For 30 advance early chapters : p atreon.com/AutumnXd
"What's happening?" The researchers crowded around the monitoring station.
Ryan pointed at the screen. "Initial connection strength at 39%. No significant rejection response. That's a success."
He glanced at the two brothers in their chairs. Eyes closed. Eyelids flickering. "They're in the first phase. Memory recall."
He was right.
Inside Jake's mind, the world had become a river of light.
Memories surfaced like bubbles. His father handing him his first piece of candy. Winning a school award. A roller coaster at age nine, stomach dropping, Dean screaming beside him. The first girl he'd ever noticed, really noticed, in tenth grade. The day he'd decided to enlist.
Twenty-odd years of life, compressed into a cascade of images and sensations, flowing past too fast to hold on to. And mixed in with his own memories were fragments that didn't belong to him. Images he recognized but hadn't lived. Dean's memories. Flashes, not narratives. A single frame from a moment, without context, without sound, like photographs pulled from someone else's album.
He wanted to stop and look. To examine one of those unfamiliar images, to understand what Dean had been feeling in that frozen moment.
"Don't dwell on the memories. Your sync is dropping." Ryan's voice cut through the cascade like a blade.
Jake pulled himself back. Let the images flow past without chasing them. Focused on the connection itself, on the sensation of Dean's presence in his mental space.
Ryan watched the sync percentage recover. It had dipped to 35% when Jake started lingering on memories. Now it was climbing again. 42%. 50%. 63%.
At 80%, both brothers opened their eyes simultaneously.
Jake exhaled hard. His forehead was damp. He turned to look at Dean. Dean turned at exactly the same moment, at exactly the same speed, with exactly the same angle of rotation.
Something had changed between them.
There was a resonance now. Not telepathy. Not mind-reading. More like a tuning fork that had found its matching frequency. Jake could feel Dean's emotional state without either of them speaking. Not his thoughts. His mood. His tension level. The shape of his attention.
They'd been close their entire lives. Now they were closer in a way that words couldn't describe because words hadn't been invented for it yet.
"How do you feel?" Ryan asked from the console.
"Incredible," they said simultaneously. Same word. Same inflection. Same pause before speaking.
"We can sense each other," Jake said. "Like a weight in the back of my mind. Not unpleasant. Just present."
Dean added: "He called me a rock."
"I said it felt like a rock. There's a difference."
Ryan checked the display. Sync was still climbing. 88%. 92%. 97%.
"What about the memory sharing?" one of the researchers asked. "Could you see each other's memories clearly?"
Jake considered. "During the initial phase, my own memories were vivid. Full detail, like rewatching a video. But Dean's memories were just images. Single frames. No audio, no context. Like looking at photographs I'd never seen before."
Dean confirmed the same experience.
Ryan filed this away. The memory sharing was less complete than the theoretical maximum suggested. Connected individuals could perceive fragments of each other's memories, but full recall only applied to your own. The other person's memories appeared as isolated still images, not immersive playback.
For the purposes of piloting a Jaeger, this was fine. More than fine. The drift needed emotional synchronization and shared awareness, not complete memory access.
For other applications, the limited memory access was actually preferable. Full memory transparency between connected individuals would have created problems that Ryan had no interest in solving.
The sync hit 100%.
Then it started dropping. The brothers reported increasing difficulty maintaining focus. The memory fragments were becoming more intrusive, pulling their attention away from the connection itself.
Ryan disconnected them after thirteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds. The longest sustained sync of the session.
The next two pairs went smoother. The demonstrations from Jake and Dean had built confidence. The Sullivan triplets connected at 42% initial sync and climbed to 100% within four minutes. The Petersons started at 45% and peaked faster still.
All three pairs achieved full synchronization. All three experienced the same memory-sharing limitations: vivid personal recall, fragmentary perception of the partner's memories. All three reported enhanced mutual awareness after disconnection, a lingering sense of the other person's presence.
The maximum sustained connection across all tests: thirteen minutes, twenty-seven seconds. Well short of the system's theoretical eighteen-hour limit. Training would extend that. The pilots' neural endurance would build over repeated sessions, the same way physical endurance built through exercise.
After the last pair disconnected, the room was buzzing.
"This technology invalidates everything we've been working on," one of the senior researchers said. He didn't sound bitter. He sounded liberated. "I'm switching fields. Neural link research. Starting today."
Nobody argued. The consensus was implicit. Brain-computer interface technology, the discipline that every person in this room had spent their career building, had just been superseded. Not gradually. Not through incremental improvement. In a single morning, by a single experiment, run by a teenager with better technology than the entire global research community had managed to produce in fifty years.
Ryan gathered the group.
"The first experiment was successful. But it's a starting point. We need sustained testing. Dual connection sessions until the pilots can maintain stable sync for extended periods. Then three-person connections. Every session generates data that has to be analyzed, cross-referenced, and documented."
Fifteen notebooks came out. Fifteen pens started writing.
Reeves caught himself mid-note and paused. The scene was achingly familiar. A room full of experts, notebooks open, hanging on the words of their supervisor, writing down instructions for the next round of experiments.
He'd lived this exact moment twenty years ago. As a graduate student. Following his doctoral advisor.
Somewhere along the line, the country's top neural engineers had become research assistants again.