A/N: Lots of cyber-neuro-techno-dweeby stuff in this one. I've been reviewing and editing it for weeks after it was finished and I'm still not satisfied that I've locked everything in, but...well, whatever. A guy can only do so much., and I've spent more than enough time. It also covers more of Shepard's relationship with Dr. Chakwas. It just also happens to be part of the Torfan flashback, and more specifically, some of the fallout.

*** Torfan, Karin Chakwas ***

With his omnitool, implant, and DCE restored from the pre-mission backups, Shepard headed back to SSV Tokyo's primary medical bay. The doctor who had been working with him on his implant's unusual requirements was on duty, sitting at one of the three medical workstations.

"Leftenant." O-3 Karin Chakwas, M.D. smiled professionally as Shepard approached noisily. "Welcome back. Ambulatory patients are always my favourites. Something else to report?"

"'Ambulatory,'" he scoffed as he continued toward her. "I'm not walking. This thing is walking for me."

"In exactly the same way as your legs walk for you most of the time. They're your legs…they're not you." Karin smiled patronizingly. "Something on your mind, then?"

Manipulating controls presented by his omnitool, Shepard brought the medical exoskeleton to a stop in front of the staff officer's desk. He had been thinking of how to speak with her without it getting noticed officially. "Yes, actually. I'd like to make an appointment."

Doctor Chakwas looked slightly puzzled. "You didn't use your VI, and you're standing here now."

Shepard knew where the cameras were and made an effort to not look at them. "I'd like to speak with you privately." Nothing calls attention to a sneak like looking at the cameras, and the camera sweeper VIs know it.

"Of course everything stays private, Leftenant," she chuckled. "I wouldn't be much of a doctor if I couldn't honour your privacy."

Shepard bit his lip and looked at the corner of the doctor's desk, then back up at her.

Doctor Chakwas flicked her eyes toward a chronometer and tilted her head at him. "But I haven't taken my luncheon yet. Would you care to join me? We can talk about a good time for you to stop by."

# # #

As a well-informed MD, Karin Chakwas nearly always made an effort to eat a well-balanced meal; her omnitool had an app that monitored her bloodstream and managed it with nanotech approved by the Alliance Central Medical Office (ACMO).

Mostly.

She also didn't quite trust the Alliance's array of professionals and personalized medical VIs to know where she wanted her health arc to take her in thirty years - she hardly knew herself! - and had spent her own money to acquire Von Neumann-augmented ATP supplements; the result kept enzymes more efficient, and functional for longer.

When they had first met, then-2LT Shepard had expressed great interest in medicine, and for many reasons that Karin shared. His knowledge of biocaneer "hacks" had provided her with the ability to implement changes that had not yet been approved by ACMO for experimentation (let alone general use) in exchange for up-to-the-minute sensor and control modifications that he knew of, but lacked equipment or other access.

After hearing about some of the software cracking functions available with Shepard's ARO, she asked if he could modify her biological and cybernetic systems, giving her more and finer control. Seeing her as a potential resource, he was more than willing, even cobbling together a collection of devices and software tools to make it easier for her to use.

She understood the added capability offered by an ARO, but wasn't quite ready to go under the knife herself. Shepard was able to offer her alternative configurations, not intended by the manufacturer, and was able to provide nearly all of the functions as a holoheadband applet. Still, the use of combat VIs to "attack' a user's DCE made the device technically illegal for Alliance medical use.

But it gave Shepard the opening to insert customized code, add functionality for which Karin's "stock" bloodstream tech lacked an upgrade path at the time.

"If it makes you better at your job, you save lives," Shepard had rationalised. "They'll have to add this kind of intelligence to the medical infosuites at some point. You can switch to that then…assuming what they offer is an actual improvement."

Of course, he was right: Better-informed doctors can save more lives, provide better heathspan. Or at least offer more options.

And when ACMO released annual updates, it turned out this was the case; Shepard wiped Chakwas' current "cracked" system, reinstalled the current version without modifications, and then applied the upgrade, which now had the added functions.

Still, the Alliance remained a bureaucracy, and it tended to move ponderously in comparison to the speed of technical advances. Though streamlined in comparison to days long past, it was weighted by its inertia, and the natural resistance to change endemic to humans. Karin being aware of advances in medical science made her impatient with the regulations imposed that actually affected her personal health.

The pun was not lost on either of them.

As Shepard sat opposite, Karin Chakwas, M.D., broke flatware off the sides of her tray. "Forgive my brevity, Leftenant, but it seems if we don't start with the meaty topics first, we never finish in under two hours. What's the topic for today?"

Shepard flicked at a control on his omnitool, starting an audio camouflage app. It would cover his voice almost completely and hers nearly as well. "I know you said to give it a year. But I'm absolutely fed up with this never-ending stream of…bad." He tapped his head with a finger. "The Counselor VI you pointed me to…uh..." he waved a finger over his shoulder, "Skaran, I think it was…said it will get better. But every other resource - usegroups and support forums - says it doesn't get better, it just gets easier to not think about."

Karin looked up from her tray, concerned. "You haven't really had time to process all of this. All the things happening in your life have been unusually stressful, even for military. I do think you need to give yourself time to normalize." Her eyebrows rose in an imploring expression. "And you haven't asked me, but in the long term, I think you should meditate. Teach yourself to quiet your mind's self-chatter. It is surprisingly effective."

"That's an organic solution, unreliable. Stumbled upon millennia ago, and refined over the years by a pseudo-religion. Too much baggage there; not interested. More to the point, I don't want to learn how to adapt to and accept the new situation," he tapped his head with a finger, "I want to modify the result here, control it at will. I want a technology solution, and more to the point, I want it now. I'm done hurting." He'd been becoming more intense as he spoke; he sighed and leaned back in his seat.

"And you have something in mind?"

Shepard prodded at his food, "We'll get to that. As I was debriefing, I remembered that when I was…uh, hunting with my spotter's help, I had…Christmas carols running through my head. Christmas carols!" He shook his head. "It was Jingle Bells non-stop most of the time, and it got a little weird when actually firing."

The doctor quirked an eyebrow in puzzlement.

He glanced self-consciously around, then sang quietly, "Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way, bang! I found myself waiting for a phrase end, or a downbeat."

"Oh…well, that's actually quite understandable. In times of great stress, when you knew there was no hope of reprieve, your mind took you back to a time of peace and security without resorting to a full psychotic break. I assume you have a big family with big holidays?"

Shepard waved a hand dismissively. "Yes, but that's not what I want to tell you. I didn't say anything at the debrief, and I'm not putting it in my report. Apparently this is a known psychological issue called 'fixation,' this particular one is called an 'earworm.'"

He pinched an icon off his omnitool and offered it to Karin, which she accepted. "Now take a look at this. It's Jordan's Combat Angel data." Karin opened it immediately, Shepard pointed into the display. "You can even see the places where my implant went into overdrive."

Karin pinched and scrolled along the timeline, which was covered with Shepard's debrief markup indicating what events were transpiring.

"Why is this secondhand data?"

"Hardware failure near mission end wiped mine. I got a copy from FBEA, which came from the team's DCE. But look at this." Shepard pointed at the holographic display, "There and...um...there especially. My spotter was never notified until it was too late for her to do anything about it, but that EPD really saved my butt. And there's another nearer the end." Karin flicked to the later events. "See that? It's huge. An unaugmented human would have likely been reduced to a quivering lump."

Dr. Chakwas squinted at the display, then inhaled, her eyes widening. "My god, what happened here? Your EPD spiked and then shut down. And then did it again…and again…and here…and…and this just goes on and on." She paddled through the data, noticed there was only biometric and audio data for most of it, video for about half, and that only showed what Nordberg's cameras saw. She looked up at him. "What happened?"

Shepard was momentarily silent, his eyes closed. He'd had two days to construct his story before Tokyo had returned to Torfan, but found it distasteful to recount it to a friend. It was easier to mask his discomfort as being related to the amount of death, rather than its specifics.

When he opened his eyes, he did not look to Chakwas'. "I…um…kind of went berserk. There was a big warehouse where they had kept slaves, and there were...a bunch of them in there at once. I didn't have a bomb, but I had two assault weapons, full-auto, and grenades. I emptied both weapons into the room…continuous grazing fire…and then went and…then…personally made sure they stayed dead."

"Are you serious?" The doctor looked up, shocked. "Leftenant, that sounds brutal."

Shepard nodded, eyes closed. "It was. But if I had it over again, I'd do the same thing. Can't have 'em shoot me when I'm sleeping, and you can see it was still days before Tokyo got back."

He looked up, pointed at the data Chakwas was seeing. "But that's still not what I wanted to tell you. It was because of this that I realized I had to do something more advanced. So last night, I updated my implant libraries using the ship's DCE and compiled a…uh...well, it's technical…uh…essentially a VI to stop the Christmas carols happening again, and discovered that the level of control that my implant offers is relatively fine. If you take the time to use it; it's kind of esoteric.

"I think I can not only restrict it to specific data...you know, memories...but I can make it play back positive instructions by itself. Just let that loop in my head instead of the bad stuff. Keep from having to re-live it. It'd be like the positive self-talk you've advocated for years, but it could run automatically!"

Karin Chakwas looked doubtful. "I suppose if it worked, it would be least in part because you've had your implant for so long. You're unusually proficient with it, even for a long-term user."

"It's a thing with this particular knock-off's OS. Sometimes it feels like it's causing more problems than it cures. But I depend on it for too much other stuff to replace it. There's not a manufacturer in the galaxy that'll back an install after this long. Some functions they don't even offer anymore, or let you retrofit to newer ones. Alien influence, or at least that's what they're saying in the forums. They're trying to push people into newer implants...which is of course more money for them.

"Anyway, a lot of the updates are for people like me that still use it, but I've had this for years, and there's more help from the biocaneer community than the manufacturer because it's been around for so long. It has a relatively large user base, and some people get them installed just because the aliens get all sideways about it. You can even find some of the original scaffolding from a morgue purge or police auction, and have it done in some offworld chop shop."

Shepard felt like he was pleading, paused to collect his thoughts. "After Elysium, I thought I was safe from brain chatter like this when I was in combat, or thinking about other things. PTSD normally gets managed with stuff like that; people find some high-focus activity that they like, and stay focused on it. It's usually therapeutic."

Karin was nodding knowingly.

"But twice, my EPD flashplayed the PVR record of…the suicide. Once when I was in hand-to-hand! I need something to make it stop when I need it to stop, or at least attenuate the emotional impact. Or even better, stop it before it starts.

"I don't want to waste the time to let it normalize, or to learn meditation. I want a fix, and I want it installed now. Peoples' lives are at stake every time I'm in combat. Mine, too." He shook his head grimly, then brightened, "And this morning, I woke up with a brainstorm: Use node- or even neuron-level control to stop the mind chatter when it happens. Eventually…maybe…get the CPA hypervisor to task a processor with managing it automatically."

Karin squinted disapproval. "Sounds like mighty dangerous stuff, Leftenant, even if you could do it. VI-driven thought control? The reason nobody uses it, certainly not the Alliance, is because it can be hacked. In combat, it could be horrific. Can you imagine if you suddenly started firing on your own team?"

"Do you know how it handles security now? The VI gets data directly from my implant, practically runs on it as a substrate, so that connection is already hardened, and I've got the UI on my omnitool using a non-standard frequency with interlocked 4-way encryption through my bloodstream compute. That's even more security than the Alliance requires, so it should be enough for puny little personal BMI, right?"

Karin shook her head. "All right, granted: The security may be sufficient. But giving a BMI of any sort root-level control over your brain? Not only is it insanely dangerous, but nothing current will have enough finesse to manage the kind of modulation you're talking about."

Shepard frowned, chewed his lip for a moment. "I wondered about that. Like that thing they tried in New Sydney, but the subjects fixated on the amygdala boost; yeah, I had even run a PVR of the experience. It was insane." He sighed deeply, leaned back in his seat. "All right, can't use a stock BMI VI. What about the low-level stuff…like embedded, targeted secretion of designer neuropeptides? Something controlled from behind Alliance and my personal BMI security. Does anyone have cellular hardware for modulating ultra-low-volume release?"

"Yes, several, but they all require sinus surgery, and there's hardly anything as powerful and specific as you're talking about, so it won't provide the kind of control you want. Not only would it release too slowly and imprecisely, it would also be on your record."

"Hm." Shepard pushed food around on his tray, cutting the synthmeat patty but not eating it.

Karin held up her left arm and waved her omnitool at him, studied the results. She pointed at his tray. "Stop toying with that and eat it," she said firmly.

"Right." Shepard gently stabbed a piece with his fork, stopped with it halfway to his mouth as an idea struck. "Hey, maybe I can write a compartmentalized, single-task VI to drive only specific nodes. Bury it inside the implant so it's behind Alliance security, plus my own customised hardening, and…hey, I'll bet I could even write that list of specific thoughts to initiate or propagate. I've seen that done with people, using this design." His eyes widened in realization. "I could even have it inoperable unless three or four modules are active at the same time, which would give it added multi-factor security…!"

Karin reached a hand toward his, nudged the fork closer to his mouth. "No excuses. Eat. We'll talk about craziness like this only as long as you're eating."

"Fine." He took the bite and began to mop another piece of meat through a puddle of sauce. "You talk. I'll eat."

Karin continued to carve her own food as she thought. "Is it possible that it's time to replace your implant? There's a lot of new neurotech that's come out since yours was installed, better wetware integration, easier-to-use BUIs…"

Shepard's fork stopped moving for a moment as he looked away, recalling the reasons why he had opted not to pursue that himself. "I would love to be state-of-the-art. But I'm not losing the capabilities the aliens took away with Gen7."

"Let's be fair, Leftenant; the aliens didn't take it away, they suggested changes, and the human manufacturers thought they were good ones. They're so good, they became the de-facto standard. They gave us…gave us the designs that allowed the L3 to go into production without licensing it. Do you know how many biotics were permanently crippled or killed by the old L2 design?"

"I know, it's scary. Seventy…eighty percent," he nodded. "I'm not denying they showed us a lot in biotics. But humans have far more experience with human brains and augmentation. If I go full replacement, I lose the crackability over it that I have now. And I've got several functions that…frankly…I'm just not giving up.

"Besides losing critical functionality, the non-surgery forward migration takes too long because it has to iterate through their entire upgrade process; you have to install every update in the sequence in that sequence. No shortcuts."

"Is that really a problem?" Karin held her flatware still over the tray as she spoke, "You could take a medical leave that long, especially considering the importance of such a thing. The Alliance would probably even pay for the upgraded hardware."

Shepard ate in silence for a moment, formulating his explanation. "You're going to have to work really hard to make me think it could be worth the time, at least with the system doing all the stuff it does correctly, and especially with it doing what nothing else does.

"Back when I was at university, YiLong was trying to become profitable again by selling a massive rewrite of their OS. To install it on my knockoff system, I had to rebuild the installer so the final system would fit, which meant losing some of the original functionality to do it. I did it over summer holidays, but it took a month. With the newer OSes, the average time seems to be two to six months to get it all straightened out."

He chewed the fakesteak as he thought. "And even if I got it working, I'm almost certain that node-level control is not even available on Gen8 or even Gen7 implants. The aliens have added all kinds of conditions about what augmentation BMIs can do. I'm not sure it's a good idea; as I said, they haven't studied human brains in action, really. Not nearly as long as we have."

Though her mouth was full, Karin continued to chew as she thought for a moment, and finally shrugged. This was specialist stuff that she'd have to consult about, or send out a VI to gather and compile a microtraining on it. Shepard seemed to have already gathered this information. Another custom function he's added to his implant, no doubt.

Lieutenant Shepard carved another bite and ate it. "Because they use array hierarchies, you have to interpolate to get anything like node-level control out of it. Like trying to get high-res data from a low-res source. It's really just simulating node control, and from what I've read and heard, it isn't fine enough for what I want to do, what I already do. The stuff I kind of had to invent can't even be effectively simulated with the current supported systems." Technically, it was his grandfather who had developed it with him, and had done most of the "heavy lifting."

He looked aside, thought out loud, "I'm not denying it's an advantage if you want to double-monitor it or use a hypervisor council to provide TPM functions, but you lose some critical, root-level capabilities." He chuckled. "Kind of like requiring one OS to run on top of another."

Karin didn't have technical knowledge to debate the point, but she knew of some experimentation that had turned out unpleasantly. "You know about the Bright Brain derivatives? Especially their leapfrog iterations?"

Shepard was already nodding, "Every single cell affected fixed target states by 10 hours, and the effects grew with time. It's very safe and stable, if you don't ever want to change your mind, and I'm almost certain you lose a lot of control over it. I know I can do these unusual things with what I'm using, but do the 8th gen implants offer that at all?" He shook his head. "Not as far as I've been able to find. Home-brew may be the only way to do it, and I'm pretty sure late-model implants don't even have or allow the things I'm already doing."

He stabbed another piece of his meal and shrugged easily, "If they release a dev kit with Gen 9 or Gen 10, I'd consider it. But I'm looking before I'm leaping."

Chakwas thought about checking her omnitool, decided not to so the direct info request would remain unrecorded. "Without checking NetBite or something, I can't say for sure, but I'm fairly sure that it wouldn't. The safer and more reliable they make them, the harder it is to modify it. You have an advantage with your implant being so old."

"And I know it," he nodded. "Kinda weird to think it was SOTA when I got it."

"And the fact that it's grandfathered might be the only thing that would let you modify it now. But it certainly won't be approved by the responsible corp, and probably not by the Alliance."

"No chance. YiLong bought…uh, the subcontractor whats-their-name…from Tegmark after their recovery. And they're not supporting it other than core updates and security stuff. They don't sell them anymore. Certainly the Alliance isn't going to take responsibility for a vendor's product support any more than they absolutely have to."

Shepard continued to contemplate, looked at his tray, stabbing another piece of sirloin to deliver to his mouth. He chewed as he thought aloud. "What if we left control where it is right now? Leave the connections and security alone, but install a new app system or subsystem? Aren't there already nanotech or neurotech that can do that with single-neuron control? Isn't that how talsit works?"

"Talsit-!" She glanced quickly toward the middle of the mess, as if someone there might have heard, then turned back to him, jabbing a finger toward his face briefly before returning it to her tray. "Don't even think that. What I gave you after Elysium was for getting through the worst of it while you were in treatment. Only because we still had some in ship's stores could I get it. On-demand, or even one-a-day talsit use is the…neurochemical feedback equivalent of a tasp. You invent some neurotronic talsit high and you'll never come out. It's worse than a one-wayer because there's no way to reach you. For all practical purposes, it's suicide."

He lifted his hands to his shoulders in a gesture of surrender. "Not to use the stuff itself, just use its vector, or emulate its delivery modality. Like how you can use viruses to deliver disease treatments. Or that stuff I did for you to make the ATP mods take. If there's a single-molecule control option…" He looked up at her hopefully.

"Keep eating." Karin swirled a finger at his tray and then leaned back in her seat, folded her arms. "Is this another one of those biocaneer ideas that nobody has actually tried on anything with less than six legs?"

"Not exactly, it's…but it's based on stuff I've seen that's like it. And what I have seen has been run in silica on rhesus and – I think – human VRS. It had looked promising, they were just a little rudimentary when I ran them in a sim of my brain because I don't want them to get out and spotted by an ACMO DCE sweeper. If I could run it myself, I would. But I don't have enough compute to run it in less than a year and trust that it has sub-neuron fidelity."

Karin had not been listening to his details, but chopped at the food on her own plate, heedless of the repetition. "Hm. As an idea, it…might work. But it would still be very dangerous."

"How so?"

She sighed. "Off the top of my head? Suppose your p-net was hacked in combat, and they took over that function. They could shut you down. Or they could potentially turn off your autonomics, which would kill you instantly."

"Like I said, my implant uses shifting, non-standard frequencies with interlocked encryption. Three shifting-channel, two gigabyte keys; my personal implant has two or three times the key strength that ACMO or anyone else in the Alliance requires...with the possible exception of Crypto or Black Intel. Even if they get past that, general I/O security is already handled by ANUBIS."

Karin did not look convinced. "That's only the most obvious concern. You've told me about how the recall goes away when you're focused on something else, an entirely typical symptom."

"Well, only usually. I didn't leave the module active in the hypervisor during combat because I don't think about this stuff then; it's not part of the Combat configuration because I've got other stuff to think about. Well, at least I did before. That's what I was talking about with the flashplay during hand-to-hand, and why I have to get something else in place.

"But even if that weren't a life-threatening concern, it clutters my head all the rest of the time. I can't stop thinking about these things. The enhanced recall is triggered by organic recall, and I haven't been able to adjust it in any meaningful way until now because it responds to my organic brain by design…which I can't control unless I'm focused on it. When something has my attention, there usually isn't time for my mind to wander to the bad stuff. I was amazed to find it worked that way in Rio. And this could be a foolproof solution that works in combat and real life."

He finished chewing, swallowed, and continued, "I want to be able to functionally flip a switch and shut off the babble."

"Babble? You hear voices?"

"Not like that. I mean the distractions, the tension. Like the earworm Christmas carols." He paused to inhale, sighed deeply. "And mostly…the regret." He tapped his head with a finger, "Replaying the last time I saw my wife, over and over, endlessly thinking about things I can't do anything about, as if I can burn out the memory by flashplaying it enough times. Once it starts, it happens so fast, I can't stop it, so it's like I relive it every time."

"And it's not like just remembering it. It's like it just happened. Again. And again. And again." He paused for a moment. "Pick the most soul-crushing, emotionally painful memory you have. Imagine what it'd be like to re-live that for the very first time, all over again, with all the import of the in-the-moment first time it happened. Suppose I told you you've got Stage Three INA. WHAM, it just hits like that, but every single time the recall plays back. For me, the first time was losing my dad, which was when I discovered that total recall isn't always a good thing, and then when…my wife…killed herself in full-immersion PVR with me, right there, two meters from her."

He anticipated the implant flashplaying the memory, winced as he made the effort to completely stop it.

He saw Karin notice.

"Normally the recall functions are excellent and helpful, practically superhuman; stuff I'm thinking about can be presented to the pre-executive augments of my PFC. The Mass Effect equations," he snapped his fingers, "Thermodynamics," he snapped them again, "Field Service Manual for the Gorgon-3," another snap, "Hell, the service procedures for Tokyo's main linac. I don't even have to say these things aloud and they appear instantly on my ARO. I have about fifteen percent of my NetBite at instant command. But recalling past events doesn't go through the same filtering. It's even more fluid and spontaneous.

"It happened while I was down there, twice in the middle of a firefight. Nearly killed me because I couldn't stop it." He noticed he had been speaking more quickly, almost desperate that Chakwas should help him. "There was a dead batarian in front of me, his shields deflecting bullets. I had to force myself out of it, to get control of it again. And it takes precious seconds that I can't afford when under fire, and that makes my real life a shambles when I'm not distracted.

"But with the right controls, my implant could make it instantly stoppable…maybe even automatically controlled. But at the very least, I want to make it volitionally controllable, to be able to turn the recall off, minimize the effects. Over time, it could even result in a cure. A cure for PTSD! Can you imagine it? It might even stem the flow of 93(g)s, and maybe even civilian suicides." His omnitool fed a factoid to his ARO, "Speaking of which, the last 12-month looks like suicides generally are only up one percent over last year."

"I saw that, but that's not the point. You know that's not how organic memory works." Karin was shaking her head. "Leftenant, meditation can really help with that. You teach yourself where your buttons are and learn how to stop pushing them, and how to make them unpushable by circumstances."

"Besides the fact that it takes time, that's only a partial solution, I can't start meditating in combat, and as we both know, it simply isn't relevant with this implant." He tapped his head again. "I want to leverage the technology to solve the problem it causes."

"For all the good an EPD does, of course it isn't a perfect solution. But at least it's been in use for decades, and by thousands of users. What you're proposing is completely untested."

"Not a perfect solution yet. And in the final analysis, yes, maybe it won't work for this. And it has been tested, just not with sufficient resolution to be sure it works that way in my head. And I think it can help me in ways nothing else ever has or can." He speared another piece of meat. "If we can get a good, working solution, think of how many sufferers of PTSD, in all its varieties, could be freed of the pain they live with. The best we can do is either the half-measure of talk therapy, the side-effect-ridden neurochemicals, or distract them with PVR."

Dr. Chakwas sighed, and was silent for a moment. She glanced down at his omnitool. "You're running your audio screener, right?"

Shepard nodded, "Of course."

Even so, the doctor leaned slightly closer, subvocalized to her RTM.

Karin Chakwas, M.D.: As we've discussed before, your particular CPTSD is depressive. Your father, your wife, Elysium…it doesn't make you violent, but if it's not managed, it could. It's still an upmodulation of the amygdala, which depresses cortical activity. It makes you stop thinking and start reacting. I understand why you want control there, but we just don't have the tech that would give us instant control that's as fine as you'd need in any given situation.

Shepard subvocalized back, Yes we do. Or at least we could, and I might be the first walking, talking example of it.

Karin Chakwas, M.D.: After what happened down there, I'm still going to recommend that you let me walk you through some of the PVR experientials. It doesn't have to go on your record because I can change the programme on the fly.

This is still for testing my proposed mod, right? Repetition of the experience as a way of reducing the emotional impact is a waste of both our time.

Karin Chakwas, M.D.: Yes of course. But we don't know if this could be an effective treatment for others. It might even require a well-integrated implant. Or it may only run correctly on your…particular brand of EPD implant. We could potentially experiment with it there.

The doctor quirked an eyebrow. "What brand of implant are you using?"

"It's off-brand, but an Alliance vendor: Technically, it's an ePax 2300, made on demand. Mine was made at TUSC County, but design vetting by Tegmark Medical, and it even came off one of their fabbers. But functionally, it's a YiLong 70/C with non-standard memory. They can use bloodstream DCE, but I turned that off for security. I have been buying more memory as I can.

"My parents opted to have it installed while I was in a coma after my accident, and the Alliance hospital stocked this one because the Conatix people had started using YiLong to integrate with their amp design. My dad wondered if it might make it possible for me to get biotics later because of it." He shrugged and gave an awkward smile. "Which is kind of cute now that we know better.

"But what if we could offer…oh, even an 80% solution for a significant percentage of PTSD types with a cerebral net appliance? Something as simple as one of those 'thinking caps.' It wouldn't even have to be an implant. Wouldn't that be worth the effort for people who don't have, can't get, or won't get augmentation?"

She paused again, thinking. "We're not talking about them, we're talking about you."

"I know that. The small game, right now, right here, is about how I can control implant-enhanced traumatic recall. Can you help me with that? Will you help me with that?"

Karin sighed, momentarily considering that she was about to commit to an ongoing task. "What specifically do you need from me?"

Shepard spent a few seconds building up a big forkful of food, thinking about how to ask. "There's a modification to the design that I haven't run. I was hoping you'd be willing to work with me, and to keep it off ACMO's radar. If you can get a talsit active folding signature and add it to your copy of my hypervisor's internal compiler RP, isolate some of the ship's DCE with your clearance, and run a 700 hour simulation, that'll be more than a month of data. There's a new battery of conditions I've added to the ExeQueue that should run automatically."

Chakwas squinted. "I suppose I should give you a copy of the report manually, so you'll know if it does what you want. I'll be able to see if it can work through a braincap." She twirled a forkful of salad in dressing. "Hmm…if it does work, you might be right about helping others, but it never hurts to be motivated by personal need."

Shepard looked away guiltily. "Yeah, well…there's that."

Karin smiled privately. At least he's self-conscious enough to acknowledge it. He's probably stable enough to be thinking clearly about it.

He faced her again. "You could even take credit for it when you propose it to ACMO, or write your paper, or however you want to go about it. Use me as a Phase III subject."

"Oh, all right," she began to cut and butter a muffin. "Send me the profile changes and I'll have a look at them."

Shepard dug in a shirt pocket and palmed a PIRAD, then reached for her plate of crisps with it. He slipped the PIRAD under the plate and returned with a crisp for eating. Karin looked up at him. "Just like that?"

"You think I'm crazy? I'm not sending that stuff through email; we could both get in trouble. That's a whole trade study environment kit on a chip, with its own DCE hypervisor, and you can run it locally. I knew it was going to be a big thing to ask, so I wanted to make it as simple as possible for you." He nodded at it. "That's a 40 petabyte chip, so I'd like it back when you're done. Though I suppose the size helps; you can write results right back to it."

Karin bowed her head in silent laughter at the cloak-and-dagger move, but pulled the plate across the table toward her, took a crisp between two fingers, lifted the plate and extracted the PIRAD with the same hand. Delivering the crisp to her own mouth, she dropped the PIRAD into her own shirt pocket, and shook her head in a reprimand. "At least one of us has clearly lost his or her mind."

Shepard unconsciously breathed a sigh of relief, made eye contact appreciatively. "And yet you're helping me anyway. Thanks, doc. I really appreciate this." He took a bite, chewed, and swallowed. "And I also want to thank you for being there to spot me, keep me from getting in too deep."

Karin considered the PIRAD now in her pocket. "It's your willingness to accept my oversight that allows it. If you didn't, I wouldn't even consider this."

He shrugged. "It's your spotting me that makes it possible for me to do it. I'm not crazy enough to try this solo."

"I also notice that you had that chip prepared before you arrived. You knew what you wanted, and have done everything you can to make it happen."

"Yeah...well...context, right? I took it as far as I could and then asked for help. And I made it as easy for you to do so as possible." Shepard smiled and nodded thoughtfully. "Getting to be old friends, aren't we?"

Karin smiled back, but didn't look up from her tray.

They ate for a moment in silence.

"I assume you haven't finished composing your mission report yet, but if you want to talk about it, I'm here."

He paused his fork's motion, then resumed sopping up sauce with the steak. "Haven't even had time to think about it, really. And I'm glad. If I could erase the past two weeks, I would."

"If you want to, now is the time," she reminded him.

"I know." He nodded, eyes briefly closed. "But then I'd wonder what happened and why everyone else knows about it except me. And mostly where my friends went."

"Well, when you're done eating, you should at least go get some sleep. We're still a few days from the relay."

Shepard looked up at her and held her gaze for a moment. "You know...the thing is...I landed on Torfan as part of a platoon of fourteen, a unit that the brass kept putting together and disbanding for crazy tough missions on and off for over five years. Thanks to my incompetence, I lost a dozen friends over the past two weeks, including my spotter. I'm one of two that survived, and I'm the only one walking." He lifted his tray and started to leave, "Could be a while before I'm sleeping again."

*** Glossary ***

ACMO: Alliance Central Medical Office

ANUBIS: Alliance Neurotronics Under Brainware Internal Security

ARO: Augmented Reality Overlay

biocaneer: portmanteau of biology and buccaneer, a term popularized for biohackers

Black Intel: Alliance Intelligence service that most people suspect exists but no one knows for sure; and those who know aren't saying

BMI: Brain-Machine Interface

BUI: Brain-User Interface, control interface offered by and for brain implants; technically a misnomer, since the brain is the user

CPTSD: Complex PTSD

CPA: Central Processing Array, a group of CPUs and SoCs that perform computations for a VDI or DCE

CPU: Central Processing Unit

DCE: Distributed Computing Environment

EPD: Epilepsy Preventative Device

ExeQueue: prioritized queue of applications, simulations, calculations (and other compute functions that do not require oversight or have time constraints) that a DCE hypervisor will run when CPA demand in its VDI drops below 95%.

FBEA: Fireteam Biodata Exchange Array; Military-grade version of CobbleStone, by which all combat biodata recorders treat the unit as a sort of super-DCE, allowing at least one complete description of a given fireteam's status (and by extension, some record of what was happening when,) to persist with the unit, even if it loses some of its members; the term is also used to refer to networked camera, biometric, comm recordings across a fireteam; most often used in debrief or postmortem analyses

flashplay: asynchronous in-silica playback of recordings, compressing playback into a fraction of the time of the original; usually applied to podcasts, or audio dramas, but also memories; speed varies by user and software, but personal memory recall invokes the original emotions because it activates the same neural pathways, albeit more rapidly

INA: Involuntary Neural Apoptosis, essentially the "death sentence" disease of the late 22nd century; think "aggressively metastatising cancer meets AIDS" applied to neurons.

I/O: input/output

MD: Medical Doctor

NNP: Nanotech Neurological Preservative. After the rise in popularity of cryogenic preservation, a short-term "last aid" solution appeared for people who accidentally die quite remote from a cryo facility to prevent damage to the brain while awaiting transport. As of 2180, NNP is effective for about five to seven months, depending on the conditions at death (hydration, temperature, type of damage if any, etc.) Normally a 2cc cell of NNP is integrated into a user's omnitool, but First Responders (SAR, CFR, and other First Aid Personnel) are nearly always equipped with NNP sinus injectors.

PFC: pre-frontal cortex

PIRAD: Parallel Isolinear Redactive Array Device; removable storage that can also function as secondary system memory

PTSD: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

PVR: Polyphase Virtual Reality; a total-immersion VR technology with between two and five channels of data that stimulates multiple regions of the brain, allowing for a nearly complete reproduction of environments or experiences. Because it is a demanding, high-bandwidth technology, it became a measure of network capability, particularly among users who depend upon it. PVR games can be very addictive, especially to the young.

RP: Resource Pool

SEPTSD: Single-Event PTSD

SNAPCap: Single-Neuron Axon Path capture

SoC: System on a Chip

SOTA: State of the Art

tasp: with a tip of the hat to Larry Niven

TPM: Trusted Platform Module: originally a piece of hardware that breaks if device security is compromised; a way to be informed of a successful security breach

VDI: Virtualised Data Infrastructure

VI: Virtual Intelligence

VRS: Virtual Reality Simulation