Neural: Origin

The midnight chime sounded dully in the depths of the data ocean. The never-sleeping neon lights of Titan City licked the one-way glass walls of the “Neural Weave” monitoring center, tinting Laura's pale profile in shifting shades of purple and blue. She curled up in a hovering operator's chair, her eyelids heavy as lead, while her fingertips tapped out a ghostly rhythm on a translucent holographic keyboard. Before her, more than a dozen floating screens revolved slowly like a cold nebula, streaming symbols, waveforms, and abstract topology diagrams beyond the comprehension of ordinary people: the real-time thought patterns left in the digital cloud by the uploaded minds of millions of Titan City's residents.