Permissions — Part 2: Eggs and Autopsy

You already know what he was like in the mornings. I am writing it down anyway.

The next morning was eggs.

It was always eggs on the bad nights. Nate's protocol, not mine. Adopted without discussion sometime in the first year he started staying over and then staying and then being part of the house in a way nobody had to vote on because the vote had already happened in groceries, laundry, bad movies, prescriptions, and who knew how everyone took coffee.

There had been a casserole before there was a key.

That is how Nate entered most rooms. Food first. Smile second. Useful hands third. He showed up one winter with a casserole dish wrapped in a towel and a joke about Midwestern courtship rituals, and Viv let him in because Viv collected strays with better judgment than I did. By the time I noticed he had a drawer, the drawer had socks in it.

The morning after the bus dream, I came downstairs and there was a plate waiting.

Vivian was already at the table. Cane leaned against the empty chair beside her, laptop open, screen reader running too fast for human souls. She ate without looking at her plate. Nate stood at the stove in boxers and a shirt from a conference neither of us had attended. He looked ordinary.

I needed him to look ordinary.

"Did you see the new viewports from BoxCo?" he asked.

I sat down with military precision and ate too fast.

"Saw the headline."

"Galvanic sensors. LLMs generating the sim from neural patterns. It builds itself around you. Thoughts, associations, memory fragments. That whole haunted-house-for-your-data thing, but expensive."

I thought about the full-body gravity beds. The way the world dropped out when the eggheads threw the switch. The feeling of air under rotors as I rose over the Science Park. The sky enormous and still. The only moving thing in it was me.

"Generating isn't the important part," I said.

Viv's fork stopped.

Nate looked over his shoulder.

"Explain," Viv said.

"They're missing the dive. Infinite content means nothing if the world doesn't feel real around you. If the embodiment doesn't hold, you die."

The room went quiet in a way I did not understand yet.

Viv had gone still.

It was the same stillness she had across the bar the first time we met, the first time she listened to me talk for five minutes and decided she could do something with all that damage. Like a targeting system, but kinder. Like she'd found the hinge.

"We could build it ourselves," she said.

Nate laughed once.

Not because it was funny.

Because it was insane, and we all knew sane had not gotten us very far.

"Not it," Viv said. "Something contained."

"The tech is classified," I said.

"The implementation is classified," Nate said, because he was already opening his laptop. "The idea isn't. The idea is on every feed in the country with a BoxCo logo under it."

"The eggheads never let me see the backend."

"Then tell us what it felt like," Viv said. "All of it. The movement. The nausea. The parts where you knew it was real before your brain caught up. We do not need their machine. We need your memory of being inside one."

Memory.

That was always the first theft.

I looked at the eggs. Nate refilled my coffee without asking.

"Consumer Fulldive?" he said. "Everyone would use it."

Viv put one earbud in. Her screen reader went silent.

"For what it's worth," she said, "I'd use it."

And so we built. For months and months, we built. Not because we wanted a million dollars. Because I wanted my wife to see again.

And I gave Nate permission to help.

I want you to understand that I knew what I was doing. I was not fooled. I was not naive. I chose him, and it was good, and it was right, and it was ours.

This is the part the lawyers care about. The paper trail. The expenditure record. Three of us with a HELOC and a Caymans LLC who thought we were just building something useful.

I want to get through it fast enough to say the part that matters.

We ordered a BoxCo viewport that afternoon.

Not to use.

To open.

It ran an open-source OS. Gods, remember open source? It meant I could start working on the interface before the delivery drone had cleared the driveway. Version one was a skullcap. I shaved my head because I could not pull enough galvanic readings through my hair and because every major life decision deserves at least one bad aesthetic choice.

It took months and thousands of dollars of busted prototypes. We paid the cost happily.

We put a HELOC on the house and lied about what the money was for. Viv used her harness to register an LLC in the Caymans. Nate drove two hours to buy a second viewport from a dead-eyed teenager in a mall kiosk because the first one came apart in his hands like a pile of oysters for a Bostonian and he wanted a control specimen.

The kitchen table became an autopsy slab.

Sensor arrays. Optical leads. The galvanic cluster. Heat sinks. Adhesive pads. Cheap plastic molded around a miracle.

"Bad design," Nate said, rotating the cluster under the lamp.

"It works," I said.

"So does duct tape, until you put it in the ocean."

Viv sat at the table with a brailler making labels she could read, because she loved me enough to know my labels were useless.

"Walk me through it," Nate said.

So I did.

Spatial orientation. Proprioception. Emotional state. Latency thresholds. Vestibular mismatch. The way the interface put its rules into you like loud emotions. Nate wrote everything down in a notebook he would keep for years. Later, people would call him a co-founder, which was technically correct and morally useless.

He was there.

He did the work.

I am not going to sand that down. That is how people get stupid about harm. They want the friend to have been wearing a villain hat the whole time, preferably with a little blinking light. They want love to have been a mistake you could have avoided with better pattern recognition.