3G: the Glowing Green Goo

The summer park could probably be called their main training ground at this point. As they did their prework-out warm up, Zax idly wondered if they would keep coming to this one for the other seasons, or if they would move to the current spring park once this one turned to autumn.

“So! The experiments had noticeable results on SG, and Aran showed there is an effect, but harder to pinpoint.”

The test subject nodded. Warm ups had been followed by basic exercises, but Aran didn’t make a new accidental figure.

“The difference in results could be due to individual variations, or because of the type of skills you’re learning. I used the same imprinting principle for both of you, but with different patterns. It may be a premature conclusion, but we have proven we can make learning significantly easier, through a form of sleep preparation.”

“Awesome!” Aran cheered.

“We’re still far from any kind of instant teaching, but it’s a good starting point.” Zax concurred. “There are many ways to refine and improve the process, but for now I think it’d be better to teach a full skill over teaching it faster. What do you think?”

“You’re asking us?” Aran leaned her head sideways.

“It’s your idea we’re working on, and it’s both of your brains we’re tinkering with.” Zax stated. “And the three of us will probably be the only ones who ever use it.” He added as an afterthought.

“Aren’t you going to publish something, eventually?” Aran quizzed, SG nodding along. Their project wasn’t supposed to be a secret, and even for a dotter, Zax was pretty open about his experiments.

“I already am.” He nodded. “So?”

Even if they created the perfect formula; who else would think it was worth having nanites in their brain?

His roommates exchanged a glance before answering as if this interlude had never happened:

“Fully succeed once before trying to do it better. Seems coherent enough.” Aran answered as SG noncommittally raised a shoulder.

“Great. What I need the most is patterns. Neural patterns. I have made a few so far, but only for specific knowledge or specific movements.” He nodded to SG and Aran, in that order. “We still have a lot of work to make a working whole.”

“What do you mean?” Aran blinked. “We have two experts here. Can’t you just… copy-paste? Like you did so far?”

“First off, I’m not an expert, and I never was. I knew some free running and I practiced a few years back, but that’s it. I don’t have much to teach, and my patterns are way shallower and more complex than SG’s. Not good for a template.”

“More complex? Shouldn’t the expert have the complex one?”

“You’d think so, but no. The more the brain does something, the more efficient the associated neural paths. They start complex and all over the place, then as you do it more it improves them. Removes the irrelevant parts, makes shortcuts, that kind of thing. Makes the whole more efficient. So, an expert’s would be simpler and more efficient than a newbie’s.”

“Uh.”

Zax couldn’t think of a gaming parallel she would resonate with, probably something about experience points, so he moved on:

“Second, I can’t just “Copy-Paste”. No two brains are the same, remember?”

“Ah, right.” That was why mapping the brains was so important.

“So what I copy has to be adapted before I can paste it. It’s not at all like converting sensorial data to VR, and there’s a lot of room for error there.”

“Got it.”

“I think that’s where the accident came from, by the way. SG, you can do a lot of different things starting with that one jump, right?” Zax turned his head back to the feathered girl.

She was startled but nodded.

“And you were thinking about those when you watched Aran? Even if fleetingly?”

Second, more hesitant nod.

“And since you’re so skilled, the patterns for those are so simplified I couldn’t tell the difference between you looking at Aran’s move and you fleetingly thinking about the other moves. So the patterns got mixed up. I can’t tell if what I made had different bits and pieces her brain put together, or if the pattern itself is like a seed that grows on its own, or if it’s something else entirely. Whatever it is, you somehow picked up on it enough to actually perform it.”

“I’m awesome!”

“You both are, in strangely complementary ways.” Zax nodded.

“So… what now?” the tailed girl enthusiastically asked.

“Now, I have one last thing I want to try. Then we’ll focus on getting clean patterns. Expect a lot of repetitions.”

“Awww, sounds boooring! It works well enough when we do one move a few times.” Aran half-jokingly pouted.

“I am not the kind of guy who’s fine with “well enough”, especially not when I’m tinkering with my friends’ brains.” Zax curtly replied. “It had a ‘neat’ side effect this time, but it was uncontrolled. Potentially dangerous.”

“Your nanites won’t hurt anyone. You have more failsafe than the Main Computer.” She waved his concerns off.

It wouldn’t do.

“The hardware will not hurt you. But yesterday was an accident, which proves we have no idea what we’re doing. I have no idea what I am doing!” He didn’t raise his voice, but he spoke with a rarely seen intensity, making sure not to blink. “This time, you did a cool figure. Next time, you could hit your face with your knee, mid vault. Uncontrolled fall, above uneven ground. Or you could try and land on your talon instead of your foot; trip and fall assured. And there’s nothing that says it won’t happen outside the lesson either. You could just be walking in the street, and a half-glimpsed flash in your peripheral vision will make you throw your arms to the side. Pushing what- or whoever is next to you. Dangerous for yourself and others. And you work around people who can’t take care of themselves. You may not only break things in their homes.”

“Can that… really happen?” The girl was shaken.

Zax had slowly gotten closer, but her voice seemed to come from far away. He let himself blink once before answering:

“I have no idea. And that’s precisely the problem.”

He stepped back to let it sink in, allowing Aran to look down. When she looked back up, he tempered his own warning:

“Now, the risks I mentioned are real, but still unlikely. For now. It’s only been a few nights, with a few similar patterns. That’s why I don’t make us stop yet. But the further we go, the greater the effect, and the greater the risks. That’s why we better build strong foundations now, when accidents don’t have major consequences and we can experiment more freely. Or else, when people get hurt, we’ll be left scrambling to fix things and we’ll only make them worse.”

A glance at SG showed her own concern. She’d heed his words too, but maybe too much. He didn’t want to worsen her quickly healing self-isolating tendencies:

“For you, I didn’t include any motor functions in your imprint. That was the point. Unvoluntary movement shouldn’t be an issue. If there are unwanted consequences, it’ll be something like… constantly thinking about the adjusting machine, or compare everything to it. Hyperfocusing on it at inappropriate times, maybe? You can’t hurt anyone but yourself with that.”

SG lowered her eyes to her wings, rubbing them and shuffling her talons awkwardly, but she eventually raised her head and nodded, relieved.

“Now, do you both want to continue? Or should we stop here and teach free running the old-fashioned way. You can change your mind anytime.”

The pair moved a few steps back to discuss, but ultimately decided to keep going.

The basic idea was simple: the brain activated the same pathways when performing an action, when thinking about the action and when seeing the action performed, albeit at different intensities.

All three of them would execute the same action one by one, with the other two watching and actively thinking how they did it or would do it. All three would also watch recordings of the performance, from several point of view, including first person perspective.

It was embarrassing, but SG was the one who mentioned the latter option. It had totally slipped from Zax’s mind, but since all three had brain maps and nanites, they could all record and read recordings of their sensory input. They could all transmit and convert them for VR, so some reverse-engineering could convert it back in someone else’s input.

It was an excellent support for conventional teaching too, showing the teachers what the student did wrong, and showing the student what a better execution, with a first-hand experience.

The hobbyist would use the resulting readings to narrow down on the pattern to imprint. Aran couldn’t perform more than basic moves, and Zax couldn’t follow SG on the advanced ones, but observation and visualisation still gave exploitable data points.

For his last experiment, he activated the impression while Aran was performing, but she was hit with nausea, vertigo and heaving. Zax immediately stopped and made the tailed girl lay down. Whatever it was passed in a few seconds, her vitals went back to normal, but the two teachers didn’t let her up.

Luckily, it didn’t take long to find out what went wrong:

“Not brain damage.” He sighed in relief. “Only motion sickness.”

“What? Like when babies are carried on the light road too long too often?” The tailed girl sat up, unstopped this time.

SG followed, looking curiously. She had never heard of that ailment.

“Exactly. In hindsight, it makes sense. Motion sickness comes when the brain struggles with opposing inputs. Usually, the inner ear detecting constant movement, but the eyes not seeing any. My imprint produced a similar effect, with similar reactions.”

“That’s good, right? That means I can just take pills and it’ll be fine.”

“No. Well, it can be good, maybe, but taking pills won’t solve the issue.” Seeing the curiosity in one of his friend’s eyes and concern in the other’s, he explained further: “They work by supressing one of the conflicting inputs. We can’t do that.”

“Drat. How is it good then?” Aran queried.

“It shows your brain tried to do… something, with my imprint. They interacted. It could be a hint to bypass dream learning, a step toward direct transmission. I’ll need to experiment first. A lot- not on you.” He added with a frown when Aran opened her mouth. “A light imprint had such an effect on you, and I’ll have to do a lot more than that.”

“Good luck finding volunteers.” She raised an eyebrow.

“I was thinking lab mice. More expandable. Yes, I know how callous it sounds. Hopefully there’s a supplier in the dot. If not, I’ll have to pay a visit to the Circle. I’ll look it up later. It’ll be more work than taking care of trees, I bet. For now, priority to finding patterns.”

That incident still gave further hindsight on the patterns. They now had three layers for Zax to juggle: sensory perceptions, motor functions, and other. Each with their own sub-categories. He had a feeling some of those would eventually become categories of their own, especially from the ‘other’ section, but that was not here nor there.

All in all, it was a productive evening.

The next day, Bathor arrived mid-morning, with two volunteers for his templates; one with a slight insectile mutations, the other with an extended reptilian one.

She asked he remove her nanites first, to show the others she had indeed gone through the same and not suffered from it. It was a smart idea, but he first checked if his tiny workers were still intact and had accomplished their task.

They had, so he launched the extraction sequence his subject had settled for: via her sweat ducts. They would seep through her skin like sweat during an exercise. For comfort and convenience, he only used her non-dominant palm; he had her grab an absorbing pad connected to the empty B-Box they came from, to be swapped with the C-Box when the time came.

It made the process longer, but it helped reassure the witnesses. Bathor didn’t feel anything beside a moist hand.

Zax put the used boxes in the decontamination drawer of the backroom, moved around where SG had relocated to avoid the Residents, and took what he needed for two more injections.

Unfortunately, it turned out one of the newcomers wasn’t mutated enough to count toward his compensation.

The fully scaled man tried to refute it, but it was undeniable: his was merely a tweak of his epidermis, giving the appearance and texture of scales. His whole body was covered, making it impossible to miss; but his current stage was mostly a cosmetic change. Common even in the dot, albeit less extended. He could still sweat, he had a few wrinkles, his scalp still had dandruffs even if hair didn’t grow anywhere; he didn’t moult or naturally loose old scales when new ones grew underneath. His mouth and diet were unchanged.

In short, his mutation was literally less than skin deep.

Zax still tried to buy his template, but a price in 3G couldn’t compare to the blackmail of Bathor’s team or the humiliation of “not being advanced enough” for a dotter. The man had only defended his mutation’s advancement out of pride, maybe fear, but he never wanted to be there in the first place. He left as soon as the horned woman confirmed he had fulfilled his part of the coercion – with nicer words – and assured they wouldn’t reveal this new shameful secret either, for a price to be determined later.

From the horned woman’s smirk, Zax had a feeling he frequently bragged about his extended mutation. She was not particularly thrilled by this development either, but she couldn’t deny the hobbyist’s observations.

The other “volunteer” was amused right until the dotter’s attention was on her. She was young, barely adult, with a slightly unnatural pink skin and unblinking compound eyes. Whether her mutation was advanced enough was debatable, since it was almost only her eyes, but insect-type mutations were rare enough and far enough from human anatomy to move the scales in her favour. Or Bathor’s.

The dotter made sure she had all the relevant information about what he wanted to do, what she was to do and not do, and so on. She was not blackmailed, just a pauper in need of units. She digitally signed an official statement of informed consent, and he started.

“Finally!” Bathor exclaimed. “Why didn’t I have to sign that?”

“The contract you signed already detailed everything. It would be redundant. We can still do so if you want.” Zax stated without lifting his eyes from his work. “It might be better, now that I think about it. It’s also a proof that you did give me my payment.”

They were quickly done, faster than with the bovine woman. Zax mentioned to the girl she could spread word about him to her friends and relatives. He was willing to buy templates from them, if they were willing to come to his shop to be set. It didn’t have to be his shop, but it had to be in the dot, for obvious reasons.

She probably knew other destitute people who could do with more units. The advancement of the mutation only mattered for Bathor’s payment; he would pay anyone willing to cooperate. They would have to reimburse the destroyed nanites if they couldn’t follow the rules, he warned, but it should be a win-win for everyone involved.