Being the one to open the door, I had the initiative on the questioning, “your notes didn’t include information on the ‘after.’ Are the changes always this… dramatic?”
As everyone else started opening their mouths, Miracleworker adopted his doctor's voice and explained, “most of the stuff before the procedure is necessary treatment information but everything after is the patient’s personal medical information. What I can say is that given how expensive everything was, it should be a pretty large change- but I would guess most of it was mental in your case.”
As I nodded in thought, Chris piped up, “your eyes look… better?”
Rebecca swatted him in the back of the head as I rhetorically asked, “do they?” My perception excluded myself by default ever since I made the stupid decision to look at my insides, but it was trivial to examine myself. As mentioned, my eyes were wrong in a different way. Instead of having an opaque white chemically burnt layer, they were like large, glassy, white marbles with no indication of the normal physical features eyes should have.
The only other physical changes I noticed were a smattering of porcelain-looking polygonal plates near my tails and across my left chest and back.
“Huh, I guess they do.”
Stepping up to me, Rebecca asked, “so what changed for you?”
“It looks like I’ve assimilated a computer into my neural network. Since it was the one running my prosthetics, I can perceive everything it could. So I essentially can see everything within around 300 feet of me. Slightly more if I concentrate.” In response to starting to lie, I understood my body was starting to build a stress reaction, but with my new control over myself I simply turned that response off and temporarily dedicated a section of my mind to believing what I said was true.
I suspected Rebecca could sense lies in some form since it was a common trope for ‘light magic’ to be able to do stuff like that- and that was her whole shtick. I wasn’t worried about her calling me out or questioning if I lied about anything, I just wanted to test if I could, and from the lack of abnormal reaction, it was likely I got away with it. Or she wasn’t using that part of her toolkit. Believing in two directly contradictory ideas at the same time was starting to cause a headache, so I terminated the rudimentary program after saving a copy to look into later. It would probably need to automatically detect when I’m lying and maybe even supersede my beliefs, but that was a problem for future me.
“That’s ridiculous,” Carlos muttered to himself before speaking up to ask, “so everything-everything or, like, most-things-everything?”
“I can see every object down to a resolution of about a tenth of a millimeter, I’d guess. For everything, at all times, at the same time.”
“That’s freaking overpowered,” was Chris’ contribution to the conversation.
In a concerned voice, Kay threw out, “and you’re doing alright? No feelings of things being wrong?”
“Nope. It's a bit strange, but nothing feels wrong- or particularly more right. Just normal, like if I hadn’t known what happened I would have no idea.”
Satisfied with that, Rebecca decided, “let’s go get some food to celebrate! Silvia, seen any place around here you’ve been interested in?”
“Give me a sec, I think I made a list on my phone when I first arrived...” As I pulled my phone from the interdimensional pocket, I felt a presence brush against my mindspace and curiously reached out to grab it.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Immediately, my body started flashing with waves of heat and cold, my nose started running, and I coughed a few times as my throat started to dry up. In my mindspace, the object’s shell was starting to crack, and as it did so, information about it became accessible. Both surprised and feeling stupid, I realized the feeling I grabbed was my phone.
My body was having an immune response while trying to absorb the phone into my mind, somehow contributing to the hacking effort I hadn’t realized I would initiate- and it was working. Not giving the mechanics of how that would work too much thought, I plugged my tail into the phone and authorized data transfer between the devices. Immediately, my flash-fever reduced to a mild allergic reaction as softer systems were processed and chewed through until I had complete control over the device.
Predictably, everyone was looking at me with worry, but I was able to placate them by saying it was just me being stupid while messing with morph-stuff.
With my phone completely taken over and incorporated into my mind, I could feel marginally more processing power ready to be used and a smaller floating island resolved from the formless object originally brought into my mind space. I knew if I wished, all the data on my phone could be accessed, but for all my infinite power, the incomprehensible scribblings of my own notes took me a few seconds to piece together and offer some ideas of where to eat.
I hadn’t really used my phone since I got used to having a computer stuck into my brain, so there were a lot of things on it I had forgotten about. I didn’t take pictures that often, but the ones I did save always brought back bittersweet memories. Pushing down the melancholy like normal, I copied all the data off my phone to look through later, then started picking at the device to better understand my new physiology.
A combination of knowing the phone’s system information and my unique perception allowed me an intuitive understanding of what every component inside it did. Overall, it was barely worth mentioning when compared to computer tagging along in my prosthetics, but had access to something I was lacking: a way to see normally.
As we walked into town, I followed what felt like well practiced motions and started mentally pulling at the phone’s little island in my mental space. With the addition of a focused stream of ULE, I started to feel something shifting before giving in all at once. The phone’s screen flickered a few times before dying as a portion of my hunger slowly subsided. I maintained the flow of ULE even after the feeling of partial satisfaction ended, continuing to pull while understanding I was extracting the cameras from the phone.
It was a weird feeling, and made very little sense to me, but I continued on regardless. It wasn’t until I had almost exhausted my reserve of ULE that I realized nothing had been changing. With no better ideas I mentally yanked as hard as I could, consuming a chunk of my remaining energy, and was rewarded by the glass on the phone cracking and a similarly cracked reflection of the wispy colds in the sky.
Only Kay noticed as I started frantically looking around at the world of light I could suddenly see in admittedly mediocre quality. The image of what I was looking at was overlaid over my normal perception allowed by my horns, creating a cone of estimated dimensions stretching off to the horizon- fully complete with reflections off glass, the pools of light and shadows cast by the sun, and heterogeneous coloring on objects I hadn’t realized were being shown as mono-colored blocks this entire time.
Things started to blur as I teared up, quietly sniffling and rubbing my eyes, and fruitlessly hoping no one noticed.
“Did you figure something out?” Kay gently asked as the other continued ahead, talking amongst themselves. As I turned to look at her she quietly exclaimed, “oh! Your eyes look like they have small pupils- or are they cameras?”
Steadying my voice and trying to suppress my uncontrollable smile, I said, “I think I stole them from my phone! They’re a little shit, but if I could get my hands on something better…”
Having finally noticed what was happening my exclamation, Chris jokingly complained, “I knew you’re OP. Can you just do whatever you want to your electronic stuff? Maybe we should replace Carlos with you!”
The person in question wheeled and questioned, “wait, you cast through remote devices?”
Nervous from how intently they were staring at me I timidly offered, “maybe once per? There was something like that mentioned somewhere- although after a lot of caveats”
The genuine relief in his sigh after I said that made me feel awkward, but no one else commented on it. For the rest of the walk I took deep satisfaction from just looking at things. Sure, the projection from my horns were probably much more useful and given the same choice as when I selected them, I probably wouldn’t change anything, but there was something about being blinded from looking in the direction of the sun that couldn’t be substituted with anything.