N is for Neural Rewiring

For the A to Z challenge this year, I’m sharing science fiction and fantasy story ideas…

This is a notion that I got in reply to a story I read via Escape Pod, “Loss with Chalk Diagrams” by E Lily Yu. That story brought in the idea of ‘neural rewiring’ to take away grief and the sense of loss after someone has died, but I started to wonder about using the same novum for someone to add new skills to help reach his goal.

Here’s how I see it: my protagonist is a young man, a stunt pilot with many strengths. He’s a  good flight leader, able to plan ‘routines‘ as beautiful as anybody in the field, (flight choreographer?) and has a good sense of spacial awareness when flying. But his reflexes aren’t good enough to fly his most incredible routines himself. He finds out about the rewiring techniques that could ‘fix‘ him (make him good enough) through his med student fiancee, his biggest booster, and she helps him apply for a clinical trial.

there aren’t any openings in the trial, he tries every connection he knows, eventually finds out the big secret of some woman who was in the trial and secretly blackmails her to get in.

The process works great on his flying, but changes his relationship with the fiancee, he still loves her but can’t show her how he feels in the same way or make her happy. Talks to the doctor about this, and finds out that he can still reverse the procedure, but not have both the reflexes and the things he took for granted that made their relationship work. And he has to decide right away, before the new neural pathways get reinforced.

So he leaves the girl with a note, and heads off to wow the crowd at the big show

This time, since I’m excited about writing this version, please don’t write it exactly as I laid it out above, but there are lots of possible variants on the idea. If you’re interested enough to pick this up and write your own version, feel free; ideas are cheap. And let me know!

Thanks for visiting!