In the inner world of Eli Deckard's mind, new ideas blossomed and flitted away into dark recesses of long-term memory like a dance of neurological lights.

Within his cranium he felt the tickle, springing forth from the plug at the base of his skull and extending into the gray matter of his brain. It was the tickle of new birth, of knowledge being transferred at 28.4TB a second and converted instantly into biological/neurological memories.

Though fully conscious, he was only dimly aware of his surroundings: the soft cushion of his piloting stasis chair supporting his whole body, that metallic smell of cold processed air from the pod's oxygen exchange system, a distant ache of muscles that received little attention... they were almost an obsolete and archaic biological convention now...

His eyelids flitted rapidly until the tickling in his mind stopped, and a soft tonal chime from his pod's computer system signaled that the skill training was complete.