Neural Interfaces Fiction!

A student put a copy of "Fools' Experiments" by Edward Lerner in my hands. Its a sci-fi novel about neural interfaces and artificial intelligence. The book is horribly written with cheesy dialog and weakly developed characters, but there are a few interesting ideas bouncing around in there. In the book, the characters have developed a brain machine interface helmet which reads your thoughts and allows you to subconsciously interact with a computer. The helmets include a neural network layer that adapts the helmets on the fly to optimize the bi-directional flow of information between the user and the computer. The fun part came when the computer became infected with a worm-type virus: the virus saw the user's brain as just another computer to infect, effectively bricking the user's brain. Of all the reactionary concerns I've heard about for avoiding brain computer interface research, that is definitely a first! Still, kinda interesting to think about...