I sat there quietly just twiddling my thumbs as I listened to Dr. Wood set up a few things and then she tapped my shoulder and guided my head to the side as she took the cable from my cerebral implant on the left of my head and tugged it somewhere in that direction to plug it into something.
Dr. Nguyen came in then and started helping Wood with something.
“Hey Mal, the surgery went really well. We’re just sorting out the monitoring equipment so we can turn your eyes on safely. We’re almost done.” Nguyen said.
“Yeah Dr. Wood said, it’s fine. Not the first time I’ve been in the dark.” I said with a smile.
Soon enough I felt Wood’s hands on each side of my head and she led me to look to the left.
“Alright, here we go Mal. You’ll see in a moment. We’re going to boot you’re eyes in safe mode and then we’ll run through the options while monitoring for brain activity, spikes in activity or heat. Then we’ll tweak the settings as we go. There shouldn’t be any pain as we’ll be doing this quickly before anything can build up to a dangerous level but if you do feel a pain in your head or your eyes just let us know, raise a hand if you can’t speak.” Dr. Wood said.
“Yeah, okay.” I said, a little nervous for a moment before brushing it away. The doctors were good and Sanctum was sitting in the shadows ready to fix anything major.
Suddenly the room was visible, no lights fading in or gradual build up. Just sudden sight. I flinched a little but quickly realized I wasn’t in pain. My eyes didn’t even have to get used to the lighting, they were just fine right away.
There was a little safe mode text in the top right of my view, it seemed to shift away when I looked towards it with it staying in the top right. Fair enough then. My sight was clear and actually a little better than my old sight, did I need glasses before?
“How does it look? How about this?” Dr. Wood asked as she waved her hand in front of Mal.
“It seems fine. Actually a little better then my old eyes. Moving stuff is good too, no after images or anything.” I said.
“I’m going to flash each eye with this pen light to see what the high brightness looks like in your head.”
Dr. Wood then quickly flashed my left eye, then my right, then my left again, then the left again.
“That all looks fine. Seems the standard vision has settled nicely, no adjustment needed. Let’s go over to the night vision.” Wood said, putting the pen light away.
The tests for night vision was much the same but it was surprising to see the night vision was almost full color. The night vision I was used to was either green or white as I’d really only used cheaper night visions. The colors in this night vision were slightly off, oddly bright and simple but still better than a single color that only had shadows.
Next up was thermal, or at least the overlay system. There wasn’t a full thermal vision setting but just a silhouette that would be generated based on visible shapes and thermal data. I looked at both Dr. Wood and Dr. Nguyen to see them lit up as they were but with a red tint that drew itself around them so it looked like they were red people wearing red clothes.
When my vision was cut and everything went dark but the outlines were still roughly held together, without the visual data to keep the outline drawn around them carefully it only had the thermal data which was obviously not enough for a tight silhouette. I’d have to aim for center mass when relying on thermal alone then.
The sonic detection turned out to be a built in function that tagged noises louder than the average background noise with a location tag that floated in the air at the position and a little word box underneath with what the system guessed what the noise was.
What was most interesting was that it corrected itself as soon as I focused on the tag text, if it guessed a door closing but I knew it was a mop falling it would quickly change. Apparently the tags were even visible through walls but the accuracy really dropped off as it went further away but there was a wide compatibility to receive data from cyberears or other detection methods to make it more accurate.
“Fantastic Mal, a standard installation without any issues. I’ll just reset the eyes into normal mode for you.” Wood said and then my vision went dark for a moment before kicking back into full sight again.
“Am I good to go? What about my head? It feels the same really, a little numb around the sides but fine enough.” I said, touching the side of my head.
“You’ll be okay as long as you don’t knock your head too hard while it’s going through the last of the healing and some of the longer term healing. As for the painkillers and such they should fade now they aren’t being topped up, you’re likely to flush out what’s left after another hour or so.” Wood said, unplugging my implant from the machine to the side.
“Alright, I’ll try not to fall over too much. It’s just some netrunning the day after tomorrow anyway. Shouldn’t need to use my head as a battering ram during that job.” I said with a little smile.
“Once you’ve given it time to heal you can go ahead and do that if you want to. Your skin over your scalp is still flesh so be careful of cuts and injuries but your head is now about as hard to break open as a decent safe and with the ballistic scaffolding slipped into your brain meat it can take a lot more of an impact before you start to feel dizzy or get knocked out.”
“You put stuff into my brain? I thought it was just a shell? It’s called a braincase.”
“Oh, every braincase cyberware has a set of supporting structures to prevent the impacts it’ll take from liquidizing your brain. Impact gel on the inside of the skull plates that also allow blood flow, ballistic scaffolding so tougher parts of your brain are cushioned from crushing the softer parts a little, a supporting set of jelly ribs around your brain stem. A few other bits and pieces. All yours are combat grade, you can get higher grade than what we put in but the actual performance returns wouldn’t be a lot different unless you started going into brain modification.”
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“Alright then. Well, as long as I can take a hit to the head without instantly going down then it’s fine. My eyes look the same as my old ones right? My mom was adamant about them being the same ones she gave me.”
“Aw. Yeah we took a bunch of pictures at different depths and plugged the data into the eyes on it’s first set up, they should be indistinguishable to most people. You’d need some serious magnification to pick out the pixels and fulfillments.”
“Great. I guess I’ll head out then. It’ll be a rest day tomorrow but it’ll be good to get some reading done before the netrunning job.”
I got up off the bed and noticed that moving around was somehow sharper and more reactive than I remembered, like a higher frame rate. Very interesting. I left the clinic with a wave of goodbye to both Wood and Nguyen as I head out the front door.
As I walked back up to my apartment I shifted my focus to talking to Sanctum.
So I imagine that you’re working on eating the braincase and my eyes now I guess? That’s weird to say and think about.
[Sanctum is currently integrating both of them, yes. There are several noted material imperfections in the braincase already detected and are likely prevalent through the construction that compromise overall resilience and micro-flexibility. The new cybereyes are interesting in that they are among the small set of designs that are unlisted among Terran designs in Sanctum’s database.]
You have off world designs stored in you? Can you make Martian stuff? Spacer stuff? Transneptunian stuff?
[There are a range of stored designs from Terran, Martian, Inner Belt and Transneptunian sources among others such as Luna, Jovian and even a very small catalog of Solar designs. Sanctum cannot produce cyberware from raw materials but can make changes to existing cyberware that starts at the nanoscale and can extend to the minute scale over longer periods of construction. This is one of the core restrictions on Sanctum’s functions.]
I didn’t even know people lived around the sun, I knew people wanted to set up a big solar collector swarm thing but I didn’t know we set up actual stations out there.
[There are only three known solar stations, there might be others but even the three ports are only known to a few of the richest and most connected people in the system. All three ports are owned by a family owned research corporation named the Pheobean Pact that operates their corporation as an isolated neofeudal empire made up of their station network that is hidden from scanners by advanced shielding and the storm of electromagnetic and gravitic emission of the Sun’s corona. Details are largely unknown.]
Are there any people out past the Kuiper belt? Like way out into the cloud?
[Information is unknown. There are signals from fixed orbit system buoys out that far but there isn’t any historic traffic data listed in Sanctum for anything that far out besides the deployment of the buoys.]
Why would they even put signal buoys that far out? A laser network for no one?
[The buoys were deployed during the post Mercury War space reconstruction efforts and there was a wide effort to establish new stations and access more resource trade lines. A full on colonization and system expansion trend led to a wide system network buoy deployment effort by many different system wide corporations both national and individual. It is likely that the furthest outliers were simply deployed as part of a prestige effort by a small section of several corporations that sought to have the claim that they had the furthest reaching network.]
Pointless posturing then. Maybe one day I can take a ship out there and write my name on one of the furthest ones out, set a mark that’ll sit there forever even when the sun burns out.
I got to my apartment door as the conversation came to it’s end. Sanctum was full of information but wasn’t one to bring stuff up itself. Part of it’s make up as a symbiotic life form maybe, initiative just wasn’t part of it’s normal brain… programming… stuff. I’d guess they are still thoughts, even if it’s just circuits firing instead of neurons firing.
Lately I’d got used to thinking of Sanctum as a busy friend, it wouldn’t check in very often. But would always respond and help if I asked. Then I had a thought along that line of thinking.
Sanctum, have I had any profile stuff lately? Any skill updates or whatever?
[User profile updated.]
[Increased Cyberload. User Value: Low.]
[Improved Attribute: Endurance. User Value: 1]
[Improved Attribute: Perception. User Value: 1]
Letting myself into the apartment and making my way to my room without grabbing any food I laid down on my bed. Since we’d moved in mom has replaced the mattress with some softer bounce to it. Quite preem.
Also my attributes were rising was amazing even if I couldn’t tell much from them. Maybe I was getting quicker? Or less stupid? The changes must either just be a tracker and didn’t change stuff like the skills or were a much more gradual change that wouldn’t be easy to see.
Will the cyberload thing be an issue Sanctum? I know about the whole cyberpsychosis thing and the meds. I don’t really want to go all weird and disconnected and emotionless and so on.
[Cyberpsychosis is a complicated mental illness, the cyberload indicator is only used a rough measurement of the overall “inhumanity” aspect of the illness. Sanctum believes that with the User’s cybercompatibility, mindset and emotional support factors the risk of cyberpsychosis is low.]
Inhumanity? I’m becoming inhuman by swapping out my parts?
[The core of cyberpsychosis has historically been the feeling of superiority and separation from other, less able humans that cyberware can inspire. Sufferers of the illness typically enter into an internal loop of thoughts that reinforces the separation and frustration, this eventually leads to emotional and psychological patterns that allow further symptoms such as synaptic and cerebral overloading to cause additional and widespread damage to the sufferer’s mind. User will be protected from large portions of cyberpsychosis symptoms and will be actively monitored for changes of less protected mental elements.]
So I can chrome up to the gills if I want to and you’ll mostly keep me covered and still me?
[User shall be protected to the degree that Sanctum is able to provide.]
Thanks Sanctum.
I started to drift off just laying there, not even undressed. Maybe it was the last of the drugs and stuff fading out from me? I yawned wide.
Sleep soon took me.
-
Waking up I found I had slept on my arm and it was flaring up in pain hard, damn it. Then I felt a familiar sensation and it seemed Sanctum stepped in and the pain went straight to a level that seemed not so much numb as just not a bother.
I walked into the living room and went straight to the bathroom, stepping into the shower and switched on the water and avoided it until it warmed up. A cool thing I noticed was that I could keep my eyes open against the flow of water without blinking or any distortion apart from the water itself, the water hitting my eye wasn’t enough to buckle the surface of the cybereyes like they would with fragile fleshy eyes.
Cleaning up and stepping out I went over to the mirror to check for scars but the only sign I could find were three little dots of synthskin and a tiny, thin line of the same synthskin around the base of my skull and mostly hidden in the edge of my hair around the back. The doctors were really good at their job.
I cleaned my teeth with some tooth gum, making sure to chew it thoroughly to get it into all the little gaps. Same as always. Maybe Sanctum could look after my teeth but it seemed a bit lame to ask a nanite swarm to brush my teeth.
Today was going to be a relax day but that didn’t mean I could just do nothing. It was time to do some reading and get some programs into my platform for tomorrow.