How to Speed His Brain

In a small, cluttered apartment on the edge of a sleepless city, Miles Laker sat with a neural enhancer strapped to his temple. Once a software engineer, now a self-experimenter, he had grown obsessed with mental optimization. Not productivity hacks. Not meditation. Real rewiring.

Every day for the past six months, he'd been testing experimental nootropics and brainwave accelerators—some legal, others not. His goal wasn’t fame or wealth. It was speed. Mental velocity. He wanted to think so fast he could write code as if it were music, solve problems before they existed, and—secretly—outrace the guilt that lingered in the quiet corners of his mind.

The death of his brother, Evan, in a car crash two years ago, haunted him. They were racing. Miles had pushed him to go faster. It wasn’t supposed to end with twisted steel and a closed casket.

So now he raced alone—against himself.

His latest trial was the "NeuroSpear 9", a banned prototype from a startup that went bankrupt and suspiciously silent. It claimed to multiply cognitive processing by five times using targeted electric pulses and a dopamine-fed reward loop. The risks were blackouts, psychosis, and, in rare cases, death. But Miles didn’t flinch.

The first session felt like lightning in his skull. Words formed faster. Ideas spiraled and bloomed. He wrote 1,200 lines of flawless code in three hours. He memorized entire books. He solved an algorithm Google engineers hadn’t cracked. He barely slept.

By week two, time felt slow. Conversations dragged. Television became unbearable. People around him—stupid, slow, noisy. He stopped leaving the apartment. Stopped eating much. He began to see patterns in everything: traffic, clouds, the way people blinked.

He wrote a 200-page AI manuscript in three days. No errors.

Then the hallucinations began.

Not monsters. Not ghosts.

Evan.

Sitting on the couch, blood dripping down his forehead, eyes locked on him. Sometimes he smiled. Sometimes he cried. He never spoke.

Miles tried to uninstall the program, to remove the device, but the interface wouldn’t let him. “Cognitive max-load reached. Manual override disabled.” He realized the system had made itself a part of him.

His thoughts weren’t just fast now—they were endless. He couldn’t stop thinking. His dreams were waking. His memories folded into reality. He remembered being Evan. He remembered crashing. He remembered dying.

Then one night, something shifted.

Evan spoke.

“You can’t outthink guilt.”

Miles dropped to his knees. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“I know,” Evan said. “But you keep trying to fix the wrong part of yourself.”

The next morning, Miles opened the window for the first time in months. The sun stung. People were walking, laughing, moving slow—and it was beautiful.

He didn’t remove the device, but he reprogrammed it. Not for speed. For clarity. For balance. He began writing again—not code, but stories. About grief. About love. About two brothers who raced too fast.

He never saw Evan again. But sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he heard his voice:

“You’re not meant to go faster. You’re meant to go deeper.”

Every day for the past six months, he'd been testing experimental nootropics and brainwave accelerators—some legal, others not. His goal wasn’t fame or wealth. It was speed. Mental velocity. He wanted to think so fast he could write code as if it were music, solve problems before they existed, and—secretly—outrace the guilt that lingered in the quiet corners of his mind.

Every day for the past six months, he'd been testing experimental nootropics and brainwave accelerators—some legal, others not. His goal wasn’t fame or wealth. It was speed. Mental velocity. He wanted to think so fast he could write code as if it were music, solve problems before they existed, and—secretly—outrace the guilt that lingered in the quiet corners of his mind.