I pass Mr. Smith and a pair of his legal goons in the hallway of the Research Center. The gorilla in a lawyer suit looks at me like I’m something foul he scraped off the bottom of his too-shiny wingtip shoes. I studiously ignore him and turn the corner to the hallway where Father has his office.

“Oh, good, Noah. You’re here,” Father says, looking up from his desk. His office is spacious but cluttered, with stacks of papers piled on several narrow tables against one wall between computers and other hardware. The opposite wall is one gigantic whiteboard covered with a tidy scrawl and arcane diagrams from corner to corner. The place looks more like an engineering work area than anything else.

“Morning, Father,” I greet him, carefully hiding my hate with a friendly smile.

“Let’s be about it then,” he says, rising to his feet. He comes around the desk, wearing his usual outfit of a short-sleeved button-down shirt and khaki slacks. “Come along, my lab is this way.”

I follow him down a few twists of hallway and through a door that could have guarded a bank vault. The lab is a cross between an operating room and an electronics workshop. Several large lights hang from the ceiling, pointed at what I can only assume is an operating table, an ominous-looking slab of dull steel in the center of the room with a dozen black straps dangling from each side. Racks of servers hum against one wall, neatly coiled wire probes hooking to ports in the front. Half a dozen monitors cluster around a standing desk with a keyboard and mouse on it not far from the operating table. Across from the server racks, a pair of large, deep sinks share the wall with open shelves holding medical supplies. Clear plastic packages containing syringes, scalpels, and gauze stack up next to an array of small machines that look like they belong in a hospital.

“Just a moment, let me get the rig,” Father says. He opens a cabinet in one corner by the server racks and pulls out a helmet with a pair of cameras attached to the front. “Here, this one should be your size. Try it on, please.”

He hands it to me and helps me with the straps. It fits snugly on my head, but the front comes down too far, covering my eyes and leaving me blind. It’s lighter than I would have expected from looking at it.

“How’s that?”

“Surprisingly comfortable.”

“Good, good,” he says. “That’s important, as you’ll be wearing it nearly all the time for the next month. Let’s fire it up.”

He guides my hand up to a button on the side of the rig and suddenly I see his face looking at me. “Are the cameras working?” I nod, not seeing any lag in the display as my head moves. It’s almost like I don’t have my eyes covered. “Take it for a little spin around the room.”

I comply, walking past the desk and around the table. “Yeah, still good.”

“Excellent. Let’s put up the overlay then.” He steps over to the desk and his fingers click across the keyboard.

Can you see this?

The text appears in large letters in the air in front of me. I turn my head and it follows me, staying centered in my field of vision. “Yeah, I see it.” I reach out with a hand in front of my covered face. My fingers pass through the ghostly words.

“Good. I’m going to feed in some more text. Practice reading it while you move around.”

The first message disappears, replaced by smaller words that look like an article from a medical journal. I steady myself with one hand on the operating table as I try to walk and read at the same time. My stomach churns at the incongruity between the fixed overlay and the moving world and I have to stop and close my eyes for a moment.

“It takes a bit of getting used to, I know,” Father says. “Take as long as you need.”

I snap my eyes open, keeping my head still this time. The text is still front and center, superimposed on my view of the world. At a second look, the letters are semi-transparent. I can see through them enough to make out the shelves behind them.

“Is the display adjustable?”

“Of course,” Father answers. “You’ll be able to change the font, size, opacity, justification, and later even split it out into multiple windows. I’ll sync your headgear up to your tablet before we’re done here and give you the documentation and an app for the controls.”

I nod, getting another little twinge of nausea. I take a deep breath and a few steps, reading through the article as I do. Looks like some researchers are working on new procedures for performing surgery on stomach ulcers. At least I’m not going to trip and fall from being too fascinated by the subject matter. Another dozen steps and I’m getting to the end of the displayed text.

“How do I—” I was about to ask how to scroll the text down, but when I look down as far as I can without moving my head, the text slides up, revealing more of the article. “Nevermind, figured it out.” I hear Father’s amused chuckle. I look way up and it scrolls back.

I practice reading and walking, letting go of the table. It takes a bit, but the nausea fades as my body gets used to having the overlay there. I stop worrying that I’m going to lose my breakfast. Something about it reminds me of playing a first-person shooter. There’s even a villain, an evil old man fiddling with some kind of glove at his standing desk. Who knew that all those years of video games would pay off?  Too bad there’s no insta-kill mega-gun in this game. I’d sell my soul for that cheat code right now if it could take him out.

“Ready for the next step?” Father asks. His crooked smile makes my stomach turn even more than the superimposed text in the headset.

“Yeah, ready.”

“Come on over here and let’s get you gloved up.” I walk past the creepy operating table with its straps and stop next to his desk. One of his monitors is a view of what I’m looking at, and as I focus on it, it goes into an infinite recursion, like a pair of mirrors facing each other, screen in screen in screen in screen. The sight gives me another twinge of nausea, so I look away.

“Left hand, please,” he says. I hold out my arm and he pulls the glove he was playing with onto it. He adjusts several straps until it fits perfectly. “Flex those fingers, make sure it feels comfortable. Like the headset, you’ll be wearing this all day, every day.”

I test it out. It’s light, flexible, and made of material breathable enough that I barely feel it once it's on.

“Good, good. Now, keep your hand still for just a moment,” he clicks something on one of his several screens and the text on my overlay disappears. He clicks one more time on a little icon of a glove. “There. Now flex your thumb, just like so.” He demonstrates moving his thumb, just past the end knuckle.

I repeat the motion. A big letter A appears on my overlay. A mirroring letter appears on his screen. I flex it again, another A. Another and another. I bend both joints and get an E in front of me and on his screen. I move my whole hand a few times and get a spew of garbage letters. Yeah, this is going to take some practice.

“Understand the concept?” Father asks.

“Yeah. It’s a one handed keyboard hooked up with sensors in the glove. I don’t understand why we would need this though. Can’t your implant just kind of, you know, tell what you want to write?”

Father chuckles. “I suppose it could, given a significant effort by both you and the hardware. But detecting the notion of a letter in your cortex is infinitely harder than detecting the nerve impulse to move a specific muscle. Believe me, this is much more effective.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I concede, flexing the glove again and getting another spew of random letters across my overlay. “Any chance you have some training software for this thing?”

He nods, his crooked smile widening. “Right in the app you’ll get today. And you’ll practice using it on all your schoolwork starting tomorrow. Your teachers will know to give you a little slack these next few days as you get used to it. Now make a fist and hold it for just a moment.”

Clenching my fist is easy, it’s getting it to relax after my overlay clears that’s harder. I just wish I could take him down right now, hit him before he suspects anything then choke the life out of him. But the security camera in the corner of the room guarantees that if I did that and somehow succeeded, I’d spend the rest of my life in jail. Maybe I could plead insanity, get off with some time in a mental institution instead.

No. It wouldn’t even work. His tech would stop me somehow.

Wait, watch, learn.