This time when I slept there were no dreams. After Miracleworker had finished and presumably made sure everything was good, I woke up as though no time had passed. At first I even forgot the surgery had been to attach a new left arm as it simply worked perfectly. I hadn’t gotten a good look at it before going under, so as I manipulated it around to see if anything was off I carefully inspected it.
The upper and forearm were made of single sections of some sort of false-skin material that felt like smooth but ever-so-slightly rubbery skin and had some give if you squeezed it. Oddly enough, it also gave off a faint heat- not as much as flesh did, but it gave a pretty convincing illusion of the prosthetic being alive. At the shoulder, there was an almost imperceptible cap of a slightly different color I quickly realized was the result of my previous shoulder muscles having been grafted into it to enable movement of the joint.
The elbow was a more advanced version of the joints in my tail: a stainless-steel-looking ball with many black wires running from section to section. The difference with this one was that the ends of the separate sections were clearly contoured to hide the ball from the outside when at full extension. Additionally, along the ball, parallel to the direction of my arm was a slot to allow the linkage to slide.
Finally, the hands were the most mechanically complex. The palm was composed of a few sections of the same false skin as my arm which allowed more than full articulation of the thumb and fingers. Each of those fingers was built like a miniature version of the rest of the assembly, more of the skin material and slotted-ball joints.
Overall, it looked and felt extremely good while being almost impossible to tell apart from my organic arm if you couldn’t see the inside of the joints.
I was also feeling significantly stronger than the days previous. Still weaker than before the Breach, but at least able to easily sit up and stagger around for a few seconds. Slamming into the wall near the door before I collapsed, I cracked it open enough to stick my head through.
“Need to do any final checks?” I asked Miracleworker who was reading some sort of doctor magazine in a chair right outside.
Lazily closing and disappearing the magazine, he rested his head on the top of the cushion before turning to look at me. “I probably should… but I’m confident my work is good enough that you'll encounter no issues. I was mostly hanging around to ask if you were planning on undergoing the morph right away.”
“Any reason not to?”
“Shit like personal preference and comfort.”
“Might as well get it over with. I assume I’ll need a nanite bath?” After receiving a nod, I asked, “can you get me a pair of crutches? I’m still feeling pretty weak.”
He stood up and stretched out a hand, which after a small vortex of ULE was suddenly holding what I asked for. I moved ‘get a better storage perk’ up to the top of my list of priorities. From there it was an annoyingly long walk to the manufactory. The people at the front desk offered to get me a wheelchair, but being able to walk- even very poorly- on my own was too nice to give up.
By the time we reached our destination, I was back to walking mostly normally. It was like my body couldn’t believe that I had recovered that quickly and was limiting itself to what I thought it should be able to do.
When we arrived, no one was around, but a few of the machines were working away at projects. As I reached the nearest nanite-room, I turned and said, “I guess see you in… Wait, Cleo, how many tokens will this take?”
{Likely forty-seven-} “Forty-seven minutes.”
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Looking a tiny bit deflated, Miracleworker sighed, “I was hoping to watch and take notes on the process.”
“That's a bit creepy…”
“If you’re concerned about modesty, I’m literally a licensed doctor and have dis-then-re-assembled you twice.”
Returning the sigh with my own, I relented, “I’ll have Cleo call you in once I’m out and it's starting.” Not waiting for an answer, I hobbled into the room and closed the door. I undressed then just sat on the edge of the tub for a few minutes not really thinking about anything, but giving myself enough time to be ready to commit. For all of my talk about not really caring about my humanity and how easy all the steps in the process were, this was still a big deal.
In the end I came to the conclusion I shouldn’t be scared about anything involved. Most of the hesitation came from feeling weird that I didn’t have strong feelings about doing this. I continued trying to poke at myself, trying various arguments in an attempt to try and deconstruct my own mind as I filled the tub. By the time it was full enough I had got nowhere in my endeavor, but I never did with stuff like this. I could always easily out maneuver myself even when I knew how I would do it.
Content with the inevitable, unsatisfying conclusion, I slipped into the water and let out one last sigh before blacking out.
{Everything was set up as close to your pre-morph state as possible. Some things will be different and I would encourage you to explore your new existence slowly and carefully- there's a lot of blatantly and subtly bad things you can now accidentally do to yourself. You’ll quickly see what I mean,} Cleo dumped into my head in the time it took for my eyes to blink open. In the same fraction of a second I received the message in a single packet of information, processed what had been said, then finally realized my eyelids were still sliding over my ruined eyeballs.
Seamlessly, my conscious perception of time slipped back to a normal and precise 9,192,631,770 ground-state hyperfine transitions of cesium-133 per second. From there my background awareness of things continued to expand. Every microsecond could be naturally and individually counted or disregarded, every collapse of electrical potential in my nerves could be logged, the exact angle of every joint and force exerted by each muscle was there at a thought, and on, and on. Strings of thought checking the condition of every infinitesimal aspect of my body ran in harmonious parallel at billions of operations per second.
At that scale, what could be considered normal thought gave way to pure data, so my mind rose above the ocean of informational noise and to an island floating in the sky- just in time to catch the second blink as I cleared my eyes of the excess wetness from the bath. I didn’t even realize my perception was turned off until my hands passed though the space above the room’s chair, expecting to hit my clothes.
There was no confusion or worry. I instantly understood I had been operating using the spatial memory from before the morph and simply hadn’t turned on my prosthetics to update everything’s position.
And with a thought, I got a taste of omniscience.
Instead of two little bubbles, I perceived the entirety of the data my horns received as raw data, not needing it to be processed into visual information. 268,082,573-ish cubic feet- a sphere with a radius of 400 feet- in which I fully understood the positions and ULE content of every object down to specs of dust in the air. The computing power needed to enable this turned the sporadically rippling ocean of data into a glassy surface as the biological data processing was reduced to what my brain could understand on its own.
Following my instincts, I realized I didn’t need to perceive the entire volume as fast as my processors could allow and eased back to a relaxed 256 scans per second, allowing the ocean to resume a much more subdued waving.
Something still felt a little too analytical, and as if following my wishes, the sky and ocean traded places. Suddenly, the real world went back to being shown to me as innumerable 3D models like before the morph- except on a larger scale. The need to turn the information from digital to visual stimuli turned down the number of scans to around one hundred a second and reduced the range to about 350 feet.
Inside my mental world, the inverted positions of the sea and sky revealed a black sun orbited by two similarly dark objects far below me, all of which had been previously obscured by the ‘water.’ It didn’t seem to do anything and resisted my curious mental pokes. Any further investigation would have to happen later. I had been standing in the nanite-bath room with my clothes in hand for a few too many minutes so my doctor and, surprisingly, team members were getting fidgety outside.