Recovery of Rez 4

However, The Boundary did not prevent advancements in implant technology in directions other than linking directly to human intelligence. Indeed, their primary function was purely medical. While no one forgot the awful lessons from the human monstrosities produced in those early efforts at genetic engineering, the advancements in biotechnology allowed mankind to discover how to turn off certain unfortunate responses in the body and end things like the common cold and a lot of allergies. Implants could instruct the body to ignore and refuse to feed any number of biological intrusions, and simply package them and kick them out of the body one way or another.
But while medical specialists might tread lightly around certain recognized limits to implant technology, it didn’t stop them pushing ahead in every other way.
Thus, virtually everyone in those days had some kind of implant for enhancements, various means for adding to the normal range of human talent. Most common, of course, were the memory implants enabling people to keep better track of the vast galaxies of increasing human knowledge alone. The blending of man and machine had ebbed and flowed over the centuries, and most everything was done via computers inside people talking to computers inside various devices and pieces of equipment because, as Big TD taught them, some things simply could not be reduced to an algorithm.
Though programming of the various computational implants was, of course, now handled by other computing devices, and there was almost no such thing as “software” any more, there were still “hackers” who studied the various bottlenecks in computational theory. As soon as they could describe their insights, some device was already running tests for feasibility and implementation. So on the one hand, there were far fewer of such people needed, and only a precious few were genius enough to actually gain a paid position in such research. On the other hand, there were a much larger group who imagined themselves competent enough, and causing trouble.
One fellow in particular was just too convinced he was a genius. While the system had relegated him to being a rather low level lab technician preparing various routine implants, he was obsessive and stayed past his working time poking around with the old simulators still used in the classrooms in the lab building.
Who’s to say whether he did or didn’t actually stumble on something useful? Instead of running it through the normal channels, he impatiently added it to one of the routine implants. It was an algorithm for enhancing eye-hand coordination. Many were the failures in this area of interest littering the landscape of implant technology. He was simply too sure of his idea, and managed to slip it into that one unit which was destined for the newborns on another planet. It looked the same and acted exactly the same, but at some moment in the future, it would load a different collection of instructions which welded the devices into the human nervous system. Somebody somewhere was going to live with a slight advantage, or so he believed.
When he discovered the batch of implants had been diverted to a colony hospital, he nearly went into convulsions. Not for fear of discovery, but fear he would never be able to track the results. All that work over several years, and he would never know how it turned out. He was sick for days, but tried to keep working. When his agitation became impossible to hide, he was sent for treatment. It was the sort of treatment which subjected him to involuntary assessment of his own memory core so his crime was discovered. But it was too late, as the implant was already transferred to a colony ship which was nearly impossible to track down before it was too late.
Somewhere out there, a male infant bore an untested implant.