Publishing science fiction can be a mad scramble between getting it in print and it starting to come true in real life.
My recent story "The Burn Out" (in Fission #3, available here) features a pop star. But he's not the story. Like many rich young musicians, he uses something to keep his edge sharpened, and like many rich young musicians, it's the younger female fans that provide it to him.
In his case it's a combat soldier implant.
The unit was optimized for combat soldiers in shock—like after a bullet wound. It instructed the sympathetic nervous system to shut some things down and dialed other things up to compensate. The telemetry package monitored the activity of the ganglia. Gully Foyle said, and this sounded like much more fun, that the upgrade allowed the user to experiment with changes that beat anything you could get out of a needle.
Because anything that changes the human body or brain is going to be used for porn first and recreation next.
For our hero, use of the technology ends about as well as can be expected, and that's coming from me, the person who hates the trope "there are some things man was not meant to know."
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Evergreen Meme |
Anyway, in the grand tradition of the Torment Nexus, the kind of technology referenced in the story has been invented and is being openly bragged about.
You should be able to get it on the Dark Web within a year (winky smiley) but you oughta read my story before you use it.
