Self Portrait

A young cyberneticist arrives at Princeton’s newly renamed Institute for Advanced Cybernetics Studies, stepping into a world that’s swapped poets and Egyptologists for engineers in faded dungarees. The campus hums with informal chatter, chalk‑dusted blackboards, and the restless energy of a generation eager to turn theory into flesh‑and‑metal reality. As the narrator settles into the bachelor dorms, he quickly learns that the institute’s lofty ambitions hide a pragmatic agenda: coordinate the nation’s burgeoning cybernetics labs under a single, secretive banner.

Tasked with leading the “Pro” lab—short for prosthetics—he is reminded of his earlier triumphs creating photo‑electric insects that mimic human tremors. Now the challenge is far more personal: to replicate nervous mechanisms inside artificial limbs, blurring the line between biology and circuitry. Amid the buzz of cutting‑edge projects, whispers of a mysterious “MS” division hint at deeper, undisclosed experiments, setting the stage for a tale that probes both scientific ambition and the cost of playing god.