Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 1.13 (Patreon)

1.13

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By the time that I had something that I was satisfied with, it was well into the night.

I barely knew it. Hours passed in what seemed the blink of an eye. My focus had laid completely on my work, the entirety of my attention directed towards a single purpose. It was a state that I’d only rarely been able to get into back when I was still entirely Human, but it flowed so easily for me now.

Mental acuity... Of all the perks of my new state, beyond the strength and the speed and the size, even the transformation into the Morph Ball, the mind was my favourite of it all. Any of the others would have been perfectly pleasant, but this... this was joy.

In the interests of not spending several weeks throwing together a completely custom circuit board, I’d chosen to take the shortcut of copying the ones that already did ninety percent of what I wanted them to do. The Cyberdecks that I had on hand functioned perfectly well, and between all the diagnostic machines, I had all the tools I needed to peer into their insides and understand how they functioned.

They were dense blocks of nanoscale construction, and I could quite easily see how a Netrunner might end up cooking their own bodies if they pushed their hardware too far. In truth, a lot of it didn’t actually need changing, though the more I looked at it the more I could see new and better ways of implementing what the designers had set out to achieve.

I only made a few small changes where they were both easily accomplished and yet had an outsized effect. If I followed all of those whims, I’d be here for months.

What needed to change was the interface. Normal Cyberdecks connected to Interface Plugs, which themselves required Neural Links, a wired artificial nervous system. Picking up brain signals was pretty easy when Neural Links threaded through so much of it.

The thought of installing something so painfully primitive, ridden with corporate backdoors, known architecture, and flaws was not a pleasant one, and so I was quick to come up with a different solution.

The brain scanner that they had here was intended to be strapped to somebody’s head, but I could see more efficient ways to achieve that, and so I did. What I designed looked almost decorative, appearing, by visual inspection, to be nothing more than a translucent crystalline hexagonal prism barely even five centimetres long. It could easily be mistaken for a piece of jewellery, at least until someone used something a bit better than the average optic to take a look at it.

It would be connected directly to the Cyberdeck, the normal connection replaced with something custom. Consequently, it would lose any ability to provide feedback to the nervous system, but considering how unsecure these devices were, that was nearly a bonus. On the other hand, since the connection was one-way, I’d have to make use of a screen in order to actually see the results rather than see the feedback.

That was fine. I could think much faster than I could type, and I already knew how to upgrade from this.

With the design finalized, I wasted no time starting production of it, before equally quickly switching tracks.

Hardware, after all, was one thing. Software was quite another.

And so I worked, ripping open the operating system of the Cyberdecks so that I could compare them to each other. Naturally, each corporation had chosen to focus on different things, and each operating system was also optimised for their own sets of hardware, but there were significant overlaps with each other because of how desperate everyone had been to escape the consequences of the DataKrash. I could easily see several spots where coding blocks had been copied outright, not even changed from the originals.

The first thing I did was rip out the feedback modules, which were entirely pointless in this design. This immediately simplified things dramatically, as that was an entire layer of translation and retranslation that was simply not being done anymore.

After that, pretty much everything other than the interface and translation protocols were next. I was not going to be doing the typical Netrunner things with this device, after all. I didn’t need it to examine SubNet architecture, and I didn’t need it to invade other systems. I even ripped out the ICE, because even that was pointless.

Its sole purpose was to be a fancy keyboard. The computer did not need to talk to it, it only needed to be able to listen to it. All data-flow was strictly one-way, from sensor to Cyberdeck to computer.

No Netrunner shenanigans with this.

The software took shape carefully, but with surprising rapidness. My talons tapped across the keyboard continuously, line after line after line being written down with the kind of productivity that I’d never had before and would never be able to live without again. The surety of what I was doing was incredible. My brain could track the entire program faster than I was transcribing it. I considered and mentally rewrote entire sections before their previous sections even made it onto the compiler. It grew steadily, yet consistently.

Beside me, the hardware did the same. I’d tossed a trio of Cyberdecks inside the tanks to begin with, and the nanotech had started pulling them apart immediately. They served well as the feedstock for the modified creation, which had started out as a small, silver speck between the three of them. From there, of course, it grew, first in the form of a latticework of nanomachines and other materials, but then that lattice started to fill in. It grew volumetrically, starting from the core and then moving outwards.

If one had recorded it, a timelapse would have let you watch every single circuit appear atom by atom. Every wire, every little isolating sheath, all of it. When the delicate insides were completed, the outer shell almost seemed to spring into existence, its lower complexity meaning that it was finished much faster than the rest of it.

When it was done, I pulled the entire assembly from the vat, and dried it off with a towel. One final set of sprays with an ethanol bottle made absolutely certain it was completely clean, and then I promptly plugged it into a charging port.

Batteries in this day and age were much better than they’d been fifty years ago, so I didn’t need to wait very long for it to charge. I spent that time loading the software I’d written onto a memory chip.

When it was charged up enough, I put the memory chip inside of a slot for the Cyberdeck. With that done, I powered it up.

Nothing appeared to happen, at first. What was happening was completely invisible.

The Cyberdeck didn’t actually have any software installed, after all. It had the most basic instruction set possible, a bitstream encoded into a chip that contained the most basic instructions necessary. At first, it looked for a BIOS, and it found none, so it moved on to next steps. It searched through specific chips, which returned empty, and so it moved on again, into ports. All but one of those was empty, of course, so it went for the one that wasn’t.

The memory chip was read. Instructions were executed.

BIOS was flashed onto the chips, and then more information went into backups. The Cyberdeck rebooted. BIOS, this time, was found, and it took over from there.

Again, the memory chip was read. A different set of instructions were read, and everything on that chip was promptly installed into the Cyberdeck’s own drive. Once again, it rebooted, though this time the BIOS picked its own drive as the source.

All of this took less than a tenth of a second. I pulled the memory chip out almost as soon as I was done putting it in.

I picked up the Cyberdeck, and promptly put it on top of the computer. A moment afterwards, a popup appeared on the screen, informing of a device wanting to establish a connection. I grabbed the mouse, clicked that notification, and then hit ‘accept’ on it.

A green checkmark briefly flashed in the corner before vanishing.

I picked up the Cyberdeck, and then clipped it onto the collar of my robes.

Moment of truth.

I closed my eyes, and I thought.

What I had now was so primitive. So much more room for improvement. I didn’t need these behemoth Cyberdecks, with their simple circuits, so limited in their capacity, layered over themselves in order to alleviate their weakness at the cost of heat. A shift to optronics would shrink the entire thing dramatically, collapse the entirety of it into a three dimensional labyrinth that would only add another centimetre to the scanner, increasing the speed even while consuming vastly less energy.

The layout flashes through my mind. Multi-phase variable-frequency metamaterials would allow me take advantage of variable energies in photons, selectively passing through or redirecting individual particles, or changing their energy states at will. Spintronic principles would provide an ultra-dense memory that wouldn’t be volatile, keeping it all safe. The pathways would be complex by the standards of this world, but the Chozo were older and more knowledgeable.

My eyes open.

On the screen, magnified into incredible size, appeared almost exactly what I’d been thinking of. Almost, because I see parts of it that hadn’t been translated correctly. A thought it all it takes to split the entire thing into cubical sections, and I examine each one just to see how some things had bled and shifted.

The conclusion is pretty obvious to me.

The interface hadn’t been able to keep up, and so sections had connected because the instructions were coming so fast that some of them were simply skipped entirely.

I closed that file, and then started a new one entirely.

Alright. This, too, is a fixable problem.

This time, my eyes stay wide open as I lean back and think about it. The layers start appearing again, the structure building up. The labyrinth starts to sketch into existence, and I start to test on how fast I can go before accuracy falls below what I want.

The answer, unfortunately, is ‘not as fast as I’d like’, but that still puts me well ahead of what I was doing before.

Alright. Optical channels for the paths that the photons would be taking. Switches. Routing. Angles had to be within a certain margin of error, or refraction and reflection would screw the entire thing over. Metamaterials for proper interaction where necessary.

I could go further than this. Usage of Neuromorphic principles would lead to something even more capable. On the other hand, with Mother Brain as an example, perhaps that wouldn’t be the best idea. Counterpoint, Ashkar Behek’s Control Units, which functioned exactly as intended...

Except I was getting ahead of myself, there. Human Nanotechnology wasn’t good enough for that degree of creation. I was limited here and now by that technology... but this, too, is a fixable problem.

How hard would it be to design a new nanite? Something more precise, faster.

But I’m getting ahead of myself even more. Yes, those were things that I wanted, but the point right now was to put myself in a better position.

So... Iteration.

Build the tools to build the tools to build the tools to build the tools. Start with a better, less obvious mind-machine interface. Something that I could keep on me at all times. Then, move on to better production systems, something I could move with me so that I don’t have to go and find a new Ripper setup if something were to mysteriously happen to this one.

It was nearly... well, not providence, since this entire chain of events had been set in motion through precognition, but I wouldn’t be enjoying this degree of anonymity forever. Get the basic tools out of the way, then permanent residence, and then upgrade something worthy of a Chozo.

A simple plan.

...

What did it take to acquire property legally, anyway?

Hmm. More research to do.