Jade bypassed a restriction that no longer mattered as he arranged the delivery of his next body, before his current one had been destroyed or even irreparably damaged.
He pushed the usual aging protocols even farther by customizing its appearance somewhat. There were glints of silver among the darker strands of hair, and it was a bit plumper than the body he currently wore.
It didn't look exactly like the Jade Emperor, but it resembled that character even more than the face he was used to seeing in the mirror.
The interface conversion was far more complex, or at least, it seemed that way to Jade, since he didn't actually construct his own mechanical bodies. The remote interface was both a modification of the interface he was using to access the spherical body at his mother's, and kind of a reversal of the one players used to access VR games.
Orbital Jade was in charge of the new body's interface, so that Jade's "primary" self was free to continue "living" his usual life. Orbital Jade was the one who held the oldest memories anyway. The records of the days when "Jade" played Living Jade Empire through what would have seemed like a "blind" interface to him now.
Jade folded his clean clothes as he internally unfolded the subroutines he used to move his hands and compared them to the movement of Orbital Jade's hands in the small environmental space at his core. Within those processes, Jade found several branches of processing that he couldn't find any productive result from, and yet if he removed them, his movement would either change, or fail to happen.
Jade unfolded the shirt that had suffered the most recent test round and refolded it with the extra loops in place. Orbital Jade created a simulation and another copy of themselves, and repeated the tests with different variables until it found the insignificant seeming modifier that was usually written back into the calculation with its original value, but was occasionally inverted.
Jade checked three times that his current backup was complete before climbing into his bed and connecting directly to his server. The update created by disassembling his own movements noticeably shrank the resources he took up within his own digital space.
--
Jade traveled to his workplace and voluntarily took on all of the activities that required physical movement during his shift.
"You slept well last night," Emily commented.
"Not exactly," Jade countered, before wondering if he actually had.
It had been a very busy processing session that had rewritten large parts of himself, rather than a period of rest, but his understanding of human understanding of sleep was a bit vague. If they were busy filing a day's data into long term storage and doing physical upkeep while they slept, it might be possible for them to perform similar changes to themselves, but he'd never heard them mention such things.
It wasn't a big change though. Jade's hands still occasionally dropped things when he misjudged a hold. His steps were no quicker than they had been. He just had a little more capacity in general.
Jade caught the partially crumpled paper cup Emily tossed to him when he was collecting the bag from the small waste basket by the door, and paused.
"Good catch," Emily complimented him.
"Yeah," he replied in surprise before adding the more traditional, "Thanks."
After a moment he stuffed the cup into the bag and carried it to the collection bin. On his way home he realized that the traffic patterns seemed easier to calculate. Nothing had really changed, except that those calculations took up less of his available space.
--
Jade attended his classes with the same odd sensation about his processing changes. He didn't simply respond with the correct information, he could modify that information with each teacher's expectations first, and though it was merely a small sample, he thought it was likely that his grades that had been dropping since his reintegration would soon begin to rise.
Eric threw an arm over his shoulders as he was gathering up to leave their last class together, and asked, "What's up?"
Jade hesitated, but his friend's warm smile didn't seem either worried or impatient today. "I've been working on reducing the subroutines I use to move around into more compressed packages, and reorganizing the libraries they call on so that they can be duplicated without containing extraneous stuff, so that I can keep my bargain with the Jade Emperor."
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Eric's smile wavered a little, but he only replied a bit wryly, "I expected you to be busy working on the quest app."
Jade pondered that for a moment. Perhaps the changes he had made within himself had been triggered by the small change he had made by reincorporating that abandoned fragment that his application had needed.
"Does it seem to be working any better today?" he asked hopefully.
This time Eric thought for a while before replying hesitantly, "I think so? It has given me a couple of rather silly completion rewards, but it hasn't been as annoying as it was at first. I don't know if that's because of anything you changed, or just from me getting used to having it running?"
Jade consulted with the fragment of himself that was now monitoring the application to see what might be 'silly', and barely stopped himself from laughing aloud. Eric had been awarded extra points for some silly dance steps that he had taken on the way from his bed to his bathroom, and for choosing his favorite flavor of nutritional drink.
Jade grinned at Eric. "I hope the changes will all turn out to have been good ones!"
"If they aren't, you can just keep trying," Eric pointed out. "You've got plenty of time."
Jade smiled, and didn't protest that assumption, even though all of his goals actually felt rather urgent to him. He needed to be in a good position to maintain the independence he'd been given, he needed to be able to provide real support to those he cared about in the future. It actually felt a little odd to realize that his own goals had finally aligned with those of the other students who shared his classes.
Eric asked Jade, "Can you let this thing type up my engineering assignment for me?"
Jade tilted his head questioningly, "You want me to write your report for a class I'm not taking?"
Eric blinked at him, and then his cheeks flushed with color as he protested, "Don't mix your program and yourself! And anyway, I just meant can you let it write out what I tell it into a document I can save!"
Jade blinked. "Of course?" He checked with that fragment of himself again, and added, "If you're willing to give it access to the programs built to compose that document format, the licensing on this topic is really weird and it will have to be notated that you used an AI assistant."
Eric's expression twisted a little, and he heaved a sigh. "Nevermind. It'll at least credit me extra points for doing it myself, right?"
Jade nodded.
"Isn't there some way to substitute your speech to text system for the publishing application's translator without that though?" Eric grumbled. "I'm not even asking for standard formula substitutions or anything, I just want it to write the right words."
Jade hesitated again. He really didn't want to dismiss Eric's request, but he didn't think he could afford the licensing for every media type anyone who tried to use the quest system might want to use. Even Living Jade Empire's celestial assistants were extremely limited in what they could produce and access outside of their home server.
The only systems that had unlimited access and use of all known formats, and their future updates were the out-system colony pod ships currently under construction. They would be expected to survive multi-century flights, so they were being loaded with everything that anyone could think of.
Those limited licensing exceptions had been created under the system-wide treaties that had supported the first off-planet settlements. No one wanted the wars on Earth to expand off-planet, and the colonies were still quite reliant on regular supplies and updates from Earth. While Jade's server was technically off-planet, it was still legally (and gravitationally) part of Earth's planetary holdings.
"I... don't think I can obtain licensing for every media type anyone might want to use," Jade admitted.
The blank look Eric gave him confused him.
"I mean, technically of course I could write your words down for you without marking them as the work of an AI, but legally I can't store it as a document," he explained. "And there are a lot of good reasons for those laws to exist, because no one wants someone to steal their work by copying it under their own name, and this is a point at which the access to the information could be measured."
"You don't understand," Eric grumbled. "I just want the app to function like a keyboard, not as the editor."
Jade blinked, and rapidly checked both his previous reasoning and Eric's simplification. The conclusion he came to was a bit silly.
"I would have to publish a separate input app, I think," Jade explained. "And all new input apps have to submit their data to governmental monitoring to be published in over half the countries in the world. I... don't think that would be good."
Eric thought about it for a while, before asking, "Because it would reveal your existence to all of those governments?"
"No, they all know about me now, but everything written that way basically become public?" he replied uncertainly.
"Okay," Eric agreed.
"Are you sure that's really okay?" Jade asked doubtfully.
"My current keyboard app is probably sending everything anyway," Eric pointed out.
"Not if you're using the inbuilt system one," Jade objected. "Most operating systems are still exempt because they weren't registered after the new laws went into place."
"You realize how ridiculous that sounds," Eric asked dryly.
Jade shrugged helplessly.
"How fast can you create it?" Eric asked.
Jade was silent for a moment as he set things up, and then he announced, "It is done."
Eric stopped walking and stared at Jade.
Jade came to a halt and gazed back at his friend questioningly.
Eric lifted his phone and opened the email Jade had sent, that gave access to the "alpha" version.
"The name sucks," Eric complained as he installed it.
"If you think of a better one that's not in use, it can still be changed," Jade offered.
Eric immediately suggested one.
"In use," Jade informed him.
Eric suggested a dozen.
"There are over a million registered apps with the word Key in them, hundreds of thousands using Transparent, and that doesn't even count names used by movies and books and such," Jade explained.
"A Soul Fed Button Masher?" Eric suggested.
"How is that better!?" Jade objected.
"It's not worse," Eric promised.