“First off, you should know that it doesn’t actually have a name yet. It is more of an idea that I have set up into a cohesive and workable format. I have started on the design and programming for it; however, I have run into a problem with how to actually make it function.” With that opening spiel over, Deckard took control of a projector on the office wall and began showing his mother everything.

Even with the enormous amount of computational resources at her beck and call, it still took his mother a few seconds to understand what she was seeing.

“This is brilliant Deckard. This first part has the potential to help the lives of everyone who has been struggling to adapt to their cybernetic prosthetics. The next part can help people learn subjects in the same manner that you and I now do, decreasing schooling time to a fraction of what it currently is. Progress in all research sectors would skyrocket as new people entered and they would be able to easily stay on top of all the new research.”

Her projection tapped a finger to her lips as she read through his work and copious notes. The two areas she had mentioned were only two out of an outlined six categories.

“I see the framework here, but I don’t see a way for any of this to interact with the person or directly help them.”

Deckard nodded. “That is part of the problem I have been working on. Programming is able to help mitigate some of the problems, but that doesn’t interface directly with the average human. Using their NetConnect for the learning portion is possible, but slower than I had originally intended.”

“Hmm, yes. I can see why you came to me. To take this project to where you have truly envisioned it, you will need more resources.” She waved her see-through, glowing hand, and the projection on the wall was split in half. “We might be able to use this. I know you are familiar with the concept of nanites.”

He snorted. “Who isn’t? They are practically the holy grail of technology in everyone’s mind. The problem is no one has ever created a battery small enough to power them.”

“They still haven’t, but with your body, we could use wireless capacitive charging. I’m sure we’ll still lose some of them, but we’ll be able to start learning more about the process, at least. As long as we include the programming for them to create more when they fall below a certain level…” She let the idea dangle, knowing how much it would interest him.

“Where would we keep their… factory? I’m always changing bodies and parts.”

“Your braincase, the hardened liner, is perfect for something like this. We can include a small port through which they can leave and come back through and that is it. I have been meaning to upgrade your braincase again for a while now. The nanites can also help to ensure that your brain stays in optimal condition. They should work even better than the sensors we have developed up to this point. In theory, they could help modulate your hormones and neuro-chemicals so you would feel more like a normal person.”

“You don’t need to sell them so hard, mom. If you have been wanting to include them in the next iteration of my braincase anyway, why only mention it now?”

“It’s a larger change than I have made in the past and is slightly invasive. It felt like something that I should talk to you about before I simply went ahead and did it.”

Deckard stared at the six categories he had created and added a seventh. “I want to be able to control and monitor all the code that goes into them.”

“I would expect nothing less, considering this is your idea and project. However, any nanites that are going to be doing anything inside your brain will be monitored by me as well. Not that I don’t trust your programming skills, honey, but I have far more experience when it comes to playing around with the human brain.” She said wryly.

It was the absolute truth. The hardened braincases were her creation, along with everything that went with them.

He was fine with that. There were far too many things that could go wrong simply because of his own ignorance. The brain was something that you didn’t play around with. It was the control center for his body. If something happened to it, then he was screwed.

He was perfectly fine with his mother taking control in these circumstances. All he wanted to do was monitor everything and continue learning for later. The information would be invaluable for other people once the project left the trial phase.

Deckard was aware of his shortcomings and was already working to correct them. Depending on someone else was natural and there was nothing wrong with doing so, especially not when they knew more than you. Some people seemed to detest accepting help from others, even when the other person was clearly more knowledgeable than they were on the subject.

He was not one of those people. It would make even less sense if that was the case, considering he was the one who had gone to his mother asking for her help in the first place.

For the remaining time of their meeting, they worked out the details of their partnership on the project.

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Meredith had already determined that the original specifications of the nanite project needed to be changed. They had been more all-purpose in design originally -and while they still needed that functionality to a certain degree- a large portion of what they would be doing with his project would be inside the brain.

That meant that they needed to be changed, and additional features needed to be added to their programming. Considering their microscopic size, making any sort of modification to them was a near monumental task. All the programming for them was already being offloaded to a CPU that would be installed in his braincase. They would receive their commands wirelessly, in a continuous feed, alongside the energy signal.

They were too small to contain any sort of large memory module for individual actions. This was his mother’s compromise, and it was a good one, assuming it worked. There were a few problems with maintaining the various signals inside the body. However, failsafes could be built into the code or the nanites for those occurrences, and they would find other workarounds.

They were merely at step one, and they had already made a tremendous amount of progress due to the combination of projects.

As soon as Deckard left his mother’s office, he hurried off to his own. His mind was swirling with possibilities and ways to make the project work even better. Now that there was a definite method of how it would all interact with the person, he could start fine-tuning everything and he couldn’t wait to get started.

There were so many ways that this could help people in the future. Truly, they were living in the golden age of humanity.

***

Screw humanity and screw this project!

Deckard and his mother had been working on the still nameless project for over a year now, and things had begun to change in the outside world.

Never before had the overall populace been happier. They were well fed; they had access to good jobs, cheap, but good education, and even their housing was less expensive than it had been in years. The people were happy.

The problem was the other corporations. They had started to eye what his mother and father had created. All the work they had done for the cybernetics industry and people as a whole, to the other corporations, all of it meant nothing but more potential money in their pockets.

They had yet to be successful in any of their attacks, legal or otherwise, but gradually, public sentiment was starting to turn against them.

All it meant for Deckard was that he was quickly losing interest in his little project, despite the major progress they had made with it over the last year.

He had started the project to help people, and maybe in a small part to help him understand the part of his humanity that had been lost. Now, those very same people had turned against him and his mother.

Why was he trying to help people who were actively working to hurt them? It made no sense to him, and as a result, his passion for the project dwindled.

He continued to learn and work on it, but the magic that had made the idea so great had vanished. Now it was just another job. It still had the same wide scope and potential to change everything, only now he was less interested in even revealing it to the world.

His mother had been working through all the issues that had arisen from putting the little nanite factory inside his new braincase. An extra-hardened model that she had designed for him. It was a little larger than normal to accommodate everything, but it had needed to be. It contained the factory, a new nutrition-feed system, and a backup power generator.

Most of that had all ended up beneath his brain, which meant the rest of his actual head had then needed to be redesigned.

After they had worked through those issues though, the real progress on it could finally begin.

Deckard’s programming of the CPU control unit and the first of the installed modules for it was an exercise in patience. There were so many interconnecting parts that getting it to work together while transmitting the correct information to the proper nanites in the precise sections was almost impossible.

Even now, what they were doing wasn’t exactly the best method. They were bouncing the location data for each nanite of each other to create a virtual map of sorts. They would then use both the map and the bounced location data to keep track of them for the needed information.

The problem with using that method is it created lag, and by the time he received the information, it was already out of date. Not by much, milliseconds, sometimes only even picoseconds, however, when dealing with the sort of microscopic sizes that they were, that was plenty.

Sending them to pre-programmed locations was met with more success. The problem with doing that is no one’s body is exactly the same on the inside. That becomes doubly true when you start dealing with prosthetics and other items that they were trying to help people with.

The solution ended up being a full-body scan of sorts. When the user first received their application of nanites, they would disperse throughout their entire system, mapping everything. They would be carried through every single working vein in the body at some point. Thankfully, since all they were doing was mapping everything, they didn’t require a lot of energy during this period.

The bots would then gather together around the person’s NetConnect device that sat on the top of their cervical spine. The entire process would normally take a few days as they would be going through the brain as well. At least that was the case in the beginning. As time went on Deckard began to notice some interesting behavior amongst the tiny little robots.

He would hesitate to call it any form of proper intelligence, but it was clear that they were learning. The paths they were choosing had become gradually more refined, parts of his body that required more time to examine suddenly had more of the bots. Then there was the scans of his brain itself, little by little they were growing in detail.

It was an interesting and unexpected quirk that came from them swarming together. He couldn’t wait to see what affects it would have on the design of his project, if any.

All of the data would be logged onto a silica Prism that had been plugged into an open port.

After it had all been logged, a profile would be constructed for them, and then their real treatment could begin.

That was the plan, at least. In theory, it would work. In actuality, there were a few more difficulties that they needed to work through before it was ready to be shown to anyone.

However, that isn’t to say they didn’t test it out. They did. The mapping function worked great on Deckard’s brain.

Even Meredith used them on herself. She found that they were far more accurate than many of the sensors she already had monitoring her brain.

With that, the first stage of the project had officially come to a close. They were ready to start concentrating on the interface and the parts that would really help people.