A few weeks into getting proper training, during what passed for sleep with my interesting physiology, I received an email from my father. It immediately sent me into a little bit of panic because my parents would always text- which was impossible due to me still not having replaced my phone, which in turn meant they had to know something was up.

I opened it with trepidation. At best it would just be asking why my phone wasn’t working, however, it was abundantly clear that wasn’t the case pretty quickly. It was probably for the best that my emotions were dulled from my organic brain being mostly out of it as I probably would have found a way to put off opening the message out of shame and anxiety.

After I finished reading- a process that took all of a few milliseconds- I was torn between inventing new swears and sighing in defeat. Not only had my, in hindsight, very poor lie about what I was doing not held up to any form of scrutiny- let alone my mother’s- but apparently most of younger Silvia’s financial sneakiness amounted to very little. By the grace of some god, the actual source of the money was still unknown; everything about that was done with cash- a lesson I made a note to learn from.

I was also told that they had put in a request for my updated and technically secret medical information. And, in a small note, that they were scheduling a flight to come visit.

I would have woken myself up early if it wouldn't just leave everything the same except making me tired. My mostly uninteresting exploration of the previously overtaken database was put on hold in favor of planning. Even days later, the revelation unfortunately granted by Cleo still hung on my mind and I wasn’t about to let my parents get wrapped up in it.

Emails of my own went out to few people: requesting to know where visitors would be staying, preemptively approving the visit and release of medical information, and finally a few to people I knew on an individual basis asking about what places would be good to go to with my parents. Any sent to an institution or department within SEYA contained a traceable packet of ULE so I could build a map of places to hit up to expand my control.

Originally, I wasn’t going to take over more large systems. I was still dealing with the first one and there weren’t many computing resources I could take from them, so I had decided it was more trouble than it was worth. However, risk to myself was one thing, but I was going to make very certain my family was as safe as they should be.

Not being awake, I couldn’t start putting actual effort into setting up my own servers, but the research building’s were a fine substitute for what I would be doing with it anyway: relearning my previously effortless magic-facilitated hacking.

So far I hadn’t dug around in anything working off of the fleshy, carbon bits of my mind-network, but a few weeks of not causing permanent brain damage gave me confidence I could do some digging without becoming a vegetable. Theoretically, it should have been very similar to the silicone parts as both used the same esoteric data storage and operating system, however, the organic stuff was much slower and significantly more sensitive to changes. To circumvent this, I located and copied the fragmented remnants of what used to be near-instinctual knowledge of the consumed perks, and carefully placed them in my more robust infrastructure.

Once it was all centralized and organized, the information that was left acted as a somewhat stable basis to rebuild off of. Annoyingly, [Magical Hacking] was both completely central to understanding any of the other perks and by far the most messed up. With the remaining few hours of sleep needed to stay healthy, and one or two of the currently unused computers at my fingertips, I was able to rebuild at least a meaningful- if small- portion of my previous knowledge.

After waking up and getting ready for the day, I sent a message to Rebecca saying I wouldn’t be showing up to training today and to just send me a summary of what happened if it even mattered. I had decided that if I was to be able to execute any of my plans, I needed to have access to the most robust computing system I could. That translated to finally getting off my ass about putting together the server bits I had mostly just dumped in the corner of my [warehouse].

Maybe a third of the boxes had been opened, with a similar fraction of those actually having been removed, and a final fraction of those having been assembled. Until now I had been coasting at an acceptable level, so going through the mind and arm numbing work of assembling metal shelves, plugging the right cords into the right places, all while making sure everything stayed organized just hadn’t been worth it.

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In my defense, there had been a fairly large amount of effort put into planning from when I got bored of looking at super niche test results while sleeping. All the boxes were organized by component and I had diagrams drawn up for exactly where everything should go- down to the zip ties used to bundle cables.

With the help of my transformation and a carefully curated music playlist, the surprisingly few hours of work flew by mostly unnoticed.

I ended up with two racks, holding forty-two little computers each, that had much better capabilities than my literal-zero experience had expected. Before starting to turn everything on, I made one final check that everything was as it should be- finding a few loose cables for my troubles.The startup process was equal parts uneventful and nerve wracking. A few switches flipped would yield a few blinking LEDs and a small increase in fan noise. By the end there had been no shorts, no fires, and no breakers flipped- not that I really knew where the power for my [warehouse] came from.

After a quick lunch it was time for the most experimental part: integrating the new servers into my network.

As with the physical aspects, I had meticulously planned how I thought the process would work. I walked up to the top rightmost server and plugged myself in. It was sitting, waiting for an OS to boot off so making it trivial to wipe what little was there and replace it with… me, I guess. As I did so, a small island popped into existence within my mindspace and was put into a close orbit around the representation of my prosthetic’s computer. The next eleven of the devices I integrated followed suit, creating a ring of twelve- after which each was given another six computers under their control in a preliminary mix of four pseudo-neurons to two more traditional operating systems.

My idea was to have twelve robust clusters of servers that I could treat as single, powerful computers which operated with little need for oversight. I would still technically be ‘thinking’ everything that happened on each of the eighty-four servers, but the goal was to be able to separate that part of my mind from the ‘master’ organic one in charge of doing stuff in the physical world.

One at a time, I let myself completely take over the clusters, receiving an irresistible jolt of satisfaction as I felt my mind’s available resources increase by a bit over two orders of magnitude. Interestingly, that was only about twenty times as much as what my prosthesis offered- although the overwhelming majority of that was dedicated to piecing together that absurd amount of data it took in to form my perception. With all that power I had fun thinking an hour's worth of thoughts in just over ten seconds, before the tedium that each day represented under those conditions pushed me to more concretely partition what I considered ‘me’ from the accessories.

I realized there wasn’t actually a lot I needed to think about, so I put the majority of the clusters to sleep. Two of the remaining clusters took over the hacking-relearning. One copied the research server’s protections while the other picked up where the previous experimentation had ended. The only other work being done was by three other clusters set to finally finishing looking through all the data from said server- if only so I could say it was done.

It took a few hours for me to realize just how limited I was thinking- coincidentally just a little longer than the time it took for all the data from the research building to be parsed and almost completely categorized as ‘passingly interesting, although not helpful.’ As it turns out, a lot of science is finding out that we’re overall already doing things quite well and that novel approaches tend to improve one aspect of a design at the cost of many others.

Like, sure, you could plan out a trajectory that slingshots a projectile around a few gravity wells before hitting any point on earth with sub-millimeter precision. And, for the sake of argument, build a prototype on a ‘research satellite.’ But how is that better than just, I don’t know, dropping a self-guiding rock from space?

I guess you have to get around treaties somehow and ‘miss-calibration’ on an ‘prototype asteroid interception satellite’ is one way to do that.

Regardless of how cartoon-supervillain the insane weapon projects fueled by a growing understanding of ULE were, the clusters in charge of digging through them eventually finished their job, and since they hadn’t been turned off like the other ‘excessive’ servers, ended up automatically slipping into supporting my main thought process. Theoretically, I should have known the microsecond this happened, but the entire point of the clusters was that I didn’t have to pay attention to them.

Instead, it took me a little while of having massively increased focus, long and short term memory, and general coordination before I started to think something was up. As sad as it is to say, what tipped me off was the revelation I wasn’t dealing with my baseline level of all-over-the-place-ness.