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Rutherford slumped on the couch in his temporary quarters, staring out the window at the stars. He'd told them he hadn't needed the space, that he was ready to go back to the barracks with the rest of the ensigns, but they'd been right. He DID need an adjustment period. Sure, his brain had already learned to integrate the inputs coming in from his new senses, it wasn't a question of losing his balance or anything... but having an implant like this, it took getting used to in other ways, too. Ways he had not been expecting.
He could see his reflection in the window, more or less. With his hair brushed over like this, most of the implant was obscured. No hiding the eye, of course, but that looked more like a cool gamer HUD than a bleeding-edge sensor net wired directly to his optic nerve. He liked the eye. But the plate... it was so BIG. And...
And... touching it was weird. Disturbing, on a fundamental, evolutionary level: Danger! Foreign object in body! Body is incorrect!! No one had warned him about that.
He gingerly reached up, under his hair, to run his fingers along the seam where implant met scalp.
A wave of dizziness told him: NOPE. TOO FREAKY. Rutherford jerked his hand away.
"This is stupid," he muttered at his reflection. Freaky or no, it was his implant now, and he needed to be able to touch it. Gotta figure this out. Samanthan Rutherford was not a mutterer, he was a problem solver!
"And if there's one thing engineers know about solving problems... it's that brute force is a valid approach!"
He reached up again, scowling with determination, to the nape of his neck. Where skin gave way to nanocarbon alloy. Just to make contact. Just to hold it there for--
"Aagh! Gross!"
Dammit. He slumped forward, sighing.
> Clamp disgust?
The implant printed the text across the bottom of his vision.
"Clamp...?" he read aloud, confused. It was asking him for permission to do SOMETHING...
> Clamp(Emotion): set maximum and minimum allowable levels
"Oh." Another thing he was adjusting to: this interface. The implant literally read his mind. Sometimes it answered questions before he realized he was asking them.
Then, "Oh, woah," as he realized what it was offering. If he could clamp his emotions, then-- then, he never had to be too disgusted, or too embarrassed, or too sad, ever again. He could always be a minimum amount of happy, confident, motivated, no matter the circumstances. Haha, Vulcan engineering!
But wait. What if he set the levels wrong and got all weird? And then, like, decided he was perfect just the way he was, but actually he was all weird and nobody would want to hang out with him anymore and--
> Clamp() fades periodically to allow objective reassessment
Oh. Well. That sounded safe enough. And, hey, he didn't have to go wild with it. Didn't have to level all his emotions. Or any of them, really! He generally liked his emotions just the way they were.
But it WOULD be nice to touch his own damn head without gagging.
> Disgust clamped👍
"O-oh. Okeedokee then." Guess "it would be nice" is the same as "yes, confirm" for a direct thought interface.
So. Disgust clamped? He didn't feel any different. Well,--
Slowly, slowly, Rutherford reached up again; this time, to his artificial ear.
He could feel the contact both in his fingers and in the ear. Damn, these haptics were impressive.
And... hey! It didn't gross him out! It felt different, sure. Solid instead of bendy. Kind of matte, somewhere between smooth and textured, and slightly too warm. But this was him, now. This was his left ear. And it could pick up entirely new frequency ranges! Which he could selectively choose to hear or ignore! Like now, he could focus in on the thrum of the warp drive... or the pulse of the inertial dampers... or...
He shoved his hair out of the way, exposing the whole plate. Turned to catch sight of it in the window. Brushed his fingers over it, lightly, so lightly, barely grazing the surface, tracing the edges of the ports with his fingertips, watching his reflection all the while. When this did not flood him with nausea-- none at all!, he explored more confidently, applying more pressure, even tapping against the plate to see what it would feel like.
Answer: exactly like tapping on the flesh side of his skull.
"Cool!" He breathed. That shouldn't be true; it was definitely overriding his nerve signals. He raised his other hand and drummed his fingers against both sides of his head at once, to confirm. Wow, there was SO much potential here. So many possibilities...
> Open API documentation for which feature?
Where to even begin. Oh, maybe how to sync with tricorders! I can do that, right?
Text scrolled across his field of vision. Rutherford sat up straight and began to read, absently running his hand up and down the seam at the back of his skull.
His reflection, filled with stars, grinned back at him.