[Please choose a sensory input channel to activate: (External audio/visual)(Tactile/kinesthetic)]

“This again?” I asked, confused.

[There are pre-programmed limits to what I can do or say, and most of those limits are aimed at making sure you are able to exercise your free will without my interference. You have to ask me what I think you should do before I can offer suggestions and I absolutely can’t just tell you you should finish learning how to control your new body. But I do find it odd you would even consider formulating a plan of action while effectively deaf, blind, numb and paralyzed.]

“Ah,” I responded, “well, you did ask me what I wanted to do next.”

“You talking to Sum?” Eddy asked.

“Yeah, he thinks I should finish learning how to control my new body,” I explain.

“That seems like good advice.”

[It is good advice. I asked you what you wanted to do, but I was hoping your answer would be something sensible like, “I’d like to see what’s happening outside.”]

“You make it sound like something important is happening outside,” I observe, “wait, don’t give me a snarky reply, just go ahead and connect my external audio/visual.”

Rather than opening new screens for me to look at, connecting to my external visual/audio was a lot like simply opening my eyes. It was as if I was seeing the red landscape with my own eyes, except better. I could see a full 360 degrees, no I could see the whole sphere, including the ground beneath me and the sky above, all at once and in great detail. Wherever I focused my attention gained magnification, becoming more detailed and hyper-realistic. It was like I had a telescope/microscope that was seamless and didn’t blur. I felt omniscient, and despite what should be massive sensory overload, I had no problem handling it and didn’t experience vertigo or a headache.

[You aren’t capable of feeling those anymore. Not unless you get hit with some sort of precursor-level system disruptor or computer virus. There are some benefits to being an AI, increased processing ability isn’t the same as being smarter, but you are able to simultaneously handle a lot more than your old brain could handle. In fact, I’m actually throttling down your processing speed just to let you experience time at the same rate as before. When you need more time to think about things, I can release that. From your perspective, it means you can activate a 1000x time-acceleration “bullet-time” at will.]

“That is pretty amazing,” I mutter. Maybe being a computer program wasn’t all that bad.

“What is? Any chance you could share what you’re seeing with me?” Eddy asks.

“Make it so, Sum,” I say, still distracted, zooming in to examine my surroundings. At a guess, I was able to get 1000x magnification without any loss of fidelity. Or maybe Sum was also throttling down my visual acuity down to human eyeball level because if I could see every grain of sand within a mile at all times, it would probably be very distracting, but when I focused, I could get full details on any one area while still seeing the full globe around me.

[I was wondering when I’d get that Star Trek reference. Your sensors are designed to be useful in space, to let you visually examine objects light minutes away. Using them to see things a few miles away is a bit like pointing every telescope your species has ever built at your own hand. 1000x? Pick a grain of sand, I can show you its atoms. You haven’t even looked beyond the visual spectrum, you actually have full EM spectrum vision. And you can also detect magnetic fields, neutrinos, and gravitons, to name a few.]

“This is pretty cool,” Eddy said, interrupting me. “It feels like I’m in the holodeck or something, except it’s flat. How is this being displayed?” He asked. Eddy walked over to the wall where the human-built starship was being shown and examined it more closely.

I glanced at the screen showing me my former self, which was a flat rectangle floating in one corner of my field of view, and I could see he was now standing in a room that had a full panoramic view of the outside world, like being in a room with screens for walls, floor and roof.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

[Each nanite can produce RGB colored light, so it can act like a pixel. Since every surface in that room is made of nanites, every surface can act like a flat-screen display. Each nanite is about the size of a human cell, so a few million pixels per square inch of resolution.]

I relayed that, but my attention was now caught by the same thing my old self’s attention was drawn to. The two spacesuited humans working on something at the base of their ship.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

[They are preparing a bomb. See that rover? They’re strapping an oxygen tank and a methene tank to it. The hard part is an improvised explosive that can rupture both tanks at once, but they seem to nearly be done with that step. Next, I suspect they will tell the rover to drive up to us and detonate.]

“They’re trying to blow us up?!” I asked incredulously.

“I mean, you did kidnap me, so… I agree it’s stupid, but I can see why they’d try it. Maybe they hope to blow a hole in your hull and come rescue me?” Eddy asked skeptically.

“More likely someone back home couldn’t handle the negative PR of doing nothing and decided angering an alien spaceship was better than looking weak to their constituents and didn’t care about the possible consequences,” I observed wryly.

“To be fair, they don’t know I’m alive. From Earth’s perspective, they’re already at war with aliens who killed one of the first humans to land on Mars. Might as well try to do some damage to get a feel for how good your armor is,” Eddy pointed out.

[You don’t have armor yet. Your hull is completely made up of nanites. You will probably take about 23 or 24 hit points (hp) worth of damage from that bomb at point-blank range. Nanites aren’t actually very good against explosion-type damage, but since you have 1000 hp, it would take about forty-two of those bombs to disable you. Your core, which unlike your nanites is made from exotic materials, could take a point-blank 100 megaton nuke without damage, but that would kill all your nanites. When all your nanites are dead (0 hp left), you will lose all functionality except what your core provides, as nanites are needed to conduct power and relay instructions to all your subsystems. Other than that, you can heal a hull breach pretty much instantly as your nanites will simply move to seal the gap, so they won’t be able to break in with just that one bomb. Since that damage estimate is mostly a measure of how many nanites will die from being caught in the blast radius you could reduce the damage by thinning the hull where the explosion hits… or you could, you know, stop them. Would you like to destroy them? (Yes/No)]

“No, thanks,” I told Sum sternly. “I’m going to let Eddy go… as soon as you put your helmet on,” I add quickly.

“Right, I’ll go talk to them, but they’re going to want to speak to you,” Eddy said as he started gearing up to handle the Martian atmosphere.

[Do you want to “listen” to all local radio communications? (Yes/No)]

“I have a radio?” I asked, then I actually thought about how stupid that question was, “Wait of course I have a radio, why wouldn’t I?”

“Let me talk to them first, or they might freak out. Since you sound like me, they will probably think you’ve turned me into a borg and are using me as your mouthpiece. I mean, they are probably going to think I’m brainwashed anyways… don’t need to feed that paranoia.”

“Maybe I should alter my voice,” I suggest.

“That’s not a bad idea.”

“Sum, make me sound a little deeper pitched and I don’t know… more autotuned or something.”

[How about I just give you the voice of Hal from 2001 and call it a day?]

“Um, no, that’s probably not a good idea,” I notice my voice has changed into something more like what I imagined a heroic male robot. “Yeah, ok this works,” I say in approval.

“You sound like what Morgan Freeman would sound like if you de-aged him then turned him into a cyborg,” Eddy observes. Despite being almost 100 years old, that guy was still alive in the year 2035, somehow.

“Hah, yeah, kind of…” I say, feeling self-conscious. “Do you think I should change it?”

“Nah, I like it, your new voice sounds good.” Eddy gives me a thumbs up, “Feels less like talking to myself.”

When Eddy finished suiting up, I silently asked Sum to scan him, to make sure the suit was properly working.

[It’s fine, as good as crude human tech gets, anyways. Which is to say, less good than just covering him with a thin layer of your nanites. You could make a far better space suit in about a second, is what I'm saying, but that junk that he has on is correctly equiped.]

“You’re good,” I tell him.

“Thanks,” Eddy said, understanding what I meant.

[I’ve rearranged your internal structure so he’ll have a straight path to the outside. I’ll drop the pressure while he’s in the corridor so he doesn’t blow out when he hits the exterior door.]

“See you, good luck,” I tell Eddy as he walks through the first door into the passageway.

“Thanks,” he replies through his intercom, “I feel like I might need it if I want to defuse this mess.”

“You and me both,” I mutter.