[FEB 22, 2015]
Just over two weeks after the first simulator units had been set up, every city and town in the United States was equipped with at least one.
This was the fastest, largest, and most successful deployment of any computer hardware package the world had ever seen. It was also the most expensive by several orders of magnitude. Every news outlet and television channel was buzzing with talk about the simulator in some way or another, many were upset by the cost of the program, and many with how it was appealing mostly to children. For every one of their oppositions however, NERV had a rebuttal, most of them were simple prepared phrases involving the good of humanity, or that nobody was being forced to participate in the program. These points proved to be enough to keep the public at bay for the most part, but the media continued in a fruitless back and forth on the topic. Real discussions on the simulators were happening elsewhere.
Chatrooms, forums and message boards were ablaze with talk of these new simulators. It was here that people noticed a pattern, in every city and town in every state in the country, the simulators showed a strong bias towards users near age fourteen. This bias was so strong that any pilot more than a few months off either end of this age were almost entirely unable to control their simulated Evangelion. At first it was thought to be a coincidence, then a software bug, and it became very well known. Despite the concern NERV's social channels maintained that the simulation was near perfectly accurate to the real platform. Any bias that existed in the simulators existed to an equal extent in their real counterpart, so would therefore not be changed.
[FEB 23, 2015]
Like many of his peers Jacob had spent every moment of free time with the simulator in some way since he got access to it. Because of the hard 30 minute limit on simulation time people who, like Jacob, were dedicated to performing well had started to spend as much time as possible preparing for their runs beforehand.
Jacob was currently in the arcade with a few of the friends he'd met while hanging around the simulator. The group of four had been frequenting the arcade in any time they had to spare, competing and trading experiences and tips. So far none of them had managed to complete the first stage, but Jacob was consistently getting a much higher projected synch rate than his peers, despite being very close to the golden fourteen year old cutoff. This certainly gave him an edge in a few ways, but wouldn't be enough to compensate for a lack of true skill.
It wasn't just Jacob's small group that couldn't defeat the first stage, it hadn't been beaten at all. The stage itself was simple, the player was faced with an unarmed virtual robot that was the same size as them, in a large city environment with buildings taller than them both. The robot would approah the player slowly with its fists raised and begin throwing punches. It was possible to dodge the punches as the large scale of the robots made them move a bit slow, but the opponent had a much better defense than it did an offence. Any time the player threw a punch it would be blocked or evaded without much effort.
People were stumped, they needed a breakthrough.