"Have you ever piloted a walker before?" Buster asked Dr. Calvini.

"Never." said she replied.

"It's like driving the biggest truck I've ever driven. Only you have to keep track of a whole extra axis with the vertical cockpit orientation. If you lift it up too high, you can throw it off balance and have a spill. If you lower it too much, you can bottom out or even crack the windshield against something. On a road it's basically a big truck with some awkward sight lines, but when you're using one on the uneven terrain they're intended for? It's like driving in the worst city traffic you've ever seen, only the traffic itself is also the road." the panda tried to relate.

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"That sounds very complicated. How were you able to learn that from a computer program? Did it come with a replica dashboard you could plug in to practice?" she asked, genuinely curious.

"No, it was all in first-person with the ability to pause and slow down the speed of time to help you learn the rhythms. If I want to start it up: I click and drag the card to the ignition, turn it one click left to start the engine warmup, turn it two clicks right to ignite once the indicator turns yellow, slow down time to click to activate the balance module in the sweet spot, use the keyboard to shift my virtual body in the cockpit to disengage the right brake and then the left, click and drag on the lever to lift the cockpit out of its docking stance, and I'm done. Perfect recreation of everything except for your actual mechanism of interacting with the world around you."

"Interesting."