The Third Eye

“	Do not speak the command, think the command! Don't give up early, the system will need a few hours to calibrate.	”
—heard during a 3rd Eye training session

“	Its hard to describe. It does only work for me if I think the command in Russian.	”
—Nina Ustinyavna, explaining her difficulty with English commands

History

The 3rd Eye is a mind-machine interface that was originally developed from a mindwipe and -copy technology captured in the raid on the laboratory of the Boskonian scientist Quattro on 2462 Nehalennia in 2015. While Great Justice took the tech that had been used to influence the Panzerkunst couriers and left the biological parts to group of catgirl victims that had just founded Catgirl Industries. Carefully comparing the effects of the technology on a dozen victims looked like a good chance to learn something about it at that time.

Catgirl Industries took the technology and began to look for ways to detect its manipulations, but they also started a research project to look for positive aspects of the technology. Despite intensive research and quite a number of small self experiments, it took until 2019 for the first portable prototypes of the 3rd Eye appeared in the labs of Jenga.

The 3rd Eye was a limited and downsized variant of Quattros original technology, being able to interface with the a metahuman brain to send and receive sensory perceptions. Its transmitter array was much too limited to do the deep mind manipulation the full technology could do.

At least that is what everyone thought.

The Accident

In 2022 the Mindtech research group at Jenga was experimenting with a new kind of firmware for the 3rd Eye, that should partly bridge the gap to the full sized version. Unfortunately for the researchers they had even underestimated the capabilities of the hardware.

Nearly a dozen researchers became influenced by the new firmware as the memories of the group began to swap back and forth between the catgirls. Luckily the situation was mostly resolved before the damage became permanent, but a few catgirls were missing months of their memory afterwards.

Aftermath

The 3rd Eye accident threw back all plans of Catgirl Industries to sell the technology by years. Shocked by the surprising capabilities of the system, the catgirls spent nearly a year analyzing the data from the accident to understand what had happened. In the end they had to acquire help from Prometheus Forge to design a new antenna array for the 3rd Eye.

This delayed the first limited release of the 3rd Eye technology until late 2024.

Functionality

The 3rd Eye is a mind-machine interface that can record sensory input from the user and overlay artificial sensory perceptions on them. This allows the 3rd Eye to function as a versatile augmented reality interface, similar to a cybernetic direct neural interface.

In addition to this a frequent user of the 3rd Eye can train something called command voice. Its a phrase for thinking about words and sentences without speaking them out. With enough training the 3rd Eye can detect the internal speech and use it as an additional source of input.

Catgirl Industries 3rd Eye

While CI's 3rd Eyes are similar to the exported versions, they have an additional feature.The devices can detect the general mood of a catgirl, which is by members of Catgirl Industries to create an artificial (and voluntary) kind of empathy between 3rd Eye using catgirls.

Quirks

• I know this voice! The mental voice generated by the 3rd Eye seems always to be familiar, but no user can really pinpoint why this happens.
• Training is everything. The command voice needs to be learned by device, which takes a couple of hours. A 3rd Eye can store only a few patterns of command voices.
• I don't remember you. If not used on a regular basis, a 3rd Eye forgets the patterns of an user within a few days. CI has been unable to fix this quirk.

Trivia

• A 3rd Eye has to be worn with skin contact on the head or neck. Most catgirls wear it integrated in a collar.
• Every user develops his or her own way to project the command voice.
• All learned command voice must be using the same language.
• There are rumors that CI has 3rd Eyes to generate a temporary and safe to use variant of the low-level groupmind that accidentally happened in 2022.

Stories

• The 3rd Eye plays a major role in the story Mixing Minds