On the trip back, Nick talked with Sana more about the brain upgrades, and they had decided to hold off on actual surgery until the ship's doctor had gotten a good scan of a few more humans. In the meantime, she was trying to teach him how to use a sort of neural interface that looked like a hair net, similar to the unit she had used to compensate for his seizures.

It wasn't going well.

"Again, Sana, I don't have a tail, so how can I use my 'tail muscles' on this thing?!"

"You have the muscles, you just never use them," Sana told him confidently. She's a doctor, he reminded himself.

"If I get a sprain in my ass because of this, you're taking care of it."

"Of course."

A few more minutes of twitching in a chair, and Nick gave up. "Let's go back to the visual field one."

"You said it was going to make you throw up."

"Well, let's hope I was wrong."

After testing the limits of the anti-nausea medication Sana had given him, Nick was ready to call it quits. "I'm sorry, Doc, but I don't think my primitive brain can handle it. Maybe we can try it again after my get-smarter surgery."

"Primitive brain..." the doctor murmured, staring off into space. Nick knew that look, and kept quiet so she could think. A few moments later, she was tapping at controls again. Nick was pretty sure she was simply looking up where stuff was in the hundreds of drawers spaced around Sickbay. For a lot of things, she just stared off into space and then knew stuff, but sometimes she did it manually.

I suppose I wouldn't want to be carrying around endless lists of things in my brain that I might never need, either. Sure, it was work relevant, but probably some of those containers hadn't been opened in years. And she probably did have a list of everything she expected to need uploaded in her brain.

Sure enough, a moment later she was opening a drawer and pulling out a small circlet like a crown. She came over and handed it to him, pointing out a marked spot on the rim. "Tap that twice to activate it. Then put it on."

Nick took a deep breath and complied. His vision seemed to get a bit blurry, but he didn't feel dizzy or anything. There was just a sort of blue haze everywhere. "What is it doing?"

"Can you see a blue square?"

"I can see blue, but it's all over the place."

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"Move it until you can see a square."

Nick reached up and shifted the position of the crown a little. The blue mess in his field of vision changed shape. He made a few more adjustments. This feels like a visit to the eye doctor. Finally, one more nudge got the blue square to snap into focus. "Got it."

"Good. Give it a half-minute to beep...um, measure the right way to be?"

"'Calibrate', I think," Nick guessed.

Soon Goldaskian letters appeared in his vision. When he focused on the first letter, it started flickering and changing shape until it turned into an "E", and the rest of the writing changed into English.

< External Mental Interface Activated. >

Nick blinked. "Cool, it's a heads up display!"

It was even better than that—Nick quickly figured out that the display would rearrange itself to suit his preferences just by him thinking at it. He immediately set up subtitles for everything spoken around him, and dropped the volume of the English translation in his ear down lower.

Sana laughed and left him to it as he got caught up in playing with the interface. He made little menus for talking to Petra without using a tablet. At the moment, it made use of the ship's computer, but it would be easy enough for Petra to build a relay so that he could control the alien device mentally.

Now, he could tell at a glance what the printers were doing, what messages were waiting for him, his "status" sheet from way back when, and he could see and hear anywhere on the ship with a thought. Wow. This is...what do you call it...omniscient viewpoint. Cool.

He updated his list of "Cool things to tell the government about." He knew he should give it all to the United Nations, or something, but his first instinct was to drop the stuff off at the White House or the Pentagon or whatever. Actually, I should figure out a plan so that I don't get the shuttle blown out of the sky when it tries to deliver stuff. He put that at the top: Item number one: this list.

He spent a while browsing through the images and statistics of the star systems they had visited or at least scanned. Apparently, Goldaskian technology could tell you the sizes and atmospheres and signals coming from any planet in any star system within something like a hundred light-years. The catch was that you needed a fixed observation post for months, which wasn't a problem if you were stationed on a planet, but not particularly workable for a starship.

I wonder how good NASA's maps are. They're finding lots of exoplanets, I remember from my IQ potion vision quest, but I wonder if they even have every individual star in the galaxy mapped already? Just our travel logs would probably have the scientists drooling. I should probably do the math on how many terabytes or whatever is in the information I want to give Earth.

Nick started calculating, and rapidly ran into concepts he didn't understand. In the past, he would have given up, or asked someone smarter, but knowing that he was going to be smarter in a few months, he was more inclined to do some of the hard work of studying, or at least of memorizing basic ideas. So, he got to work learning the basic concepts of Goldaskian computers.

It felt weird. Nick wasn't smart. He knew he wasn't smart. All his instincts said that he had no business even trying to study this. And yet...for a few hours, he had known stuff. Remembered stuff. Understood stuff. He had made dozens of connections between ideas and things in his life, that made him feel like a dumbass for never seeing before. But now he had them. Just having them, he felt a little bit smarter. The world made a little more sense.

And having gotten a taste of that...he wanted more.

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