Chapter 2

Year: 2044

Karl stared expectantly into what was slowly being assembled in front of him in his molecular 3D printer. Inside it was something that looked like half a brain, with only the bottom half showing as it was being printed, layer by layer. Beside the fact that brains normally do not appear outside of human skulls, another peculiarity was its shape. It was square. This shape was the most space efficient for fitting inside the casing embedded within an older quantum computer Karl had found in a storage room last week.

A lot of older and more recent tech could be found lying around on the many floors of the Education Collective, or EduCol, free for students to make use of. That, together with a universal 3D printer available in each student apartment, gave almost unlimited possibilities for prototyping and creating new technology. Other than banning guns and hazardous materials, the university gave students freedom to be responsible with the tools they were handed by the university. And Karl used them to their limit.

Printing a brain might seem like complicated business, but there really isn't much more to it than finding a cheap blueprint online made by a reputable neuroscience wiz and downloading it to the printer. And if need be you could just catch a neuroscientist in the hallway and get the rundown you needed. The hard part is developing the software to run on the neural network inside of the organic brain tissue. Luckily Karl was a half decent coder, and his ex-girlfriend Eliza had left detailed notes on simulating AI run on neural nets lying around in his apartment, as she was storming out during their final fight. He looked out a window at the sunny but windy Scandinavian sea surrounding the university island of Anholt lost in thought.

“Hey Karl, open up will ya!” someone outside of Karl's door yelled, after knocking a couple of times.

“Yea, what's up Kenneth?” Karl responded as he opened the door slightly, having recognize