tens of thousands of neurons. The motor cortex has maybe ten billion neurons. With Nexus, we could tap into more of them. Millions. Tens of millions. We could get finer control over robot arms. You could catch a ball, write with a pen, do stuff you can't do with current systems.
INTERVIEWER: Go on.
SHANKARI: Well, we knew we could get data in too. Nexus nodes talk to each other by radio.
INTERVIEWER: How do they talk by radio?
SHANKARI: I dunno. Fucking nanotubes are little radios all by themselves, man. There's a lot of nanostructures in Nexus.
INTERVIEWER: OK. Software.
SHANKARI: Software. Yeah. So, anyway, they talk by radio. They sync up. Every node has some way of saying what part of the brain it's in. Every node listens for broadcasts addressed to its part of the brain, so it knows when to fire. If we could crack that, we could listen in on brain activity, and we could make neurons fire in whatever part of the brain we wanted.
INTERVIEWER: Why would that be relevant to your work?
SHANKARI: There's a million reasons. More than that. But for us it was about feedback. Sending the brain information on what the arm was touching, where it was relative to the body. Without that, an artificial limb is useless.
INTERVIEWER: So again, systems like that exist. Why your work?
SHANKARI: Same reason. More neurons. Higher bandwidth. Higher sensitivity, more precision, no surgery. Next question?
INTERVIEWER: Software. How did this lead to software?
SHANKARI: Yeah. Well, we dosed up some mice, started recording all the signals…
INTERVIEWER: Where did the Nexus come from?
SHANKARI: [pause] We bought it from a guy on the street.
INTERVIEWER: Your pulse just shot up ten points, you're starting to sweat, and your systolic blood pressure just went up by five. Try again.
SHANKARI: [sighs] We made it.
INTERVIEWER: How?
SHANKARI: We autosynthed it.
INTERVIEWER: How'd you get past the censor chip?
SHANKARI: [pause] We got access to an old one. It's out of date. The updates haven't been installed on it for years.
INTERVIEWER: Who's the license holder?
SHANKARI: [sighs] Crawford Lab. They've got a newer fancier one. Their old one mostly just sits idle. I've got access to their lab. They never knew.
INTERVIEWER: Where'd you get the molecular structures?
SHANKARI: We got the chemistry from Recipes for a Revolution . I smuggled a hard copy back from India.
INTERVIEWER: And the source material?
SHANKARI: All over. It's mostly innocuous. The only problem is there are so many different molecules in Nexus… sixty-three different molecular parts. The autosynth only had one chemreactor. We had to do sixty-three runs, then hand mix in the right proportions.
INTERVIEWER: OK, back to the software.
SHANKARI: Yeah. Fine. So we recorded the signals. It was a bitch. Way too much going on. We did more and more mice studies, tapered down the doses as low as we could go. We started injecting straight into the brain to get the lowest possible doses, simplify the traffic between the mice, simplify the analysis for us.
INTERVIEWER: How long did it take you?
SHANKARI: Most of a year. We would do the dosing before we left lab each day, then record activity overnight. The results made no sense. The signal traffic was chaos. Huge volumes of chaos. There was nothing that looked like the position of the nodes.
INTERVIEWER: And then?
SHANKARI: And then… and then we hit pay dirt, man. Kade figured it out. The nodes don't know where they are in the brain. They know where they are relative to other nodes in the same brain. How much position data they send depends on how many nodes there are around 'em. And it's not even really position data. They figure out what functional region they're in, send that in their signals. It's fucking amazing. [shakes head] Anyway, once Kade
INTERVIEWER: Go on.
SHANKARI: Well, we knew we could get data in too. Nexus nodes talk to each other by radio.
INTERVIEWER: How do they talk by radio?
SHANKARI: I dunno. Fucking nanotubes are little radios all by themselves, man. There's a lot of nanostructures in Nexus.
INTERVIEWER: OK. Software.
SHANKARI: Software. Yeah. So, anyway, they talk by radio. They sync up. Every node has some way of saying what part of the brain it's in. Every node listens for broadcasts addressed to its part of the brain, so it knows when to fire. If we could crack that, we could listen in on brain activity, and we could make neurons fire in whatever part of the brain we wanted.
INTERVIEWER: Why would that be relevant to your work?
SHANKARI: There's a million reasons. More than that. But for us it was about feedback. Sending the brain information on what the arm was touching, where it was relative to the body. Without that, an artificial limb is useless.
INTERVIEWER: So again, systems like that exist. Why your work?
SHANKARI: Same reason. More neurons. Higher bandwidth. Higher sensitivity, more precision, no surgery. Next question?
INTERVIEWER: Software. How did this lead to software?
SHANKARI: Yeah. Well, we dosed up some mice, started recording all the signals…
INTERVIEWER: Where did the Nexus come from?
SHANKARI: [pause] We bought it from a guy on the street.
INTERVIEWER: Your pulse just shot up ten points, you're starting to sweat, and your systolic blood pressure just went up by five. Try again.
SHANKARI: [sighs] We made it.
INTERVIEWER: How?
SHANKARI: We autosynthed it.
INTERVIEWER: How'd you get past the censor chip?
SHANKARI: [pause] We got access to an old one. It's out of date. The updates haven't been installed on it for years.
INTERVIEWER: Who's the license holder?
SHANKARI: [sighs] Crawford Lab. They've got a newer fancier one. Their old one mostly just sits idle. I've got access to their lab. They never knew.
INTERVIEWER: Where'd you get the molecular structures?
SHANKARI: We got the chemistry from Recipes for a Revolution . I smuggled a hard copy back from India.
INTERVIEWER: And the source material?
SHANKARI: All over. It's mostly innocuous. The only problem is there are so many different molecules in Nexus… sixty-three different molecular parts. The autosynth only had one chemreactor. We had to do sixty-three runs, then hand mix in the right proportions.
INTERVIEWER: OK, back to the software.
SHANKARI: Yeah. Fine. So we recorded the signals. It was a bitch. Way too much going on. We did more and more mice studies, tapered down the doses as low as we could go. We started injecting straight into the brain to get the lowest possible doses, simplify the traffic between the mice, simplify the analysis for us.
INTERVIEWER: How long did it take you?
SHANKARI: Most of a year. We would do the dosing before we left lab each day, then record activity overnight. The results made no sense. The signal traffic was chaos. Huge volumes of chaos. There was nothing that looked like the position of the nodes.
INTERVIEWER: And then?
SHANKARI: And then… and then we hit pay dirt, man. Kade figured it out. The nodes don't know where they are in the brain. They know where they are relative to other nodes in the same brain. How much position data they send depends on how many nodes there are around 'em. And it's not even really position data. They figure out what functional region they're in, send that in their signals. It's fucking amazing. [shakes head] Anyway, once Kade
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