One week and two days later

  I felt stiff.

  When I tried to move my hand, I couldn’t—it felt so heavy, and there was something stopping me. My mouth was so dry that it was hard to even open it.

  What’s happening?

  Then I remembered—the surgery.

  It took me a while, but eventually, I managed to croak out, “Water.”

  Only a bit later, I felt water trickling into my mouth, and everything started to feel better. When I opened my eyes, I could only see out of the right one, which panicked me a bit, but then I remembered—the left one was probably bandaged up.

  I also saw the medical drone dripping water into my mouth. Damn good this function was programmed into them.

  “Master, are you there? Have you awakened at last?”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Good, so you're back. Do you want a report?”

  “Just wait a bit... I'm tired.”

  “Of course.”

  It took me a few minutes to properly wake up. Breathing in felt normal—well, that wasn’t entirely true. It felt powerful, like I could pull in a lot more air than before.

  “Give me that report, please.”

  “Overall, the surgery was a success. There was a problem at the start. The organs started to disintegrate faster than we expected when we started to cut them out. This caused a bit of a problem, and because of that, you were technically dead for about five minutes. But your brain was oxygenated, so you should still be good.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time I was technically dead.”

  “Yes, that’s true. Otherwise, things went reasonably well. Some organs had some problems incorporating, but the nanomachines were able to fix those issues. I suspect it will take a few weeks for you to properly be able to use the enhancements of their cybernetics, but even now, they are working well enough to provide you with a normal human experience.”

  “Well, that’s good news. But next time, when you give a similar report, please don’t show video clips of the surgery and especially don’t show black goo being sucked out of me that used to be my organs.

  “Acknowledged”

  “But the real question is—am I ready for the next set of surgeries?”

  “In a day or two, you should be. The next few ones will be easy, just changing some of the other cybernetics you have. The last surgery for upgrading your computer and adding more ports. Will be a bigger one and will require full sedation once again.”

  “One anomaly is the heat exchanger behind your heart. It seems to be working better than expected, although I’m not entirely sure why.”

  “Yeah, let me just go and get some food, and then I’ll see to it.”

  The heat exchanger was working better because the new bio-cybernetic muscle fibers were thermally more conductive than expected. It seemed to be a strange interaction between the blood, the new vascular system, and the muscle fibers that helped bring excess heat toward the heat exchanger.

  “Well, that will work just fine. Some extra good news.”

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  Then I gathered my courage and went to see myself in the mirror. My skin looked like normal human skin. The scarring on my head was gone. I looked almost like a normal human, but there were still some things that showed the damage I had taken. Those would be fixed during the last surgery.

  The more I looked at myself, the more foreign my image seemed.

  “Lola, during my last surgery, change some of the left side to have scarring once again. Not as bad as before, but I don’t want it like this.”

  “…Acknowledged.”

  What followed were small operations every day or two to replace the other cybernetics, like my right eye, the data port connections in my fingertips that allowed me to touch a data port and interact with it. Small stuff like that—overall quality improvements I got over the years to help make my life easier.

  I also finally managed to get the AR system working for my cybernetic eyes. It felt like I was blind without it. Being able to see data everywhere was just too convenient, even if I enjoyed having proper screens to look at. Without AR, interacting with aliens was also going to be difficult, but that was no longer a concern.

  Currently, I was putting the last touches on the computer that was going to replace the one underneath my brain. This one was a lot better, should be more secure, and should allow me a lot more connections. There would also be a lot more data ports available and some special ports—I hoped I got the specs right for.

  Anyway, it was time for the last surgery, but I was already feeling so tired. My body was at its limit. I should wait a bit longer, but my current computer could barely keep up with the needs of my current modifications, so if I didn’t upgrade, there would be other problems.

  I kind of would’ve liked it if I didn’t have to upgrade all my cybernetics right now and only fixed the dangerous ones, but the mana rebirth is too good of an opportunity to get all of my cybernetics to properly work with magic, and we just couldn’t let that go.

  “Lola, please start.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  So once again, I went completely under and hoped I woke up.

  Four days later

  This time, my eyes opened fast. Everything felt right. My mind seemed to work fast.

  “Lola, you there?”

  “Yes. The surgery went well. Would you like the full report of the surgery now?”

  “Yes, please.”

  There was nothing unexpected in the report, which still surprised me. Things had gone way too smoothly. I was beginning to worry that I was piling up too much bad luck.

  It took me a bit to get off the chair as I was wobbling, but fortunately, the zero gravity helped a lot. I don’t know how I’m able to do it, but you can still fall in zero gravity. It’s just that you don’t hit the floor.

  When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see the half-melted and scarred person I used to be. But I now had some of the scars back and that helped connect the old me I knew so well, to this new one.

  Do I have to start worrying about hair growth now? No, I should be able to modify that.

  Still, being able to touch a large part of my face and feel smooth skin was... it kinda felt good. Everything was still stiff, but with time, a lot of that should go away, which was weird to acknowledge.

  What I could also do now was hear properly. It had been so long since I didn’t have the electronic static whenever someone spoke.

  “This is going to take a while to get used to.”

  What followed was me doing some exercises to test all my cybernetics. While some still weren’t working at 100%, it would take some time for them to reach that. I felt good enough for the next step.

  It was time to upgrade all of the drones and even the ship computer into AI. None of them would be at the level of Lola—I just didn’t have the resources for that—but what I could do, and was actually quite simple, was to give them a personality level around that of cats and dogs, although they would be a lot more capable in other aspects.

  It was always dangerous to do that because, well, not every personality would be what you expected them to be. Some might be... a bit more eccentric. A perfect example was Bob.

  He wasn’t even a proper AI yet, but in some things, he was quite stubborn. He still did his job better than any other hauling drone I had, and that was the upside to having personalities—they usually became quite good at their assigned tasks.

  Upgrading didn’t take long. It was actually quite simple, although I had plenty of drones to go through. The ship computer was the last one I upgraded, having connected them all to my brain-computer.

  If I didn’t have the upgrades I now have, I would be dead. Currently without the battery, I could run about a dozen connections. That was better than expected. With the number of connections, I was currently running I needed to recharge the battery every 8 hours so most of the time I stayed plugged in.

  It felt quite crowded when everyone was online, so I made some programs to handle communications so I wouldn’t constantly hear when they talked to each other.

  It wasn't like the talking Lola and I did—they communicated with beeps, but I actually understood the drone language.

  Something a lot of people did wrong when getting AIs with these types of personalities was leaving them alone to do their tasks. That would not be the best approach. What you did was communicate with them, help them, so you would form a proper bond.

  So for hours and hours, I talked with them and helped them understand their tasks. That was quite difficult to do as I had 112 connections. Even the nanomachines were quite loud. Although they didn’t have an AI personality, they did have a lot of work to do so needed a lot of answers.

  My body was so tired, I needed a lot of rest.

  What I would’ve loved was a few months recovering and getting to know all the new AIs. Things, however, don’t work out the way you expect them to. Because I needed to make so many bio-cybernetics, I had a real problem with food.

  The trip to the Trade Centre would take about a month. It could take longer, so I would like to have at least two months’ worth of food, but I was almost underneath that number, and I think it was going to take another week before I went through the mana rebirth.

  Of course, there were other trade stations between us and our destination, but in none of them could I register as an adventurer, which would complicate some things. If I needed to, I still could dock. At least I knew that I wasn’t going to starve. Still, it would be a bit annoying having to deal with extra questions.

  Living with my new cybernetics got better day by day. The stiffness started to disappear. I could move more steadily as I used tools, and slowly, I was getting used to the new way I was seeing and feeling things. It was strange being able to be connected to so many beings with their own personalities but still being able to handle that amount of communication with ease.

  My AR was also working so much better. Lola was constantly upgrading the program, making small improvements. The sharpness of the blueprints displayed was the best I’d ever seen.

  I got so many real-time details just by thinking about stuff a little bit—like wondering how long a piece of metal was and all of a sudden being able to see real-time calculations showing the measurements and even what materials that metal was made out of, if I knew it.

  It was hard to test out how well I could estimate range, but on the ship, I could do it within millimeters even 15 meters away, as that was the longest unbroken sightline I was able to find on this ship. There were just too many things on the ship and too little space.

  One of those things was the mana rebirth chair, with its silver and gold spikes. Connected to it were many cubes, and according to Lola, it had been ready for quite some time. I was still half convinced this was a hoax. I guess we will see.