Myriad Heavens: Rise of the Rune God

Chapter 96: Chapter 96: Neural Interface 2

The wireless transmitter went in next. Tiny circuit board, barely bigger than his thumbnail. It would take the analog EEG signals, convert them to digital data, and broadcast at 2.4 GHz to the smartwatch.

Low latency was critical. He needed sub-100-millisecond response time for the BCI to feel natural. The transmitter was designed for that—high bandwidth, minimal processing delay.

Micro-battery installation. He’d chosen lithium polymer cells rated for 500 milliamp-hours each. The EEG sensors used maybe 5 milliamps. The transmitter used 15 milliamps. Total draw: 20 milliamps.

Battery life: 500 divided by 20 equals 25 hours of continuous use.

Not great. But he’d designed the system to sleep when idle. When he wasn’t actively using the BCI, the sensors would power down. The transmitter would go into low-power mode.

Real-world battery life: probably two days with normal use.

And the smartwatch would double as a charger. When the earbuds ran low, he’d just dock them on the watch. Magnetic charging contacts would snap into place. The watch’s larger battery would recharge the earbuds in about thirty minutes.

Elegant solution. Self-contained system. No extra cables or charging cases needed.

By evening, he had one earbud assembled.

He tested it. Put it on his ear. The bone conduction speaker worked—he could hear test audio clearly through the vibrations. The EEG sensors showed clean signals on his laptop.

”Nice.”

He built the second earbud. Same process, faster this time. Muscle memory kicking in.

Then the smartwatch.

The watch was more complex. It needed to receive signals from both earbuds simultaneously. Process six channels of EEG data in real-time. Run Rene’s neural interface AI for pattern recognition. Communicate with his computer. All while fitting on his wrist.

He’d designed a custom circuit board using knowledge from the library. Better power management than commercial designs. More processing capacity. Efficient wireless protocols.

The PCB manufacturing company had delivered it two days ago. He’d sent the design file with rush shipping. Cost extra but worth it.

Orion soldered components onto the board. Processor chip—quad-core ARM processor running at 1.5 GHz. Enough power for real-time AI processing. Memory—2 GB RAM, plenty for the pattern recognition algorithms. Wireless receiver—dual-band for earbud connection and computer communication. Battery—1000 milliamp-hours, should last a week with normal use.

The watch casing was 3D printed. He’d designed it to look normal—just a slightly bulky smartwatch. Nothing that would raise questions.

Everything fit together. The watch was thicker than commercial models but not suspiciously so.

He powered it on. The screen lit up with a simple boot sequence.

Then text appeared: RENE INITIALIZING...

A moment later: SYSTEMS ONLINE. AWAITING EARBUD CONNECTION.

He put on the earbuds. They connected automatically via Bluetooth. Soft beep in his ear.

EEG SENSORS ACTIVE. NEURAL PATTERN DETECTION ONLINE. BEGINNING CALIBRATION SEQUENCE.

”Alright Rene,” Orion said aloud. ”Ready to learn how my brain works?”

A voice came through the bone conduction speakers. Female, calm, with a slight warmth that made it sound almost human. He’d installed an emotional module into Rene’s core—not full sentience, but enough to give her responses personality.

”Ready and excited, Orion. This is my first neural interface. I promise to learn quickly.”

He smiled. The emotional module was working perfectly. Just enough personality to make interaction natural without being creepy.

”Let’s start with the basics. I’m going to think simple commands. You watch the brain signals and learn the patterns.”

”Understood. Beginning data collection.”

THREE DAYS LATER

Orion sat at his desk wearing the earbuds. Three days of constant training. His scalp was slightly sore from the sensors, but the results were worth it.

He’d spent hours each day thinking specific commands while Rene watched his brain activity. Move cursor up. Click. Type the letter A. Open file. Close window. Over and over. Thousands of repetitions.

But it wasn’t just simple commands. He’d trained Rene on complex patterns too.

He’d imagined images in his mind while Rene learned to translate visual thought into image data. Thought about specific words while Rene learned his linguistic patterns. Even imagined short video sequences—a ball bouncing, a bird flying—while Rene learned temporal-visual encoding.

The neural interface framework he’d built worked beautifully. The frequency filtering removed heartbeat noise. The spatial filtering eliminated muscle artifacts. The ICA separated brain signals from eye blinks and jaw movements.

The recurrent neural networks learned his temporal patterns—the way his brain activity built up before commands. The language models learned how he thought about text. The visual encoders learned how he visualized images.

Rene’s voice came through the bone conduction speakers. ”Orion, I’ve completed the final calibration analysis. Current accuracy: 99.1% for all command types. Latency: 80 milliseconds average. Text translation: 100 million words per minute bandwidth. Image generation: 30 frames per second for mental visualization. Video encoding: 24 frames per second with temporal coherence.”

He grinned. ”That’s better than I expected.”

”I had an excellent teacher.” There was warmth in her voice. The emotional module making her sound genuinely pleased. ”And your brain produces remarkably clean signals. The enhancement you received made the patterns very distinct.”

That made sense. His enhanced brain probably had more organized neural activity than normal humans.

”Ready for the real test?” Orion asked.

”Absolutely. I’m quite curious to see how well we perform together.”

He took a deep breath. Focused his mind.

Thought: Open text editor.

The editor window appeared on his screen. Instantly. No delay between thought and action.

His heart rate jumped. Not from stress. From excitement.

He thought: New file. Name it test.nex.

A new file appeared. Named exactly as he’d specified.

He thought: Print ”Hello World”.

The code appeared on screen:

print(”Hello World”)

Perfect syntax. Exactly what he’d imagined.

”Holy shit,” Orion whispered.

”Language, Orion,” Rene said with what sounded like mild amusement. ”But yes, I agree. This is quite remarkable.”

He kept going. Tested more complex commands.

Thought: Print the full Lorem Ipsum text.

The code appeared flowing onto the screen as fast as he could think it:

print(”Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec quam felis, ultricies nec, pellentesque eu, pretium quis, sem. Nulla consequat massa quis enim. Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec, vulputate eget, arcu. In enim justo, rhoncus ut, imperdiet a, venenatis vitae, justo. Nullam dictum felis eu pede mollis pretium. Integer tincidunt. Cras dapibus. Vivamus elementum semper nisi. Aenean vulputate eleifend tellus. Aenean leo ligula, porttitor eu, consequat vitae, eleifend ac, enim. Aliquam lorem ante, dapibus in, viverra quis, feugiat a, tellus. Phasellus viverra nulla ut metus varius laoreet. Quisque rutrum. Aenean imperdiet. Etiam ultricies.”)

”Bandwidth is holding steady at 100 million words per minute,” Rene reported. ”Neural coherence: excellent. No signal degradation.”

The bandwidth was incredible. With his enhanced reflexes, typing manually he could maybe do 1500 words per minute. With the BCI, he could think entire concepts at once. The AI translated them into text at rates that should be physically impossible.

100 million words per minute. That was the speed of pure thought converted directly to output.

He thought: Create new file named prime_finder.nex. Import standard library. Define main function. Create integer array from 1 to 100. Filter for prime numbers using efficient algorithm. Print results.

The code appeared instantly. Fully formed. Perfect syntax. Exactly what he’d imagined:

import std; function main() { array numbers = range(1, 100); array primes = filter(numbers, is_prime); print(primes); } function is_prime(int n) { if (n < 2) return false; if (n == 2) return true; if (n % 2 == 0) return false; int sqrt_n = sqrt(n); for (int i = 3; i