sod2 implants

Training had made sure to cover how to use the Universal Command Prompter. It was a slow and clunky way of going about implant I/O in an age of artificial telepathy, but it had its uses. Emma plugged the data cable into the back of her neck, then into the transmitter she'd pulled from the IFV back by Cluster 14. She fitted a battery into the transmitter's power supply, then daisy chained a few more together. It was probably not that safe, but it would do.

Now, Emma just had to remember what she was supposed to do. She pulled up the UCP and stared at it blankly.

"Uhhh… oh right, _system update /force_," she thought at the blipping cursor.

Emma's world abruptly cut out, before she began falling endlessly and accelerating. Complete pressing nothingness overwhelmed her. Emma unsuccessfully fought against rising panic, belatedly recalling that this had, in fact, happened in training.

Then an impossibly loud bing as her auditory cortex came back online, followed swiftly by her olfactory system. She could smell beef stew most strongly, followed by… well it was herself, clearly. At some level, everyone knew what they smelled like, of course, but she'd never taken the time to sniff herself before. Who did that?

Then a flash of white text. Emma mentally recoiled as streams and streams of information spiraled across her vision. It was all moving too fast to read, and the sheer glut of data was dizzying. Emma picked out something about mind-to-mind communication and muscular enhancements.

The word "ERROR" kept appearing with alarming frequency. There wasn't nearly enough time to figure out what was error-ing out, but it was enough for Emma to feel nervous about combat. What if something failed half way through? What if her data I/O wasn't functional and she didn't get any updates? Alright, fine, most of what she did was uniquely magical, but it wasn't as if they gave you an exhaustive list of the implants you had. Cascading failure could happen, after all, and—

—the world clicked off as the logos of Chronos Biologics and Hephaestus Nanotechnology blinked across her vision. Another, quieter, bling, and then everything rushed back in.

Emma jerked back to her body with a gasp. Everything burned and sparked, as if she'd been dropped into a vat of liquid nitrogen, left for a few seconds, and then doused with molten iron.

Well, that was probably hyperbole, but calling it a "tingle" was complete understatement.

With a groan, Emma sat up. Her tactical interface rebooted a moment later, almost cheerfully telling her that the reset had restored some other basic functions to her TacComp, including hardware management protocols. Would she like to access these now?

Yes, yes she would. A window blinked open, turning translucent to overlay her field of view. A list rapidly propagated, along with several columns of information.

…Goddess, half her implants were nonfunctional. The readout was also totally unhelpful, merely stating that "the requested implant technology cannot be found". Were they burned out? Was her diagnostic malfunctioning? Did the firmware on the implants get corrupted?

Completely useless.

But, at least, her I/O implants were definitely working, and she had a much more useful TacComp than she'd thought. It was already capable of very, very basic computing. File management, running scripts, et cetera. It'd probably be another day to get even close to full combat capacity, but anything was better than nothing.

More worryingly, her medical implant readiness kept flickering between 30 and 98 percent. A two-percent degradation was easily manageable, but if Emma actually only had access to 30% of her implants' regeneration capabilities, any hit she took would burn through her gem like fire through tissue paper.

(Sodales, Chapter 2)