and unfortunately, his wings. Wound up landing a job up in Langley for his analytical capabilities. He and Monty worked closely together, one caring for my health and wellness, and the other making sure I still had a voice with the spooks up in Langley, as some up top still don't see us frames as anything more than over-glorified and expendable drones, even if one does have a human brain. Many are put off by his clean and suave appearance (personally I think it's the eyepatch, we tell him to just get a glass eye), but he's always looked out for us, and made sure we had everything we needed to get the job done... Even though we knew not to question how he was able to do so...

Been meaning to do this piece up for a hot minute, maybe as far back as January last year, but shit got busy back there and I was not satisfied with how the original image looked. I did something new with this one, featuring a background I put together in Blender! I'm looking at ways of trying to incorporate 3D assets into some of my works to reduce drawing time, and potentially reuse later on even. :3

Low-key thinking of "Ebony Eyes" for the song here, by Bob Welch.

As for the watermarks, I am sad to say, some people do not respect artists and their wishes, and think it's okay to reupload these to other sites or use to train AI models. I always used film-grain and chromatic aberration simply for aesthetic, but I've heard that AI models really HATE grain and not-so-precise coloring, so consider it a permanent part of my works now. I've seen reports of some college professors putting together software for artists to fight back against AI training by allegedly "poisoning" the model, one ironically called "Nightshade" too, and you can bet I'll be all over that once it's available. I did not dedicate years of practice, passion and efforts to drawing just for someone to take those images and use them to generate a half-assed carbon copies in minutes.

Don't take this as a 100% anti-AI stance, I see how it can be applied usefully, to HELP artists make certain things easier, particularly with visualizing something and maybe taking the workload off certain things, but what gets me is you have people who post these pieces with no care to credit the sources, or try to pass it off as their work.