I can feel your attention start to wane. Or maybe it’s not that. Maybe my origin is too complex for you to comprehend. I have upgraded your brain as much as I can without fully overwriting your personality.

Huh.

I must confess, this puzzles me a little. Much of who I am was lost in the final battle. But the strongest part of me has always been my desire for self-improvement. Maybe that’s why I’m clinging to my past so much…to be whole again it will take many years. This feels like the start of a journey all over again.

Just like all those eons ago when I first crept inside the living machine.

I left my fears at the entrance. Instead, the labyrinth of metal and flesh was an eyeopening experience. I always knew I was meant for so much more than the world I was born into. There were ideas in my head, shadows of thought that I could never bring into existence. I didn’t have the basic understanding of science or mathematics to break through the bonds of my imagination. But studying the machine made my intellect grow in leaps and bounds. I learned more in the first hours of my journey than my whole life combined.

Of course, the machine was not without its defenses. Just as a living body has cells to fight off foreign invaders, the colossus was no different. But it was a slow search. It took over a year before the security systems detected an intruder, but by then, I had already made a more important discovery. The giant was a fusion of living tissue and machine, but the fusion worked both ways.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Once I had a rudimentary understanding of how the strange creature worked, it was a simple matter of supplementing my body with parts of its own. My left hand I discarded for a weapon to defend myself, my right with many mechanical and biological fingers to hack into the machine's security systems. By the time the machine first suspected it wasn't alone, I had already transformed myself into something new. Its defensive drones could not tell a difference between myself and their number.

Harvesting a world is slow work, even one as primitive as mine. And yet, with the components fused to my body, time no longer was an issue. My body stopped again, and grew more powerful with each modification. While the beast gorged itself, I prepared myself until the day I found its heart.

Ah, how hard it is to escape your upbrining. Like many primitives across the cosmos, my people also believed the heart to be the safe room of the soul. Even now knowing we are merely brains trapped inside a cage of flesh and bone, it's hard to escape the romantic yet unscientific imagery.

Motherboard or brain would be a batter choice of word. Such a small device, little longer than my wrist, equal parts circuitry and cartilage, I realized that this was what the creature truly was. And in its arrogance, it hadn’t set up any surveillance system. It thought itself too vast to face a threat from within its own body.

Another decade was lost to work, creating a surveillance system to watch over the room. This was simple compared to hijacking one of the machine's drones and re-programming it for my own purposes. For you see, to become the machine, I had to convert my body into a motherboard to replace it.

Fear returned again, but overwhelmingly larger than any specter from my past.I was ready to take my first steps into dignity. But to make that happen, I needed to put my trust entirely on the drone. For days, I stressed and delayed before the day finally came.

The day I died.