This essay first appeared in my July 2026 newsletter.
Late July in San Francisco
On July 23, Neuralink released new footage featuring participants in its clinical trials controlling powered wheelchairs through its brain-computer interface. The implant decodes intended movement and moves an on-screen cursor. The cursor then operates a custom app connected to the wheelchair, controlling its direction and speed. An imagined movement becomes movement through physical space.
It is useful and necessary. Still, the image stays with me longer than the technical details. Someone thinks, and the machine answers by moving. The distance between signal and action feels shorter than it used to.
In the first book, Jenny noticed the wrongness early. Thoughts that were not hers began arriving without warning. In dreams her body learned to move as if ordinary weight no longer applied. Later the world shifted further. The man who had stayed with her for years became a stranger who no longer knew her name. The edges of what she could trust started to blur.
I keep thinking about a short scene I shared in an earlier letter, the one where Jenny puts on the StarVolt neural visor and finds the city still there but slightly delayed, as if the world is buffering and hoping she will not look too closely. That sense of lag feels nearer now. A wheelchair controlled through thought makes Jenny’s experience seem less remote than it once did. The question is no longer whether the interface works. It is what else starts to feel optional once the interface becomes reliable.
Book 2 is still turning around the same unease Jenny first felt. What happens when someone begins to doubt the world they live in and can no longer be sure where their own mind ends? The pages are coming slower than I would like, but with more focus than before.
What about you? How do you feel about technology responding directly to human thought?
In the meantime I hope your nights still hold a little jazz.
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