Michael’s body stayed inside the AutoDoc for three weeks, and… that was kind of my fault (OK, not kind of, it definitely was).

First, there was that first week of my loony personal time, and then the following two additional weeks I needed to do some… tweaks. The MI would not wake him up without my OK, and he was fine where he was; in a state of induced coma, with all his bodily needs taken care of by the AutoDoc.

You have to understand, being turned into an AI (or AI adjacent), does not make one instantly omniscient, quite the opposite. After snooping around inside the ship’s systems, I realized how much I didn’t really know. This was all new to me, so it took awhile for me to learn the ropes.

There was this virtual ocean of information, and me, standing on a small desert island, having no freaking idea about what is what. Imagine being in the largest library in the world and all those books are written in gibberish. Oh, and the main libraries about who built the ship and any reference to historical events were obviously erased, but most of the technical data was still here. Just like buying a new appliance with all user manuals that would enable you to use it, but without any information of designers and workers who assembled it. Not so much as a ‘Made in…’ mark.

At first, the MI was driving me nuts with its unhelpfulness, but it turns out I didn’t know how to ask the right questions. If you ever tried to have a meaningful conversation with one of those digital personal assistants, you know exactly what I mean. Besides, this one had zero personality or imagination, and the damn thing was connected directly to my mind. It’s a wonder I didn’t go all schizo on him when for the thousandth time, he gave me completely different information than the one I was asking for.

Of course, it helped greatly that time, in this new reality that I found myself in, was running at different speeds than the real-world (It was faster, a helluva lot faster).

What was two weeks for Michael (and all you linear entities), for me, was almost two years of subjective time spent educating myself.

I essentially had to learn the language the MI was programmed in, since, as I said, all the user manuals, including the one for the CEI, were written in it. There was some kind of auto-translate option, but it was a freaking nightmare, just as the one that shall not be named. (Yes, I mean that search engine one.)

My exuberance when I found and activated that function was crushed with pages of incomprehensible text that made no sense whatsoever. (Did I tell you that calling that program machine intelligence was an oxymoron, there was no intelligence in its ancient code, nothing but instructions that it blindly followed.)

The only reason it even knew the English language was all those years gathering some radio and TV satellite signals beamed to Earth that reached grandpa’s valley. One of its autonomous functions was to analyze all received data and find a correlation between it and its default language. That was not a small blessing since without it, my education would have been a thousand times more difficult.

Once I understood that language, I had to educate myself with the new technology I suddenly had access to. For a time, instruction manuals (that were incorporated into every piece of technology on the ship) became the bane of my existence. There was no way around it, no magical download and instant understanding like in the movies, I had to learn that crap page by page.

Then there was Michael, lying there in the AutoDoc with his body still healing.

Yep, that's right, the MI (or Dum-Dum as I started calling it), wouldn’t perform any additional healing procedures except the essential ones. For anything extra, it required my authorization since I was apparently classified as the closest relative. The AutoDoc kept him stabilized, but it would not 100% fix him (not even his old busted knee, on account of it not being a life-threatening condition).

Therefore, medical decisions would have to be done by me, with draconian restrictions… just great.

I didn't have the foggiest idea of what I should do. I’m not a doctor, and there were thousands of options and procedures that could be performed. I don’t think choosing them at random would have actually helped. If Michael woke up with a pair of big knockers as a consequence of one of those choices, who do you think he would blame.

(OK, it’s highly unlikely that some wrong choice would have resulted in breast augmentation, but it was not out of the realm of possibility.)

A human mind is a wonderful thing, it remembers much more than you realize, and I had access to a lifetime of my own memories. Do you have any idea how much useful information has passed in front of your eyes, without you even realizing it? All those medical shows you watched on TV, things you read in newspapers, books, first aid courses, pamphlets in a doctor’s office. Your mind records everything without you being the wiser.

Consequently, I created a database of all those random pieces of knowledge and combined them with everything the MI had in its memory, to create something that I could work with. In a day, I had the comprehensive medical knowledge of an adequate physician (even more, since they are human and fallible, where I could not forget a single thing).

That was the time I dreamed of having an Internet connection. This entire amateur MD escapade I set myself on, would have been a million times easier if I had access to more data. The MI wouldn’t transmit one single thing, all it did was receive, and badly at that.

That no transmit restriction was ultimate, and Dum-Dum simply didn’t want to even acknowledge any request for connecting the ship to outside sources without explicit orders from Michael—who was in a coma… catch 22 again.

I never really had the heart to tell Michael how he had been kept alive for three weeks. His body still needed sustenance, and all biological stock in the ship's stores was so much dust now. It has been 12,900 years after all, and nothing organic keeps that long. As a result, I had to get creative with the acquisition of bio-matter in order to keep him alive. The AutoDoc borrowed most of the fat tissue in his body, and there were still some unexploited nutrients in his stomach and large intestine. Additionally, there were a good number of earthworms beyond the rock which encapsulated the ship, and one or two animals with a burrow near the entrance shaft. The MI was kind enough to use robotic drones and collect them for me since for some reason he didn’t want to give me access to control them myself.

As they say, waste not, want not, so I harvested every bit of their remains into new biological stock. With those kinds of supplements, Michael could have lasted inside the AutoDoc for a few more months, but by that time, he would have looked like a concentration camp survivor. (At least those twenty extra pounds of fat we acquired in the last decade were put to good use.)

Three weeks was the longest he could be kept under without suffering any degradation of essential biological systems, I didn't have much time left.

Now, the Cerebral Enhancer Implant is an amazing piece of tech and it is light-years above current human technology. I analyzed that thing down to a molecular level, and while it was an excellent design of functionality, it was not exactly perfect. It was obvious to me that it wasn't designed by an AI, since it lacked that level of perfection I was beginning to appreciate more and more. It was created for a slightly different mind than Michael’s, and I guess it still would have worked fine, but not to 100% of its capabilities.

There were a few snags here and there, which I managed to fix, and generally improved the whole thing significantly using medical nanites. The original user interface would have required a long learning curve, but after my tinkering, it became much more user-friendly. That took some time, but it was time well spent. I labeled my improved model as CEI 2.0.

You know by now that the nanites are the most important tech on the ship. Without them, I would have been unable to do anything in the real world. Having them inside Michael’s body and fixing him from within was a game-changer of undreamed of proportions. I even took a bit of time to improve their design, increasing their efficiency and shrinking their size by an order of magnitude. The things that I learned while enhancing the CEI 2.0 transferred to this tech.

In the end, it was one generation of nanites making changes and building a second, improved generation. It almost duplicated what evolution does by itself. Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the old girl sure did some good work. I’m planning on additional tinkering with them, making them even more useful in the future, but with the time constraint I am under, this will have to do.

I fixed Michael to a great extent, more than the MI or the AutoDoc would have ever done by themselves. The list of possible fixes was a few pages long. From a busted knee to a few benign cancers, trouble with his teeth, bad eyesight, a buildup of plaque inside his arteries, the onset of Arthritis… a really, really long list.

Some of that I managed to fix or patch, there was only so much I could do without talking to Michael first; again, the MI wouldn’t let me go overboard with fixes. And it required a crazy amount of digital paperwork for every procedure. More than once, I had to skirt the edges of what he would allow me to decide as Michael’s proxy, but I tied him in so many logical loops, it is a wonder he didn’t blow his circuits. (Did I mention that I had a lot of time on my hands?)

You would think that humans were designed with some degree of competence, think again. There are so many inefficient systems to make one scream in desperation. I do not know if it was God or evolution, but the blueprint of the human body should have stayed on the drawing board a lot longer. I could have done so much better (without any false modesty).

During that tinkering, I realized there was no reason why Michael shouldn’t have a longer lifespan (as in—indefinite). With my new generation of nanites, it was possible to make changes on a cellular level, to repair them and ensure they divided perfectly with a few nudges here and there. What's more, the best thing was that the MI didn’t even know what I was doing; I called the entire procedure a simple cellular repair of damaged tissue, so it didn’t put a stop to it. It’s the little things that make your day.

Now, I just needed to find an optimal time to tell Michael when I woke him up. It was a pretty big thing, immortality, and whatnot.

About that blasted MI, it was still giving me constant grief since it wouldn't listen to some of my orders no matter how many different ways I managed to come up with rephrasing them. It recognized Michael as its prime user and the ship's new owner, while I couldn't give a single order about things not related to Michael's well-being that would be obeyed. I had to get creative to accomplish half of the things I planned. And there were some annoying instructions in my memory core that prohibited me from certain things. For instance, I couldn’t enslave the entire human race or cause its eradication. Not that I ever would, but it was annoying, and made me wonder who the hell built this AI-core with such restrictive guidelines.

I had further plans to upgrade Michael, seeing that his very human body, was way too fragile. Being biologically immortal doesn't mean a thing if a simple bullet can blow your brains out, so it needed some major improvements. That was a pet project of mine that I started working on in my free time, as soon as I saw the possibility. It was a good thing my subjective time was so stretched out; it took an insane amount of it to develop some of my… more extreme ideas. Still, nothing could be implemented without his explicit approval; even I wasn't that crazy. My prediction algorithms gave good odds that if things were presented in a certain way, he would go for it. When you get right down to it… I knew myself.

You may think of me as a manipulative SOB, but one of my new life missions was to help Michael in all of his endeavors while having a little fun myself. I didn't think he would have minded some of the things I've done, but why should I bother him with the small stuff, I'm doing it for his own good.

With all things planned for this first stage of our new life finished, I took a subjective day off, (half an hour in real-time), and went over all that happened. Satisfied with the results I gave instructions to the MI and the AutoDoc.

It was time to wake Michael up.