by Ashlie Minamida » Thu Apr 04, 2024 3:36 pm
While Samantha and Miss Bell - plus (n) Wills - are working, Ashlie is left to examine the landscape. She'd be more than curious to investigate more closely but even if driven by pure scientific curiosity, it'd still be a severe invasion of privacy. Except of course... She looks up at the distant structure in the sky, though while to everyone else it seems to almost reside at the edge of space it's more like a low flying plane to her. Her hand reaches back to touch the artificial port at the back of her neck and the structure's lights seem to blink in response.
A manifestation of her subconscious mind? She reaches out with one hand and moves her fingers through a complicated series of exercises, part of her attempts to be more conscious of her body in the absence of total awareness and control of every little system. The machine in the sky responds in kind, segments moving, unfolding, reconfiguring. And reaching back; a cable unfurls, tipped with a connector and a protruding filament of metal. Ashlie lowers her hands and closes her eyes, becoming more aware of the movement of the cable as it comes closer, winding around one arm in an almost gentle gesture before slipping past her shoulder, rearing back and plunging into the back of her neck, cable filaments driving into her spinal cord with just a brief flash of brilliant pain.
And then her perception leaves her body, taking in her surroundings in a broad awareness that reminds her of constructing a view from multiple cameras. She'd taken to thinking of the nanites suffusing her body as an almost separate system but it's an erroneous affectation. Cognizance blooms throughout her body like familiar pieces of a machine she build herself and she knows. Has known all along, deep down. Vulcanized muscle fibers, alveoli glittering with metal-studded membranes, molecular machinery augmented by pico-scopic additions working seamlessly together, bone structures made from organic metals that should not, could not exist. And finally she realizes why she could never feel anything resembling Natalie's technopathy. It never just transmitted electronic signals between mind and machine, it's function goes so much deeper. Facilitator. Adaptor. It had shifted focus. Instead of bridging brainwaves and electromagnetic signals it now combines two other incompatible functions; biology and inorganics. Ensuring her body can function, melding flesh and metal, sinew and plastic.
And finally she can feel her power dancing across every cell of her body, awareness granting some measure of conscious control and the barrier between 'herself' and the autonomous functions of the nanites fall away. A body doesn't need to be aware of it's every function, in fact a normal mind could not handle the deluge of information consciously. But hers is no normal mind. She flows through the data, is the data, knows every line encoded in her neural net and where new curls of code have formed to govern functions of her body. A process fully aware of it's own existence.