He closed his eyes and went through another breathing cycle. The exotic energy flowed through his body. Strengthened his cells. Made him more.
Three years to unlock the synthesis method. Then he could make concentrated exotic energy. Share it with the people he loved.
Just had to build a fusion reactor first.
Which required money.
Which meant it was time to start building.
Orion opened his laptop.
First step: tools.
To build software fast enough to generate real money, he needed a better interface. His enhanced reflexes let him type at a sustained 500 words per minute. Fast, but not fast enough.
His brain could think thousands of concepts per minute. Typing was the bottleneck.
He needed a Brain-Computer Interface, BCI for short.
A BCI would let him code at the speed of thought. Transform mental concepts directly into written code. The bandwidth increase would be enormous.
Orion started researching.
Most BCI technology was not tha. Medical-grade systems cost hundreds of thousands of credits and required surgery—electrodes implanted directly into your brain. Consumer versions barely worked. You could maybe move a cursor if you concentrated really hard.
He needed something better. Something he could build himself.
After two hours of searching, he found a starting point: cEEGrid Around-the-Ear EEG Bundle.
EEG meant electroencephalography. Fancy word for "reading brain electricity." The human brain ran on electrical signals—neurons firing created tiny voltages. Those voltages traveled through brain tissue and skull to the skin surface. Sensors on the scalp could detect them.
The cEEGrid was designed for research. Thin electrodes wrapped around the ear and picked up brain activity through skin contact. Better than a full headset—less bulky, more comfortable.
800 credits. Expensive but workable.
Problem: it still looked medical. Obvious. People would ask questions.
Orion sketched on paper. What if he miniaturized the components? Hid the EEG sensors inside something normal-looking?
Earbuds.
Specifically, bone-conducting earbuds. Those worked differently than normal earbuds. Instead of sending sound into your ear canal, they vibrated against your skull. The vibrations traveled through bone to your inner ear.
Weird technology, but it meant the ear canal stayed open. Room to hide sensors.
He could integrate the EEG electrodes into the earbud casing. Position them to touch skin around the ear. From the outside, they'd look like premium wireless earbuds. Nobody would know they were reading brain activity.
But EEG sensors generated lots of data. Raw electrical readings that needed processing to make sense of. He'd need computing power.
A smartwatch could work. Receive signals from the earbuds wirelessly. Process them in real-time. Send commands to his computer.
Plus, the watch could double as a charger. When the earbuds ran low on battery, just dock them on the watch to recharge. Convenient and practical.
Orion started adding items to his cart.
cEEGrid Around-the-Ear EEG Bundle—he'd disassemble it for the sensors. The electrodes were the important part. 800 credits.
Bone-conducting earbud components—the housing, speakers, vibration drivers. 200 credits.
Miniature wireless transmitters—to send data from earbuds to watch. Needed low latency and high bandwidth. 150 credits.
Micro-batteries—lithium polymer cells small enough to fit in earbuds. These would power the sensors and transmitter. 100 credits.
Circuit board components—resistors, capacitors, microcontrollers, all the tiny electronic parts. 300 credits.
Smartwatch components and casing—processor, memory, battery, screen, wireless receiver. 450 credits.
Total: 2,000 credits.
That was most of his monthly scholarship stipend. He'd be eating cafeteria food for a while.
Worth it.
He clicked confirm.
Delivery estimate: 3-5 days.
While waiting for parts, he could work on software foundations.
Orion stared at his screen.
Current programming languages were built on decades of legacy code. They carried bloat from when computers had kilobytes of memory and processors ran at megahertz. Inefficient. Slow.
He needed something better.
From the library knowledge, he understood what made languages fast. Direct hardware access—talking to the computer's transistors without layers of abstraction slowing things down. Smart compilation that optimized code automatically. Efficient memory management that didn't waste resources.
He could build that.
His fingers touched the keyboard.
Creating a new programming language from scratch was insane. Teams of PhDs spent years on language design. Decades sometimes.
But he had the knowledge. All of it. Perfectly organized in his enhanced memory. And his enhanced brain could comprehend it all.
"Screw it."
He started typing.
The mechanical switches clacked under his fingers. Fast. His enhanced reflexes turned coding into a blur. Each keystroke precise. No typos. No hesitation.
He wrote the compiler first—the tool that would translate his new language into machine code. This was the foundation. Everything else built on it.
The compiler needed to parse syntax. Optimize execution. Manage memory efficiently. Handle errors gracefully. And do it all faster than existing compilers.
Hours blurred together. His fingers hammered the keyboard at inhuman speed. Good thing he'd bought quality mechanical switches with strong springs. Cheap ones would've broken under this abuse.
The language took shape. He called it Nexus.
Nexus could talk directly to transistors when needed. For critical performance sections, he could bypass all abstraction and write code that executed at the hardware level. Like speaking the computer's native language instead of using a translator.
It understood three-dimensional programming too. Normal code was linear—one instruction after another in a flat file. Nexus let him structure code in multiple dimensions. Organize it how he actually thought instead of forcing everything into a line.
Most importantly, it compiled to pure optimized machine code. Every instruction efficient. Every operation fast. No wasted cycles.
He worked through the night. Didn't stop. His body didn't need sleep anymore. The breathing technique kept his cells energized.
Morning came. Sunlight through the window.
Orion looked at his screen. The language was done.
He wrote a test program. Something simple—calculate the first thousand Fibonacci numbers.
Compiled it in Nexus. Ran it.
Execution time: 0.0003 seconds.
He pulled up equivalent C++ code from a class project. Ran it.
Execution time: 0.006 seconds.
Twenty times faster.
His hands were shaking slightly. Not from fatigue. From excitement.
"Beautiful," Orion whispered. "Okay. This is real."
DAY SIX
The operating system was next.
Current OS designs were bloated. They supported ancient hardware nobody used anymore. Included features that most people never touched. Managed resources inefficiently, leaving processing power wasted.
Orion would build something revolutionary.
He started with the architecture—the fundamental design everything else would build on.
From the library knowledge, he knew standard architectures were limited. Linear processing, flat memory structures, basic resource management. Fine for normal computing. Inadequate for what he wanted to achieve.
He needed something better.
After hours of planning, he settled on a hybrid design: recursive neural fractal dimensional architecture.
Recursive meant the system could modify itself. Watch how it was being used and optimize automatically. Like a living system that learned and adapted.
Neural meant it used artificial intelligence principles. Pattern recognition to predict what programs you'd open next. Adaptive behavior to allocate resources where needed. Smart decision-making instead of rigid rules.
Fractal meant it scaled infinitely. Same efficient patterns whether managing one program or a thousand. No performance degradation as the system grew.
Dimensional meant it processed information in parallel spaces. Multiple tasks happening simultaneously in separate "dimensions" that didn't interfere with each other. True parallel computing.
Nobody had combined all four before. The math was brutally complex. The implementation even harder.
Orion spent an entire day just working out the theory. Drawing diagrams. Writing equations. Making sure the architecture was actually possible.
Then he started coding.
Nexus made it faster. The language was designed for exactly this kind of low-level system programming. Direct hardware access. Efficient memory management. Perfect for building an operating system from scratch.
The OS took shape over two days of intense work. He called it Aether OS.
Aether utilized every transistor, every CPU core, every byte of memory with perfect efficiency. It dynamically allocated resources based on real-time needs, predicted future requirements using integrated AI, and optimized power consumption while maximizing performance.
It was also modular. Users could strip it down to bare essentials or add features as needed. No bloat. No wasted space.
And it was fast. Boot time: 1.3 seconds. Program launch: effectively instant. Resource overhead: less than 2% of total system capacity.
Orion installed it on his computer and rebooted.
The difference was staggering. Everything felt responsive. Programs opened before he finished clicking. Multitasking was seamless. His computer had just become several times more powerful without changing any hardware.
"This is going to change everything," he muttered.
But not yet. He couldn't release this publicly. Aether OS was too advanced—people would ask questions he couldn't answer. How did a college student build something that made professional operating systems look primitive?
For now, it was his tool. His foundation for building everything else.
But it wasnt finished he needed an AI to make the architecture work. Something smart enough to handle the recursive optimization and neural adaptation.
He pulled up AI knowledge from the library. Started designing.
The AI would be called Rene. Short, simple, memorable.
Rene needed training data to learn from. Normally this meant terabytes of carefully curated information. Months of training on expensive hardware. Research teams spent fortunes on good datasets.
Orion found some free datasets online. They weren't the best quality—public data never was. But they'd work for now. He could see better training data in the library, but it was massive. Trillions of parameters. He couldn't possibly type that out by hand.
That would have to wait until after he built the BCI. Then he could upload the advanced data directly from his thoughts.
For now, free data would do.
He set up the training on his PC.
His computer had the latest Nvidia 1nm AI GPU. The best consumer chip available. He'd won it in a competition six months ago—Nvidia challenged students to optimize a neural network, and Orion's solution beat everyone else's by 30%. The prize was this beautiful piece of hardware.
The 1nm chip represented cutting-edge semiconductor technology. Five years ago, the United Federation's scientists had worked together to push lithography down to the atomic scale. A massive breakthrough. But since then, progress had stalled. They were working on photonic chips—using light instead of electricity for computation—but no major breakthroughs yet.
Still, the 1nm GPU was powerful. Top of the line.