One of these days I'll spend longer than an hour on one of these things and give you something worth reviewing. In the meantime, this is today's effort: in Schroedinger's Human, a few people liked the "reboot" sequence. I've played with that idea some.

Activity detected. Decompressing kernel..................../o ok
Checking.... 0%...20%...40%...60%...80%...100%          ok
Loading HMI                                                                ok
Loading Modules                                                          ok
Loading NIC                                                                fail
        NIC not detected
Loading NeuralNet                                                        ok
Looking for host                                                           found
        Host interface available on port 0
Bringing HMI service up                  3    2   

The text scrolled at the edge of my perception, like seeing something out of the corner of your eye. If I looked for it, it was gone. But, if I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, let my mind forget about my eyes for a moment, the scrolling text clarifies and hangs in space, in letters about 10 feet high.  In a few moments, the software in the dongxi will finish its loading routine and in place of the huge letters will be a series of icons and a workspace upon which I can do... whatever.

I peel the electrodes from my forehead and chest, and reach around to remove the small optic fibre running into the small of my back. They know I'm awake now; a doctor will come soon. How much do they know? Can they read my dreams?

I am privileged. I am the first truly augmented human. While on the outside I look like a boy of 19, slender and trim with floppy black hair and the awkward clumsiness of teenage starting to give way to the confidence of early adulthood, on the inside I am a god. Or a monster. My body bears the scars of the operation. One is just slightly larger than an appendectomy, just a little too far around. There is another, matching one on the other side. And in my back is a small plastic port, too small to see, though large enough to snag clothing.

I have been practising. It only takes me a moment now to switch from the workspace to my eyes and back again. I am trying to see whether I can perceive the two together, to overlay my menus and icons onto the world, but it's hard. For nearly three weeks, I couldn't see anything at all. For the last month as I've been doing my morning exercise routine and physio to try to heal the scarring inside, I've been able to realise more that the dongxi is there; in the last week it's begun to feel a part of me.

The "thing", the dongxi is a small computer system. It can only be fitted inside a man, and then only inside a slim and strong man. Overweight men have too much fat internally, and women are banned from the tests for other reasons. I was in my school basketball team, and was taught, though no longer practice, a gong-fu of the region. I am tall and strong, though not bulky.  I studied hard at school and did well in the regional exam competitions. I am in the top 3% of the district, and personally commended by the Leader. I am special. And so I was chosen to be one of the shortlist.  The dongxi is a little bit larger than a VHS cassette, specially shaped to fit snugly against the inside of my pelvis and sacrum. It has a silicone tube stiched into my renal artery to feed the fuel cell with the same sugar and oxygen that I need to live. It's a hungry beast: when it was new I felt breathless. Now I am stronger.

The doctor arrives with a perfunctory greeting. It's 08:12. I know that instinctively. He checks my pulse and breathing, and orders me to go to the gym. My blood sugar level is low at 3.6 mmol/l and I tell the doctor this. My blood oxygen is within limits, so I don't tell him. Those are the only variables I can monitor now, though the doctor tells me that one day I will be able to do more.

Before I'm allowed breakfast, I must do the exercises they give me. The TV is boring this morning, so I play with plotting graphs of blood oxygen against breathing, blood glucose against heart rate. I make a surface plot of blood glucose and heart rate vs breathing and the exercise machine's reported resistance. I remember this for the future. In a year, maybe I can see whether I've improved, or whether age is setting in.

I will spend today the same way as always, studying for my degree, doing physical and psychological tests. I am allowed to study for the degree though having the dongxi is like taking a library into the exam with me. I will probably never be awarded my degree.

Shutting down.

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Activity detected. Decompressing kernel..................../o ok
Checking.... 0%...20%...40%...60%...80%...100%          ok
Loading HMI                                                                ok
Loading Modules                                              
        Renal                                             ok
        Liver                                             ok
        Immune                                         ok
        Spatial                                           ok
        Overlay++                                     ok
        MonCom                                        ok
        ModuleLauncher                              ok
             All modules loaded                                          ok
Loading NIC                                                                 ok
        IP 192.168.3.24 mask 255.255.252.16 gw 192.168.3.1
        SSID "" mode public enc none
Loading NeuralNet                                                       ok
Looking for host                                                          found
        Host interface available on port 0, 1
Bringing HMI service up                  3    2   1           ok

I have been whole for a year now. The researchers have worked hard to provide me with sensors to monitor my biological body's components. Soon, they promise, I will start to receive augmented organs that can assist or replace the functions of my biology.  I bear more scars now.

Now that they are sure that I am not physically harmed I have been allowed to sleep unmonitored.  I have also been allowed to go home, and meet with my family and all my old friends. My best friend is married now. They seemed strange to me. Slow-witted. I couldn't work out what they all wore on their wrists for a moment. I forgot they wouldn't even know the time. But we still have fun together, my human friends and I.

My development has improved now that I have the ModuleLauncher and ModuleCoder. I have been improving my own software. I can write and test far faster than the researchers and monitor the efficiency of the code.

Today is my "birthday". Not the mundane, biological birth of humans. One year ago I accessed my first menu to read the time. Today there is nearly nothing I can't do.  Earlier this morning I broke into a movie studio's computer: I have seen all the latest movies already, on the biggest screen with the best sound system ever imagined. Nobody else can share that experience with me, it is mine.

I decide to treat myself. There is a good restaurant in the shopping centre, where we all used to meet up after school to chat and play and occasionally help each other with homework, before our parents got back from work and family life had to start again. All the old crowd promised to be there to wish me well on my new birthday. Just for fun I decided to break into the mall's security computer. It was ridiculously easy, but the link was too slow. I wriggled a little deeper into the system and the world opened up to me.

When I was a child I saw a picture of how a fly sees - lots of pictures, all the same. What I saw now was like that but all the pictures were different. I looked for myself - was that me, over there? I tried to access my eyes, but the link back was so slow. Who was that talking to me? A boy, (could that be my friend?) was standing in front of me. He's saying something that I can't make out. Could it be "abomination"? Hurry up! Access eyes, ears, something?  The boy's arm lifts. I move and zoom three cameras to look, write an image processing module on the fly and loaded it. The resolution wasn't good enough - was that a pen he was holding or...? NO!

The cameras blinked for a moment. I saw the boy running away. I saw myself standing for a moment. At the edge of my awareness alarms started pouring in and I was helpless this side of the link. I cancelled the access, pulled back as much as I could. When I finally dropped the connection, I watched myself fall. It took nearly four seconds to resolve the picture and see the blood. I looked for the boy that could be my friend: I should feel angry now, I should feel pain or at least loss. I didn't feel. Something inside me was looking for something. A connection that wasn't there anymore, a feeling.

Eventually I saw it: host connection lost. Now what?