Mage: The Dirty Version – Transhuman Adept Tradition Prologue
It’s a toss up between the eye socket and nostril. The nose is safer, but the eye’s quicker, more direct. Luc doesn’t want to go blind but part of him thinks that if the Wire goes down wrong he’ll toss something steel in there – a few LEDs, a half-petabyte SSD – something that proves he’s ready to drop the meat.
Still, Luc cut himself a mix of modafinil, phenobarbital, and pinkie nail’s worth of Manila Shabu dipped in slow-release caplets, just to keep his hands steady. Maybe he’s not quite ready to heap contempt upon his unimproved flesh. He wipes drool from the left side of his mouth – it’s slackened by the nerve block – and clamps back his eyelids on the same side.
The Wire’s smart enough to find its way home but too weak to make it through the first few layers of protective tissue. Luc calls up the manual again; it calls for an “assertive push.â€
So Luc stabs himself in the eye socket.
Tremendous pressure. The sensation of weeping on half-numb skin (Luc knows it’s watery blood and wipes it away like the drool – another messy flaw in the meat). He knows the brain feels nothing, once you get past the guardian nerves, but he imagines the sensation of something slithering along bloody paths to clutch his left parietal lobe.
It’ll branch out from there, ruthlessly pruning unused connections: a second wave of neural Darwinism for a parallel mind. But even now, at its simplest, the Wire hums with potentiality. It sings to the world’s currents, and Luc answers.
