Three weeks and two days later
 
The screens to my left and right, which would allow me to see everything around my ship when sitting in the pilot’s chair, were gone. What replaced them were storage vessels that held the different bio-cybernetic organs that were going into me in about an hour.
 
Drones were moving about, practicing the surgical moves they were about to perform. These were the medical drones I had brought with me, so this was their job, but it was still eerie to watch them practice cutting me apart.
 
Once again, I brought up the list of cybernetics ready and scheduled for the operation. Only one was still orange; the others were green. The orange meant it was still going through testing to ensure it would function as it should.
 
In that accident, the most damaged part was my left side, so most of that was entirely cybernetic. But that acid-like substance was carried around my body through my circulatory system. It affected my nervous system even more, but fortunately, I was saved before it could damage my spine or penetrate my brain.
 
Some of the stuff was not too far gone, so they were able to save it, like over half of my circulatory system, but the other half still ended up as semi-cybernetic. That will all be replaced now, including my heart. While I have plenty of my own skin left, it will all be replaced with something that should be a bit more resilient.
 
The entire respiratory system, including an update to the gas canisters that allowed me to function in the thin Earth atmosphere, will be replaced. My stomach, liver—well, almost my entire insides that fit into my chest and stomach area—but funnily enough, my bladder and everything below that is mine, except for half of my hip and my left leg.
 
My left arm as well, and about 35% of the muscle mass of my torso, almost all of it on the left side. Everything, including the muscles, was made to work basically like normal flesh, but this new one was going to be tougher. That’s why the bones that were still mine would get strengthened, including the joints.
 
It would not make me capable of crushing tungsten. Although, I should be able to put at least finger marks onto steel. As for lifting, I will be able to do it better, but, well, that’s never just the job of a few muscle groups; you do it with your whole body. Although, I guess I would still be good at arm wrestling, even though I’m a right-handed person, which is a bit awkward.
 
The chemicals that destroyed so much of me mostly destroyed my entire nervous system, poisoning it. The one I have is not the best, but that’s why I also have an upgrade for this.
 
Unfortunately, it's not feasible to make it better in the sense of increasing reaction speed, as you can't really make signals go much faster than they already are. But what Lola and I could do was make the pathways a bit shorter and more efficient, which should result in at least a marginally better result.
 
Behind my heart would go the main component of the heat exchanger cybernetic. This is something entirely new, so much so that I have not heard of that kind of cybernetic before although there were rapid cooling systems for your on-board computers.
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My left arm was also not normal as next to the joint was the battery or generator slot. Right now, it was going to have a carbon sheet battery the best Earth technology could make, but there should be better stuff out there. Hopefully something that could eventually allow me to replace the battery with a generator.
 
On my right side, mostly, I had cybernetics that I was able to get through the underground market, as all of my officially gotten money needed to go into keeping me housed and to buy the needed upgrades for those cybernetics I could get no other way, but that was not enough.
 
Without learning how the underground market worked, I wouldn’t have been able to get the necessary materials to feed my cybernetics to keep them functioning properly as I continued to grow. The pains of having cyberware smaller than what they connected with was horrible.
 
The reason why I was doing this in the pilot chair was because it had the function of being able to supply me with blood and keep that blood oxygenated. Also, to my right was a setup with an IV filled with a mixture of fluids that should keep me fed and hydrated.
 
This was going to be a long surgery—at least 48 hours—after which I would be under for about a week to let the nanomachines keep me alive while the bio-cybernetics integrated properly and ran through their setups.
 
Right now, I can’t really focus on keeping my mind off everything happening around me. Even doing some design work wasn’t helping. In fact, it was actually making things worse, as the design I was currently working on could never work, so I scratched it out and put my design notebook aside.
 
There was always a chance that this surgery might fail. It would mean that I would never wake up. I never much liked the idea of going in my sleep. I would much prefer that when my life came to an end, I would be awake. To understand that this was it. Unfortunately, you can’t get everything you want. Most of the time, you don’t even get a bit of what you want.
 
I decided to open up the galaxy map and study that a bit. Perhaps that would help. The map now was a lot more filled out, and there were a lot of black systems. Those were the ones that had intelligent life that hadn’t yet reached a technology level that would allow FTL. I did notice that some of those black worlds were in grey areas marked as unexplored.
 
“Hey, Lola, if those areas are unexplored, how does anyone know that there are habitable worlds—let alone worlds with intelligent species on them?”
 
“That’s because that database isn’t supplied by anyone in this galaxy. It’s on a quantum net site that lists all systems with intelligent life in them. I’ve marked them as black because going there is a death sentence because of the universal law.”
 
“You need to explain things a bit better to me because I’m lost.”
 
“Everything goes back to the First Rebellion. Before that, there were no universal laws. The First Civilizations to reach space and FTL fought with each other, conquered numerous worlds, and, of course, every habitable world discovered with natives on them meant profitable exploitation.”
 
“Eventually, what everyone calls the Starter Civilizations had more of those natives doing everything for them than they had their own people. Eventually, those natives, who were treated horribly, forced to fight wars, and do everything, finally rebelled. They destroyed the First Civilizations and implemented the First Universal Law to stop the same thing that happened to them from happening again.”
 
“They put entire generations into figuring out how to make the universe as safe as possible for people who couldn’t protect themselves because they simply weren’t technologically advanced enough.”
 
“Apparently, there are some scouts that have gone through every planet, somehow implanted themselves in worlds with life, turned themselves into quantum computers, and now monitor those systems, reporting any FTL jump recorded in them.”
 
“Honestly, there are a lot of conflicting reports on the quantum net, and I’m not even entirely sure what I just said is accurate. But one thing is for sure—on that quantum net site, there are a lot more galaxies listed as being fully explored and all the planets marked than there are properly connected galaxies. So, whatever is actually happening, it is accurate and has been going on for millions of years.”
 
I looked at all those black dots. There were so many.
 
One of the reasons why there were so many was because of the definitions of sapient life. By universal law, and even by AI law, beings with a personality even a bit lower than cats and dogs would be counted as sapient.
 
No mirror test or any other to determine if someone was or wasn’t sapient. You apparently just went by this list and that was it, but I wasn’t going to try to even argue with established law that had been in place for millions of years. In fact, I agreed with them—at least in that.
 
What I also understood was the temptation to break that law. Worlds that had life on them were incredibly valuable, and just having so many within reach but never being able to even see what was there would be quite frustrating.
 
I continued to look at the map until Lola spoke up.
 
“It's time.”
 
“So it is. I am ready.”
 
I actually wasn’t, but I looked around, letting the chair clamp down and the needles pierce my neck. If this was it, it had been a good run, although it would be a shame not to have seen the galaxy and what it held.