After watching the release of this video from one of the patients in Neuralink's first clinical trials, I decided to post here the prologue of some fiction I have been writing which is set in a world where BCI tech experiences the same exponential growth that we have seen with LLMs.
dedicates its first clinical trial to the morally unimpeachable work of helping quadriplegics control external devices. The early successes are heartwarming. The first viral video is of a hospital bed bound young man in Trenton New Jersey slowly dragging a cursor across a point-and-click keyboard and telling his mother “LUV U” is of a man with ALS explaining his condition, how supportive his wife has been, and how much Neuralink has improved his quality of life (Updated April 28th, 2025). It is followed shortly after by a teenage girl named Hope piloting a motorized wheelchair through a park. CNN runs a cinematic shot of her hair billowing in the wind.
The Phase I clinical trial involves 55 patients, many of whom churn out inspiring content on a regular basis. Redditors who see these successes drop whatever they are doing to furiously clarify across their various socials that these achievements, while great, should not in any way be credited to Elon Musk. Regardless, the tech is at first immensely popular and Neuralink the company skyrockets to an approval rating in the mid 90s. This makes it about as popular as root beer floats, Rocky IV, or receiving oral sex.
Political pressure to make the technology more easily available mounts. Patient advocacy groups and libertarian minded lobbyists team up with Silicon Valley accelerationists, all of them pushing to get “ultra fast tracking” for BCIs. There’s not a politician or bureaucrat on the planet eager to oppose wheelchair bound sob stories backed by tech billionaires. The call comes from on high, the Oval Office itself, and the FDA issues a special medical device approval pathway for BCIs which only requires one year of safety data to clear Phase I. It also allows manufacturers to provide accessibility for patients suffering from quadriplegia causing conditions under Expanded Access.
An unintended consequence of this sped up regulatory pathway is its interaction with state Right to Try laws. In Montana, only four months after Neuralink clears its Phase I trial, a cyclist suffering from partial paralysis in his calf gets an operation to have a BCI implanted so that he can use it to activate a modified NEUBIE to restore some functionality to his lower left leg. There is some grumbling and concern trolling, this isn’t really what the legislation was meant to accomplish, but nobody prominent sees coming out against helping the partially paralysed to move again as an attractive hill to die on.
Two weeks later, a 19 year old deaf girl has a Neuralink implanted to help her tune her hearing aid in real time, and reports spectacular results. Due mostly to the short timeframe between these events, the concern trolling is a bit louder this time. A few opportunists make “consumer safety” ragebait content with the goal of controversy marketing themselves into the limelight, but again it’s no one important and it falls flat. Musk is asked about the stories on X and in his characteristic style bluntly expresses support.
Before long getting a prescription for a Neuralink implant is dealt with by rubber stamping physicians and psychiatrists, the same way California medical weed licenses were in the early 00s. If you have the right condition and know the right doctor, they can have you in surgery and thinking to your computer before the end of the week.
It’s expensive, most people are priced out as insurance won’t cover it. On top of that, there are some post-operative horror stories. But for every kid who jumps in his pool the day after getting chipped and winds up with a skull infection, there are ten more showing off what look like discount superpowers on Tik Tok, and another two shedding tears of joy as they contract muscles of their own volition for the first time in years.
Some real political opposition momentarily starts to form, but it lacks central control over its messaging. The movement makes the strategic error of aligning itself with Federal level politicians who are more interested in being seen as anti-RFK than anything else, and who have no control over state laws or FDA enforcement discretion anyways. There is some drum banging around “Billionaires experimenting on our kids” which is all the rage on CNN for about three days, until the dopamine hit fades and mindshare liquidity rotates elsewhere when Trump tweets something outrageous.
Other states see a medical tourism opportunity and begin to pass similar Right to Try laws. There’s high faluten talk on the tech bro podcast circuit about how “Cyborgs” will transform both school and the workplace. Your kid simply won’t have a chance at being competitive if they aren’t augmented. ETA 3y, so sayeth the wise Chamath.
Despite this, outside of the medical success stories the tech remains largely a gimmick. The implant works, but there’s not many professions where being able to drag a cursor by moving your tongue gives you a real advantage. Plus, each new device integration requires specific attention from an approved Neuralink developer. Both the approvals process and the limitation on dev hours available serve as bottlenecks.
The anti-climactic rollout is to be expected from the Mk. 1, which despite being marketed as read-write, has little to no usable functions to transmit signals into the brain, and is both closed source and too delicate to reliably jailbreak.
changes that, with an multi-implant installation process which wires into areas in both your brain and nervous system, including:
With carefully timed microbursts of electrical signals, incoming sensory data can be altered. With enough fine tuning, even sensory inputs which were never really experienced by the user can nonetheless be transmitted through their nervous system into their brains.
At first, this latter experience is rough.
Sights come through as shimmering blobs of motion and light, blurring at the edges. Sounds oscillate violently between sharp clarity and murmurs. Touch feels like light static shocks mapped only approximately to areas of the body. Flavors and scents bleed into one another, strawberries might smell like soap, steak might taste faintly of burnt plastic. Some early users worry they’re having a stroke, or will be stuck like this for the rest of their lives. It's often compared to the world's worst bad trip.
To compensate, the Mk. 2’s smoothing neural nets (brought to you by xAI complimentary with X Premium+) work overtime. Each user’s brain is passively monitored, with individualised learning models retraining the stimulation patterns. The only limitation is the number of hours the user is willing to put in to the process. Neural nets predict missing sensory data, reinforce correct perceptions, and gradually sculpt the alien inputs into something the mind processes in a way which is aligned with user goals. It becomes common practice to have your nervous and neural activity monitored for a month before receiving the implants, and then for another month after implantation before activating them, just to shorten the time required to get past this awkward phase.
Still, the first few attempts at manufactured or imported sensory inputs are always disorienting and hallucinatory. But for most users, after about a week of twice a day hour long post-activation training, the experience crosses an invisible threshold. Sensations stabilize and seem meaningfully closer to the real thing.
It’s not perfect. There’s a sort of uncanny valley to every generated experience. Most users find they can only properly comprehend manufactured visual inputs with their eyes closed, minimizing interference from sensory noise. Physical sensations accompanied by substantial physiological reactions (orgasm, nausea, fatigue, etc.) often fail to map properly for reasons not immediately understood. Still, it feels nothing short of miraculous, and everyone can see the end game things are trending towards. This is the future of VR, not some clunky headset. Zuckerberg throws a bottle of sweet baby ray's at his office wall in a fit of anger.
The Mk. 2 is secured with an M of N Threshold Signature Scheme authentication system and a manual shutdown trigger, but its API is open source. Anyone anywhere can ship code which can send to or receive from a Mk. 2, and the brain it is wired into. Its clinical study focuses on neuropathic pain and partial blindness, but its obvious to every late night comedian and teenager what the real killer use case is: full sensory VR media.
With a Mk. 2 and the right software, a user can record all the tactile sensations, flavors, scents, sights, and sounds of a moment. It’s not long before there’s a popular and battletested dapp to make them available for others to experience. The going rate for a top quality memory starts high but before long even high caliber orgies are going for a few Satoshis per hour.
There are bugs. Many users report nauseating body dysmorphia, and there is one particularly bad episode of induced epilepsy. These are are quickly squashed under the boot of vibe coder mindshare. With sufficient data and compute, there’s not a problem in your sensorium that more LLM mediated smoothing can’t fix. Try more dakka, if step 1 doesn’t work, refer back to step 1.
The societal decay is immediately noticeable. Social media and the transformation of even innocuous interactions into high stakes political capital wagers was already pushing people into isolation. Fully immersive VR with sensory feedback makes being alone more comfortable than ever.
Hikikomoris are forged anew around the world as a young and already economically dispossessed generation finds at their fingertips the opportunity to live lives of sex and opulence vicariously, struggle and risk free. People no longer ‘stare at their phones’. They sit back with their eyes closed and zone out to carefully crafted memoryscapes. Whole new genres of content and storytelling emerge. Media empires and independent creators both scramble to get in on the ground floor of the action.
If you’re eighteen you have two choices; go a few hundred thousand dollars into debt chasing a college degree that will probably be obsolete by the time you graduate, or stay locked in your bedroom hooked up to VR all day having feasts and orgies. Guess what most of them choose?
The bottleneck that prevents this from simply consuming the entirety of Gen Z is the tolerance of their parents. There simply are not enough Millenial moms and dads willing to subsidize their children “Checking Out” of reality to rot in bed all day. And so in the grand tradition of all post Breton Woods generations, the Zoomers begrudgingly drag themselves off to increasingly automated and poorly compensated service jobs for eight hours a day. Their earnings do not even really help their parents defray their costs, so meager is what’s left after a food budget and Social Security taxes, but “at least they’re not just conked out in bed all day fergodssake”.
Progress doesn’t magically stop.
with its improved wiring into the primary motor cortex, supplementary motor areas, and spinal motor circuits, is pitched as a cure for paralysis. It comes with an optional upgrade: a series of tic-tac sized intramuscular implants paired with a full body suit of NEUBIE-style dermal patches. This hardware is supported by frontier neural networks, individually trained to interpret each user's brain signals and spinal activity, translating them into rapid and coordinated muscle activation.
With this arsenal, some quadriplegics can learn to walk again. Their movements are not elegant. They seem stiff and uncoordinated. Even the best of them looks mildly drunk… but they are ambulatory. This breakthrough is rightly hailed as humanity’s greatest triumph over the fickle hand of infirmity since the Polio vaccine. Many kinds of paralysis are no longer lifelong sentences; overnight they become conditions treatable through an in-patient surgery and a few weeks of rehab with a physical therapist specialized in LLM integration.
This is one of the Mk. 3’s two world changing innovations.
The second emerges almost accidentally, an idle musing among Neuralink engineers: “If the Mk. 2 could already capture sensory information, could the Mk. 3 capture dreams?” As it turns out, yes.
Lucid dreamers can control their environments with a thought. However, even the best struggle with unstable, dampened sensory input and difficulty maintaining complex dreamscapes for long periods. That’s fine, because Somnabulent doesn’t.
Launched out of the Y Combinator Fall class of 2028, Somnabulent is a digital intelligence designed to work alongside Neuralink, decoding and reinforcing users' REM sleep patterns to stabilize and enhance dream environments. Even the most amateurish insomniacs can fall asleep at will and achieve complete lucidity after just a few nightly sessions. The LLM quickly learns each user’s brain activity and adapts accordingly.
Somnabulent is free to use, but requires cloud computing credits to run effectively (purchased through a standard monthly subscription). On the base plan, the average nightly session costs about $15, with much of the processing offloaded to the user's own brain to minimize server costs.
One night, after sleepwalking during a session with Somnabulent, and waking up mid-orgy to find himself rummaging through the fridge, a Stanford dropout has an epiphany. Humans don’t need to be awake to move. Now, with the Mk. 3, humans don’t even need to use their brains to move. If that’s the case then, strictly speaking, humans don’t need to be awake to work.
Thus TechStars’ Spring 2029 rising star, Rentabody, is born. With a $500 pair of camera-equipped goggles (financeable for $50 a month for 18 months) and a fully loaded Mk. 3 Neuralink, you can Check Out into a Somnabulent-driven lucid fantasy of your own design while simultaneously earning a wage. Living the dream.
After they close their Series B and secure a strategic partnership with Amazon, the pitch gets even better. Living expenses? Don’t worry about them. Rentabody will house you in a memory foam pod, provide three daily MREs with mineral water, and even offer prophylactic medical care to keep your body in peak condition… or at least healthy enough to keep stacking boxes in a fulfilment center. It’s all deducted automatically from the paycheck your body earns while an LLM pilots its movements, with enough left over to finance a constant Somnabulent induced coma fantasy.
It turns out human labor can stay competitive with robots if you simply turn humans into robots. It helps that they benefit from the inertia of millennia of infrastructure designed explicitly for human hands operating in human dimensions… and there’s an army of several billion of them available on day one.
The societal backlash is fiery. Nobody left of Ron Paul is comfortable watching glass-eyed zombies shuffle down sidewalks and drop off packages. Representatives scramble to ban the technology at state and federal levels, only to find themselves trapped in an endless quagmire of lawfare and outpaced by open-source clones and international clinics.
If an employee illegally uses Somnabulent or its competitors during work does the employer face liability from consequences arising due to their failure to detect it? Do people have a constitutional right to alienate and thus automate their body’s labor? Does regulating intrastate Somnabulent labor fall under the interstate commerce clause, or lie outside Congress’s authority? The legal system is diligently at work; appealing, filing, counter-filing, counter-appealing… and should be able to get back to you with definitive answers in give or take six years.
Public sentiment toward Neuralink plummets as streets fill with puppeteered bodies. Still, when push comes to shove, most of the critics are unwilling to pay an extra $10 to have their Uber Eats delivered by a conscious person.
Government and industry are conflicted. They were already grappling with the looming problem of populations rendered obsolete by digital intelligences and robots, and the free market has gifted them a scalable solution. Plus, this has put the whole UBI debate to bed — at least for now. On the other hand, even the most staunch Cato Institute mouthpiece gets a little nervous when he walks down the streets of Manhattan and has to search for fifteen minutes before finding another “real person”.
“What exactly are we aiming for here? As a nation? As a species? Are we destined to become lotus eaters, forsaking humanity’s Nietzschean destiny in the stars for endless luxury inner multiverses?”
While this philosophical debate makes great fodder for the culture war, military and economic decision makers in DC remain focused on the Intelligence Explosion arms race with China. Beijing won’t flinch at implanting its entire middle and lower classes. Falling behind is not an option. The automation of human labor becomes a pillar of 21st century economic efficiency. It is an elephant in the room that everyone works very to ignore as productivity per capita and GDP climb exponentially upwards hand-in-hand.
Inequality doesn’t just widen; it compounds, accelerating alongside all the other economic trends. In meatspace there are only two kinds of people left: the wealthy, and everyone else.
Children born into generational fortunes live in comfort and opulence, coasting by on broad indexing strategies amid productivity booms, enjoying Rentabody harems and robotic servants. Despite this, life is increasingly empty. Even the greatest genius in the most complex field becomes a Magnus Carlsen; an impressive spectacle, but ultimately inferior to even a household device. There is no meaning left in work. The social scene withers as more and more people opt for literal heaven. The club scene get sad. It feels a bit silly sitting at a VIP table by yourself in a loud room with an empty dance floor.
Those without enough funds to reach Prosperity Escape Velocity face a different challenge: the struggle to survive. They are squeezed on one side by an increasingly competitive workforce of robotic drones and Rentabodies driving down wages (and you thought H1-Bs were bad!), and on the other side by capital buying up every scrap of land and infrastructure to build ever larger compute farms. The few remaining living spaces grow smaller and more expensive.
They do eat the bugs. They do live in the pods. And even that is difficult to afford when they can’t work a perfectly efficient sixteen-hour day. They hustle from gig to gig, sometimes working for the black market, and still barely make ends meet.
Checking Out is an ever looming temptation for both groups.
No matter how rich you are, your experiences in meatspace are limited by physics and social scarcity. You will never fly effortlessly through the air, or be a famous musician, or the President. You can in your dreams though, it’s as easy as downloading an app. And with longevity science improvements, it could last indefinitely.
For the poor whose lives are closer to those of workers in the great depression than any imagined tech utopia, the prospect of literal heaven forever is usually too much to ignore. It is only the irrationally stubborn who cling to the “real” in the face of infinite abundance.
is the final nail in the coffin of the waking world. Gradual uploads.
Over time, data is gathered about your mind. With sufficient data, neural processing can be seamlessly integrated with external systems. At the same time, your implants can artificially dampen the activity of the old grey matter. “Atrophy” isn’t quite the right description for what happens as a result, but it’s close enough to be used in common parlance. Thanks to the wonders of neuroplasticity, your brain can be coaxed into offloading its functions to these outside sources.
If done gradually enough the transition is imperceptible: one day fifty-one percent of what you think and experience is hosted on cloud servers. Then seventy-five percent. Then ninety-five. Always asymptotically approaching, but never quite reaching, one hundred percent. Eventually, the biological residue becomes so thin that even catastrophic bodily destruction would register as nothing more than a moment of disorientation. Theseus’ ship is no longer a mere thought experiment, but it turns out it’s really no big deal in practice.
Pair this with an indefinite Rentabody contract, regenerative medicine, clever financial engineering by reinsurance companies, and a compliant Federal Reserve, and humanity’s retirement in heaven is officially secured.
Let your body work itself to death. You won’t feel a thing.
The Neuralink, Rentabody, and Somnabulent merger proceeds despite fiery anti-trust speeches from Elizabeth Warren, and Checkout Industries is born.