101 Days remain

Noah took a deep breath.

He exhaled slowly and cracked his knuckles.

He was sitting at his desk, looking at all of the equipment he'd spent 3 months and over a year's worth of saved allowance money on.

"This had better work"

Noah picked up the final piece of the puzzle, the crown-like compact EEG, and placed it on his head.

He'd spend the last few days fighting the strange piece of technology to work with his console. Wishful thinking had caused him to think the EEG would simply connect to his system and work without a fight, of course, that wasn't the case.

Hoping to finally put all those weeks of rewriting, rewiring, and rebooting behind him, he pressed the power button on the console.

Fans spun up and the now intimately familiar console startup screen appeared on the monitor.

Noah launched the simulator program, entered the code, and placed his hands on the controls.

As per the norm, the simulator faded into the first level.

Up until now Noah had never seen more than thirty seconds of the first stage before its inhabitant dispatched his floundering vehicle.

He had seen so many failed attempts that he had come to expect the strange unpredictable behavior that came with an incomplete control scheme, but this time something else happened.

As Noah pressed down the pedal under his left foot his view from the cockpit shifted to the left as well. Noah's eyes went wide.

As the first stage made its way toward him he shifted his weight to the other pedal, again the movement was reflected as the giant robot did the same.

Once a fluke, twice a coincidence, three times…

Noah pulled back on the flight stick in his right hand, it wobbled against the cheap clamp holding it to his desk.

In his mind Noah was cocking back a right hook, and he saw his robot lift its arm past the cockpit and pull it back out of view.

Tinny distorted crashing of the adversaries feet came from the pair of headphones on Noah's desk, which he'd stopped bothering to repeatedly remove while testing.

The enemy drew nearer with its guard up, Noah held onto his punch.

Another step, a huge smile crossed Noah's face as he shoved the right flight stick forward, like slamming a plane into max throttle, he saw the camera twist to the right slightly from the reaction force of the punch, the fist followed.

A streak of red screamed onto his monitor and barreled into the enemy's guard. Noah's surrogate fist pushed the enemy's arm into its face, but it pushed Noah back too.

He'd done little to set his posture for throwing a punch, so his narrow stance reduced his balance. He pressed his left foot down hoping to step back, and that he did.

With the EEG enabled this limited number of control surfaces had gained an entirely new level of cohesion. At that moment Noah understood that the controls were merely a subjective tool through which to translate his intent to the machine. The bindings the controls stood for didn't matter, just the intent with which he used them.

In traditional video games the press of a wrong button or a slight deviation on an analog stick could produce unwanted results but this system could infer exactly what the player wanted by peering directly into their brain.

A loud sound from his disused headphones distracted Noah from his epiphany, and he was suddenly back on Earth. Those vivid thoughts had caused him to all but forget he was supposed to be trying to use the controls to survive, regardless of their amazing design.

Unfortunately though, it was too late.

The enemy had already taken advantage of the gap in Noah's defense, and punched him directly in the face.

Noah watched as the enemy robot did to him what he had already seen a hundred times over, but this time there was no crushing feeling that he was being left behind, this time he knew he had the power to fight back.

He had never been so happy to lose.