Most of the administrative tasks related to Jonathan's arrival had been handled by the Royal Academy's computer system. The only errand Jonathan had to run himself was to visit the central warehouse and pick up his school uniform. The previous evening he had found the deserted campus a bit eerie. This morning the empty hallways were a beautiful sight as he sped through the queueing area and scanned his id card at the front terminal.

The attendant came forward a moment later with a box holding three sets of the uniform. Jonathan signed for it and was on his way, musing about how he was going to fill the free time. He'd planned to spend all morning waiting in line or signing forms. Instead he would have time to explore the campus if he felt like it, although it felt like a bit of a waste without any other students around.

He got a surprise when he returned to his room and opened the box. As expected, there were three identical uniforms contained inside. Vaguely military in design, the shirt, jacket, and pants looked just as they'd been pictured in the academy brochure. What hadn't been pictured on the brochure was the gold piping on the edge of the jacket's lapel.

Jonathan's first thought was that there had been some kind of mix up. He hadn't ordered any modifications to the basic uniform. He hadn't even been aware that there were any options to choose from. He unfolded the jacket and found that it was his size, though, which seemed an unlikely coincidence.

"Damn," Philip said, pausing in the process of putting his own uniform away, "you really played it cool."

Jonathan blinked. "What do you mean?"

"Are you kidding?" Philip asked. "That gold decoration goes to the top student of the year."

Now that he mentioned it, Jonathan thought he remembered seeing something about uniform decorations in the brochure. The color coding he'd been paying attention to was the distinction by year. First year students wore white, while second year students wore blue and third year students black uniforms. Jonathan hadn't expected to have to worry about any other decorations at least until school started.

"How could they hand this out already?" he asked. Taking a closer look, Philip's uniforms were decorated with silver where his uniform had gold.

"Right now the only merit points we have come from the admissions officer," Philip said. "You must have put something impressive in your application packet."

"Well," Jonathan said, "there was my sync rate."

Jonathan didn't think that his recommendation letter from the director of the orphanage would have made him stand out. The only unusual thing about his application had been the sync rate, and even there it was hard to believe he could earn the title of top student based on a single number.

"You... I heard somebody put up a monstrous number," Philip said. "That was you?"

"Eighty-one percent," Jonathan said.

Philip pantomimed clutching at his own heart. "Even the rumor mill didn't go that high. Hey, don't forget about your old roommate when you're commanding the royal army."

Jonathan scoffed, shaking his head. "Don't be ridiculous. I just have a little head start."

He wanted to hold on to the golden decoration, but he wasn't going to let it distort his thinking. His fellow classmates at the Royal Academy were the best of the best. Students who had been training their whole lives to be mech pilots, using equipment that wasn't even available back on Matoug. The Divine Piloting System had given him a leg up, but he might not even get access to it again until after he graduated.

The basic piloting package might have given him a head start on synchronization, but that was a gap that could be closed with time and training. Also, it was hardly the only factor in a fight. Sure, better synchronization made for smoother and easier operation of the mech, but superior skill could easily overcome a little awkwardness.

"If it was just a head start, why do you think it's so important for your admissions test?" Philip asked. "Every point in your initial sync score means you have that much more potential for future growth."

That was a tidbit of information that hadn't been mentioned in any of Jonathan's early education. Honestly, he wasn't sure that it was good news. After all, he was pretty sure that his natural sync rate had been fifty-six percent. That had been where the reading seemed to settle before he'd gotten the basic piloting package, and it suggested that the system had given him a tidy twenty-five percent increase.

If you were looking at it not as an evaluation of how smoothly he could pilot a mech but rather as a gauge of his potential, Jonathan wasn't sure whether fifty-six or eighty-one was the right number. Maybe the basic piloting package had done more than just bump up his sync rate, but he couldn't know for certain.

Johnthan took another look at the gold piping. One thing was for sure, if we wanted to keep it then he was going to be in for a fight.

"Is eighty one really that high?"

"In the whole class there might be one or two people in the low seventies," Philip said. "The teachers put you in first place for a reason."

"I guess I'll have to try and live up to their expectations," Jonathan said, then sighed. "This is going to be a lot of work."

If the system had painted a target on his back without giving him a skill boost to back it up, it was going to be a long three years. Jonathan was willing to buckle down and work hard, but the cold reality was that without the system there was no way he would ever have rubbed shoulders with the students of the Royal Academy, let alone competed with them for the top spot.

He'd long known that he wasn't getting the best possible education from childhood. It wasn't like he had ever been in the position to complain. As a penniless orphan, he was lucky that he had food to eat and a roof over his head, let alone a free education. His burning desire to become a mech pilot had driven him to excel in his classes, but even so he'd been nothing more than a big fish in a small pond.

Now that he'd moved to the capital and enrolled in the Royal Academy, though, he was going to be swimming with a bunch of sharks who had been honing their killer instincts since birth. Even if the system had given him a chance to succeed, it wouldn't matter if he didn't put in the work to take advantage.

"It wouldn't be impressive if it wasn't hard," Philip said. "C'mon, I'll show you the ropes in the virtual trainer."

Part of the appeal of Royal Academy came from the distinguished teachers. Part of it came from the chance to rub elbows with other outstanding students. A large part of it, though, came from its access to a rich stockpile of training equipment. The wealth of the academy was obvious just from looking at the veritable city that made up its home base on a planet where every inch of real estate was precious. Where the rubber really hit the road, though, was the virtual trainers.

The technology was unimaginably precious and unimaginably useful. The academy back on Matoug had boasted of four training pods to be shared among hundreds of students. Even such limited access was a tremendous boon in developing young mech pilots.

The basic problem facing all trainees was that maneuvering a building sized mech that was built for war was a dangerous task. Even without any enemy attacks, it was all too easy for a trainee to hurt himself. Stumbling and falling would be more embarrassing than truly dangerous, but the harm caused by feedback from a poorly synchronized pilot trying to reach beyond his abilities was no joke.

Feedback was a vital component of mech operation. Without a mechanism that allowed the pilot to feel as though he had truly become the mech, moving it about would be awkward at best. It would be as though an ancient knight tried to charge into battle while his whole body was numbed by drugs.

More fundamentally, without the feedback mechanism it was almost impossible to spark the spirit reactor that allowed mechs to dominate the battlefield. Without that strange alchemy giving access to improbable amounts of energy, combat might as well be left to tanks and drones piloted by sophisticated AI.

All that said, when a badly synched pilot tried to give orders that were out of tune with the true state of a battle mech, he'd be lucky to get off with just broken bones. More permanent injuries and even death were all too possible.

The other horn of the dilemma came from the fact that the only way for any pilot to improve was to push his limits. Even if newbies were painstakingly trained to avoid fatal accidents by means of cautious piloting, ten hours of training with the utmost caution was hardly as good as five minutes of really pushing themselves.

The virtual training pod cut through the problem with the power of technology. A training pod worked through a neural interface to put students into a simulation that was about a ninety percent accurate simulation of the real world. It was a fantastical device that relied on components harvested from dangerous locations in the depths of wild space. Not only were they fiendishly expensive, but even those with money to spare could only buy one if they had enough political pull.

It was a sign of the Royal Academy's wealth and influence both that it provided a pod for every student. They were limited to using the device no more than four hours a day for safety reasons, but their own pod would be available for them to use whenever it fit into their schedules.

First year students trained almost exclusively on the virtual pods. Second year students could earn the rights to some amount of real world training. Third years were more likely to spend some time in real mechs, though they still did most of their training in the virtual space.

The official enrollment that had granted them their uniforms had also opened up access to the virtual training pods. Jonathan had to admit that he was curious about what they were like. Following Philip to get a personal feel for the new technology seemed like an excellent way to fill in the time before lunch.

The virtual pods were located in a large building in the middle of the campus. The two of them had to pass through yet another security checkpoint on their way inside. Almost as much as the headmaster's office, this was the beating heart of the academy. Setting aside the sheer wealth represented by the training pods stored within, the students inside the pods were blind to the outside world, completely vulnerable both to petty pranks or more serious crime.

The Royal Academy addressed both threats by putting access to the pods in the most secure and most highly surveilled building on campus. Cameras filmed every inch of the interior from almost every angle. Jonathan felt a little strange walking through such intense surveillance, but he had to admit that he felt relieved to think that all of that technology would be safeguarding him while he was focused on the virtual world.

Those same cameras were no doubt recording Jonathan as he peered about like a rube from a third rate planet. He couldn't help it. The dizzying array of readouts and monitoring screens surrounding the high tech virtual training pods was everything he'd dreamed of when he'd first realized that he'd been reborn in a futuristic world.

His heart beat faster as he came closer and closer to his first real interaction with such fantastic technology.