Theseus

My eyes fluttered open slowly, my mind reeling for a moment as I tried to place where I was, but as my conscious mind began to recall where I'd drifted off, it was obvious that there was still something wrong. My eyes went wide as I looked around. All I saw was white. Not a white interior of a ferry, not even a white building. Just white.

I tried to gasp and let out a noise, but in flowed something thick and fluid. I almost choked before I realized that my body wasn't asphyxiating despite the fact that I felt as if I was floating in thick water.

At first I thought that I must have still been dreaming, but despite how foreign the situation was to me, it felt too real. There was too much alarming clarity to what I was experiencing.

Looking down at myself, I saw that my clothes were gone. I was completely in the nude. But more alarmingly was when I saw my left arm. The skin had been stripped away, and a console of some sort was sticking out of my flesh. I'd seen its like before, an electronics control unit that would allow a person to interact directly with computers at a touch. The skin around it looked scarred and irritated, as if it had been shoddily grafted into place. It made my whole arm itch, like there was something terribly alien about it.

It wasn't uncommon for people, especially in labor and tech jobs, to augment their bodies to better interact with heavy machinery as well as very technical computers, but I'd always disliked the idea of turning myself into a machine, and had avoided getting even the most basic implants. So what was this doing on my arm? Panicked, I began feeling around my body, and after touching around, I was alarmed to find a metal plate behind my ear. An implant interface. I'd helped with the design of such things before, but I didn't have any cranial implants either. At least I didn't before. I found several ports of some sort at my neck, and some kind of thick metal enclosure grafted at my hip. Every piece of it felt wrong. I wanted to tear them off, but I knew enough about these things to know how bad of an idea that would be. I'd be bleeding out immediately.

What had happened? Where was I? How long was I out that someone had the time and opportunity to perform cybernetic SURGERY on me? And why? One thing was for certain, I couldn't just sit here floating in this void, lamenting over my state, that wasn't going to solve anything.

I began to reach out and tried my best to 'swim' through the nothingness that surrounded me, but I wasn't even sure if I was moving at all. There was nothing to latch onto. No landmarks to judge my movement. Literally nothing.

All I could do was lie still. What could I do? I tried to scratch at my new body parts, the unyielding metal causing me to grumble silently. At least it wasn't painful, but it was annoying, and without anything to distract from it, it was all I could think of. It dawned on me that the fact that it wasn't painful meant that I had not only been unconscious for long enough to have this done to me, but also for long enough to mostly recover.

Just as boredom was starting to set in, there was pain. A spike of pressure to my head like I'd never felt before, as if someone was stabbing a needle directly into my brain. I tried to let out a scream, but the fluid surrounding me forced me into silence. I held my hands up to my head, but it felt like it was coming from inside of me.

I tried hard to hold on and brace for the pain, but the harder I held against it, the more it hurt. I closed my eyes and when I finally felt myself run out of energy, I let go of my head, only to find a throbbing ache replacing the pain. Had I been holding my own head so tight that I was causing the pain myself? Feeling slightly embarrassed. I let my body relax, the pain slowly starting to dissipate, but the feeling of a foreign influence in my mind remaining. It was like I was connected to something. There was something there that I could feel.

I reached out and I felt something that was almost familiar. Something akin to a console. Except it wasn't there. It was... in my mind. Whoever had tinkered with my body must have changed something beyond the surface of my head too. I wanted to cry. Who would violate me like this? Why? I just wanted to go home. Instead, here I was trapped in some sort of emptiness, trying to figure out the machinery operating under my skin.

I took in a deep breath. The fluid was just as nourishing to my lungs as air had always been, so I did my best to calm myself. Breathing in and out. I had to remain grounded if I was going to make sense of any of this.

I went over what I knew about cybertech. It allowed a human mind and body to operate directly with various types of technology. So what kind of technology was I feeling right then? I closed my eyes and imagined it. I tried to look for thoughts that didn't belong. They came easily.

Machinery. Terminals. Consoles. Sensors. Whatever I was feeling, it was elaborate. Something was moving... inside of me? No, inside of the machine I was connected to. I felt as if this thing was an extension of what I was. As the pieces started to come together, I began to get a sense of space. There were rooms. This wasn't just a machine, it was a structure. And things were moving about in it. People, I began to piece together. I was hooked to the inside of a building? A security system perhaps?

No, there was more than just sensors. Life support. Water and waste management. Generators... Propulsion. Propulsion? All these things combined could only mean one thing. This thing that I felt was a spaceship.

That was impossible. Ordinary humans couldn't interface directly with anything of this scale, much less something mobile. It would fry a human mind in an instant. Things like emotion, reasoning, and personality conflicted with the massive processing power needed to run such things. That's why ship cores, blank non-sapient clones grown for this specific purpose, were used as the central control unit of spaceships. So why was my mind still slowly continuing to reach through these systems with little more than a mild headache to show for it? I should have been braindead by now if I had been connected to such a thing.

The how of it could wait. I had to focus. If I had access to such things, that meant I had to have at least some control over it, right? I tentatively reached forward and tried to touch the 'console' in front of me, but my body flailed just as uselessly as before. I took in another deep breath. I wasn't used to my thoughts having control of something real, but I knew that was how these things worked. I stilled my body and instead pretended to reach out, not with my body, but with my mind. I could feel that console.

It worked like anything else. It showed biological readouts, and it had interfaces to change modes, reading heart rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure... and psionic resonance. I paused. It dawned on me that I was reading my own biometrics, but something was very wrong. Arthausen Syndrome caused some scanners to mistakenly pick up psionic resonance in my mind, but there was no actual potential there. That was a human impossibility. It had to be implanted, and it destroyed much of what made someone human when it did, hence why it was only performed on otherwise braindead clones to make ship cores.

It dawned on me right then, I knew what I was looking at. Somehow, I wasn't just controlling a part of the spaceship I was in, I was acting as this ship's core myself.

I tried to concentrate and 'look' around the room. It was almost like I could see what was there, but it was distant, like remembering an image rather than seeing it. There was a large metal sphere at the middle of the room. I'd seen a ship core module before. That was me, I was enclosed inside. I had to get myself out. There was a release switch. I tried to connect with it, manipulate it, but it was mechanical, and had no controls connected to me. I wouldn't be able to get myself out.

There was someone in the room with me. Another person. I wondered if I might be able to signal them. Let them know I was there. Tell them to release me. But the only terminals were for monitoring power output and my own biometrics scanner. I could only change what information it displayed, not input my own text or noises. The solution wouldn't be in this room.

I tried to reach further. As I did, it felt like I was beginning to discover limbs that I hadn't had before. As soon as I envisioned it, it felt like the hallway that I was 'seeing' had become a part of me. A piece of a growing mechanical structure forming inside of my mind. It was hard to process too much at once, but it was easy to think of the chamber that I was physically inside of as my 'heart' which I was expanding away from. The hall was quiet. It didn't take long until it was a whole part of me as well. So I reached further.

It was like I was building a map in my head. I quickly became accustomed to keeping my eyes closed and focusing on the mental world building up around me. A longer hallway this time. A single person idled inside. A larger man. Detail was becoming easier to parse. I could tell the person inside of my room... inside of my heart... they were also a tall man, but this one seemed... gentler somehow. I reached into some of the rooms off of the long hall. Dormitories. They felt small, but personal; they were very lived in and had a homey feeling. At the end of the hall, there was a larger space that was proving more difficult to get a grasp on. It had multiple sensor arrays and the feedback from each other was confusing, so it was a larger room. A cargo bay? I gave up on it for the time being. It was starting to become a headache.

I tried to look back to the first hall. There were stairways going both up and down. I grumbled to myself. Mentally mapping in a 3D space was harder. I thought for a moment. Helms were typically at the top or the front of a ship, right? And a helm would have a communications console. I began slowly creeping my influence upward, using the various sensors to add a greater range to what was quickly beginning to feel like a second skin; a shell around me. It was somehow comforting. Like I belonged there. It was like I was safe despite the obvious danger that I was actually in.

I shook off the feeling and found another hall. A quick cursory glance and I found there was a restroom in one direction. I was briefly alarmed at the thought of the sanitation of my own situation. Was a ship core module made to filter waste or was I just floating in my own refuse? The fluid didn't seem at all filthy, but still, I wasn't privy to the sanitation systems inside of one.

It was a question that I'd have to ponder later. I ignored the restroom and continued forward. And at last, I found it. A console that was clearly meant for system navigation. This had to be the helm.

And there was a person sitting at the console. She wasn't terribly big or small, but as she came into detail, I began to notice that she had a certain presence that made her seem grander than she looked at first glance. Charisma, I suppose I would call it. That and impatience. She was waiting for something, and when I accessed the console, I quickly learned what. There, she was waiting for a bar with the words 'SYSTEM INITIATION' to fill from left to right. It read 41%. Was that me, I wondered? Was I the system the ship was waiting on? Was it waiting for me to complete the picture and build the ship around my mind so that I could feel it all? So that I could become the ship wholly? I supposed that a standard ship core would probably be able to boot like this in a uniform time, which meant that she was impatient because I was being slow.

It dawned on me as I reviewed the rooms I'd visited so far, that this was not any kind of standard ship layout that I'd seen before. This was a personal vessel, not a corporate or military affair. What had I gotten into?

For now, I just had to access the console she was watching. I didn't know what would happen if I closed out the loading bar, if it would stop sending me so much sensory data that let me view more of the ship, so I refused to touch it. Instead, I looked for another piece of the interface I could manipulate. The clock. Messing with the system clock display shouldn't have too bad of a negative effect on the system, so I felt my way through to it just like I would any other computer. I tried to focus on how I could change it, and I found I had access to every aspect of the computer. It was like I was speaking to it in assembly. I was good with computers, but could it really be as simple as I felt it would be? It was like I was thinking in just the same way as it. I froze the timer at 16:38. Perfect. Since they were all different numbers, I could change the fonts and communicate up to a five letter word.

The code opened up for me and it didn't take more than a moment to edit the clock to instead display the world 'HELP'. The person at the console reacted almost immediately, sitting up in her chair. I noticed that my tampering had changed the number 1 to H on the loading bar as well, and realized that I must have been editing a system variable, but it was too late to rethink that. She'd clearly noticed the message on the clock, so I changed it again. 'CORE' I wrote this time, then seeing her staring, I changed it again to 'ALIVE' and then once more to 'HELP'.

The woman stood from her chair quickly and stepped away from the console. Had she gotten the message? I felt her walk out into the hallway and down the stairs. It was strange, like feeling her move through me. I followed her through my mental map, like a ghost watching her every move, and I saw her look at the sensor arrays more than once, noticing them following her. She walked straight into my heart and I thought I heard her yell something. I hadn't even thought about sound, but I must have been getting that data from my sensors too, there just hadn't been much to hear just yet. It still seemed garbled as I became used to it, but she was addressing the man watching my biometrics. The man responded, again I couldn't make sense of his words, only that he was speaking, and they had an exchange. After just a moment, the man walked up to my chamber. I watched him put his hand on the release lever, and...