“Please don’t move.”
When the doctor injected the nano-bot into his brain, Joonho flinched as if dodging a flying pigeon.
Joonho took a cab and stared at the 12-inch screen on the back of the front seat. Stuffy air filled the car. There was no sound, but he could hear murmurs being transmitted from the device. “THE WORLD ... CHANGED.” The ad wasn't lying about that. From holding robots to becoming robots, humans were spiraling into a new era.
Joonho had never been an early adopter of technology. He liked to code quirky websites for fun but never considered himself a programmer. When he signed up to be one of a hundred beta testers, his co-workers worried their colleague was risking his life for a billionaire's pet project. "This could be bigger than the moon landing," Joonho said. For him, the nano-bot injection was a chance to escape his corporate job. His world was burning, and the surgery was a lottery ticket to Mars.
The cab slowed as it approached a red light. Joonho felt a light headache. As soon as the bot was inserted, his brain began to function as a messenger app. In theory, he no longer had to speak out loud to communicate. He could “speak” in his mind to deliver messages to other computers. His thoughts didn’t have to be polished either. Before confirming a message, the software transformed the words into articulate sentences.
The cab dropped Joonho off at a 30-year-old brick apartment. He ran up to the third floor and looked around just in case some journalists had followed him.
The beta testing was completely free under one condition. For a year, every participant had to report daily about their status. Joonho checked in with the company as soon as he entered his room. He only needed to answer "yes" or "no" to questions like “Do you think you're utilizing 100% of the nano-bot?” The company already knew—from numerous experiments with chimps—that some testers would outperform others by 10 or possibly 100 times.
Most hackers on the Internet were sure about one thing: "Thinking" was about to become the most valuable skill in the world. Many testers were already gaining massive popularity online, and some of them shared their bots' messenger IDs to maximize the pool of data to play with. Joonho thought joining an open competition was a mistake. A lot of noise wouldn't help him control his semi-robotic brain. He wanted to set up a temple in his room. He needed a quiet environment to truly understand his consciousness.
From what he had learned from Internet forums, Joonho wrote down three stages to becoming fluent in the nano-bot.
1. You can receive messages from other bots.
2. You can send messages without any mistakes.
3. You can communicate with AI bots to handle complex tasks.
He thought reaching step 3 would grant him unprecedented power. If he could communicate with AI at the speed of thought, he could research, experiment, invest, engineer, and design faster than any human in the world. He would become humanity's mastermind to solve the universe’s mysteries. He would be considered a god.
Part II is coming soon.