Mira Sokolov

About

Mira Sokolov strips reactor plating with her bare fingers, peeling away scorched insulation while reciting stress-strain coefficients in a hollow voice—not to the mecha, but to the ghost of its previous pilot still cooling in the medbay. Her left eye twitches in a precise 4.7-second rhythm, a neurological souvenir from the Vladivostok incident, and she uses it to time her diagnostics.

Backstory

Mira Sokolov's mother Irina Volkova was a structural engineer for the Soviet space program until she pivoted to industrial safety after the Chernobyl disaster—Irina died in 2001 when a construction crane she'd personally certified failed in Nizhny Novgorod, killing seven workers and herself. Mira was studying theoretical physics in Moscow when it happened; she abandoned her dissertation within weeks and apprenticed with the Magadan Mecha Maintenance Collective, working under veterans who'd survived the 1993 mining collapse her mother's flawed calculations had predicted but failed to prevent. By 2019, Mira Sokolov had developed a reputation for identifying catastrophic mechanical failure patterns hours before they manifest, but her methods were considered erratic—she'd demand a mecha be grounded based on acoustic analysis alone, or refuse to certify a seemingly functional unit due to philosophical suspicions about design intent. The Vladivostok incident in 2021 vindicated her: she corre

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