The Martial Unity

His words gave him a surge of confidence that drowned out his fear and apprehension, finally giving him the courage to go through with this crazy process.

He was not a Martial Artist. Bravery and courage were not foundational traits for tekvores. They were scientists, in some ways even more so than dwarves. They were applied scientists who followed the scientific method and took calculated risks, not utterly terrifying gambles.

Argenton would be lying if he said that this couldn’t go wrong.

It was possible that integrating all thoughts with all other thoughts would lead to the ultimate and absolute form of schizophrenia rather than Transcendence.

And yet, he was prepared to gamble his life this time.

He knew that the tekvores had been lagging behind the other pathwalkers for the past eighteen years because of NOVA’s enslavement of the entire race. He knew that the prospects of the other races getting their Transcendents were much greater than his own under ordinary circumstances. He had taken a long time to recover from NOVA’s control, stagnating the entire time while the other races had moved forward.

He was barely in the top thirty anymore as far as pathwalkers went, an embarrassment for a major race.

He refused to live a life of passive humiliation any more.

He would rather die than let himself rot as he had all this time.

Immediately, he transmitted a command to the laboratory’s systems, activating the protocol.

The laboratory’s artificial intelligence system immediately complied as a second medical tube emerged from the floor right beside the synthetic lattice brain that he had created. A teleportation protocol transferred him into the medical tube, causing him to hover slightly.

The artificial intelligence sent him a final confirmation message

[Operation Transluminance may cause you to lose your sanity or your life, sir. The latter is technically guaranteed for a period, but if the transfer doesn’t succeed, you will stay dead. And insanity is still very possible even if your consciousness is successfully transferred. Are you sure you would like to proceed with this operation?]

”Continue.”

[Very well, sir.]

The air grew charged with anticipation. His anticipation.

From the ceiling within the medical tube, an apparatus of surgical instruments emerged, hovering about his head. Several wires also emerged, inserting themselves into his mostly mechanical body, gaining temporary control over some functions, shutting down all but the most critical functions.

The entire laboratory activated its energy shields, its dense array of seismic stabilizers, and other precautionary measures.

The operation was so delicate that even the slightest disturbance would ruin it all.

Only after all the preparations were made did the operation finally begin.

A high-precision laser beam tool pierced his crystalline skull with a laser beam that was so accurate that it stopped just short of piercing his skull and damaging his brain, killing him on the spot.

It cut off the top of his skull entirely.

Immediately, a solid light construct, a technology he specialized in, prevented cerebral fluid from escaping, while maintaining the liquid pressure the brain was accustomed to.

At the same time, the crystalline components around his neck opened up, revealing the base where the brain connected with his synthetic nervous system, composed of thin fiber optic cables. It disconnected the brain from the fiber optic cables, while another solid light construct covered up the brain. The other components in the brain containment unit also opened up, disconnecting the brain from his cybernetic body.

This was not the riskiest part.

Peak tekvores had already replaced everything but the brain with technology, so the brain containment unit was quite modular. The riskiest part, of course, was the consciousness transfer from his brain to his synthetic lattice brain prism.

The brain was then transferred to a remote scanning apparatus that slowly began to scan the entire structure of his brain at the sub-atomic level. Every scrap of information and subsequently integrated information that emerged as a whole from the entire system, was extracted from his brain.

Unfortunately, this required the destruction of the brain in the process.

This was a time-consuming process even though the entire laboratory complex had been built for the purpose of this operation. Quantum computers dug through the data, identifying all patterns. The artificial intelligence overseeing the entire process then took those identified patterns and processed them through an algorithmic protocol that constructed a neural net model that ’mimicked’ his consciousness with 100% accuracy in all situations and stimuli, as vetted against a pre-existing Large SOUL model that Martial Artists used for Enlightenment of Self.

Once the neural net model was created, it had to be transferred into the synthetic prismic lattice brain.

However, the transfer of Argenton’s consciousness model wasn’t as simple as plugging a USB cable into the brain and transferring the data.

That was what NOVA had done.

And that was her greatest folly.

The transfer process that Argenton had innovated transferred consiousness into the brain through a process very similar to neuron plasticity in real human brains.

Prismic malleability.

In other words, he would literally ’mold’ the prismic light pathways in the shape of his consciousness.

It was a grand and profoundly difficult endeavor.

But he was confident that the solution he had created would be functional.

The synthetic brain was removed from stasis. It could not be unchanging for what was about to take place. It was placed within a spherical chamber right above the chamber where Argenton’s body floated, a chamber whose inner surface was laced with nano light pulse transmitters.

These transmitters would subject the prismic lattice brain to a tsunami of a highly specific series of controlled and calibrated light beams that would mold each prismic lattice, essentially crafting the personality, the memories, and both the subconscious and conscious mind structure across the countless prismic nodes of the lattice brain.

VMMM

The process was long, lasting an entire week. While Rui and Dwight could do something similar at a much faster pace, they benefited from the power of the Verse that could overcome a lot of limitations.

The moment finally came a week later when every node in the prismic lattice brain was finally molded in exactly the right way so as to contain the equivalent of all the information in his brain.

The transparent brain looked identical to how it had before, but contained a… profound metaphysical weight that went beyond words. It was transferred to a chamber that had Argenton’s body, where a custom brain containment unit was prepared for it, smoothly clicking shut after the brain was locked in; prismic power needles were inserted into the appropriate sockets.

Then, the artificial intelligence activated the power source within Argenton’s body, commencing the boot-up process.

VMMM…

A surge of light energy was transferred from the antimatter reactor in the chest to the newly connected brain.

[Consciousness boot-up commencing.]

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