The soft blue glow of the monitor cast faint reflections across the walls of Elian's study. The lab was quiet except for the low hum of Muse's processing core and the occasional flick of a stylus tapping against a tablet screen.
Elian sat perfectly still, wearing the finalized BCI headset — now sleek, compact, and embedded with a layer of smart polymer cushioning to maintain ideal skin contact. Ten microelectrodes read his neural activity in real-time, each one calibrated to a tolerance of less than a millimeter.
Jenna stood in the doorway, arms crossed, sipping from a mug. "You haven't blinked in five minutes."
"Correction," Elian said, without looking up, "I blink every 2.7 seconds. Muse logs it."
She raised an eyebrow. "And I thought you were just focused."
"I am. But the system is now fully synchronized with my neural rhythm. I don't have to manually type or pause to rephrase. It's just thought-to-output."
He gestured toward the glass board — now covered in elegant layers of equations, flowcharts, and system calls. All rendered in real time through Muse, transcribed via the matured bio-adaptive translator.
Earlier that morning, Elian had finalized the full integration.
The BCI was already functional, but now it was mature.
Muse had applied the complete structural brain model Elian had uploaded days prior — mapping the neural layout of the human mind onto its internal codebase. Not as a consciousness simulator, but as a performance framework.
The result?
A measurable transformation.
Muse's R&D throughput increased fourfold. Data synthesis and theoretical modeling ran at sub-second intervals. Its ability to extrapolate long-chain research proposals from partial data inputs had become, in Elian's words, "absurd."
"Human neural structure successfully applied to logic core. Processing pipeline efficiency: +431%"
Elian had stared at the message and simply whispered, "Good."
Muse wasn't "thinking like a human." But it now processed like one — fast, parallel, intuitive. Only without the fatigue, emotion, or need for caffeine.
"Show me the latest test," Elian said now, still wearing the headset.
Muse responded instantly. A 3D model bloomed onto the display wall — a lattice diagram of a new alloy structure he'd been refining earlier that day. Normally, this kind of simulation would've taken an entire afternoon and a team of interns. With the new input method, Elian had mapped and adjusted it in under thirty minutes.
"Output ready for prototyping."
He nodded. "Tag it. Move it to the mid-priority stack."
"Done."
His fingers barely moved — only to steady the stylus out of habit. The commands, the tweaks, the complex theory adjustments — all flowed directly from his mind through the translator into Muse.
Jenna stepped inside and walked around behind his chair, watching the rhythm of Muse's response patterns.
"You've officially outpaced your own lab," she said.
"Was bound to happen."
"How many projects are you working on right now?"
"Thirteen. Four active. Nine in data phase."
She whistled. "You used to max out at five."
"I was limited by typing. And fatigue. And caffeine quantity."
"Now?"
Elian leaned back for the first time in hours. "Now it's just bandwidth."
The interface was smooth. Not perfect — there were still moments where Muse needed clarification, especially with abstract concepts. But the translator had reached the point where Elian could write entire system modules or structure new compound models just by thinking through the shapes in his head.
He didn't even need to imagine code anymore. Just principles. Functions. The intention behind the logic.
Muse filled in the rest.
"Okay," Jenna said, leaning over the console. "I have to ask. How fast are you typing now?"
He blinked. "Muse?"
"Average input speed via translator interface: 587 words per minute. Conceptual coding throughput: 92 function blocks per hour."
Jenna laughed. "You've officially become the research team."
"I don't need faster hands," Elian replied. "I needed fewer bottlenecks."
She leaned against the desk beside him. "Still, don't forget to take breaks. Or, you know, exist as a human."
"Noted."
He glanced at the time. He hadn't moved in nearly four hours. But his mind didn't feel exhausted. Instead, it felt like it had space — like someone had cleared a traffic jam in his head and let everything run freely for once.
By evening, the day's research log had grown to over forty pages — including a completed compound analysis, two simulation-ready prototypes, and a new framework for adaptive micro-scaling in composite materials.
All from one person.
No delays. No meetings. No keystrokes.
Muse processed it all and returned only what Elian needed to keep going.
He stood up, stretched, and looked around the lab.
"This is how it was always supposed to be."