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IamLEAM1983
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To Travis

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

Are Optogenetics more developed in the Hopeverse?
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IamLEAM1983
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Post by IamLEAM1983 »

"Not on a consumer-grade level, no. Ask any Chimera what goes on in the ol' maturation pod before they're decanted, and you'll have your answer.

See, Isaacs might've been insane, he wasn't wrong about how to re-wire a Chimera's brain.

You need two things to make that happen: a pattern, and dopamine. Lots of it. The pattern is what you want to imprint on your unborn Chimera's brain. It might be something as simple as the ABCs or as complex as knowing how to field-strip a Paradise Maglev rifle in exactly 12.6 seconds. The first option's just applied knowledge, the other one involves keying in the deep muscle memory as if that newborn Transgenic had worked with that rifle for decades.

From what we know of Elysium, the early research into that involved using viral organisms related to algae to sort of 'turn on' the light-sensitive capabilities of targeted neurons. Trigger them with a pattern of flashing lights, and connections are made. The tricky part involves knowing how to code in Brain, like it's C++ or JavaScript - and even Karthians don't know how. Their own minds and cerebral structure handles any Dominion's technical aspects in a way that's totally unconscious to this day. So as you can imagine, that particular model got scrapped pretty damn quickly.

Instead, Isaacs went around that problem by mapping the brains of everyone in Sector Seven's Yakuza staff. With over sixteen thousand distinct maps, he could figure out correlations that pointed to specific patterns: Pattern A for speaking Japanese, Pattern B for motor skills, Pattern C for pistol use - so on and so forth. In her own time, Eiko Kazamatsuri used the same principle to map out things like empathy, diplomacy, morality, a sense of patience or of frugality - all the things that would eventually make up Caliban Smith's brain and personality. Logically, that means there's a bit of Eiko's brain in Caliban's - and also a bit of Isaacs'. Just enough to figure out how not to act like a megalomaniacal asshat, from the looks of it.

Then, to actually imprint those patterns, nanomachines get injected in the maturing Chimera through the outer edge of the right eye's sclera. Seeing as the skull is hard to penetrate without breaking it, the only useful aperture is your average eye socket. The nanites travel up the optic nerve and reach the brain and reproduce all the needed patterns physically, stimulating the separate neurons all the way through. The 'bots essentially stand in for connected neurons until the axons and dendrites kiss and make out, sustaining the pattern - and the associated life skills or knowledge - without prosthetic assistance.

When that happens, the now-useless nanites migrate through the bloodstream into the bladder and large intestine and are basically shat and pissed right out. Interestingly, that kinda cuts back to Jenkins' Deadlights, seeing as most cultists our Ops team get to question report seeing flashing patterns and weird retina impressions while their Squid master verbally unloaded on them. We thought it was just their brains going on the fritz, but it might be the Black Speech is basically a set of garbled command-line batch files coded in that hypothetical Brain language.

If that's the case, these morons are using the scientific find of the century to turn people into homicidal maniacs. Why do that when you could use the same toolbox to, I don't know, stave off Alzheimer's or dementia or transfer skillsets on the fly? Have the brain squirt a ton of dopamine while you're Black Speechifying a coding seminar, and you might turn Sunday-morning computer users into the tech sector's miracle workforce practically overnight!"
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