Yu Ming is a former Steelframe pilot and current-day consultant for interplanetary corporations with offices on Titan. She is a deeply empathetic person, taking great care to ensure the safety and well-being of those around her or under her command, but that compassion tends to manifest as a rigid, military code of order. In her line of work she believes that uncompromising commitment to safety and protocol is the strongest guarantee that everyone makes it home alive at the end of the day, and while some may find that sort of icy exterior off-putting or intimidating, those in her company know that there's a core of love beneath the cold. It is personal; she is genuinely trying to keep you around as long as possible in the way she knows best, that's all.
There is a niche that exists between the land and the stars, between all-terrain ground vehicles and sky-splitting starships, and that niche is filled by Steelframes. Tall as a building, Steelframes are large mechanical humanoids equipped with powerful engines and jet boosters, allowing them to navigate remote and forbidding terrain that is inaccessible to tracked or wheeled vehicles as easily as they can maneuver through the weightlessness of space. Piloting a Steelframe affords a team a rare mix of precision and mobility that few other vehicles can match; it's a costly answer to complex problems, however, when speed can be substituted with time and patience the Steelframe's utility tends to vanish. Frame pilots like Yu Ming are few and far between, but if your job calls for a big metal robot, there are no substitutes for the real thing.
Becoming a Frame pilot isn't easy; in addition to the rigorous filter of a pilot aptitude and training program, a Frame pilot must also survive the ordeal of receiving an invasive neural implant. Easy to spot by the rectangular indentation and two contact points on their forehead, a Frame pilot needs this implant in order to pilot a Steelframe at all- due to the towering scale of a Steelframe, a network of gyrostabilizers and micro-adjustment computers are required to keep a bipedal machine standing and ambulatory. To do that, the Steelframe is wired directly into the pilot's brain, taking advantage of their own subconscious sense of balance to feed data into the central stabilization systems that keep a Steelframe upright, where piloting a Steelframe without this neural implant is akin to getting up and walking when your arms and legs are numb; you're going to fall down. It's the sort of limiting factor one never pays much mind to until it's no longer there, but it's absolutely crucial to operating a large-scale mechanical frame. Even under the best conditions, undergoing a neural implant procedure has about a 50% success rate, with a 20% chance of fatal rejection by the recipient. Between the aptitude screening and successful recovery from a very invasive procedure, good Frame pilots are extremely uncommon. Yu Ming is one of the oldest still kicking around today, in the 2380's.
Yu Ming began her career as a starship pilot with the Terran Star Navy where she served aboard a carrier of nimble fighter craft. Between her skill on the yoke and her strong leadership qualities she was invited to join a program exploring the military applications of the industrial Steelframe. After training and recovery, Yu Ming and her unit- the Sparrows- were deployed to serve the Star Navy during the Inner World Terraforming Conflict. The idea was, a squadron of heavily-armed Steelframes would have the maneuverability to evade enemy fire and the precision to breach a forcefield and land aboard the hull of a rogue starship, rendering its defenses inert and exposing it to fire from larger battleships. In practice, the Sparrows saw some small successes and a few injuries, but for combat applications it was simply more practical to train and equip starship pilots than it was to maintain a crew of neural-implanted Steelframe operators, and so the program was quickly retired. Big robots, it turns out, are not any more suited to space combat than a small craft with guns on the front.
Civilian outfits, however, have all kinds of uses for a Steelframe's utility, and so they've found a niche in construction, survey, exploration and maintenance of heavy industry in remote places. In the wake of the Inner World Terraforming Conflict, Yu Ming and her Sparrows found employment with the Venture Out corporation, who needed a team of competent Frame pilots to assist with construction of a habitat on the dark side of Luna. Known as the MoonGate project, the Sparrows were to use their skills to assist in the surveying of Luna for a appropriate site and to assist with the remote construction of a large long-term living space in an environment that does not innately support life. Venture Out wanted to market an answer to the old Horizon CX units by creating and deploying a range of autonomous construction vehicles touted for their ability to build habitats in the uninhabitable without the need for a manned crew. The Sparrows' job was to make sure Venture Out's operation appeared to work as intended, using their Steelframes to keep the unmanned machinery on track. Based out of an orbiting starship, the Sparrows would deploy each day and maintain the illusion that Venture Out's operation was as unmanned as they claimed.
Things didn't go well. Poor funding, limited engineering freedom, executive meddling and a marketing-driven timetable plagued the MoonGate operation, and despite these obstacles the Sparrows were able to deliver the job on time and under budget. They didn't have long to celebrate, however, as shortly after debuting the MoonGate habitat and housing its earliest residents, catastrophic system failure and an ensuing blast stemming from a Venture Out self-maintaining fuel regulation system caused a massive rupture in the East wing of the project, exposing all of the facility's occupants to the indifferent grasp of Luna's vacuum. While the Sparrows did their best to deliver the project, Venture Out intended to saddle them with the blame for the MoonGate's failure. The Sparrows were formally disbanded, their Steelframes were decommissioned and the team went their separate ways. The remains of the MoonGate habitat have sat undisturbed on the dark side of Luna ever since. Chip, an abandoned colony explorer and a respected video journalist, has described the remains of MoonGate as "surprisingly intact but shockingly haunted." No salvage crew will touch it.
These days, Yu Ming works as a consultant for interplanetary corporations whose interests call for the recruitment of Steelframe pilots. Having served under her prior commands, she advocates sternly for best practices in hiring and supporting Steelframe crews, doing what she can to ensure they're given the best chance they can for success. Pilots are a rarity, and each loss is a huge toll on her community, with exploitation and mismanagement presenting constant threats for pilots who are hungry for work. Yu Ming can often be found in Titan Garden, in the B-District, visiting one corporate tower or another, doing what she can to look out for her people. She hasn't wired into a Steelframe herself for a few years.
Yu Ming is a regular patient at the Ironworks Clinic, where the chief cybernetics engineer, Magnus, has taken on maintaining her clockwork prosthetics. She has a good rapport with Magnus, who in turn appreciates her regulated and uncompromising personality- occasionally they'll talk and she'll share stories with him, and he'll always lend an ear to listen. She loves to talk about her Sparrows, about Spider's practical jokes or Sidewinder's miraculous good luck, or Jackal's crazy ideas about using their neural implants to upload themselves to computers. She misses them, and he can tell. She'd heard about the fate of one of her old crew, they'd been working as a starship pilot aboard a ship called the Reef Shark, running transport jobs for credits. She didn't talk about it much, but she trusted Magnus enough to share that story with him. Never heard about it herself until after the fact, so she never got to be there for the funeral.
Magnus is sympathetic, he's quiet for the somber stories and saves his own energy for the right times- he often compares Yu Ming to stories about his other patients, about one in particular who is a real stone in his boot. Yu Ming has seen this one, fleeting, as she's leaving the clinic; there's an Android who sometimes accompanies her, a mediator between doctor and patient. She doesn't know many Androids, but there's always been something about this one, about the way she talks or the way she carries herself, the friendly rapport she has with her companion. Yu Ming's always wondered, but always felt it a breach of decorum to speak up and say something. She's seen enough ghosts in her time, she didn't need them haunting strangers. She often leaves quietly when those two show up, out of sight. It's none of her business, really. It's best not to ask.