In the early days of development, the General Magic units suffered from a variety of issues. The Institute developed the technology in the first half of the 1980s, as part of a secret ‘SkunkWorks’ project department codenamed “Blushing Bride”. As such, funding was low and secrecy was high. Taking their lead from the great successes of MKUltra and Monarch, consent was manufactured and volunteer test subjects acquired accordingly.
Initial prototypes didn’t use the now-familiar skull probes, rather needles inserted between the fingers picked up on alpha and beta waves and modulated transposed frequencies accordingly, setting up the essential feedback loop at 29 Megacycles. This configuration was not deemed optimal as subjects struggled to undertake simple manual tasks while online.
Once skull probes (and their specialist housings) were settled upon, the real problems started. Subjects complained of side effects such as stuttering, clamminess, digestive issues (including but not limited to explosive diarrhoea) and hydrophobia. Minor adjustments to probe depth seemed to mitigate most of these, but when the GM units were connected to production environments, it became almost impossible to predict which test subjects would have a violent reaction, or none at all.
Subject 23 experienced time dilation to such an extent their conversation had to be recorded and played back at 5x speed to be intelligible.
Subject 816’s lower body muscle fibres transformed into ultra-high twitch configuration allowing them to run at speeds of up to 80mph before dying of cardiac arrest (“Rush Boots”).
Subject 9 could smell death within a 3km radius.
By the early 2000s, most of these kinks had been ironed out, and only a statistically irrelevant number of fatalities regularly occurred.