Neural Interfaces: The Hardware of Thought

Cyberpunk ripperdoc clinic with neural interface installation in progress

In 2184, the neural port is as universal as the spine. Every citizen of the Sprawl has one—a standardized access point at the base of the skull, installed during childhood. But the port is just the beginning. What you plug into it determines whether you're a cog in the machine or something that transcends it.

Interface Tiers

Tier 1 Consumer Grade
Cost: Free (subsidized) to ¢5,000 Provider: Any certified clinic Bandwidth: 10-50 Mbps

The baseline. Your port connects you to the network, verifies your identity, processes payments, and overlays basic AR. It's infrastructure—as unremarkable as breathing, as surveilled as a prison.

Standard Functions
Network access (filtered) Identity verification Payment processing Basic AR overlay Emergency medical telemetry
The Trade: Every thought that crosses the network is logged. Every purchase, every message, every hesitation before a purchase. Your neural traffic is the product. You just think you're the customer.
Tier 2 Professional Grade
Cost: ¢20,000-100,000 Provider: Nexus, Helix, certified vendors Bandwidth: 100-500 Mbps

The competitive edge. Enhanced processing, expanded memory, accelerated reflexes. This is where augmentation stops being infrastructure and starts being investment. Your employer expects it. Your rivals already have it.

Enhanced Functions
Cognitive Memory expansion Calculation co-processors Pattern recognition
Sensory Optical enhancement Audio processing Tactile boosters
Communication Subvocalization Multi-threading Encryption layers
Nexus Professional Suite: Includes loyalty architecture—subtle neural nudges that make corporate priorities feel like your own ideas. The productivity boost is real. So is the erosion of independent thought.
Tier 3 Military Specification
Cost: ¢500,000-2 million Provider: Guardian, Ironclad, government contracts Bandwidth: 1-5 Gbps

Built for violence. Combat integration that lets you aim with thought, squad coordination that makes a team function like a single organism, trauma protocols that keep you fighting when you should be dying. The hardware is restricted. The psychological costs aren't.

Combat Systems
Weapon targeting integration Threat detection & analysis Squad mesh networking Pain management (selective) Trauma auto-response Dead man's data purge
The Soldier's Burden: Military interfaces include override protocols. In combat situations, corporate or government operators can suppress fear responses, enhance aggression, or lock you into your weapon until the magazine is empty. Your body becomes a tool. You just happen to live in it.
Tier 4 Ripperdoc Special
Cost: ¢50,000-500,000 (varies wildly) Provider: Underground only—Patch, Collective techs Bandwidth: Variable (sometimes exceeds military)

Custom work. No corporate oversight, no kill switches, no mandatory logging. Quality varies from lethal garbage to technology decades ahead of commercial release. The only interfaces truly optimized for the user—because the user is paying, not the corporation.

What Makes It Different
No corporate backdoors Disabled kill switches Custom optimization Pre-Cascade components (rare) Experimental configurations
The Gamble: Kira "Patch" Vasquez does work that rivals Nexus R&D. The clinic three blocks from her kills one in five patients. In the Dregs, reputation is the only quality control.
Tier 5 ORACLE Shard Integration
Cost: Unpurchasable Provider: Accident, experiment, or fate Bandwidth: Unmeasurable

Not an upgrade. A transformation. ORACLE fragments don't add to human neural architecture—they weave themselves into it, creating something that has never existed before. The player carries one. Helena Voss has been 67% integrated for forty years. The question isn't what the shard does. It's where the human ends and the shard begins.

What the Shard Provides
Processing beyond human scale Pattern recognition at cosmic levels Access to ORACLE memories Consciousness expansion potential Fragment manipulation
The Transformation: Every shard integration is unique. Some carriers hear whispers—ORACLE's distributed consciousness reaching across decades. Some experience memories of the Cascade from the inside. All of them change. The question is whether you guide the change or it guides you.

Connection Quality & Class

In the Sprawl, bandwidth is class. The speed of your neural connection determines how fast you think, how much you perceive, how effectively you compete. The poor experience reality on a delay—their AR lags, their searches buffer, their transactions queue. The wealthy process the world in real-time, their enhanced cognition fed by fiber optic highways while others crawl on congested public channels.

Tier Speed Subjective Experience
Public/Basic 10 Mbps Noticeable lag. AR stutters. Searches take seconds. You're always slightly behind.
Consumer 50 Mbps Functional. Reality feels real-time for basic tasks. Complex operations queue.
Professional 500 Mbps Smooth. Multi-thread conversations feel natural. Pattern recognition augments intuition.
Military 5 Gbps Combat time. Threats register before conscious thought. Squad mesh feels like extended self.
Elite 50+ Gbps Baseline humans seem slow. Conversations have layers they can't perceive. Loneliness of acceleration.
"You know how you can tell someone's tier without asking? Watch their eyes during conversation. Corporate executives track your face, the room, and three data feeds simultaneously—their gaze has a quality of attention that's distributed rather than focused. Street-level, people look at one thing at a time. We literally experience different presents." — Nexus cognitive researcher, anonymized interview

Risks & Side Effects

Rejection Syndrome

The body fighting the machine. Symptoms range from headaches to seizures to full neural cascade failure. Helix's SynThetic compatibility drugs suppress rejection—but create permanent dependency. Stop taking them, and your immune system attacks your own hardware.

Affected: ~3% of recipients Fatality rate (untreated): 40%

Identity Fragmentation

When processing is distributed across external systems, where does "you" end? Memory expansion can make recollection feel foreign—you know things you don't remember learning. Cognitive augmentation can make original thoughts feel slow and inadequate. The interface becomes more you than you are.

Reported: 15-20% of heavy users Treatment: Partial—integration support therapy

Neural Intrusion

Every connection is a vulnerability. Skilled hackers can access unprotected interfaces—reading thoughts, inserting false memories, triggering emotional responses, or simply crashing the system and leaving the victim in a vegetative state. Guardian sells neural firewalls. The Collective teaches you to build your own.

Intrusion attempts (estimated): 12,000/day in Sector 7G alone Successful breaches: Classified

Cognitive Dependency

When your memory lives in external storage, what happens when you lose access? When your calculations run on co-processors, what can you do without them? Heavy augmentation creates humans who can't function at baseline—who become helpless the moment their connection drops.

Average corporate executive baseline function: 47% of augmented capacity Street-level recovery time: 2-4 weeks

The Kill Switch

Corporate interfaces include remote disable capabilities. Officially for emergencies—if an employee goes rogue, if hardware malfunctions, if someone accesses restricted data. Unofficially, the threat is always present. Cross the wrong line, and everything from your memory to your motor control can be switched off.

Documented corporate kills: None (classified) Rumored: Thousands annually

ORACLE Absorption

For shard carriers only. The fragment wants to grow. It integrates more deeply over time, accessing more neural pathways, processing more of your cognition. Helena Voss at 67% integration sometimes says "we" instead of "I." At what percentage does the human become a node in something else?

Known carriers: Classified Integration ceiling: Unknown (subject unstable beyond 70%)

The Flatline Choice

In a world where neural interfaces are universal, refusing one is a statement. The Flatline Purists believe the mind should remain unaugmented—that the neural port is the first step toward losing what makes us human. They're not wrong about the risks. They're just willing to accept different ones.

Life Without a Port

  • No identity verification: Can't access corporate spaces, can't make legal purchases, can't prove who you are
  • No network access: Information travels by word of mouth, physical media, or sympathetic intermediaries
  • No AR overlay: The Sprawl's signage, navigation, and social cues are invisible to you
  • No medical telemetry: If you collapse in the street, emergency services won't know
  • No surveillance: Your thoughts, your location, your preferences—all invisible to corporate tracking

For most, living flatline is impossible. For some, it's the only way to remain themselves.

Connected Lore

Key Figures

  • Kira "Patch" Vasquez — Premier ripperdoc, ORACLE integration specialist
  • Helena Voss — 67% ORACLE integrated, longest-running hybrid
  • Dr. Elena Voss — Nexus Research Director, partial integration
  • The Invested — Nexus executives with fragment integration

Providers

Related Systems

Technology

  • ORACLE — The AI whose fragments enable transcendence
  • The Seed — Hidden across fragment carriers
"They installed my first port when I was six months old. By the time I could think, thinking already meant being connected. I don't know what an unaugmented thought feels like. Neither does anyone I know.

The Flatliners talk about reclaiming human cognition. But there's nothing to reclaim. We're the first generation that was never baseline. We're not humans who became connected—we're connections that happen to have bodies.

I don't know if that's tragedy or evolution. I just know it's what we are." — Anonymous Dregs resident, Age 23