A Beginner’s Guide to the Opening of the Third Eye
Little black matte box. Little blue band-aid with a little thin blade containing a microchip outfitted with human nerve connectors. I’d heard the graphene nanotube was too minute, too microscopic for the human body to feel, but when I pulled back the little wax strips–the right side, then the left–grit my teeth when the warm edge sunk to bone, and the unspooling nanotube shot (in a fraction of a second) a human nerve tissue wire up my arms into my neck and my spinal cord, I felt a jerk like a snapping guitar string from my middle finger to the center of my forehead. I blinked, and then my forehead blinked. Superimposed on my point of focus like a hallucination was a little pink bubble with little blue text saying hello. The device was successfully integrated with my neural networks, it informed me, and proceeded to connect to a nearby wireless network.
Advances in lab-grown organic tissues and human nervous system programming made in the early twenty-first century paved the way for body augmentation and sense organ addition, starting in the industrial sector with visible wavelength-extending lens replacements. The first devices of this kind seemed rudimentary, clunky, even primitive compared the sleek, minimal neural gadget I had just gotten my hands on (and into my hands), although fundamentally they worked the same way: reprogramming the human brain to allow for another field of vision, but instead of displaying temperature or radioactivity (which made early so-called ‘parietal’ eyes so invaluable to nuclear engineers) the bubbles massing over my face gave me updates on music events in my area, the locations and activities of my friends and family, and trending global news stories. As technology media outlets had predicted, the first commercially available parietal eye was announced as a thought-integrated smartphone.
To be continued…