For 30 advance early chapters : p atreon.com/AutumnXd
After Kyle's unveiling, the new researchers spent an hour circling Scrapper, touching the armor, examining the joints, photographing everything their phones could capture. The combination of reverence and professional curiosity was visible on every face.
Then an aide found Reeves.
"Dr. Reeves, please follow me."
They left the warehouse and crossed to a smaller building that had been converted into a conference room. Reeves walked in and found a teenager sitting at the head of the table.
He recognized Ryan Mercer immediately. Everyone on Earth would have.
Around the table sat fourteen other people. Reeves scanned the faces and recognized four of them instantly. All senior researchers in neural interface technology. All people he'd collaborated with, published with, or competed against at conferences. All of them were hunched over tablets, reading with the intense absorption of people encountering something that fundamentally challenged their assumptions.
"Dr. Reeves. Please, sit." Ryan's voice was calm, direct, and carried the authority of someone who was used to being the most important person in the room regardless of age.
A tablet appeared in front of Reeves the moment he sat down. He opened it.
The document was titled: Neural Link Technology: Overview and Operational Framework.
He read.
Two pages in, the outside world ceased to exist.
The technology described on the tablet was not brain-computer interface technology. It shared conceptual DNA with BCI, the way a helicopter shares conceptual DNA with a kite, but the execution was something else entirely. The signal acquisition methodology bypassed every bottleneck that had limited BCI research for decades. Where conventional systems struggled with noise, latency, and resolution, this system simply... didn't.
The identification accuracy was the thing that stopped Reeves's breath. According to the documentation, the neural link's signal recognition was effectively perfect. Not 95%. Not 99%. Functionally one hundred percent, under all tested conditions.
If that was true, and the math on the tablet suggested it was, then everything that BCI researchers had been trying to achieve for fifty years was suddenly trivial. Speech synthesis from neural signals? A software problem. Thought-controlled prosthetics? A software problem. Direct neural control of any electronic system? A software problem. Once you could read neural signals with perfect accuracy, the hard part was over. Everything else was engineering.
Reeves looked up. The other fourteen researchers were emerging from their own reading with similar expressions. Stunned. Recalibrated. Slightly nauseous.
A man named Dr. Kevin Cross spoke first. "This technology makes our entire field obsolete and simultaneously opens it up. Every application we've been trying to build for decades becomes achievable the moment you have this level of signal recognition."
Ryan nodded. "That's correct. And the technology is already operational. It's been installed in Scrapper since before the first public test."
The room absorbed this. The neural link they'd just read about wasn't theoretical. It had been working inside a forty-foot mech for months. The thing they'd spent their careers trying to build was already built.
Reeves studied Ryan. The kid wasn't gloating. He was waiting. There was clearly something else coming.
"Your task," Ryan said, "is to master this technology as quickly as possible. I believe that with your backgrounds, this should take significantly less time than it took my junior team. Weeks, not months."
Reasonable. Expected.
"After you've internalized the neural link framework, we're moving to the next phase."
Ryan paused. Not for drama. For precision.
"Human-to-human bidirectional neural connection."
The room froze.
Patricia, seated in the corner, had known this was coming and still flinched.
Reeves felt the temperature in the room drop. Not literally. But the collective mood shifted from academic excitement to something closer to alarm.
"You're proposing to connect two human nervous systems directly to each other," Reeves said. Not a question. A statement that he needed to hear himself say out loud to confirm he hadn't misunderstood.
"Three, actually. The target system supports a minimum of three simultaneous neural connections."
Nobody spoke.
"During the connection," Ryan continued, "participants will experience a phenomenon I'm calling neural drift. The connected individuals' brains will exchange involuntary neural impulses. In practice, this means shared sensory experience and, periodically, shared memories. The deeper the emotional significance of a memory, the higher the probability of it surfacing during the drift."
He let that settle.
"In other words," Cross said slowly, "the people connected will see each other's memories."
"Fragments. Not complete narratives. Flashes of significant experiences. And the sharing is bidirectional. Everyone in the link sees what surfaces from everyone else."
Silence. The kind that comes when a room full of scientists realizes they're standing at the edge of something that isn't just scientifically unprecedented but ethically explosive.
Human-to-human neural bridging. Memory sharing. The ability to see inside another person's mind.
This was the reason for the enhanced security clearances. The special NDAs. The seaside facility far from any university campus.
Patricia spoke up from the corner. "I want to remind everyone that the multi-person connection research is classified at the highest level this project permits. Nothing discussed in this room leaves this room."
Ryan addressed the concern he could see on every face.
"The theoretical framework for the drift connection is thoroughly validated. I've verified every derivation personally. Even in failure scenarios, the system is designed to disconnect safely. Neural pressure is monitored in real time, and the link terminates automatically if thresholds are exceeded."
He opened his tablet to a specific page. "Section twenty-seven. Failure mode analysis. The connection between participants operates on the same principles as the mech neural link. If the connection fails, the participants experience neural fatigue. Unpleasant, but not dangerous. There is no mechanism by which a failed drift can cause injury."
He looked around the table. "I'm not asking anyone to take risks. I'm asking you to study the documentation, verify the safety protocols independently, and then help me run a controlled experiment that could fundamentally change how humans interact with machines and with each other."
The tension in the room eased by a fraction. Not because the ethical weight had disappeared, but because the assurance was specific, technical, and verifiable. These were scientists. "Trust me" didn't work on them. "Read page twenty-seven and check my math" did.
Reeves nodded slowly. The others followed.
"We'll review the documentation," Reeves said. "All of it. If the safety framework holds up to independent analysis, we'll proceed."
"That's all I'm asking."
The meeting broke up. As they filed out, Patricia delivered her reminder one more time.
"Classified. Nothing leaves this room."
Everyone nodded. Nobody argued.
They understood what they were holding.