Chapter 4 - In which the first human experiments are performed

This is going to sound cheesy, but my neighbours’ daughter...

Ok, you can stop laughing now...

I felt it was convenient to perform the first experiments without needing to travel far. My neighbours’ daughter was an appropriate target to start with. Sixteen years old, give or take, and with a decent body. Not a stunning beauty, but definitely rather attractive. Mostly though, she was a convenient target because she lived nearby. Jessica was her name, in case you care to know such details. Is her name, actually. She’s still alive.

First, I needed to figure out a way of infecting her with the NanoReps. Maybe I ought to say something about the rate of infection? Just as with ordinary viruses, NanoReps follow an s-curve pattern when replicating, and the initial slope is determined by dose. A single NanoRep can start off an infection, but things will be very slow for the first days. One becomes two, two become four, four become eight, etc - two to the power n, where n is the generation. Each generation takes time to build the next generation. Once a certain critical concentration of NanoReps circulate in the bloodstream, the growth rate becomes limited by the available resources and tapers off. Starting off with a large dose speeds things up tremendously, and I was impatient.

So I bought a six-pack of plastic Coca-Cola bottles. I carefully drilled small holes in them and injected them each with a few drops of NanoReps, before using a tiny dab of epoxy to glue them shut. Then I lurked on my porch for a while, and as Jessica came home from school, I called her over to the fence between our gardens. I explained that the local store that makes home deliveries had failed to give me diet coke, and since I have diabetes ... would she like to have these for free?

It worked like a charm. I think she probably drank two or three bottles that day, because around midnight, my system lit up and signaled that the NanoReps had already finished infecting her and built the necessary connections inside skull.

Well. Maybe that ought to be further explained. What the NanoReps had done was to set up the initial conditions - the very basic structure I had devised for the cats. First they reproduced and gained mass, then they started assembling critical circuitry: a powerful wifi antenna from a large number of thin strips of NanoReps simply fusing together on the inside of the top of her skull, capable of transmitting on the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands; a main power-harvesting circuit capable of converting chemical energy from her blood into electrical energy to power the other circuits; all the micro-processing circuitry to run the necessary calculations for relaying her signals over wifi; all the connections to her optical nerve and the various parts of her limbic system and some other brain regions and glands that I wanted to gain control of. This was a very basic configuration that would give me low level control, but wouldn’t let me do anything really fancy to her. The whole circuitry would operate on just two Watts of power, and the heat it generated could be easily dissipated through her whole body. Two Watts power draw means 48 Wh per day, which equals 41 kcal, i.e. the energy content of a kiwi fruit or half a banana. She would never even notice the increased appetite. The only thing she would feel, except for maybe a bit of headache the first day, would be a craving for food rich in certain minerals and metals that the NanoReps had stolen from her system. I myself had been eating beef, broccoli, kale and brussels sprouts with surprising appetite for days, gulping it down with orange juice, which I otherwise never drink.

Using my internal interface, I connected directly to her system over the 2.4 GHz band and acquainted myself with the controls. I spent hours tweaking the layout of my human control interface, deciding which functions of her brain to link to which controls.

Wait. Maybe I ought to explain that bit too? An internal interface isn’t constrained in the same sense that a keyboard and mouse setup are. To manipulate those - to use your mouse and keyboard to click buttons on a 2D interface on a monitor that doesn’t fill your whole field of view, or to use your fingers to press buttons on your keyboard to input text - is slow and inefficient when compared to a direct-to-motor-cortex-interface. You only have ten fingers, after all. In a digital construct, you need no fingers at all. It feels a bit like using limbs to input data at first, but that feeling fades after a few hours, and then it feels more like thinking “I want this done”, and then it happens. The latency is extremely low, and the whole experience is very strange at first. It is as if this is what your brain was always meant to do, but it had to drag this bag of meat and bones around through the process, and now it’s finally free to be as fast as it wants to be. It is orders of magnitude faster than interacting with a computer through your hands.