Chapter 14
“Today, we’ll be practicing maneuvers in the virtual space.” Professor Kitagawa explained, as we entered the VR Hall. “Here, you’ll have the opportunity to raise your rank, and eventually pilot a real Shinka.”
This class had only been theory until now, and I was dying to at least get to virtually pilot a Shinka.
I may not be a master of climbing ropes or carrying bags up a mountain, but maybe the sparring moves I’d been learning would translate.
“I know many of you have never used a system like this before, so take some time to get comfortable with basic movements, and I’ll be available through your COMM systems to offer guidance if you’re having trouble.
Once you’re able to move comfortably in the lobby environment, I’ll give you the coordinates for the starting portal, and we’ll begin the scenario. ”
With that, he sent us all into the locker room in the Virtual Reality Labs.
I liked it. It sounded like a fair system to me, and it gave me hope that I wouldn’t be stuck in the bottom rankings forever, so long as I had better luck in the pilot seat than I did on the track.
In the locker room, I located my assigned locker, where an Imperium suit made to my specifications was nestled inside.
An imperium suit was a skin tight, flexible bodysuit that had circuitry and nerve sensors built into the fabric, connected to the body through small, needle-like probes that embedded into the nervous system upon activation.
These suits allowed the pilot to synchronize movements with their machine, using a LYNC helmet to translate the neurological signals directly to the control center of the robots.
I’d seen it in pictures and had it explained extensively in lectures, but it was hard to fully imagine what it would be like to actually wear one.
“Well look at this. You’re even smaller in your Imperium, Mishka.
” Elio gave me a hard slap on the back that sent me careening into the locker.
I fortunately caught myself without banging my head into the metal door, because I was not going to be another concussion statistic if I could help it.
“Watch your back in there. Just because it’s virtual, doesn’t mean you won’t feel anything. ”
Dressed in his Imperium Suit, his muscles were even more visible, the dark fabric creating shadows in all the right places, leaving very little of his body to the imagination.
Some of the guys wore pants over their suits, but Elio had no such bashfulness.
I’d seen him working out enough times to know he was quite proud of his strength and fitness.
I shook my head, not wanting to take that as a thinly veiled threat, and deciding it was just locker room banter, for my own sake.
But then again… Did you feel pain while in a Shinka?
They hadn’t addressed that in class, and I hadn’t thought to look into it.
I suppose if your nerves were fully linked to the robot’s functions for movement, it could be possible that damage might translate in your brain as though it was happening to your real limbs.
“Quit being so dramatic, Firefly.” Breaker cut in, his uniform pants covering the bottom half of his black suit.
The sensory links throughout the fabric glowed like purple track lights, drawing flattering lines down his torso and arms, hugging every hard shape of his defined Adonis belt.
“You’ll be fine, Pipsqueak,” he addressed me next.
Pipsqueak… My expression flattened, all of those good feelings fading in the wind.
How many nicknames was I going to collect, and why did they all have to be about my size?
I’d made the mistake of looking up Mishka, which in one language meant bear, but in another language meant mouse.
I’d been pretending Elio meant ‘bear’ for my ego, but I was well aware I was lying to myself.
Sebastian had started calling me Snow, apparently because of some weird and very small Earth animal that looked like me, and now I had become Pipsqueak.
Well, as long as none of them called me she, her, or Fianna, maybe that was still winning.
Breaker followed his last words of encouragement, adding: “Just focus on the movements like you would focus on balancing a pen on your fingertip. Once you start to feel it, and your body naturally understands the way it needs to compensate to find the balance point, it becomes second nature.”
“Don’t coddle him.” Sebastian approached, wearing his full uniform over his suit, and I immediately swallowed down my sense of dread as I finished pulling on the gloves.
“We don’t need another liability.” I knew I wasn’t the best during Basics, but we’d been sparring a lot in weapons training, and I was starting to believe I’d earned his respect.
And yet the first time he acknowledged me outside of obligatory instruction was to call me a liability?
I frowned, trying not to internalize that the guy I admired the most had nothing good to say about me now that we were outside of practice.
“I won’t be a liability,” I said, hoping that was true.
Sebastian frowned, and Breaker broke eye contact, neither one of them actually giving me the benefit of the doubt when faced with doing so publicly.
“Like I said, you’ll be fine.” Breaker patted me on the shoulder in that way-too-hard way he often did, and I cringed at the fact that I visibly buckled under the pressure in front of everyone.
Sebastian just shook his head, and I felt the smallest I’d felt since I got here.
I needed to be good at this. If I did nothing else right the whole time I was here, it had to be piloting a Shinka.
I headed out of the locker room, and I located my designated VR pod. In every way, the Cylindrical training stations were designed to be identical to the real cockpit of a Shinka suit.
I climbed the stairs beside the pod, then I pressed my palm to a red circle in the center of the hatch, initiating the open sequence.
The metal panel broke away in a fan like motion, withdrawing into the rim of the tube, then I dropped into the chamber, scaling a few feet of buffer room before I landed in the seat.
Inside the cylinder was cramped and narrow, with a circumference only large enough to fit the seat and the controls in the bottom of the cockpit.
Uncharacteristic claustrophobia hit me as the hatch closed behind me, and I sat in total darkness for a second or two before the chamber lit up with screens that wrapped around the entirety of my person.
I slotted each of my feet into large boot-like chambers that were affixed to the floor, then I slotted each of my hands into two small, rounded pods at the end of the arm rests that had a light blue glow.
Inside each was something that felt like a cool and squishy gel that melded itself in between my fingers and coiled around my ankles.
My appendages were frozen in the gel, while I had the impossible-to-explain belief that I was still moving them freely, despite.
Maybe this was what Breaker meant by learning to adjust to balance points.
I was going to have to get used to willing my body to move with ordinary brain signals, while accepting that I was actually in a chair and wasn’t personally performing the actions.
The disconnect sounded impossible, but if these guys could handle it, so could I.
Next, a belt closed around my waist, and an armor-like vest restraint clamped around my chest, snaking up over my shoulders and locking me in to the backrest. A feminine voice read me my vitals once I was completely secure in the seat.
The LYNC helmet rounded my crown next, expanding to cover my full face, then extending a lens across my eyes.
That cooling sensation started oozing into my ears at the same time that the probes in my Imperium suit started penetrating my skin.
I felt the body-wide prick of needles while gel fill me all the way to my ear drums, and in the blink of an eye, a hard jolt ripped my consciousness out of reality and into the Virtual World.
I looked down at my hands, which now belonged to a Shinka.
I felt along my face, and I took in the information that translated beneath my feet and through my fingertips.
I could feel things as though this body was truly mine, from the pressure on my heels as I stood in the virtual lobby, to the temperature of the false environment, to the precise way I tapped a finger against my arm as a sanity check.
This suit had become a second skin, as sensitive as being completely naked.
Shit, I probably will feel pain.
It was difficult to come to terms with the fact that I was sitting completely still in the pod, while my mind had been transferred into this false armored suit.
The machine moved as naturally as my own body, and I could no longer discern the difference between my physical existence and this virtual one.
It was more vivid than the most lucid dream, and I’d truly become this robot.
I located my weapons in the form of two swords crossed behind my shoulders, and a variable weapon cylinder on my hip that, similar to our training spheres, could be expanded into my tool of choice, Next, I moved every single joint just to find its range of motion.
Its flexibility was slightly more limited than my own, but it moved with such an agile step and effortless fluidity that it wasn’t terribly hindering.
I located all of my propulsion jets on my back unit, my heels, on each side of my calves, and some beneath the armor of my shoulders, allowing for fast and dynamic movement in every direction, while they were activated by my will in a way that felt as natural as walking.
The propulsion was simply part of me and how my body knew to move.