The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1347

"Are you surprised?" Terrence smirked. The old Chukan mech designer revelled in airing the dirty laundry of his specialty field! "Much of the galaxy sees neural interfaces as safe, mature devices because trillions of man-hours have been poured into developing and refining them for widespread usage. Yet almost no one knows that most of those hours only broadened our perspectives to how serious neural interfaces can fail!"

Throughout this ’exchange’ with Old Man Terrence, Ves had fallen into continuous shock. Almost every neural interface specialist should be aware of all of the pitfalls concerning the technology.

Even Iris Jupiter, who introduced him to this field, must have known as well!

What Ves found egregious was that the MTA’s deliberate stance to conceal the actual risks of neural interface technology. By propagandizing that neural interfaces were much more sophisticated than the dangerous, pre-Age of Mechs models, an enormous amount of mech designers and mech pilots readily embraced something that must had led to an immense amount of damage!

In Old Man Terrence’s case, the damage the tech had caused must have weighed heavily on his conscience! Now that he was nearing the end of his life, Ves found himself in a strange position of hearing the aging Journeyman’s confession.

"Neural interface tech is the devil’s tech." Terrence reiterated with a shaky fist. "Every mech designer unknowingly incorporates pieces of tech that slowly and gradually degrade the cognitive functions of the users of their products. Does that sound responsible for you? Are we truly serving mech pilots to the best of our abilities, as the MTA often likes to instill in people of our profession?"

"We swore an oath to serve mech pilots!" Ves retorted.

The old man laughed. "Hahaha! That is true, but the devil is in the details! There are multiple interpretations we can choose from. For one mech designer, it may entail minimizing the repercussions of piloting their mechs as much as possible. For another mech designer, it may entail pushing the limits as far as possible regardless of the consequences! Who decides which interpretation is right?"

Ves could very well imagine that different mech designers would not agree on a common interpretation.

Mech designers such as the Skull Architect would definitely try to push his neural interfaces to an extreme!

Having studied his mech designs extensively, Ves knew very well that the pirate designer cared nothing about mech pilots! Instead, he would seek to exploit every opportunity to raise the performance parameters of his mechs as much as possible!

If the lifespan of the users of his products halved as a consequence, then what did that have to do with the Skull Architect?

Perhaps paradoxically, a mech designer like Gloriana might choose the opposite. As crazy as she seemed, she genuinely seemed to care about the mech pilots of her mechs. As a principle, she would not allow her mechs to be marred by dangerously volatile neural interfaces that posed a clear threat to their mech pilots.

As for Ves? He was still in way too much shock to make up his mind!

He turned his attention back to the conversation. "I take it then that the MTA has already decided on the right interpretation on behalf of every mech designer."

"Correct! One of the main duties the Mech Trade Association has taken up for themselves is to set universal standards for mechs. After an extensive study in the risks associated with neural interfaces, their wise councilors at the top have decided that a certain amount of risk is acceptable!"

"Then wouldn’t that make every mech in existence a defective product in a sense?"

The old man laughed again. "Again, there are multiple interpretations! The MTA just chooses to select the most convenient ones to suit their own needs. From my perspective, mechs aren’t necessarily defective. Instead, they are all experimental products!"

"That’s..."

"Mech designers like you unknowingly sell dangerous mechs to ignorant mech buyers who subsequently assign them to oblivious mech pilots. All of this would have been ethically sound if everyone was aware of the true risks associated with the neural interfaces built into the mechs. Unfortunately, the cold hard reality is that no one except a select group is aware! You can thank the MTA for keeping your conscience clean!"

Until now, Ves silently whispered. Calling it the devil’s technology sounded very apt to him now. Every mech designer who made use of the so-called standard neural interface models made available by the MTA unknowingly treated every mech pilot as their experimental test subjects!

He wasn’t surprised to hear that the MTA acted in a hypocritical manner. He just wanted to understand their reasoning.

"Mr. Reedan, what does the MTA get out of standardizing higher-specced but unsafer neural interfaces?"

"What do you think the MTA stands for?" Terrence prompted. "The answer is mechs! They worship mechs! They will do anything for mechs! If they have to choose between the wellbeing of people and speeding up the development of mechs, they will choose the latter each time!"

That sounded very extreme even for Ves!

"Unsafer neural interfaces speed up mech development?"

"Of course! While I’ve mentioned numerous negative consequences of using unsafe neural interfaces, risks are always associated with rewards! Perhaps the single most important factor is that unsafe interfaces are correlated with a higher emergence of expert candidates and expert pilots!"

This was another explosive revelation! If this was true, then Ves could definitely see why the MTA pushed for unsafer standards!

"So it’s all about increasing the probability of expert pilots emerging from the masses of oblivious test subjects!"

"Other than risk exposure, which would be very bad for the MTA?" Terrence chuckled. "They secretly tried it out in a couple of star sectors. What they found was that while the probability of expert pilots emerging from the ranks definitely increased, their quality deteriorated remarkably. An alarming proportion of them suffered from a host of issues such as suffering from personality disorders, premature aging of their brains or a total loss in interfacing ability. Over a longer period of time, these star sectors fielded less expert pilots than usual because too many of them died or ended up crippled!" _{freewebnσvel.cøm}