Noelle

Noelle / N01(e) is the cybernetic personality of a 45-tonne bipedal ‘tank’ in the near-future apocalyptic science fiction story ‘In Armour Clad’ by Bryony Marsh. With her pilot, Captain Lucas Garand, she fights in the European Civil War, serving in the Army of Burgundia and Auvergne. For reasons of efficiency, Noelle has been engineered to have a personality that Garand will fall in love with.

Garand is badly wounded, losing his legs, but he is able to keep fighting because he steers via a mind-machine interface. Noelle also suffers severe damage. She ought to be replaced outright, but Garand bribes a technician to pass her as fit for action. The pair are highly dependent upon each other from this point onward, and Noelle plans to have herself “miniaturised” after the war so that she can continue to help her pilot.

The pair acquire a large quantity of valuable ‘liquid metal’ in a battlefield heist: a material that can be made to change shape at will. When Garand suffers grievously in one of the last battles of the civil war, Noelle operates upon him, saving just enough human tissue to keep his brain alive. When he regains consciousness, he’s still inside Noelle but she’s now human-sized and made almost entirely from liquid metal. She poses as a refugee and the pair face new challenges as they try to escape Europe, such as being captured and put to work as slave labour and narrowly escaping when Trieste is destroyed by an atomic bomb. Later they return, looking to restore some measure of peace to the ruined continent. A very distorted version of Noelle’s story emerges in European folklore and as a comic book character in Japan, the vigilante ‘Woman in Pink’ who poses as a helpless refugee to trap those who try to waylay travellers.