Chapter 2 - In which unethical experiments are performed

In which unethical experiments are performed The human brain is a fascinating lump of lard. Before I really started to learn about it, I just knew that it was a very complex network of about a hundred billion neurons, all interconnected with axons, dendrites and synapses, and that there was quite a bit of chemistry going on, on top of all the electrical signals being passed around. I vaguely knew about the different levels of the brain - the neocortex and the limbic system, the cerebellum etc. - and that they played different roles.

The NanoRep project, though, and the Interface project to some extent, had required the scientists involved to wade through tons of scientific papers, extracting all available topological and functional data about thousands of different tiny areas of the human brain, and assigning them to different “affect channels” that could be tweaked by NanoReps in specific ways without the operator necessarily knowing all the details. I spent several months after the initial theft fine-tuning my own custom interface and assigning new affect channels to target regions of the human brain.

My first few batches of custom NanoReps were injected into cats in my neighbourhood. I simply dusted some fresh prawns with the NanoReps, and left them out for any cat to find and eat. Six hours later, I got a beep on my monitor saying that a live video feed was available from an infected subject. The NanoReps had finished attaching themselves to the optic nerve and infiltrated the relevant areas of the cat’s limbic system. Converting signals from the optic nerve into actual sRGB video and sending them over WIFI was one of the areas where the NanoRep project had already developed their own API when I tapped into their research. I watched with fascination as the cat prowled around the neighbourhood, seeing what it was seeing in a near real-time feed on my computer monitor.

Then I started up the 2D mammal control user interface I had built for viewing on a computer screen. The controls were very crude, using only some of the primary affects; mood, arousal, salience, fear, disgust and aggression. My very first attempt at controlling the cat was when it got home to its owner - a middle-age woman two houses down the road from me. When the cat laid down in her lap and the woman started petting it, I simultaneously bottomed out the fear- and aggression controls.

The reaction was what you might expect. The cat attacked the woman immediately, clawing and biting her, and then rushed out of the room.

After that proof-of-concept, I readied a small batch of NanoReps to infect myself with, in order to build myself an augmented reality neural interface. Since I had already built the software for such a project once, adapting it to my needs was quite a simple matter. I drank the batch of NanoReps in a glass of milk one evening and let them work all night while I slept, replicating themselves using elements from my bloodstream, building their intricate network inside my optical nerve and around certain areas of my primary motor cortex, and also building a powerful wifi-antenna right on the inside surface of my cranium. I had really strange dreams that night, but put that more down to my own imagination than to any effect that the NanoReps could have had on my brain.

Next day, I interfaced with my new internal hardware and did a systems check. Maybe you’d think that this would be a strange and uncomfortable experience, but actually it wasn’t that much different from using a VR display device and a keyboard to manoeuvre inside a video game; the only difference was that after just a few hours of practice, my control of the internal interface got to be very smooth, fast and finely tuned in a manner that I wouldn’t have been able to replicate with a keyboard or game controller.

Hang on a minute.

There Phew. I needed to cum. Damn, that was a good one. Nothing quite like having a budding teenage girl give you head for hours on end before you allow yourself to cum in her throat and let her experience an orgasm that nearly makes her pass out from sheer pleasure as she feels your semen erupt in her oesophagus. Her intermingled moans and gags as she gargled on my cock just now, while it was unloading a torrent of thick cum down her throat, made my own orgasm nearly unbearably strong, even without augmentation by my NanoRep circuitry.

Anyway. Where was I?

Oh, yes. The day after I had infected myself with the NanoReps and they had built my internal circuitry and interface.