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Chapter 228 — Emergency Online: The Brainwave Project
🕑 Added 2025-10-25 16:33:21 +0000 UTCKeeping a pet at home always comes with one major headache — the bathroom problem.
Even though Henry had given BB the ability to handle waste, he couldn’t just let Katie do her business anywhere in the apartment. Figuring out how to train her to use a fixed spot gave him a mild migraine.
After all, Katie was a tiger — albeit a cub — and you couldn’t exactly train a tiger the same way you trained a cat or a dog. He even set up a litter box, then froze mid-action, holding it in his hands, wondering if that even made sense.
The library didn’t have any books on how to domesticate predators. Maybe a circus animal trainer would know, but Henry had no plans to make Katie do tricks, so why bother finding one?
As for communication…
No matter the species, good animal trainers all share one trait — they understand the creature’s habits. Only by understanding can you read its emotions from its movements and calls.
But what if you could directly know what an animal was thinking? Wouldn’t that save a lot of time interpreting behavior and sounds?
His earlier experience of having Professor X violently invade his mind had given Henry plenty of ideas about brainwaves. He hadn’t yet built the psychic-protection helmet he’d imagined, one based on the principle of a Faraday cage.
But really, he couldn’t just build such a helmet and then stroll up to Professor X saying:
“Hey, Baldy — wanna test if you can read my mind?”
If it worked, fine. If it didn’t, he’d just publicly exposed his own weakness. And if the telepath did break through, he couldn’t exactly punch the guy — not when he’d volunteered himself for the test.
Besides, who was Professor X, anyway? Why would he cooperate? Was Henry’s face really that big, or was Charles Xavier simply bored?
Since the mind-shield project was a nonstarter for now, decoding brainwave patterns themselves seemed like a fine alternative. Starting with a human brain was too complex — so why not practice on a tiger’s?
At least a tiger’s thoughts couldn’t be that complicated… right?
Henry smiled wryly. Men and women already felt like different species; how was he supposed to understand a tiger’s mind? Still, he’d give it a shot.
If he didn’t quickly figure out a way to communicate with Katie, the well-fed cub would keep burning off her energy by chasing BB around the apartment — until the little robot’s battery died. Then she’d happily grab it and start chewing.
That, unfortunately, was the price of choosing a plastic shell for convenience: BB had been turned into a chew toy. The poor core robot was so full of teeth marks that even rolling around had become difficult — its outer shell constantly got jammed. Henry had to keep repairing it, or the little bot would be scrapped.
No use whining — when inspiration struck, Henry acted.
The brainwave reader wasn’t that complicated, really — just another language to decode. The key was accurate data collection, and finding patterns within massive data sets to identify which waveforms corresponded to which words or emotions.
He even considered pairing this with scent analysis — using pheromones and hormones triggered by emotion — to judge an individual’s mood.
But both micro-scent and brainwave signals were notoriously fragile. Lower the sensor’s sensitivity and you’d miss data; raise it, and you’d drown in noise.
In the end, everything came down to data processing power — massive volumes of information needed to be handled efficiently.
To push research forward, Henry had no choice but to upgrade his computer systems again — not in terms of raw CPU power, but in data storage, transfer methods, and capacity: in short, hard drives.
At this point in time, mainstream drives were 5,400-RPM IDE (ATA) disks, ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred megabytes. For greater durability, capacity, and speed, enthusiasts bought SCSI drives.
SCSI’s advantage was that it supported multiple drives and devices, and even RAID setups for redundancy. Each SCSI device had its own onboard processor to offload work from the CPU, improving overall performance.
Of course, as CPUs kept getting faster, the need for separate processors in peripherals would fade away. Eventually, computing would shift from chasing higher frequencies to multi-core, multi-threaded designs — more tasks handled in parallel rather than faster in sequence.
Even so, storage technology barely kept up. From IDE to SATA was a small step — only when solid-state drives (SSD) arrived would computers finally feel significantly faster to human users.
When Henry had been hand-building his systems, he’d focused mainly on the CPU, motherboard, and RAM — expanding toward server-grade architecture. Peripherals like hard drives, floppy drives, and optical drives he simply bought off the shelf; their technology was mature enough.
His main side project had been helping an online group build the Linux ecosystem — Henry as one of many bricklayers, with other engineers leading the design.
Linux’s core philosophy was to extend the lifespan of old machines — making them useful again. So chasing raw performance had always been a Kryptonian indulgence of pride. His hand-built systems always outperformed commercial models, and that gave him a small sense of satisfaction.
But in real applications, he’d begun to notice bottlenecks — gaps he couldn’t ignore. So fixing those weaknesses became necessary.
Now, at his workbench, Henry dismantled an old hard drive, thinking about NAND-Flash — a future technology he’d read about — and wondering if he should build a prototype SSD of his own.
Just then, BB — recently upgraded with a metal shell — collapsed at his feet again, battery drained after yet another round of being chased by Katie. Getting the robot to stay on its charger these days was nearly impossible.
Even though his brainwave research hadn’t made major progress, at least Katie had learned to use a fixed spot for her business — a small but satisfying victory.
Still, the energetic little tiger clearly wasn’t content staying cooped up. The apartment Henry rented from Old Gary was big enough for a small family, but between the sound system, computers, sofa, TV, and kitchen gear, there wasn’t that much open space left.
To keep his things from being wrecked, Henry added layers of non-lethal protection — barriers that took the brunt of Katie’s claws and teeth. Replace the barrier, not the furniture.
But that also meant less room for Katie to move. Maybe, Henry thought, he should build her a custom jungle gym — something vertical, to give her more to explore.
As he mulled over these ideas, far away in his black-market clinic in South Los Angeles, the patient bell rang again.
Business was calling.
Without hesitation, Henry put on his “tinkerer's” gear — and headed out once more.
