After Argo left the chat room I was left thinking. The information that the higher-ups on the ranking list protected me was reassuring, but at the same time, I had no idea about the ramifications.

What irked me especially was that nobody had talked with Spectre about it. And I would know if they had.

I also began a list of all the abyss-dwellers I have sold hard- or software to.

To my surprise, it encompassed more than 2/3 of the A list.

Sure, only four of the top 20 used my boards.

But over the last year, I had custom-build several DSPs for a few of the hackers here.

Most though had bought a utility or a few from me. A dozen or so had bought complete frameworks like the firewall or encrypting/decrypting software.

More surprising was that I sold three copies of Precious OS, without the board with it.

Of course, the version I sold did not have all the bells and whistles the full version had, but again the basic framework that the hacker could adapt to their own liking was what most wanted.

The full OS, like Precious herself, was too much tailored to Spectre, and following that, my needs.

I shook my head lost in contemplation and returned to the general Abyss. I found nothing new that was of interest to me. The other brokers had apparently taken my admonishing to heart, as there were no new requests for Spectre.

With that done, I decided to finish the auto surgeon design.

With the CPU and GPU done yesterday, I returned to the motherboard.

My first instinct was to throw it all overboard and build it from the ground up with Q-links instead of data lines.

But only for a short time, before I realized that it would change virtually nothing.

The bus width was hardwired into the processor, and the Chimera would be my utility CPU so I did not see the need to redesign the actual blocks.

I would need to do that for the next CPUs for my next board or my next cluster, but for the auto surgeon and other similar used systems, the old limits would be plenty.

I would not be able to hit the limits of the processor with any application I planned to use it for.

Of course, that was no reason not to use the Q-link from the get-go, but without it I could use the industrial fabber to build the board, leaving the NADA for other, more critical endeavors. That would change naturally when I build another NADA, but that was in the future. I had to run the first one through its paces yet.

So the motherboard mostly remained unchanged. Sure, I replaced much of the signal lanes with Q-link receptors, as the Q-links themselves were easy, fast to manufacture, and cheap as they can be, and would take virtually no resources from the NADA, but otherwise kept the system the same.

When I began to design the chassis I contemplated for a moment using nano-positors in conjunction with the stepper motors. At first, I was going to dismiss it, but then I thought about neurosurgery, where micrometers might be too much, and decided to include them.

Sure, they made the design much more complicated and expensive to build, but that translated to at most twice the costs in time and materials. With the decision to include the positors I had of course to choose from the higher end of controlling options. Without the Chimaera, I would need at least three CPUs to make it work, and even then it would be much more graceless, but fortunately, the Chimaera was at hand so I could build the best auto surgeon one could get.

When I began to integrate the scanner it was the first time I encountered some problems.

I had several designs of scanners at the ready, but I realized that none of them had the resolution to make use of the positors.

I have to confess it took me a few hours to design a scanner that included all the little advancements of the designs I could get my hands on.

Debugging the design in simulation took even longer. I was a bit sad that I could not do it without adding another CPU.

It would have been nice to make a one CPU auto surgeon to rule them all. At least the scanner design was useful for other functions and it would be trivial to make it stand alone.

After that, the frame was easy. As so often, Carbon was an ideal material for the task, and it took me only a couple of minutes to combine all of it into a complete if somewhat ugly design.

Surprisingly it did not violate any published patents.

Maybe a few submarine patents, but the courts tended to frown upon those. Oh, sure, much of the design came straight out of the black labs, but as a rule, they did not patent their stuff.

The next task was to have the cluster run the design through a simulated wringer. I was aware that that would not eliminate all problems, but at least the annoying ones would be caught.

When I looked at the time I realized that I had spent nearly 40 hours on the design, and that was mostly taking stuff I already had and arranging it new.

Thank goodness for the compression so it had taken not quite an hour in real-time but I was mentally exhausted. The surprising thing though was that my funk had lessened. It was hard work and took an enormous amount of concentration but this tinkering session was exactly what I had needed.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

If the design passed the simulated stress test it would take around three weeks to build it. At least that is what I hoped. I had so far no valid data about how fast, or not, the NADA was. It should be, if not blistering fast, still quite speedy. But reality had the uncomfortable habit of biting one in the derrière if one relied on such nice innocent words like should or would.

To make it short, I hoped for the best, but I had already ordered an off-the-shelf auto surgeon for the worst case. It should arrive later this week.

With the design work done I decided to play for some time. It is barely conveyable what it feels like to fly through the mindscape. Either you have done it and know the feeling or you did not. It would be like describing the color blue to a blind man.

Then I thought about a possible next project. It would be irrelevant at the moment to begin a new design for my implant surgery.

The bioreactor I would have to design from the ground up. Sure, I had the small model in the lab, but that design would not scale well.

I had built it predominately for my cranial implants, and while it could be used for cyber muscles it was far from optimized for that role.

Not that the process itself was fully developed.

Also, I would like to have the possibility to work on several parts at once.

And frankly, I felt the need to have the ideas simmer for a bit. Except that I would definitely include a nano fab into the design. A big one at that.

Left study time. I did not think I could learn much more in implant surgery at this moment. Nicolin was the foremost specialist and I more or less learned everything he taught.

Left the new fields, energy production, and gravitics.

I can’t claim to be particularly interested in either of them, but I knew that I would be pretty bored pretty quickly if I run out of new things to learn.

While I contemplated the various merits of both fields, I remembered that I had the first gamma-curse attack since I implanted my new cranial board.

That, in collaboration with the new 12th gen nanos I had started to use only two months prior might be able to finally give me an answer to the curse.

I called up the records of the onset. Initially, I did not see anything different between normal activity and the initiation of the attack.

Not completely unexpected though as my nanobots observed around 50 billion neurons, so I employed the cluster to analyze the data for abnormal changes during the curse.

Honestly, without the storage capacity of the cluster and the Q-link, this amount of observation would have been completely impossible just from the mass of data alone.

For the cluster, it was trivial work though. I reduced my compression while I waited for the results, and started reading the introduction of gravitics, after a virtual coin toss. As with nearly every introduction text I have ever encountered it was dry working, so it took a while to get into it.

I had half the book finished when the cluster signaled that it had results. Dry, boring physical texts were instantly put aside and I looked up the results.

It was not a pretty picture.

Essentially some of my synapses reacted with a slight denaturation of a couple of proteins in the ion channels, which began to deform the neural signal.

That, in turn, spread the denaturation around it, increasing the damage. After a certain point, the cascading feedback cycle began, releasing neurotransmitters that were not meant to be released in this amount, closing receptors that were meant to be open.

All that spread the denaturation further and further increasing the runaway cycle even more. A short simulation of the denatured proteins showed that they would not be metabolized without being slightly changed by specific neurotransmitters docking. These neurotransmitters were not unusual but after the process had begun the amount of new denaturation exceeded that of metabolization.

The initial factor was apparently an overload of the synapses. Theoretically, it could happen to every mongrel, but the risk was negligible. But the overclocked brain we Pures got free of charge increased the probability massively.

The catalyst of the overload was in the first instance stress. Hard thinking also contributed, but it was mostly stress. That of course was another reason why it did spin out of control so fast.

The stress itself was in a vicious cycle. The more pain, the more stress, the more it damaged the synapses, and the stronger the curse, increasing the pain and thus the stress.

Only when the pain was too much and the victim was unconscious could the stress abate and the vicious cycle shut down. It would still take several hours to clean up the proteins, but it would happen.

The reason why the previous attempts to break the runaway reaction failed was that they tried to stop the effect, and not the cause.

The abnormal neurotransmitter activity was the result of the actual curse. If one stopped the transmitters one would also stop the transmutation of the denatured proteins and such the metabolization, so when the medication was released the cycle just started anew.

It is hard to emphasize how important that discovery was for us high gammas, but I was far from being capable to use that information.

I might be able to modify the neurotransmitters, and with the help of the 12th gen nanos I might even direct them to the affected regions, but that would only kick the can down the road.

Reluctantly I decided I was not the right person to use this data, so the next virtual hour was spent finding out who the right person was.

In the end, I found Dr. Katherine Chalmers who, while not the foremost expert in pure neurology, was known to accept information from other sources than the closed university system.

I composed my message, explaining that I got access to these detailed records of the events during the onset of the curse, pointed her at the denatured proteins, and gave her an anonymous email to contact me.

Then I uploaded the raw data into an abandoned web storage, all 362 EB of it, along with the analysis of the event. I would naturally observe her behavior over the next weeks and months, making sure she accessed the data and, if necessary point her to the conclusion I had found.

After that, I signed the message as Seraphim and send it. Hopefully, that name would carry enough weight to get things done. Otherwise, I would have to go a different route.

Now there was only one mystery left about the attack. I did not send the part of the data where Darren intervened. I had looked at it, but I was puzzled at what happened. It was frustrating, I had several 100 million nanobots recording events in my brain and the only thing I got was some strange radiation and the cycle began to recede.

Just like that. The strange radiation was a multifrequency EM radiation, and I could measure it, but I could absolutely not explain how that radiation, which should actually have cooked quite a few of my neurons instead repaired the damage.

Everything I knew about physics told me that that was impossible. I pondered over the results for a while, before I gave up for the time being.

Either I would get an idea of how it worked or not. Maybe I could get a lab cloning station and a few lab rat strains.

I had lost my old cloning station when I moved to New York, but I never had much use for it, except when I tested the biosheathing.

The next idea was to get a full-sized biotech cloning station. I knew it was way overkill for a little research, but sooner or later I would look at the biosciences, and until then I could offer cloned organs and limbs in addition to the implant surgery.

While I was at it I just ordered the whole biological, chemical, physical, and material science lab equipment. With me beginning to learn about gravitics and later energy tech it would do pretty well for me. It was, after all, not possible to do everything in the matrix.