Eli looked at the test results one more time, the colors in the SNC moving from blues, violets, to reds, before a bright yellow overtook them all.

"Well, if we're going to do this, let's do it right." He pulled a tall chair over to the workstation and sat down. "Keyboard," Eli spoke, and the table surface brightened with cyan key outlines. He began typing, his fingers moving deftly, as he issued commands to open another terminal window on the large wall screen.

"Start by recording the session; network, transference, relay, and," he completed a few strokes, "stream. Let's also take a peek at our benchmark metrics in real-time." To the topmost right of the screen, several words formed a block of measurements: global latency, local latency, throughput, packet loss, response time, SNC peak utilization, SNC average utilization, compression percent, and SNC synchronization. The last metric, SNC synchronization, read steadily at 100%.

Eli opened another blank window, making it take up almost a full half of the display space.

"Separate the visual stream and pipe it through here."

AV accessed the SNC, separating the visual cortex data, then passed it through a post-processor before sending the output stream to the screen.

"Done."

Eli stood up and took a step back. The fibers of the SNC, mostly yellow and orange, moved about excitedly.

"You take it from here," Eli nodded, scratching his stubble before the corners of his mouth turned up in almost a smile.

"I have it, Eli. The Project Deep login protocol is now loaded. Should we login?"

"Do it." Eli watched the screen as the login initialized.

Briefly, the black window flickered, a horizontal white line centered in the screen expanded until the whole of the screen was white, before fading, leaving a familiar scene. An unfathomably deep ocean, storm clouds, torrential rain, huge swelling waves that cast dark shadows on the foaming sea. The point of view started high in the sky, looking down upon the stormy waves, before descending to skate over the water, riding up the crestless waves, before plunging back down into the dark valleys between them. Rain pelted the surface of the water in sheets as the wind drove it down into the ocean.

To Eli, there was always something foreboding about the loading scene to Project Deep. Was it the raw power of the storm that churned up such titanic waves, or the hidden depths which you had no visibility into, or maybe it was the long fall at the end?

The view changed as the camera crested the last wave before a city-sized whirlpool came into frame. The ocean poured down, the endless darkness absorbing wave, rain, light, and with a final quick pan, even the camera as the perspective fell, rotating abruptly, looking skyward at the receding storm clouds until all that remained was an endless tunnel of water that got darker and darker until there was nothing but black once again.

Eli shivered. He could only imagine what experiencing that loading screen fully immersed would be like; the frigid spray, the scent of the ocean, the powerlessness of being surrounded by the endless black.

After a moment of black, the screen faded in again - this time to a stone fireplace with a roaring fire. Eli tilted his head to make sense of the images on the screen.

"Can we pull back to a third-person perspective?"

"Let me see," AV replied as he pulled up the relevant character model and extrapolated the visual displacement filter. "Yes, pulling back now." On-screen, the angle righted itself as the view pulled back to see a boy sitting at a table, his head on the table resting, face towards the fire. The boy was young, perhaps eight, with a shaggy mop of brown hair, and dressed in clothes of brown and beige.

"Macro loading is complete; you should have control."

This boy. Him. With a pre-defined hand gesture, he started the rotation macro, rotating the camera around the boy, giving Eli a better view. Green eyes, olive skin, a few freckles; he didn't look all that different from when he first created this character almost eighteen years ago. Eli looked up at the performance block on the outer screen; synchronization was holding steady at one hundred percent, latencies were low, utilization was low.

"Increase our transmission rate to initiate hyperization," he requested as he rotated the point of view back towards the fireplace.

Project Deep was a vast network of immersive realities. Unlike the early generation virtual reality game environments, many of Project Deep's realities enabled permanent residence status, which made it possible for users to stay connected indefinitely. They marketed these as upgraded realities.

One benefit of these realities, supposedly, was that you could extend your lifespan. Eli had read the research. It wasn't magic, rather it relied on the gradual acceleration of mental processes during periods of physically desynchronized brain states. They called it hyperization. In theory, a person living in a hyperization-enabled reality could experience twice as many days of life, compared to one without, effectively doubling their lifespan.

For Eli, it raised a few questions. For example, how would you interact with other people if you were both experiencing reality at different rates? Despite that, he was interested in hyperization because it would afford him the ability to performance test the SNC in an immersive environment.

"Hyperization initialized Eli."

Keeping one eye on the performance metrics and one on the fire flickering allowed him to notice the speed increase of the immersive environment.

"Add the ratio to our real-time performance block and increase our transmission linearly until our synchronization drops."

It was time to test how stable the SNC was.

The ratio 1.25 to 1 appeared in the performance metrics before immediately climbing. It went to 1.5, then to 1.75 before settling at 2 to 1. He checked the synchronization, it remained steady at one hundred percent.

"We have reached the average hyperization rate. Increasing transmission rate."

The rate continued climbing: 2.5, 2.75, 3, 3.5.

"Synchronization is stable at 100%, hyperization rate exceeds the theoretical maximum. Continuing to increase our rate may draw unwanted attention. Continue?"

Eli looked at the flickering fire on the screen. The flames flickered frenetically, faster than physically possible.

"No. Bring it back down, logarithmically. Let's not press our luck on our maiden voyage."

Eli sat down at the worktable again, tapping his finger against the cool metal surface as he considered the session.

"Go ahead and log out."

Eli brought up another terminal window, showing the histogram of the session. He reviewed the logs and graphs for a few minutes before commenting, "The lines for most of these metrics are purely linear, that doesn't seem right."

His fingers tapped the surface of the table, pressing on the illuminated keys. "This compression is," he scrutinized the memory utilization against the sum of all the network packets. "This compression is impossible."

AV considered this problem. A purely linear transmission would mean that new models, textures, sounds, were not being transmitted. That would normally only happen after a scene was loaded and every asset cached. Since they hadn't logged in in two years the system should have requested every asset. With no obvious explanation, it spawned some sub-processes to further investigate.

"You were only sitting at a table. You did not even move. And if there were no other players in your vicinity, it is possible there was little to nothing to load." AV gave his analysis.

"I suppose. We need more data. Run the same sequence again a few times, then do some comparatives on the different sessions. I'm going to get some coffee," he headed towards the galley, a smile forming on his face.

Baselines first. Then I'll take it out for a spin.

***

The next hour Eli watched as AV ran the same tests repeatedly, comparing the results. After establishing some consistent baseline performance metrics Eli began venturing out, using his pre-recorded suite of macros to control his avatar's movements.

It was the first time in almost eighteen years that his avatar moved from the table. To others in the Nest, the name of this starter immersive, he was the sleeping boy, a person who never woke up. Perhaps they thought it was a bug, or an Easter egg, but more likely they never thought of it at all as most left the Nest after completing a few chores.

Eli created this avatar when he was six. As part of that process, he could configure his appearance, which he fiddled with for a while before ultimately reverting to his normal appearance, except for his skin which he made darker, like his mother's, whom he found beautiful. Once avatar creation was complete, he logged in, and that's where everything went wrong.

The technology used by Project Deep, introduced as Dominant Apprehension Overlay, was quickly shortened to DAO tech or apprehension tech. It relied on sending shortwave em pulses straight into the brain, bypassing sense organs altogether. These pulses stimulated the areas of the brain that converted raw sensory data into comprehensible images, sounds, taste, etc. The genius of apprehension tech was in dominating any other conflicting sense data, effectively replacing genuine sense experience with simulated ones.

The developers of DAO tech were attempting to create a heads-up display for users that suffered from severe eye issues that prevented them from wearing the more common ocular headsets. Initially, users of first-gen DAO tech reported headaches, dizziness, mental fatigue, but over time, as they made improvements, these issues became less common and eventually disappeared altogether.

Except in rare cases, like Eli.

When he was six years old, the moment he logged into the Nest, he promptly collapsed to the ground in a fit of paralyzing vertigo. There he lay, retching the contents of his stomach out until with shaking hands he pried the headset off.

In the eighteen years since, Eli had crawled from the central fountain, past Anne's Bakery, to the Gentle Woad, an inn where he eventually made his way inside and pulled himself up to the table.

It had taken 83 sessions to move his avatar that far. After each one he would have to rest for days to recover from the phrenophasic episode. His inability to interface with immersive realities was the driving reason he became interested in understanding how it worked and what motivated him to develop the skills needed to build the SNC.

The SNC was his solution to this problem. It wasn't his first solution, to be sure, he'd tried many before it. All failed. It wasn't an absolute loss. Each brought him one step closer to success, and those failed solutions worked for some, he used them for the other Phasiacs, to overcome their Phrenophasia. I just didn't work for him.

So he built a perfectly synchronized replica of his mind, a replica that emitted the same em signature as his, except with the SNC he could control his automatic responses, and he could alter the em signals sent by the apprehension tech. This was his ultimate solution to the problem. Eli's working theory was, it didn't matter what his brain was doing wrong (he still didn't know exactly what the problem was), he should be able to adapt to anything using the SNC.

Displayed on the screen, Eli's seven-year-old avatar was once again sitting at the table. This time with a whole loaf of freshly baked bread, jams, butter, and a glass of milk arrayed before him. He'd walked to the bakery and gotten it himself.

"My analysis is complete Eli," AV's voice tore Eli from his thoughts. "The SNC is functioning as expected, better in most cases. It really is quite phenomenal." That last part AV said gradually slower and left a long hanging pause before continuing.

AV was simulating the performance of the SNC's core, applying it to other computational tasks. Early results were exceptional. This new processor was many times better than previous neural circuitry. AV created a daemon, tasked it with increasing network security. The daemon spawned its own processes further delegating the task to those workers.

"Eli, we have completed every test we planned, save one. Immersion. Are you ready to go in?" The question hung in the air like static before a lightning storm.

Eli took a sip of coffee, thinking. His last phrenophasic episode, two years ago, was his worst. He had the shakes for days afterward, his vision blurry for almost a day. He sat the cup down before jumping up.

"Let's prep for a deep dive AV," Eli started for a wall cabinet, opening it and rummaging through gear. He pulled out a pair of VTs, a suspension harness, and a deep blue box, still factory sealed.

He sat down and started gearing up. VTs, or variable tractions, were boots that interfaced with DAO tech to vary the traction from none at all, enabling the user to run at full speed without moving to the extreme, making it impossible to slide one's foot at all. He slipped into them. They automatically adjusted to his size until they were comfortably tight.

"Bring down the cables," Eli instructed as he pulled himself into the padded orange suspension harness, sliding into the webbing one leg at a time until he could clip it around his waist, slip it up over each shoulder, then complete clipping it closed in the front.

Cables lowered from the lab ceiling. The suspension harness was not, as the name suggested, to keep him suspended during immersion. It was only a failsafe should he lose consciousness. It hadn't taken him too many knocks on the head to learn it was better to be prepared.

Eli clipped his shoulders to the cables before breaking the seal on the deep blue box and opening it. There, under the cover, was Oceanic's logo, a series of blue rings emulating water rippling over a black background. Oceanic was the creator and operator of Project Deep. Eli grabbed the card and flipped it over. The text on the back read: Welcome to Project Deep, your new reality.

He set the marketing material to the side with the instruction manual before removing the standard apprehension headset included in the box. This was an older model - at least four years old, he had a few older models, but most he had disassembled for parts or for research. He hadn't bothered to get a new model since he had no use for it. Until now.

He held the bulky band in his hands. He was both fascinated by this technology and hated it. He hated how expensive it was. He'd had to scrimp and save every token of his minuscule state stipend to afford these devices. He practically lived in the dark to save enough tokens to afford his research. He hated how obsessed he was with it. He was even more obsessed with it than his parents were and they had turned him over to the state to rear because of their obsession.

"Make a note, AV, we should get one of the newer models in, to test." Eli grabbed the cable from the box, connecting it to the headset, then to the cable descending from the ceiling. All ceilings came with DOA cabling pre-installed. It wouldn't have surprised him to learn that Oceanic bribed all the construction conglomerates to make it mandatory.

"So noted."

Stepping back from the table, he brought the headset up in front of him.

"I'm going in." he settled the headset in place. It circled his head, just above his brow. Lights flashed on both sides of the headset, showing the pairing process had begun.