Somebody, somewhere, signed off on this.
That is the part I keep coming back to. There was a meeting. There was a budget.
And the budget did not stretch to a whole mechanical man, so the requisition came back approved-with-modifications: one ape, surplus, and one television cabinet, walnut veneer, twenty-one inch, with the pilot's own skull mounted up behind the glass and lit from within so the farm folk would know to be frightened.
They set it down in a soybean field behind a collapsing barn at sunset. Two of the crew came out in the good green suits with the fishbowl helmets.
And the third came down the ramp on his knuckles, tuning himself as he went, because the reception out here is TERRIBLE.
He gets one channel. It is him.
