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After the briefing cleared out, Ryan turned to Patricia.
"The test pilots. Are they here?"
"Settled into their quarters this morning. Ready when you are."
Ryan followed her across the compound. The radar station's residential block had been hastily renovated: clean rooms, working plumbing, adequate if not luxurious. The kind of accommodations that said "we care about your comfort" while also saying "we built this in nine days."
"Nine volunteers," Patricia said as they walked. "Three sets of identical triplets, selected per your specifications. All have completed psychological screening, background checks, and medical clearances. No history of trauma, no unresolved psychological conditions, no factors that would compromise the neural drift."
Choosing triplets hadn't been arbitrary. The drift required baseline neural compatibility between connected pilots. Siblings had higher compatibility than strangers. Twins had higher compatibility than siblings. And triplets, especially identical ones raised together, had the highest baseline compatibility Ryan could find outside of science fiction.
In the Pacific Rim films, Jaeger pilots were selected through combat compatibility testing. In reality, Ryan didn't need fighters. He needed people whose nervous systems were already accustomed to each other's rhythms. People who finished each other's sentences, moved in sync without thinking, anticipated each other's reactions. Triplets who'd spent their entire lives in unconscious neural proximity.
Three sets of three. Nine pilots. Enough for three complete drift teams with no overlap.
They arrived at the quarters. Three rooms, three sets of triplets standing at attention outside their doors. The resemblance within each set was striking. Copy-paste humans, differentiated only by minor details: a slightly different haircut, a small scar, the way one stood with his weight on his left foot while his brothers favored the right.
Ryan shook hands with each group.
"I'm Jake," the eldest of the first set said. "My brothers are Marcus and Dean. But honestly, just call them Two and Three. Everyone does."
The other two sets introduced themselves similarly. The Sullivans and the Petersons. Each eldest brother took the lead, each younger pair deferred with the easy familiarity of people who'd been doing this their whole lives.
Ryan brought them inside and ran through the program.
"You know the basics of what you're here for. Neural connection testing. The system links your nervous system to a machine, and eventually to each other. During the inter-personal connection, you'll experience shared sensory input and involuntary memory exchange. We discussed this in your briefings."
Nine nods.
"One thing I need to confirm directly. Your psychological profiles came back clean, but profiles don't catch everything. Are any of you carrying unresolved trauma? Painful memories that might surface under neural stress? This isn't a judgment. It's a safety question. If a deeply negative memory gets pulled into the drift, it can destabilize the connection and cause neural fatigue for everyone linked."
The nine men looked at each other. Quiet consultations within each triplet group. Head shakes all around.
"Good."
Ryan led them to the warehouse. Scrapper lay in the center of the floor, surrounded by crates and equipment. Kyle and the research team were working nearby, organizing the latest shipment of components.
"First step before the drift tests: familiarization with single-pilot neural connection. You need to understand what connecting to a machine feels like before we ask you to connect to each other."
He walked them through the cockpit. The gyroscopic mount, the sensor suit, the helmet, the pedals, the gloves. The holographic display and its controls. The startup sequence. The emergency shutdown.
The triplets listened with the focused attention of people who understood that the machine towering above them would respond to their thoughts, and that getting the procedure wrong had consequences.
While the technicians swapped Ryan's custom-fitted neural link gear for the universal set, Ryan briefed each triplet on what to expect. The pressure. The expansion of awareness. The feeling of suddenly occupying a body sixty times your size.
Jake went first.
He mounted the cockpit with the careful movements of someone entering a space they didn't fully trust. Strapped in. Sealed the helmet. Found the activation switch.
"Just follow the prompts on the holographic display," Ryan called up from below. "And don't try anything creative. Walk forward, walk back, stop. That's it for today."
Jake activated the link.
Inside the cockpit, the holographic ring bloomed to life around him. System status reports scrolled past. The neural pressure settled over him like a blanket made of static electricity. Uncomfortable. Manageable.
He raised Scrapper's arms. Both of them. Twenty feet of steel responding to his thoughts. He made a sound that wasn't quite a word.
Below, Ryan watched on the external monitors. Clean connection. Good response times. Neural load within acceptable parameters.
"Walk forward."
Jake walked Scrapper forward. One step. Two. The warehouse floor shuddered. Equipment rattled on nearby shelves.
"Walk back."
Two steps back. Steady. Controlled.
"Shut down."
Jake killed the link, opened the hatch, and climbed out looking like a man who'd just seen God and wasn't sure how he felt about the meeting.
"That," he said, "was the most terrifying and incredible thing I've ever experienced."
His brothers were already pushing past him to get in line.
One by one, all nine pilots ran the familiarization sequence. Each one emerged with the same shell-shocked expression and the same urgent need to try it again.
By late afternoon, all nine had completed single-pilot neural connection, and Scrapper had been walked around the outdoor compound enough times to leave a track pattern visible from the air.
The new researchers, most of whom had arrived that same morning and hadn't yet been assigned duties, had gathered at the warehouse perimeter to watch. A hundred neural engineers, seeing the system they'd just read about in operation for the first time, watching strangers pilot a forty-foot mech through nothing more than thought.
Ryan stood beside Patricia as the last pilot finished.
"First supplies arrived," Patricia said, checking her phone. "Neural connection fabrication components. The rest of the equipment will follow over the next month."
Ryan nodded. The pieces were coming together. Pilots training. Researchers studying. Equipment arriving. The coastal facility taking shape around them.
Somewhere in the system, Project Two ticked upward.
The next phase was about to begin.