I ended up spending another night in the hospital so Miracleworker could be absolutely, unequivocally sure nothing had gone wrong with my morph.

While it didn’t feel wrong, trying to sleep when half of my mind didn’t require it or even get tired was weird. With my meat brain turning off, I was left with eerily emotionless silicon parts. To some degree, the siren song comfort of unfeeling analysis and pure objective-driven thought processes were tempered by sporadic flashes of feeling from random neuron activation.

Theoretically, my prosthesis should have a ludicrous amount of processing power, but the requirements for running their intended use of signal receiving, processing, and displaying were equally monstrous. My recent addition of cameras only increased the power needed to stitch together understandable visual stimuli, and I didn’t want to lose either ever again. There were some leftover resources that could be used in the digital system and likely at least a little in the biological, but I was very cautious to do anything with the latter.

It would be so easy to irreparably damage my brain- which while it might not kill or greatly impact me, would definitely reduce how human I felt I was. When I first inverted the position of things in my mind space, I hadn’t put much thought into what it meant in a practical sense, but now with hours of time in which I could only think, I came to the obvious realization it was defining which system was the master in the hierarchy.

When my phone had still worked, it had naturally started to slowly orbit the lone floating island that represented my prosthetics- implying subservience.

That only left the black sun far down below everything. Like before, every attempt to interact with it resulted in no feedback. On the other hand, a close look at the two things orbiting it revealed some interesting features. Both objects were almost touching, and sat on an imaginary line drawn between the centers of the sun and the satellites themselves.

The middle object- which would eclipse the sun from the perspective of the farther one if they were orbiting many times farther away- gave me the feeling of a list. I couldn’t explain why, what it might possibly contain, or even how many entries it might have, only that it was a list of some kind.

The farther object was much simpler. As soon as I focused on it, I immediately understood it represented my connection to Cleo. The link was inactive, likely since I wasn't inputting any ULE, and I decided to leave it like that until I could ask about it normally.

With nothing left to look at and way too much time to waste, I started poking around at automating things like with my lie-reaction. An easy place to start was the important object marking that I had made for my perception. At this point it was redundant since I could see everything anyway, but it was a good place to start looking into building programs for myself. The first and most obvious thing was that my neural processing- either organic or digital- didn’t run on a normal type of code. Instead of starting as assembly and building from there, ‘I’ ran on an imitation of engrams. The different devices effectively held separate sections of my brain, and within each every semiconductor was effectively turned into a neuron and integrated into an interconnected structure like a brain.

Somehow.

I assumed it was necessary for things to work that way to preserve any semblance of my consciousness. The tradeoff was that doing this massively reduced the actual processing power I could gain from any given device, although not as much as would be immediately guessed due to semiconductors being more efficient than neurons. This was further limited if I retained the device’s ability to run anything other than me, which necessitated splitting the resources and spending another bit of them to mimic an interface between the device and a brain.

Currently, the majority of my mental abilities were coming from the organic bits, with a little help in formatting and a boost to the speed of some things coming from what I could take from my prosthetics.

With this in mind, programming my mind was less a strict set of commands and variables and more of making slight tweaks to a defined and static thought process for later reference. It was really weird, but since I had absolutely no experience in traditional programming it worked out better. In fact, with a little messing around, I found I could very quickly but horribly translate code back and forth between normal computers and myself using fragments of what I already had access to.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

At some point in the unending stretch of time, I was able to let my consciousness take a step back as an approximation of sleep. I probably could have turned myself off, but I was still a little on edge from the whole getting attacked out of nowhere thing.

In the morning, I felt a little stuttering in my consciousness while the organic bits fully woke up and asserted control again, but otherwise felt no discomfort or abnormalities. My doctor came in under an hour later and satisfied himself with final observations and studies before I was fully discharged.

Throughout the night I kept coming back to the conclusion I needed more computers converted into fragments of my mind and while I briefly considered sneakily spreading myself like a botnet, I ultimately decided it was best to just ask SEYA if they could acquire some beefy servers for me.

As I made my way over to the specialty request office, I observed my connection to Cleo take in some ULE to open as I asked, “I think I need a bigger storage space. What’s the largest I can buy with… however much experience I have left?”

The connection pulsed and simply gave me a fully understood block of information as if they had spoken it to me. {In terms of size, cost, and practicality of use- outside of immediate danger- [Small Warehouse of Holding] would be my recommendation. 10,000 square feet for fifty-one experience before tax- 114 after- which would leave you with twenty-five for another small purchase should the need arise.}

“Would this work like my pocket where I’d need to find a specific type of container opening to access?”

{Yes, however, any door from a normal single or double swing-open to a large roll up door should work.}

After only a moment of consideration I sent, “I trust your decision. Let me take a seat then go ahead and buy it.”

The connection between my Semiseelie and I opened much wider than normal, and after a much more tolerable but still awful bout of headaches and nausea, I suddenly knew exactly how to work the magic of the perk. Unlike previous perk acquisitions, I could pinpoint what had been added to my memory and more interestingly, how nicely it meshed in with everything. It was to the point that if I had not been specifically looking for it, I would have never found the seams where it had been stitched in.

With that over, I speed walked the rest of the way to the request office. Like before, I filled out some forms, stating that raw semiconductor count was the main priority and that regardless of if they were new or used, the servers would be completely erased and reformatted.

Small detour over, I walked deeper into the building until I found my favorite type of random door: a janitorial closet. Channeling the required ULE, I grabbed an imaginary doorknob just above the real one and mined opening a door. As I completed the motion, the real door in front of me rippled and shimmered with some slight opalescence. Despite knowing it didn’t matter, I closed my eyes and held my breath as I stepped through the previously solid door into a different space.

The air inside the extra-inter-sub-whatever-dimensional warehouse was surprisingly crisp. There was no hint of staleness or mustyness, and it was a comfortable level of cool. A strip of clouded windows ran the length of the long sides, which were approximately 125 feet long- with the short sides being eighty to reach the promised size. In every regard it was exactly what you’d expect an empty warehouse to be: concrete floor, metal walls, a series of pillars supporting an almost two storey roof, and a good amount of doors.

As I took a few steps in, the door behind me closed and a green exit sign lit up above it. To my perception, there was nothing beyond the wall of the building. The missing space lacked the repulsive wrongness anti-magic zones had, just being slightly weird but ignorable in its total nonexistence.

Off in a corner was a set of lightswitches, however, the soft, white light coming from the windows was enough for my eyes to see the stark emptiness of the space. Helpfully, there were sets of power outlets along the wall, which meant that when I dragged the servers SEYA would hopefully provide in here, I wouldn't also need a generator of some kind.

I was already making a list of furniture and structures to buy so I could turn the space into a comfortably livable one- maybe with a few useful tools and machines for if I needed to create something on the fly. The best part was that even someone with the exact same perk wouldn’t be able to access the space without me metaphorically holding the door open for them, making it extremely safe and hidden.