Board
[Apr 13 2015]
Naomi winced as her physical therapist put pressure on her knee.
"Did that hurt?"
She almost lied, but decided not to.
"... yes"
Air hissed out of the swivel stool as the therapist sat. He wrote something on his pad and started reviewing his notes. Naomi interrupted with a question.
"How long do you think? Until I'm better."
The aging man looked over his glasses and his mustache crumpled against his nose.
"If you keep up with the routine I gave you, and stay off of it… another three months"
Naomi stared out the car window on the way home, she'd been feeling conflicted lately.
On one hand, she wished she'd never gotten injured, then she'd be coming home from a kickboxing gym instead of a physical therapist.
On the other hand, she had no doubt that she never would have given the simulators a chance if it wasn't for her crippledness.
The thought of being accepted into the training program crossed Naomi's mind from time to time, but being ahead of every other pilot seemed ridiculous to her.
For now, she thought it best to treat it like nothing more than a game.
[Apr 15 2015]
Jacobs' chance at fame had come and gone, another pilot had gotten the recognition for being the first to defeat the second stage. The young pilot stood by his decision, but things weren't all good.
Having such a large secret to keep had pushed Jacob away from his group of friends. He felt that staying near them would eventually result in the secret spilling, and all his work to keep himself anonymous going to waste.
He would do his best to avoid those he's previously been working closely with, and keep pushing himself forward, loneliness be damned.
[Apr 16 2015]
Kara's face was cast in yellow as the brightly lit knife swiped past her viewscreens.
'Spacing"
A voice from the real world chided.
Kara glanced at the boy standing outside of her simulator, his tall frame leaning against the wall behind them.
He'd been acting as a sort of personal trainer since Kara approached him on the day of his arrival. Naturally it had been a bit odd for him to be approached by a random person asking for knife fighting tips on his first day incarcerated, but after finding out he wasnt eligible for a pardon, and because he had nothing else to do, he decided to oblige Kara.
The duo spent any free time they had together practicing person to person, then he would oversee Kara's runs and give her notes.
"Block low"
Kara pulled down on the stick as the yellow blur was thrust at her, the block was timed perfectly.
Force from the impact caused the enemy's hand to open, the knife flew free of its grip and embedded itself into the floor.
A laugh escaped Karas usually stonefaced mentor.
"Get it"
Kara pressed both pedals to crouch, and made a frantic grab for the knife, her surrogate hand arose with a glowing yellow armament.
She wasted no time thrusting the knife into her opponents thorax, sparks flew and the robot tried to push her away.
Excitement crept into the tall boy's voice.
"Now gut him!"
Kara pulled the stick down and her Eva followed suit, ripping a clean vertical channel through the enemy.
Time slowed as the opposing robot collapsed.
Kara hardly heard the cheers or felt the slaps on her back as people came to congratulate her.
She'd now been the first to complete two separate stages.
[Apr 19 2015]
Noah sat at his desk in awe.
In all his life he'd never believed in miracles, but the past week had made him question that.
He held a crown shaped object made of black plastic in one hand, it was an EEG. Not only that, it was the very one used in the simulators themselves. He'd found it online sold by a Chinese manufacturer, once he'd found it it became obvious that NERV would've been all but forced to outsource most of the parts for their build, a project of that scale would be simply impossible otherwise. Not only was it affordable enough to fit in his allowance, it also shipped directly to his mailbox within a week.
Both those things were amazing, but what had driven Noahs week into miracle territory was what he'd found while trying to get his simulator to read the input form the EEG,
Hidden within the encrypted source for the game was a small unencrypted .jar file named with random characters.
Noah opened the file and found it empty except for three lines, an IPV4 address, the string "dataserv01", and the word "scoreboard.bin".
With a single shortcut Noah opened the command prompt and typed
'mstsc'
A window appeared where he entered the ip address and the server name.
The window closed and he was back at the command prompt, but this time it looked like this:
dataserv01\:> █
Noah watched the little white rectangle in the command prompt blink for a moment;
dataserv01\:>█
dataserv01\:>
dataserv01\:>█
dataserv01\:>
then he remembered the filename, he typed it in
dataserv01\:>scoreboard.bin█
He pressed Enter.
The cursor disappeared and there was a pause as the client waited for a response. Finally it got one, and formatted text filled into the black command prompt.
It was a long array with cells separated by bars and underscores.
___________________________
| Pilot: | SSID: | Score: |
___________________________
|1. Stevens, Kara | -3245 | 0000001326 |
___________________________
127 other entries followed Ms. Stevens, 128 in total, organized by points in descending order. 128 Stuck out to Noah, not a conventional number of entries for a leaderboard, like fifty or 100. It was two to the seventh power, he thought it must be significant somehow. Those 128 pilots were something special, in that moment Noah knew he had to be on that list when the time ran out, and he would do anything he could to be at spot number one.