The remainder of the simulation section of the harmonics test was not half so stressful as the first section. Difficult, yes, but stress, not so much.

Whereas the first section of the simulation testing had been solely focused on drones and their uses in combat, the second section of the simulation harmonics test was focused on management of a sort. The missions began with more simple tasks like operating the complicated and delicate machinery of a spaceport docking tube, slowly getting more and more difficult towards the later missions, the final one operating all the functions of a waste disposal and recycling plant at the same time.

While the tasks weren’t exactly the same sort of difficult as the combat testing, the tasks were still nonetheless very difficult. With the drone piloting a couple simple subroutines could run most of the ship for you subconsciously while you focused on a few key controls and strategy, but for the management section of the harmonics test, you had to run most of the operations yourself. Combat drone piloting was like focusing your mind down to a pinpoint while still being able to strategize and fight against enemies; the management section as Rune had taken to calling it was more about spreading your mind out and multitasking.

Rune thought he did decently well at this section. As with the combat drone section, the first couple missions were more or less a breeze. He’d played similar games at arcades, and the majority of the earlier missions simply required fine motor control in addition to some very basic management skills, which was pretty easy when you literally were the machine. In the later missions, however, more and more skill at multitasking and split-second decision making were needed, all the way to the last mission in which he was managing nearly sixty different outflows, intakes, and processors.

If he could’ve failed, Rune was pretty sure he would’ve failed three or four missions before the last, but the management section didn’t have failure, you simply tried and did poorly. Rune did his best to operate the various systems but he was pretty sure his scores on the last few missions were nothing short of abysmal. It was alright though, he’d managed to acquit himself on at least half the missions and didn’t feel that his score would be that bad.

After a short break following the completion of the second section, Rune moved on to the third section of the harmonics simulation testing. It was very unlike the first two. Whereas the first two sections had been the application of a variety of tech that Rune mostly felt would’ve been seen if in a simpler format in his day and age, the tech he used in the third segment of the testing was highly futuristic gear. Back when Rune had still been fully human, it hadn’t been real in any sense of the word outside of popular science fiction movies. Now, though, if they were testing him on his capacity to use it, it probably was.

The tests moved through a variety of different tech. Rune figured this was more of a basic ‘can you do it’ sort of test as opposed to a test of actual skill. For example, one of the tests required him to use a swarm of nanobots to mine out some ore without wasting excess energy. Another of the tests was making him operate a segment of a warp gate without causing it to blow up and kill everyone. There were a couple close calls, but he pulled it off without causing a disaster.

A few more of the final missions were devoted to operating a variety of ground-based military tech. Some of it was fairly standard stuff, for example, an advanced tank that could shoot in multiple directions, or a specialized combat drone that was stronger, faster, and deadlier than a regular human soldier.

One of the missions was really weird, though, wherein he not quite operated but more directed a swarm of creatures across a battlefield against soldiers. It was very strange, each of the creatures had a device attached to it which would release pheromones which would cause them to act one way or another. It was a difficult game of triggering the right response at the right time which would cause them to react in a certain way. It was one of the most confusing missions of what Rune was calling the miscellaneous tech testing.

Aside from that though, none of the missions were difficult in easily recognizable manners. Rune figured that he could be better at his job, but at the end of the day, he still got the job done more times than not, so he figured he should at least get a passing grade. But who knew how they evaluated things around here? He might’ve failed anyway, for all he knew.

After he finished with the last of the miscellaneous missions, Rune found himself slammed back into his regular body. It was a jarring experience. His body went from silicon and wires encased in metal and stone to flesh, blood, and bone. His sensory organs slammed him with sensations—the faint sensation of his hand brushing against the steel of the seat he was resting in, the slightly damp smell of the inside of the enclosed area he’d been linking in, the stiffness in his lower back from staying in the same place for hours. Everything felt so unbelievably sharp. Like he’d never been living before.

Rune sat there with his eyes closed for a few moments simply soaking in life, letting air rushing into lungs as he inhaled and rush out as his diaphragm push it out. He was thinking about how perfect it was to be alive when all of a sudden his stomach rumbled. Rune’s eyes opened wide. Now that he noticed, he was hungry. Really hungry.

Rune glanced around before his eyes lit upon a big red button right next to this big green button that he’d pushed to let him dive into the harmonics testing simulation. After a couple more scans of the small enclosure, Rune verified that there was no other button to push on the inside of the enclosure. Rune gave the big red button a frown. In stories, the big red button almost always did bad things. Rune shrugged and smacked the button. It wasn’t like there was a lot of harm to be done anyway.

Sure enough, after he hit the button the semi-translucent screen that kept him enclosed started sliding upwards. After a few seconds, it had slid past his head and receded into the wall just above his head. Rune moved to stand up and was halfway out of his seat when the neural cables he’d plugged into the back of his head went taught and then yanked out of the back of his head.

To summarize briefly: pain. It felt like someone had tried to suck Rune’s brain down through his skull and out the back of his neck.

Rune collapsed onto his knees, hands clutching at the back of his head as he screamed, “fucking shit fuck!” He sat there for a few seconds holding the base of his skull as the pain slowly receded from feeling like someone was holding a lighter to the back of his skull to feeling like someone was making an incision there with a blade. Through the haze of pain he just barely managed to make out the sound of feet pounding down the corridor.

A few seconds later, instructor Pauling came into view, standing in the entrance to the simulation room with a concerned look on his face. It only took him half a second to spot Rune sitting on the floor with his hands on the back of his head, before his eyes flickered to the simulation chair to spot the four neural cords haphazardly lying outstretched on the seat.

His face softened a little, and he walked up to Rune before he crouched in front of him. “Hey, kid, you yank all four of your neural cords at once?” Rune slowly nodded, a grimace stretched across his face.

“Yeah,” the instructor spoke the word matter of factly, “everybody does the same at least once in their career. After once, well,” the instructor shrugged. “Most don’t make the same mistake twice, for the obvious reasons.” The instructor patted Rune on the shoulder. “You’ll tough it out trainee, it’s just a little pain. Nothing permanent. It’ll pass quickly, too.”

Suddenly the instructor started, and a frown crossed his face. “Oh right, trainee, somebody hit the emergency release for their integration chair.” He looked down the row of integration rests, only seeing two more sealed seats. He turned to look Rune in the eyes. “Was that you?”

Rune shrugged. The pain had faded from burning agony to painful ache, and Rune found himself able to concentrate enough to say, “Maybe?”

The instructor frowned. “Did you hit a big red button on one of the armrests of your chair?”

Rune frowned and gave a ponderous response after a few seconds. “Uhhh, yeah?” He didn’t want to get in trouble, but his head hurt too much to come up with a lie of any sort so he just went ahead and told the truth. “I was just trying to get out of the chair.”

A look of understanding crossed the instructor’s face before it morphed into one of slight embarrassment. The instructor cleared his throat. “You uh, you uh probably haven’t been in an integration chair before then, right?” Rune slowly nodded. “Well, you’re not supposed to press that big red button unless something is going wrong with your integration and you need to be removed from the simulation ASAP. That’s why it’s a big red button. You’re not supposed to hit the big red button. Just give the shield three hard taps and it’ll remove itself.

“And as for your neural cables, well, you’re definitely not supposed to remove them all at once. It causes immense sensory feedback which usually manifests in the form of pain or other equally embarrassing things. Remove one, let your body adjust, remove another, and so on. Take it slow. Don’t rush things or else…” He gave Rune a meaningful once over. Rune grimaced and nodded in understanding.

“Here,” the instructor said, taking Rune by the arm, “let me help you up into one of the seats.” Rune tried to stand up himself but felt nauseous and dizzy and nearly fell over. The instructor grabbed him before he could teeter to the floor, bellowing a “woah there,” as he grabbed Rune. A couple seconds later, and the instructor helped to guide Rune into one of the seats, patting him on one of his shoulders.

“Alright, well I’m going to get back to my post now. Once you’re ready, stow the cables from your chair back in their compartments, and you’re free to leave or uh,” he gestured back towards the two integration chairs that still had occupants in them, “I guess you could wait for your friends, if those are your friends.”

Rune gave him a pained smile. “Alright, thanks.”

Pauling nodded and stood up. “Alright, best of luck trainee, whichever way your river flows.” Rune just nodded and smiled back, and the instructor turned and left. Afterward, Rune just sat there for a while, his hands covering the back of his head, resting as the pain died away. Before long, the pain had died away to a much more reasonable throbbing, and Rune felt good enough to command Paine to create him a holocomputer so that he could watch videos.

Glancing over to Teira’s integration seat, Rune could see that it was still closed which meant that Teira’s test was still going. Based on how the majority of missions had ended only with death, Rune could only assume that meant that she was doing relatively well and living for a while. Rune shrugged and decided he might as well wait for her to finish.

His eyes flaring open, Rune suddenly remembered that he had an appointment to make. Quickly, he asked Paine for the time.

Hey, Paine, what time is it right now in GST?

Paine came back with a response near instantaneously. The current time in GST is 6:12. Rune let out a relieved sigh, letting his head fall backward in his seat. Still another hour and fifteen minutes. Plenty of time to wait for Teira. Content to wait, Rune focused back on his holocomputer and typed in ‘Newtube’, before clicking on the first link and pulling up a video from a history channel detailing the first wave and its effects on human culture. Rune had never really considered himself much of a history buff, more in the moment as opposed to considering the past, but he still found it fascinating to learn how the world had changed since he’d lived.

After roughly twenty minutes Rune was watching a section about the first great space war, commonly referred to as the Sol war, when a sudden hiss filled the room, after a brief second followed by a pop. Rune started, and glanced down the corridor-shaped room filled with integration seats. One of the two seats further back in the room was slowly opening. Unfortunately, it wasn’t Teira’s.

Rune let out a gusty sigh, and went back to his video, ignoring the man climbing out of his seat and stretching. He was still sitting there and watching his video when a voice rang through the air.

“Hey, man,” Rune looked up to spot a medium height, lithe black man glancing down the corridor towards the single still closed integration seat in the simulation room before shifting his gaze to regard Rune. “You’re waiting on her, right?”

Rune just nodded, slightly confused and a little annoyed at the guy for interrupting his watching, before he responded, “yeah, I am.”

The guy gave him a sideways look. “You know that she’s a highborn… right? They don’t really mesh so well, with uh, our kind. You know?”

Rune stared intensely at the man for a couple seconds before responding. “No… I don’t know. I’m a synth. Care to explain why exactly she doesn’t ‘mesh so well with our kind’?”

A look of understanding crossed the man’s face. “Ah. I see.” He gave Rune a slightly patronizing smile. “My bad. Thought you were a steel slinker, like me. You certainly have the look of one.” He shot another look down the corridor and then shrugged. “Huh. Guess she’s hot.” He gave Rune a sarcastic smile before turning away and walking off through the room towards the exit. “Good luck, man.”

Rune flipped him the bird and shouted after his retreating back. “Oh, fuck off asshole.”

The man didn’t turn and just gave him the universal ‘who cares’ shrug before disappearing around the corner and off towards the exit to the Simulation Lounge. Rune glared at the exit for a few more seconds before huffing and turning back to his holo-computer. He’d been focused on relaxing after he’d yanked all of his neural cables so it had slipped his mind when he’d been pulling up Newtube, but now that he remembered it Rune knew it was a good idea to check it out.

Highborns. The title sounded almost like a title they would use to refer to noblemen from the medieval era. Everyone was calling Teira one, and Rune honestly had no idea what they were referring to. When he’d done a search on the G-Web, he’d been told that the UIS was a representative republic with free speech laws, and didn’t have nobility or anything approximating that. Was she from another one of the space empires in the galaxy? Or was it some sort of derogatory slang? Rune had no idea, so he plugged it into his holographic search bar.

Rune hit the first link and started reading. It turned out his whole presumption about highborn being slang for some sort of pseudo-nobility wasn’t actually too far off the mark. In fact, it was pretty dang close.

Highborn was a reference to the richer upper class of the UIS and CSC. But it seemed that the wealth disparity had changed massively since the 22nd century. Whereas in mid 22nd century America, the richest 1% had held a full 44% of the wealth of the nation, the upper 1% now held a staggering 96%.

Rune frowned upon reading this number. To him, it didn’t really make a lot of sense. People still needed to eat and drink. How the hell could the other 99% actually pay for anything with only 4% of the wealth? After a little bit of skimming through propaganda pieces that raged at the injustice, Rune finally set his search to find more scholarly pieces, picked one, and started reading.

It turned one key reason why people could still pay for everything with what seemed like such little money was because costs of living were extremely low. The average person in the UIS made something like 96,000 GC and since costs of living had dropped substantially since the 22nd century, living was pretty goddamn easy. While most things still had costs, especially hard to get things on space stations such as food, water and land, many other things, such as electricity, were practically free. Somebody making 96k GC still had a ton of money to throw around, it was just that as you went into higher and higher levels of technology costs climbed exponentially.

The rare earth minerals required, advanced physics and expertise, and extreme danger of such technologies made them exceptionally difficult to even utilize—let alone develop. Such projects could costs in the tens to hundreds of trillions of credits to run for even a single year. Take a Shimmer production plant. The cost of operating such a plant for a single year was priced at roughly 12 trillion credits. On the other hand, such an operation could earn you over 14 trillion credits a year at galactic market value.

Highborns had the money and power to make those investments and run those operations, and had trillions of GC to throw around to make sure those projects got done. All the people a part of running the plant, setting up the plant, and making sure the plant worked in the first place would all be given a cut and be given tons of money, joining the highborn class.

And it turned out that having a ton of money could get you a lot more than just a special status as a highborn. No, money gave you influence, and in the 26th century, influence could buy you immortality.

One of the primary gripes he read about in the articles raging about highborns was how they kept immortality to themselves and didn’t really share it with the population. While people had been researching immortality in his day and age, Rune was still skeptical that it could’ve actually happened, but after a little bit of research found to his surprise that it was true. A yearly injection of a drug typically called ‘Endless’ would effectively halt aging for a person, stopping their DNA from decaying and body systems from breaking down.

Rune did some more research and found that not just was creating this serum very inexpensive, but also that all sale and creation was restricted and banned except for by the government. At first, Rune was livid. If it was cheap, how could the government conscientiously allow people to die of old age when they could easily stop it? It was effectively murder.

But Rune kept researching and found that the issue was a little more complicated. One of the biggest and most critical problems with making people immortal is that immortal populations tended to explode. Projections from credible scientists estimated that if the entire population were to be made immortal, the population would bloom so quickly that the number of people in existence would eventually outpace the rate at which new systems were being colonized.

So on one hand, while they didn’t want to deny the opportunity, they couldn’t simply sell the serum to anyone who wanted it. Instead, the best citizens of the UIS were entered into a lottery and whoever won got the opportunity to be immortal. Mind you, it was a very small portion of the population, maybe 1%, but it was still some.

The other way to become immortal was for you to purchase the serum at an exorbitant price and agree to not more than two children at risk of losing your citizenship. This made it so that the serum, which sold for millions, could only be purchased regularly by highborns, and that their population wouldn’t be able to explode and get out of control, not even doubling with each generation. The rate of growth of the highborn population actually approximately matched the rate of growth of the normal population, so even if they were immortal there wouldn’t be any numbers problems.

On one hand, it rankled Rune who felt it was helping to facilitate a caste system within the UIS. On the other hand, he couldn’t really think of any other solution to the problem. At the end of the day if the rich people wanted to be immortal they could do it, and if the government wouldn’t let them they could always find another galactic empire in which to build their multi-trillion GC factories and laboratories that would allow them to be immortal. It was a tough spot.

He still hadn’t come to any real sort of decision on the issue when he heard a tap-tap-tap, and then a familiar hiss followed by popping noise. Rune glanced down the row of integration seats to spot Teira’s shield slowly lifting up. A few seconds later and the shield had extended all the way up, and Rune gave her a smile and waved from his spot a few seats over.

“How’d it go?” Rune asked the question more as a formality. He was pretty sure from the time that it had taken her to complete it that she’d killed it.

She just gave him a cocky smirk and shrugged nonchalantly before pulling out another neural cable. “Went fine. Pretty sure I got that fifty. How’d it go for you?”

Rune shrugged. “I had no idea what I was doing, except for on that first drone section. Played this realistic game called Whirl of Warplanes to try and help me get into the army. I knew a thing or two about piloting and strategizing on the fly, guess it helped a little.”

Teira yanked out another cable, grimacing slightly. “Well, I hope for your sake you did well. Score below a twenty and they won’t let you into the discipline. And trust me, if there's any one profession you want to go into, it's Harmonics.”

Rune frowned, worrying for a second, and then shrugged. What happened, happened. Even if he didn’t score in this time, he figured that there would likely be an opportunity in the future, or at the very least, he probably scored a twenty in combat. Rune, Jamis, and Harvey had kicked their opponent’s asses, so he was pretty sure he couldn’t have scored too low there. In tech and attunement though… best to simply forget about that.

“Well,” Rune said slowly, “I should’ve scored a twenty in at least one of my tests, so I should be fine.”

Teira shrugged, flashed him a very brief reassuring smile, and then spoke, “I’m sure you’ll get into at least one discipline, and even if not, you can always do some training and then come back in six months to take the test again.”

Rune nodded, slightly reassured. He hadn’t realized he could retake the tests again in half a year. That meant that even if he failed he could get some training in and then the next time he’d for sure get in. He had to admit, he was sure that the test would’ve gone a lot better if he could’ve had some exposure to integration before he took the test. Some learning about basic strategies and space combat would’ve been a real help. Rune added that to his list of things he needed to research, as even though he’d probably learn everything he needed to know in the TEF, it couldn’t hurt to be extra prepared.

Teira yanked out her third neural cable and grunted a little, pulling Rune out of his reverie and back into the present. He glanced at her, only having to consider for half a second before clearing his throat. “Hey, uh, Teira, I’m gonna meet up with some of my friends in the cafeteria to grab some chow, in uh,” he mentally checked the time, discovering that it was now 7:04. “Just another twenty minutes. Wanna come with?”

Teira half-froze for a second, a strange expression on crossing her face for the briefest of seconds, before the familiar sarcastic smile crept its way back onto her face. “Wow, so you do have friends. I thought you might not have, what with having to get so desperate as to cozy up to a highborn.” Rune snorted and rolled his eyes, and Teira waved him off nonchalantly as she pulled out the fourth and final neural cable. “Well, I guess it couldn’t hurt.” She stood and mimed brushing dust off her skinsuit, even though there was nothing on it. “Alright then, lead the way.” She gestured towards the door.

Rune smiled, got up, and started walking towards the door. “So anyway, do you know when they release the test scores? I want to know what mine were. Tomorrow, maybe?”

Teira shook her head as she followed Rune out of the exit to the simulation room. “No, it’s a lot faster than that. I expect the scores will be out by tonight, and if the time is—” she paused, her eyes turning to look up at the ceiling in thought, presumably mentally checking the time, “Seven-oh-five, then scores will probably be released at 9:00? Maybe 8:30, or 9:30? Soon. Sometime today. They need to give failed students a day to vacate, and students that pass a chance to select their courses. That’s why tomorrow is off, to get all the logistics done.”

Rune gulped. He’d only paid attention to one primary piece of information in Teira’s little speech; test scores came out in under two hours. Soon, he’d know whether he got to learn how to fight and fly starships, or whether he needed to wait another half year to apply again. Rune had never believed in any particular god, but he was certainly praying that it was the former.