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Reeves and Cross arrived at the conference room to find every seat taken. The full inner circle. Fifteen senior neural specialists, all staring at the projection screen with expressions that ranged from fascination to mild alarm.
On the screen: a structural diagram of the liquid neural connection device.
Most of them had never seen it before. The documentation Ryan had distributed covered the theoretical framework and operational principles. It had not included detailed hardware specifications or images of the actual equipment. The assumption among the group had been that the device was still in development, a conceptual design that would take months or years to fabricate.
Ryan was standing at the front of the room, laser pointer in hand.
"Tomorrow morning, we're running the first drift connection test."
The room processed this.
"Tomorrow?" Cross said. "We don't have the equipment yet."
"We've had it for a week. It's in Warehouse Three."
Silence.
Reeves felt the now-familiar sensation of reality lurching ahead of his expectations. He'd spent lunch discussing how many years it would take to build the drift hardware. The hardware had been sitting in a warehouse three hundred feet from where he'd been eating.
"The device you're looking at," Ryan continued, pointing the laser at specific sections of the diagram, "is a complete liquid neural connection system. The central hub receives amplified neural signals from connected participants. The signal processor integrates those signals, identifies commonalities, and manages the data exchange between connected minds. Output goes to the monitoring station, where we observe the process in real time."
He moved the pointer to the sensor caps. "These are the participant interfaces. Non-invasive contact sensors, similar in principle to Scrapper's neural link but configured for inter-personal connection rather than human-to-machine connection."
Ryan didn't elaborate on the internal mechanics. Deliberately. The research team didn't need to understand how the device worked at a component level. They needed to understand how to operate it, how to read the output data, and how to interpret the results.
He was building a team of experimentalists, not engineers. Their job was to run tests, collect data, and analyze patterns. His job was to use that data to reverse-engineer the first principles of the technology.
"The reaction solutions," he said, pointing to the array of numbered containers visible in a photograph of the actual device. "Nine solutions, loaded in sequence. They facilitate neural signal transmission through the liquid medium. The loading process is documented in the operations manual I'll distribute after this briefing."
Cross raised his hand. "Can we see the actual hardware?"
"Of course."
Ryan led the group to Warehouse Three. A guard opened the door. Inside, under the same three-colored tarp that had covered Scrapper on arrival day, sat the liquid neural connection device.
Ryan pulled the tarp away.
The group surrounded the machine. Touched the glass chambers. Examined the sensor caps. Traced the cable runs from the central hub to the signal processor. Cross picked up one of the red sensor caps and turned it over, studying the internal sensor array. The components were unfamiliar. Similar in concept to non-invasive BCI hardware, but the actual sensors, the signal amplifiers, the receptor elements were different. Custom fabrication. Proprietary design. Nothing off the shelf.
"Even if we understood the theory perfectly," Cross said quietly, "we couldn't build this. The fabrication specifications are completely unique."
"That's intentional," Ryan said without elaborating.
He powered up the device, loaded the connection software he'd spent the last three days writing, and began walking the team through the operating procedures.
The session lasted four hours. Every function, every parameter, every safety protocol, every emergency shutdown sequence. He covered what each display readout meant, how to interpret the neural overlap visualizations, what the signal strength percentages indicated, and what threshold values should trigger an immediate disconnect.
By the time he finished, Reeves's hand was cramped from note-taking. His notebook was full. He looked around and saw fourteen other researchers in exactly the same condition: notebooks packed, eyes wide, brains full.
Cross stared at the monitoring screen. All readout values sat at zero. No active connection. Just waiting.
At lunch, Cross had described the neural link technology as opening a peephole in a locked door.
Looking at the drift device now, he revised his assessment.
This wasn't a peephole.
Someone had knocked the door off its hinges.