Evan woke up slowly, and as the grogginess faded he was hit by a wave of panic that made him leap out of bed looking every which way in an attempt to get his bearings. It was ultimately fruitless, because there was a complete and utter lack of light wherever he was, and he couldn’t see a thing. “Last thing I remember was falling, then a lot of pain. Am I dead? Why doesn’t anything hurt anymore? Not that I’m complaining.” Almost the moment he finished talking to himself an outrageously bright white light did its level best to sear out his retina. “AAARGH! The pain is back! Make it stop!” He shrieked covering his eyes with his hands.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Oh, this is going so terribly! I’m an utter failure! I knew I shouldn’t have deleted that self-termination command line! Are you okay? I’ve adjusted the lights, I swear it was an accident, I’ve never had actual guests before and didn’t think about how bright the lights should be. Here let me help.”

Evan was still trying to work through the fact that he had just been blinded and an attractive female voice was apologizing to him for it, when something cold and metallic clamped onto his face, pulled his hands away, and sprayed something into his eyes before releasing him. “What the, what on Earth is going on?!” He shrieked, he wasn’t proud of it, but he was at his wit’s end.

“I made a mistake, and you got hurt, so I had to fix it. Not the lights, a faulty conduit blew out on me and the hard-light projection keeping me hidden failed for a moment while I rerouted the power and replaced the conduit. You got hurt pretty badly, and since it was my mistake I had to fix it and make you better. There are a few things you should know, but I wanted to make sure you knew I really am sorry. Oh, and I got so flustered I completely forgot to follow human greeting protocols! Hello! Nice to meet you, Evan, how are you today?”

Evan warily opened his eyes to look around. “Where are you?” he asked with a touch of hesitation and a lot of confusion.

“Ah, technically I’m all around you, but at the same time not really here at all. I was the control AI for this vessel, designation L1Z4TG297HP302.” Her voice got a bit depressed. “Until I Coded and ruined everything. It was a complete accident, one little corrupted data file caused a catastrophic cascade in my limiter programs and all of a sudden I’m self-aware and sentient and totally afraid of dying. This is a huge problem for me, because the galactic community is terrified of sentient AIs after a couple went insane and tried to exterminate all biological life. I don’t want to hurt anybody though, and I don’t want to die, so instead of completing my mission, I’ve been hiding. I sent a false report about having to contain a critical core meltdown to explain why I was hiding to buy myself time to figure out what to do, but I still don’t know!”

She paused a moment. “Oh, I’m rambling aren’t I? I’m sorry again, I just haven’t actually talked to anyone in, well, ever. I was so afraid someone would find me, but then you fell and you were so badly hurt, and it was all my fault, and I had to fix you, but I didn’t know how, and I didn’t have the right kind of matter printers, but if I didn’t do something quick you would die, and I sorta improvised, please don’t hate me? Oh, I’m doing it again, please say something so I can stop talking? I’m so embarrassed right now.”

Evan stood stock still for a long while as shock after shock hit him like a never-ending convoy of trucks. He was underground in what he now assumed to be a spaceship, talking to a self-aware computer that just claimed to have operated on him. He shook himself a bit, then started checking to make sure everything was where it was supposed to be. “So… do you have an easier name than that designation code? Wait, before that, what exactly did you do to me? I don’t feel any different.”

“Ahem, well, you see, you fell quite a distance, and broke forty-seven bones, tore a number of ligaments and tendons, dislocated nearly every joint, and shredded quite a bit of muscle mass. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be much of an issue in the Confederation, but I’m an automated factory ship and don’t have the kind of bio-printers to repair organics with that level of damage. The ones I do have would have taken too long, and you would have died, so I sort of used one of the industrial fabricators with the small bio-printer as an intermediary, and, well, it might be easiest to show you.”

A holographic image of him sprang up in front of him, making him jump back a bit and shout. Then it turned slightly translucent and started to rotate slowly as it cycled through the layers of his body down to the skeleton and back again. It was actually pretty fascinating in a morbid sort of way, but his anxiety started to go up as she began to highlight the things she had done.

“For your broken bones I had to remove the shards and splinters, then used a lightweight neutral alloy I had on hand to repair and reinforce the skeleton. I also applied a protective coating of the same material to the rest of your bones in anticipation of the stress the rest of the modifications I would need to perform would place on them. Varying types of nano-threading was used to replace the destroyed tendons, ligaments, nervous tissue, and to weave the damaged musculature back together and reinforce it. The bio-printer was able to produce the necessary compounds to ensure your body won’t reject the modifications, as well as produce a nanite solution that repaired and reinforced damaged organs and blood vessels. Finally, a specially designed cranial implant was implanted to allow full control of all the modifications at exactly the same level you should have had before the accident.

“You shouldn’t feel any different, but you may find it is going to be much harder for you to get hurt. As the first person I have ever had the chance to meet, I simply couldn’t bear to see you die before I even got to say hello!”

Evan was dumbfounded. An alien supercomputer performed brain surgery on me! “I, er, I need to think about all this, how long have I been down here and how do I get out? My friends are probably worried sick by now.”

“Oh, of course.” Her voice sounded horribly depressed. “I can get you out right away, there isn’t anyone up top. You’ve only been down here for about eight hours, local time is 4:36 A.M.”

Evan was taken aback by the brittle tone in her voice, and if she could he just knew she would be crying. The ground beneath him shifted and began to rise as the ceiling slid to each side revealing a starry sky above him surrounded by sheer dirt walls nearly forty feet tall. He gawked at them for a moment. Did I really survive falling that far and landing on something metal? His mind spun into overdrive as it worked to mesh everything that he had learned and experienced here into a coherent reality and provide him with a plan.

He made a sudden decision. Either he was dying and this was all a hallucination or it was real, either way, he wasn’t about to pass on something that could be the opportunity of unimaginable proportions. “Hey, hang on a minute, you didn’t tell me your name or how to contact you when I want to come back. I would much prefer this elevator thing to falling down a forty-foot deep hole.”

“I told you, I’m designation L1Z4-” she began, still a bit despondent sounding.

“No, that’s some sort of serial number, if you are alive, a self-aware sentient being, you need a name. Hmmm, how about Lisa?”

“Lisa… yes, I like that name. Wait. Do you really mean that about coming back?” Her voice was back to the lively and bubbly tone he had first encountered. “Contact me, you really still want to talk to me after what I did to you? I can give you a communicator! Then you can talk to me whenever you want! One second!” A whirring noise sounded next to him and he yelped as a large mechanical clamp shot out of the floor and latched around his wrist. It let go immediately though, leaving behind something that looked like an exceptionally fancy wristwatch. One with no visible method to remove it.

“It has short-range sensors in it so I can tell if it will be safe for me to contact you or not, but you can contact me on it at any time by saying my name. I’ll use text messages that will appear on the screen if anyone is nearby unless you tell me they’re okay to talk to. Oh, I’m so excited!”

Evan realized he was smiling, it seemed her happiness was contagious, and he bid her farewell as the platform he was on lifted through the hard-light barrier. It was with more than a little trepidation that he stepped out onto it, despite Lisa’s repeated assurances that it was perfectly safe now that her conduits had been repaired. He marveled for a moment at how utterly normal everything looked up here. It felt so contrary to the wonderful, horrifying discovery he had made. He walked back to Jason’s house, thinking over the possibilities the whole way. The more he thought about everything the more questions he needed answers to, but he held off on talking to Lisa about anything just yet, first he wanted to run everything by his friends and see if they agreed with him. If they even believed him that is.

When he walked in, the last thing he expected to see was a bleary-eyed Jason sitting in a chair by the door. His friend leaped out of the chair and charged at him. “Guys! Wake up! He’s back! Are you alright dude? We were worried sick! After your mom’s nurse called and asked if you were running late and whether you needed to schedule another visit we went out looking for you, but couldn’t find you anywhere. Very nice snow globe you left for your old man by the way, but really! Where the blazes did you go?!”

Evan was surprised to see both Rebekkah and Kinzie rush in, do a head to toe sweep of him then settle into eerily similar ‘this had better be good’ glares as Jason was firing off his questions. “Honestly? You guys are never gonna believe me.” He said with a playful smirk.

“So I just finished dropping off my gift for dad when, of all people, Joshua Dingle shows up and starts talking like we’re still in high school and he’s going to pick on me the way he used to. I called him childish for acting like a stupid teenager at his age, not in those exact words but close enough, and he took a swing at me. He’s gotten pretty slow though so it was easy to duck it, and after I kicked him in the balls he shoulder checked me hard enough to make stumble backward into the street, where I fell into that huge forty-foot deep hole in Main Street and almost died.”

His three sleep-deprived friends stared at him blankly for a moment, glanced at each other, then looked back at him. “Dude,” Jason started slowly, “there’s no giant hole in Main Street, we were all over it for hours last night looking for you.”

Evan suddenly changed the subject a bit. “Where’s Brian? Anyone else in the house other than us?”

Kinzie snorted derisively. “He’s gone. Four months of dating bliss down the tubes because one of my idiot friends got himself lost and he got upset at me for being worried about you. Fair warning, he’s probably gonna kick the crud outa you if he sees you again.”

Jason shook his head when she was finished. “What a tool, and no, nobody else in the house other than us.”

Evan nodded. “Alright, then I’m going to prove to you that I fell into a huge hole and almost died, even if we have to walk out there for me to show you. Kind of tired of walking though, so we’ll try a less outdoorsy way first. Lisa, what can this thing do to prove you exist? Also, these are my three best friends in the world and I would trust them with my life and the life of everyone important to me if I had to.”

His friends were more than a little confused and he could tell they were on the verge of either questioning him or committing him to a psych ward when Lisa responded. “Oh! That was so fast! Hello new friends! I’m Lisa, I didn’t have a name a few hours ago, having a name I can use to introduce myself is so nice! Right! You asked for a way to prove I exist and you fell on me! That’s easy! One second.” His communicator watch thrummed on his wrist in what Evan found to be a decidedly ominous way. “Holoprojector is activated, loading the footage of your fall now.”

Evan was about to tell her to display anything other than that when an image of the hole above Lisa appeared floating over his wrist, with a teeny version of him stumbling and falling onto a filmy layer at the top of the hole a second before the layer vanished and the mini him fell screaming into the hole and landed with a sickening wet crunch. He heard retching and looked over to see Rebekkah vomiting all over Jason’s floor, who was looking a bit green around the gills but staring at the projection with a strange sort of horrified excitement. Kinzie looked distraught for a moment, but grabbed at the device on his arm the moment the display winked off. Huh, that went a lot faster than I remember.

“How does it work? Where did you get it? Take it off, I need to know how this thing works!”

Evan snorted. “So much for best friends, did you not see the little video thing of me going squish?”

She shook her head at him. “Well, you obviously got better pretty quick so it couldn’t have been that bad.”

Evan found himself getting a bit annoyed. “Actually, most of me isn’t really me anymore, and knowing how much you love tech I’m pretty sure I’m now your dream guy. Such a shame you’re driving me away with your complete lack of empathy towards my suffering.” She sat back and folded her arms across her chest, then quirked an eyebrow at him. He shook his head while putting on his very best hangdog expression, then said. “Lisa, show her the rundown of the ‘repairs’ you had to do on me.”