A/N: I started writing this for NaNoWriMo 2009 - unfortunately, I only reached about 37,000 words before the end of November, due to classes and such. I'd like to finish it, so I've decided to start posting it for feedback. Hopefully this'll inspire me to get off my ass and keep writing. The plan at the moment is to upload a chapter every two weeks or so, depending on how much I've edited and what else life (and classes) is throwing at me.

Enjoy! :D

His first moments of awareness were brief and fragmented - vague, blurry glimpses of a dark room lit with blue, a sensation of floating in something that wasn't quite liquid and wasn't quite air, and a feeling that he was being fed massive amounts of information that his mind wasn't yet ready to process.

His first -real- moment of awareness came later - how much later, he couldn't tell. The dark room and blue light were gone, as was the floating sensation. Instead, as his mind slowly emerged from the soft black fuzz it had been in, he realised that he was lying on his back. He opened his eyes, then squinted at the sudden light and blinked several times till his eyes had adjusted. He didn't sit up though, not yet. His mind felt slow and lethargic, like it was wading through a thick haze. There was information in there somewhere, he knew it, but it wasn't yet processing properly.

He blinked again and slowly looked around at what he could see from his prone position, not yet trusting himself to move much more than that. The room he was in looked plain, painted a pale cream with a large mirror that took up almost all of one wall. There was only one door, with a solid-looking handle and lock. From what he could see in the mirror, he was lying on a low bed in the corner of the room, and was dressed in plain, tan overalls and socks, but no boots. That struck him as odd for some reason, but he couldn't figure out why. Brief pieces of information kept floating to the surface of his mind, then sinking into the haze again before he could properly grasp them.

He finally decided to try sitting up, and after a few false starts as he sorted his limbs out, he was perched on the edge of the bed, hands lightly gripping the edge of it on either side of him. As there was nothing much else in the room to hold his attention, the mirror quickly became his main focus. He studied himself intently, his brow furrowed in concentration. He was tall, but seemed to be of average build - how he knew it was average, he wasn't sure - fairly lean, with a square jaw, pale blond hair that was almost white, and bright blue eyes. He studied himself for several moments, absently tilting his head this way and that as he tried to get a good feeling of himself, of who he was.

He'd gotten to his feet and was walking around a little unsteadily when the door opened and someone stepped inside. Startled, he spun around and nearly fell over before recovering his balance. The newcomer, a short, slim, black-haired woman with wire-rimmed glasses, closed the door and smiled thinly at him. "Your reflexes are good, but it looks like your motor skills still need some work. How are you feeling?"

He blinked, taking a moment to register the meaning of her words, then frowned uncertainly. "Strange," he admitted after a moment, gesturing vaguely with his hands as he privately wondered where the words and his understanding of them was coming from.

The woman eyed him clinically. "Strange how?" she asked, tucking her hands into the pockets of her labcoat. "Physically? Mentally?"

He paused for a while before replying as the words and their meanings swam up from the haze of his mind, then spoke slowly and carefully. "Mentally. Fuzzy. Like... I know things, but I don't know what, or how I know them." It never occurred to him to question her in return.

She nodded understandingly. "Delay in information assimilation. That should pass as you experience things first-hand." She tilted her head slightly to one side. "And you're feeling all right physically? No aches or pains? No trouble balancing normally?"

Once again he paused before replying, looking down at his hands and flexing them experimentally. "Nothing that I've noticed. A little unsteady, still getting used to moving, but I think I'm all right."

"Good! Very good." She smiled in satisfaction. "You're our first surviving one, so we're all figuring this out as we go."

He frowned in confusion. "First...?" That surviving comment worried him.

The woman eyed him with surprise, then sighed. "Of course they wouldn't think to include any of that," she muttered, withdrawing one hand from her pocket to pinch at the bridge of her nose. "All right, let's see how much they did include." She dropped her hand back down and eyed him levelly. "Do you know who I am?"

He was about to reply to the negative, but her appearance had caused something to float to the surface of his mind, and he grasped at it awkwardly. "Doctor... doctor Vonel?"

She nodded, smiling again. "Right. I'm Jen Vonel, and my colleagues are doctor Mark Hess and doctor Timothy Arrick." Jen glanced over at the mirror, then looked back. "You'll meet them later, probably. This is the Biotech R and D facility, and you're our first surviving subject in our attempts to bioengineer soldiers specifically for aerial integrated mech combat."

His brow furrowed as he absorbed that information, which in turn caused more pieces of information to float to the surface of his mind. "Aerial integrated... A.I.M. combat. I know what that is. I know what the mechs are-" His expression shifted to surprise, then his brow furrowed in concentration for a few moments before he added in wonder, "- and I think I know how to pilot them."

"Excellent!" Jen practically cheered, smiling broadly. "We'll have to test exactly how much transferred, of course, but that's a very good start." She gestured to the foot of the bed. "Get your boots on, and we'll head to the training room."

Puzzled, he looked to the foot of the bed, then spotted a pair of combat boots resting in the corner against the wall, half-hidden in the shadows. He perched on the edge of the bed and pulled them on, as Jen watched with a touch of impatience. He fumbled a little with the bootlaces, but soon managed to sort them out and lace his boots up. Once he was done, he stood up and experimentally rocked back and forth on his feet to get used to the feel of them.

"All right," Jen rubbed her hands together once he was ready, then opened the door and gestured for him to follow. "Let's go and see exactly how much you know."

...

Doctor Mark Hess stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his brow furrowed in thought. He watched through the one-way window as Jen ushered the subject back into the observation room and exchanged a few words with him before exiting. The subject moved over to the bed and dropped down onto it, lying back with his arms folded behind his head. Mark idly noted that the subject was moving much more fluidly and confidently than he had been earlier. "Good physical progress," he mused, his gaze fixed on the scene in the window.

The shorter, stocky man seated beside him glanced up at his words and nodded. "Good mental progress as well, according to the test results," he added, looking back to the monitor before him. "Near-perfect recall of all the implanted information that he's been tested on so far."

The door to the room opened then and Jen slipped inside. "So, how'd he go?" she asked, moving to stand behind the seated man and peer over his shoulder at the screen.

He glared up her. "You know I hate it when you do that."

"Sorry, Tim." She didn't sound at all repentant though and stayed right where she was. Timothy let out a resigned sigh and looked back at the monitor. "As for your question, he did very well, as I was just telling Hess. A near-perfect result. It looks like the information transfer went off pretty much without a hitch."

Jen straightened up again with a faint sigh of relief. "We're finally making decent progress."

"Just as well, too," Mark spoke up suddenly, turning his back on the window to eye his two colleagues sternly. "Our client has been getting impatient. He wants results, and quickly. We need to make sure he gets them. Our reputation - and our budget - is resting on this." He shifted to look back at the window. "How are our next subjects progressing?"

Subdued, Jen replied quietly. "They're still growing, though the information upload is going smoothly. They should be ready within the next week." She frowned slightly. "I was thinking perhaps we could add some more to the info upload, though. While our current subject is doing well with the piloting and combat data, he seems rather... lost... when it comes to why he was created or - well, anything else."

Mark levelled a bland stare at Jen. "They're soldiers. They're being made to fight. They don't -need- to know why. They don't need to know anything else. They just need to do what they're told." He dismissed the suggestion with a sharp shake of his head. "I don't want you adding anything more. In fact, see what you can trim out. The faster we can produce these, the happier our client will be."

Jen's frown deepened, but as Mark's stare bored into her she finally dropped her gaze and nodded. "Understood." Timothy watched the exchange in silence, eyes wide.

Mark eyed Jen until he was satisfied she'd accepted his orders, then turned back to the window. "Get the current subject started on the simulators. I want to make sure everything is in order before we let our client know how we're progressing." He didn't bother waiting for a reply from either of his colleagues, and just spun on his heel before striding out of the room.

Jen and Timothy watched him leave, then Jen let out a sigh and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Which means he wants us to start immediately," she murmured blandly. "No rest for the wicked, it seems."

Timothy nodded in wry agreement. "I'll get the simulators started up for you." Jen offered him a faint smile in thanks and headed out of the room.

...

Jen ushered her charge into the large room that held the simulator modules. He looked around with interest, absently noting that all the equipment looked to be almost brand new.

"Right," Jen started, gesturing towards the nearest module. "These are the training simulators for the A.I.M.s. I'd tell you how to use it, but you probably know that better than I do," she added with a wry little smile.

He smiled hesitantly in return and looked back at the machines. "Probably." During all the questioning earlier as Jen had tested what he knew, the haze in his mind had finally lifted, and he could think much more clearly and quickly. He headed over to the module that Jen had indicated, then paused to look back at her. "You haven't used any mechs before at all?"

Jen shook her head, her expression wistful. "No. I wish I could, but I'm not compatible with them. Very, very few people are, so far." She smiled at him again. "Which is one reason why we're working on this project. There needs to be more people who -can- use them."

He nodded in understanding, then opened the module hatch and slipped inside. The interior was dark and cramped, and he had to suppress a brief twinge of unease as he leaned back into the padded supports and started to strap into the harness.

Jen watched him carefully from outside, her expression inscrutable. "Once you're up and running, Timothy will be telling you the mission objectives. They shouldn't be anything too complicated to start with. We just want to get you familiarised with using the mech."

He nodded again as he adjusted yet another strap. Finally he'd finished with the harness and reached for the control helmet, eyeing it for a moment before slipping it on. It was large and bulky, attached to the inside of the cockpit by a thick hose, and sported a close-fitting visor that went over his entire face. The back of it moulded to his head and extended down his neck, with areas inside adhering to his temples and either side of his neck.

The helmet prevented him from seeing anything but black, but once he was settled the hatch closed automatically with a hiss of hydraulics. A moment later his vision sprang back to life, overlaid with an unobtrusive heads-up display. He was standing out on what looked to be a large airfield, with hangars off to his right and runways in front and to the left. The ground, when he glanced down, seemed to be about ten meters away. He lifted both his hands to look them over, but instead of seeing his own fleshy hands, he saw two large, metal-armoured mechanical hands. The helmet intercepted his body's electrical impulses and translated them to the simulated mech, which moved in response, then gave him feedback via the helmet again. He didn't feel like a pilot in a mech - he -was- the mech, and it was him, moving and reacting as his own body did. He could feel the air moving against its surface, the warmth from the sun, and the ground beneath his feet.

He took a few experimental steps, then halted in surprise when a male voice suddenly spoke up in what felt to be somewhere in his left ear. "All settled?" It only took him a moment to realise that this must be the Timothy that Jen had mentioned.

"Ah, yes," he replied out loud, a little surprised at the sound of his own voice when filtered through the mech.

"You don't have to talk out loud to communicate over the comm. system," Timothy commented, sounding vaguely amused. "Remember how to use it?"

It took him a moment, but once he remembered it became almost instinctive. "I do now," he replied a little sheepishly over the comm.

"Good, good." Timothy sounded pleased. "All right, let's get started. There are several targets set up in the general area - scan for them, then take them out. That ought to get you familiarised with your scanners and weapon systems."

He nodded, then belatedly replied over the comm. "Understood." It was only a moment's work to get his scanners up, and he looked around curiously to see what they'd pick up. Several points of interest were helpfully targeted by his HUD, information on each one flashing up as he focused on them individually. Another moment and his weapons systems were online, his forearm and hand shifting into a cannon that quickly hummed to life. He eyed it curiously - the transformation and humming were an odd sensation, though he suspected he'd get used to it very quickly.

He considered the targets his scanners had already picked out, then instinctively aimed and fired at the nearest one. A white-hot blast of energy shot out of his arm-cannon and sizzled through the air, searing past the side of the target and hitting the ground beyond it in a spray of dirt. He frowned and tried again, then felt a little thrill of success when the blast hit the target just off-center and exploded quite satisfactorily.

Emboldened by his success, the next target went down just as easily, then several more in quick succession. As the last target disintegrated and his weapon spun down, Timothy's voice spoke up again. "Excellent! You picked up on that very quickly." He started a little in surprise - he'd almost forgotten that this was a simulator run and that someone was monitoring the whole exercise. "Let's try some moving targets now, shall we?"

Before he could reply, his scanners warned him of several hostile ground vehicles incoming. He instinctively spun on one heel to face them, his cannon whirring to life again as he let off a volley of shots. The vehicles scattered, two or three exploding as the shots hit them. Others peeled away and roared off in separate directions, some taking cover amongst the hangars while the rest spread out in the open.

The ones out in the open proved to be fairly easy pickings - they weren't fast or agile enough to avoid his shots, now that he had his eye in. The ones that had taken cover however proved to be trickier. He wasn't sure if he was allowed to damage the hangars, so decided to err on the side of caution and not just destroy the buildings to get to the vehicles. Arm cannon at the ready, he stalked towards the hangars with one eye on his scanners.

One luckless vehicle was crushed by a large metal fist slamming down onto its hood as it rounded a corner. Another was half-melted by a point-blank blast from the arm cannon. A third was picked up, then thrown into the side of a fourth. As he stood and scanned the area for any more targets, the last vehicle - a sleek-looking sports car - flashed past, briefly visible between two hangars. He immediately gave chase, skidding around the corner just in time to see it vanish behind another building with a screech of tyres. The deadly game of cat and mouse continued for a few more minutes, until finally he managed to flush it out of the collection of buildings and into the open.

The sports car immediately took off, heading for the horizon. He broke into a sprint after it, accelerating with each stride, but the elusive target continued to pull away and out of his range. Some unknown instinct kicked in then, and without even thinking about it he leapt into the air and mentally twisted. The mech swiftly folded and rearranged itself around him, parts sliding smoothly into place. Powerful engines kicked in with a roar as the transformed jet took off into the air.

There was a brief moment of disorientation as his view shifted, but once it settled he found himself already a few hundred meters up and still climbing. He quickly levelled out when he spotted his target below, a thin tail of dust kicking up behind it. He dove towards it, the laser cannon mounted on the underside of the jet's nose strafing at the car. It managed to swerve out of the way though, and the shots struck up short sharp showers of dirt and rock shards.

He pulled up as he overshot the sports car and started climbing again before circling around for another run. This time, the hapless vehicle wasn't so lucky, and it was peppered with holes before one shot found its gas tank and it exploded in a particularly impressive fireball. He circled the burning wreckage a few times before heading back to where he'd started from, gliding along a couple hundred meters above the ground before pulling his nose up to slow down and lose altitude. He transformed in mid-air and landed on his feet, stumbling a little from momentum and that moment of disorientation as his view shifted, but he quickly recovered and straightened up again.

"Excellent!" Timothy's voice cheered in his ear, and he winced a little. "We weren't expecting you to pick up on the transformation or flight so quickly. You've done very well!"

He felt a little glow of accomplishment at the praise, on top of the fading exhilaration from the brief flight. "What next?"

There was a pause, as though Timothy was consulting with someone else before he finally replied. "Let's step things up a bit and give you something that can fight back, shall we? Melee first - see how much of the embedded hand to hand combat you can recall."

He nodded and felt a small thrill of excitement as once again his scanners picked up on incoming hostiles. "I'll do my best."

"That's all anyone can ask," Timothy replied cheerfully. "Show us what you can do!"

He proceeded to do just that.

...

Jen was waiting for him when the simulator run was finally over and he emerged from the module. He was a little unsteady on his feet, but smiled broadly at Jen when he spotted her. Jen couldn't help but smile back. "How'd you do?" she asked as the module hatch hissed closed behind him.

"Good! Once I got going, it all came so... naturally. Even the flying! Though transforming felt a little weird at first." He idly flexed his hands, then shook his arms out and wrinkled his nose. "Also feels a little weird now, going back to just being flesh and bone again."

Jen chuckled lightly. "I imagine it would," she agreed as she started towards the door. "So how much did Tim put you through?"

"A fair bit," he replied as he followed her, limping slightly. "Melee combat, ranged, flying, then some aerial dogfighting." He rubbed his shoulder and winced a little. "Took a few hits - didn't bother me much at the time, but I didn't realise it would persist outside the mech. Especially since it was just a simulator. I'll need to learn to dodge better."

Jen halted in her tracks and frowned, eyeing him up and down. "How bad does it feel?"

He paused beside her and looked thoughtful for a moment, rolling his shoulder experimentally. "Not bad," he replied finally. "Just kind of achy, like a bruise. I think it'll wear off pretty fast though."

Jen raised an eyebrow at him dubiously, but he just shrugged and smiled a little sheepishly. "Well, let me know if it doesn't, all right?" she told him sternly before continuing forwards.

"Will do," he replied with a nod, falling into step beside her. He looked around as they walked, brow slowly furrowing. "This isn't the same way we came, is it?"

Surprised, Jen glanced up at him. All the corridors looked much the same, painted off-white and lit at regular intervals with fluorescent tubes. The only real differences tended to be the placement of doors and other hallways, and the occasional small sign. "You're right, it isn't," she replied. "I'm taking you to your actual quarters. They should be a little more comfortable than that box you were in before."

"Ah." He nodded, accepting the explanation, and continued looking around with interest. A few minutes later, Jen halted by a door, opened it, then gestured for him to head inside. The room was spacious and looked to be some sort of common area, with a couple of couches and armchairs around a low table. More doors were spaced out on the other three walls. Once they were both inside, Jen stifled a yawn, then gestured to some of the doors. "Bathroom and kitchen areas over there. The rest are bedrooms - take your pick of whichever one you like." She patted him gently on the back. "Get some rest now, all right? I'll be back for you in the morning."

He seemed a little taken back at the pat, but smiled faintly at Jen. "I will." He hesitated, eyeing her for a moment, then added, "You get some rest too, all right?"

Jen blinked, surprised that he'd even noticed her weariness, then replied with a lopsided smile. "I'll try." She took a step back, then turned and left the room before he could reply, the door clicking shut behind her.

...

"Impressive." Mark Hess watched the last of the simulator recording before looking over at his colleagues. "Quite impressive. Our client will be pleased at how quickly the subject picked up on combat and flight." He looked over to Jen, who was leaning against the wall and trying not to look as tired as she felt. "What was his physical and mental state afterwards?"

Jen straightened up a little before replying. "He was pleased with his progress. Physically he seemed normal - some residual pain from feedback caused by the hits his mech took, but he assured me they were just mild aches. I've ordered him to inform me if they linger."

Mark nodded, mentally filing the information away before dismissing it from his mind. "That's fairly standard. Tomorrow, get him started on physical training in the morning, then more simulator work in the afternoon." Jen nodded, and Mark turned his attention back to the monitor, replaying some of the simulator run. He watched it for a few minutes, then frowned and looked over at Timothy. "Is there any particular reason the subject didn't fly any higher than a thousand or so meters?"

Timothy opened his mouth slightly to reply, blinked, then closed it again and looked thoughtful. "Not that I can recall," he replied, turning to his own monitor to scrub through the recording. "Hm. He did seem to keep quite close to the ground, though that might just be unfamiliarity with his limits."

"Make a note to test that more thoroughly in the next session, then inform me of the results."

"Roger that," Timothy replied, rapidly typing something into his computer. "How hard do you want me to push him?"

"As hard as he can handle," Mark replied immediately. Jen raised her head, then bit back her protest and remained silent as Mark turned to stare at her levelly. "You had something to say, Doctor Vonel?"

Jen shook her head. "No sir."

"Good. Continue work on the next batch. I want them out and operational as soon as possible." He gave the monitor one last glance, then strode out of the room. Jen waited until he was gone before muttering something highly uncomplimentary and pinching at the bridge of her nose. "Another late night for me, it seems," she said resignedly.

Timothy made a little sound of sympathy. "You and me both," he replied wryly. "But like you said before, no rest for the wicked."

"So why is Hess getting so much rest then?" Jen asked rhetorically, and Timothy snickered. Jen smiled faintly in response, then shook her head and heaved herself away from the wall. "Well, back to it then. I'll bring you some coffee later."

"Appreciated, Jen." Timothy waved a hand briefly in thanks and farewell as Jen headed out of the room.