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Author's Note: I'm back! This Australian summer has been strangely non-productive in terms of my production of erotica, bucking the trend. But then, as we come to the end of the wet season, this past weekend I took this draft I had from two months ago and added about ten thousand words to it! Strange when inspiration -- and more importantly, motivation -- strikes! I really wanted to tell this story, but as all authors do at some point or the other, during the initial production of the draft I got stuck at one sentence. I stared at it, ruminated over it, whinged about it, and eventually gave up on the story altogether. Yet when I got back to it this past Friday, all I had to do was delete it and write a new one. To all my fellow smut and non-smut writers: If you ever find yourself in this situation, believe me when I tell you you're not stuck. You're just in transition from one good word, phrase, sentence, paragraph or chapter, to the next one. Take a break and keep going!
As for this story, dear readers, I'm afraid it's a long one. A simple word count tells me that the introduction -- with a fair bit of sci-fi and world-building thrown in -- is about six thousand words long. I seriously considered separating the intro into its own submission, under the "Non-erotic" genre, but looking at other similarly-sized stories I feel like the average smut reader can trudge through a LOT of sludge to get to the gold. Let me know if I'm wrong, however!
If you just want to skip to the sexy bits, hit CTRL-F and keep searching the pages until you find mention of "Petrosus". The story description should give you enough background on what you need to know about the happenings prior. This is definitely a multi-part series, and I can't wait to see what sexual adventures Ja/mian gets up to next. In the meanwhile, I'd love any and all comments you may have.
Happy reading!
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They would've never believed it.
Given the weight of evidence -- which was the entirety of the existence of the modern
homo sapiens
-- was stacked against something like this ever happening, they would've thought I was a raving lunatic. They would've sooner put me in an institution for the psychologically disturbed than behind bars with the rest of gen-pop. They scrutinised me with stern eyes, tapped their pens on the table, chewed gum with mouths half open, ran their fingers through their hair and blew raspberries. They poked, prodded, threatened, cajoled, negotiated, pleaded and screamed for answers. But I stayed silent, for I could never tell them the truth.
Their time was running out. In another six hours I would be free to go. They hadn't managed to pin any charges on me in the past forty-two, and it didn't look like they would be able to do so in the time remaining. At best, they could prosecute me for trespassing, breaking and entering. But both of those were bailable offences, and I'd be on a plane back home by the afternoon. But I figured that the detectives suspected something deeper was going on, something bubbling under the surface. They were probably tearing up my house to find something,
anything
. I wondered how many times in the past two days they had gone through my affects. Three, four times? Each time their search getting more frantic, increasingly frustrating?
My flat in Madrid had some breadcrumbs, but the loaf was long gone. Thinking back, it was definitely stupid of me to have stayed the extra day that I did. If the Garcias next door hadn't noticed me slipping in at midnight and called the police, I would've made it in and out of Spain without anyone being the wiser. But now... I had some explaining to do back home. I toyed with the empty packet of sandwiches on the table, and tried to give the camera my best bored expression, but I was pissed. I had made a naïve mistake. The kind only a young, hot-headed man would make. I falsely believed I had grown past that. I stared at my hands -- smooth, unwrinkled, unmarked. Next to the sandwich pack stood a paper cup. Its bottom was stained with the long-dried dregs of coffee. I wondered how much coffee I had drunk since being brought into this interrogation room. It was making me... unbalanced. A year-and-a-half ago I wouldn't have even touched the substance because of the effect it used to have on me. But in the past twelve months I could afford to indulge, and coffee was the least problematic out of all my indulgences.
Problematic
. That was a word I hadn't heard in a while. It was Corinne's favourite, judging by the way she used to bring it up in meetings all the time. I was only too glad to not have attended those meetings in a while. Towards the end of my previous life, they had gotten more and more unbearable. It was almost like any idiot could buy their way into the board, and I know a lot of them did. I had to spend ten years in the basement before I was even allowed past the fiftieth floor, let alone sit in on executive meetings on Level 63. And even that was ten storeys below where Richard Steinbeck had his Director's office. The first time I saw his face was during my second week at the company. He was, like me, much younger then. At least, he still had control of his arms and legs. By the time I became VP of R&D, Parkinson's had crippled him.
Richard was the reason JCD had acquired and funded a biotech company at all. Everyone at Nervosyn had been puzzled about the world's fifth largest cosmetics company investing in their tiny Brain-Computer Interface start-up, beating out top bidders from more closely aligned fields, but no one was dumb enough to say no to the money. Or to the free reign we gave them for the first five years. Nervosyn's prime directive was to develop an electro-neuronal bridge to alleviate the symptoms of neuro-degenerative diseases, like Parkinson's. As far as bets went, Richard Steinbeck had bet big. We basically poured money into the company, to the tune of hundreds of millions. Then one night, Elijah Turner, Nervosyn's Chief Technologist, had called me to their labs to show me the findings from the latest prototype. His tone on the phone had been grim. When I arrived, I saw that his eyes were bloodshot. He kept fidgeting with his wedding band.
"It's not looking good, Damian." He told me.
He took me to their experimentation pen, which was where their prototypes underwent live testing on animals. Elijah led me to a catwalk overlooking two enclosures on the opposite ends of the pen. Both the enclosures had a lone pig in them. One of the pigs was milling about, munching on some slop from a feed. The other one was rolled over. It didn't look like it was breathing.
"What am I looking at?" I asked.
"We implanted our latest BCI prototype into this pair of subjects." Elijah explained. "One of the pigs was perfectly healthy, while in the other we simulated the symptoms of a neuro-degenerative disease. This manifested as total loss of motor control, from the neck down. The second subject could not voluntarily articulate anything on its body except its mouth."
Elijah went on.
"The way the prototype works, is that it has two components: a
teacher
and a
student
."
"A teacher and a student?"
"One teaches, the other learns."
"Learns what?"
"How to interpret incoming motor activation signals from the brain. In a person afflicted with Parkinson's, there's a lack of a chemical substance in their brain which is used to reinforce, or inhibit, signals to activate and move their limbs. That chemical basically acts as a lube between the neurons, and when there's not enough lube, signals don't travel between their brain and their spine the way they should. This leads to loss of motor control and function, which manifests as tremors, slowing down of movements, stuttering and rigidity of limbs."
I nodded along. Elijah continued.
"The
teacher
half of the BCI, implanted in a healthy, functional host, is basically an observer. It observes how those reinforcement and inhibitory pathways function, and what a healthy feedback loop between motor activation signals and the resulting response -- say, lifting one's leg to step forward -- looks like. It records each activation and response, and sends it to the servers in that room over there," Elijah pointed to a dimly lit room behind us. Racks upon racks of servers hummed quietly behind the glass, bathed in blue light.
"These servers host dozens of Tensor Processing Units: AI cores. They process the incoming signals from the teacher unit and learn from the host over time, slowly building a neural network model of these healthy activation loops."
"Uh huh."
"This neural network model basically parses the loop into a 1:1 signal-response relationship which is passed on to the student unit. The student unit then acts as the go-between for the motor cortex, where the activation signals originate from, and the rest of the spinal system. For example, if it sees a signal to raise one's foot, it knows exactly what response is expected out of that signal, and passes it down the spinal cord, bypassing the faulty chemical pathways. Same thing happens during feedback, but in reverse: the student unit records the response to the signal and sends it back to the motor cortex, so the brain knows where the foot is, and whether it's okay to step forward."
"The theory makes sense." I looked out at the two pigs below us. "But I suppose it hasn't worked in practice."
"It would seem that way." Elijah said grimly. "So which one do you think got each half of the interface?"
I furrowed my brow and looked at him. Then, without turning, I pointed my finger at the pig that was strolling in its pen.
"Teacher."
Then I pointed to the one who had given up the ghost.
"Student."
For the first time in all the years that I had known Elijah, a smirk creased his mouth. But it had no humour to it.
