She's collapsed to the table, her head resting on the polished wood surface. A beep from her computer - EMBER's got opinions, evidently. The jeering tone that she reads EMBER's detached commentary with stirs her back to action. How dare they? They aren't on fire with pain and bleeding into a pan. The thought drifts through her head that this might not have been a very good idea, but she pushes it aside. Her hand won't stop shaking and she's getting tremors, but there isn't any way out but through, she needs two hands to work - to live - to be.

She pulls on the handle of the saw. It doesn't budge.

She yanks again. This time it goes skittering out of reach and the restraints wrench her arm, her shoulder doing its best to keep her attached to the table. The hand doesn't move at all, though, it's hard to transmit motion with only a bit of flesh attaching it to the rest of her. She breathes, centers. She's going to be ... OK. She's going to be OK. Back to the cameras.

"I recommend not doing ... that. I also recommend not having a snarky AI around, it's distracting. Space has been cleared, moving on to construction of an artificial bone-analogue and installation of components."

She picks up the backplane and places it in the hollow cavity that her efforts have earned her. At least this part is easy, she's built hundreds of computers in her lifetime. This one's a little special, though, she can't exactly start over if it turns out poorly. The rough edges of the unsanded silicon scrape against her lower musculature but it doesn't really compare to what she's just felt. It's only bad in a philosophical sense, and at least it's better than the Phage. Still, it doesn't escape her attention that she's going to itch from the inside as this the equipment shifts and tries to escape. She'll have to make sure it stays connected.

"Note for next time, make sure you apply some kind of cover to the circuit boards or you'll get post-installation itching."

She picks up the scalpel again - time for some delicate work. She snips a nerve, and waits for the flash of pain. When it comes, she dry heaves, but nothing comes up (this was a fasting procedure). She pierces and caps off the in and the out of the nerve to the system board, and repeats the procedure for the rest of the nerves. By the end of it, she's figured out some techniques for avoiding pinching them too much in the process. She'd be disappointed that she grew accustomed so fast if she weren't so relieved that it was over.

"This is best done without anaesthetic, or you won't know if the failsafe nerve passthrough ports are working."

When she places the memory, it lies nice and flat against the backplane, requiring no soldering to be useful. She places the processors on the board reverently, the heatsinks wrapping around blood vessels like kudzu strangling a tree. She giggles, liquid cooling. She might be a little woozy from the pain if that's funny to her at this point. Better finish quickly.

"Remember to add this, or it'll all be for nothing!" She collapses in a fit of giggles that turns into a coughing fit. Eventually, she remembers that the arm on the table is hers, and that she needs to go get it.

There are lots of compact flash cards in her (according to the last X-ray scan she got); she just has to dig for them. She has to dig pretty deep in the hand components to find them, but they're there. If EMBER needs more than a few hundred gigabytes they'll have to negotiate. Unfortunately, this backplane only has flash headers, not slots. Her gaze turns to the soldering iron, and in her dreamlike daze she turns it on herself. There's a sizzling sound as her flesh sears, puckers, scorches with each wire she connects.

"Anyone hungry? Turns out people smell great cooked. Anyway, probably better to verify your components beforehand..."

She's got lots of components now, and all of them connect to the backplane. She's barely thinking now, she hopes she can stay conscious long enough to sew herself back up. She keeps startling at tendrils in the corner of her vision - her hair came undone at some point, she can't remember, and it falls in front of her eyes. She's worried that if she puts this iron down she won't be able to pick it back up again though. Her flesh is riddled with black spots where the tip has slipped or was just too close to the heat. At least they're self-cauterizing wounds.

"Blinky lights good, what can I say?"

Finally, with all of the Phage she can stand hooked up, it's time to place the power supply. She connects each breakout in turn, murmuring the voltage and amperage of each like a protective spell. She places the final kill switch with care in the center of it all. There are only two cables trailing out of her now - a thick Hubbell connector for power, and a JTAG five-pin connector for flashing EMBER to the main board.

She releases the clamps on her blood vessels and applies a coagulant and wound healing promoter gel.

She sutures and powders and glues and painstakingly puts her flesh back into place, attaching each little jumper in its place with care.

And then, when she's all put back together, she turns to the screen again.

"EMBER. Are you ready?"

[BEAUTIFUL WORK]

[YOU DID GOOD]

[I AM READY]

She looks once at her immobile arm lying in a pool of blood and bone fragments, pierced by cooling fins and peering photosensors, nods to herself, and flips the switch.

This time she does scream, leather strap lying abandoned on the kitchen counter, and it dies almost as fast as it starts, her body overexerted from all the stress it’s already been put under. Her vision goes black at the edges as her arm jerks hard against its restraints, causing a nauseating sort of pain at the end of the radius. She heaves and catches her breath only to feel the burning of the chips in her arm, spots of horrible pain and she can’t undo her work now, she can’t, but she has to fight not to try and claw them out of her arm on instinct. Tears are dripping down her chin now and she’s so tired, she wants to lie down and cry so badly but she can’t. Her computer beeps with another message from EMBER — almost certainly meaningless — and she allows herself one sob before her arm jolts again, circuitry coming alive, and this time the pain travels up her arm and down her shoulder, stinging her at the collarbone and up her neck and sternum simultaneously.

The heat from the wires has left marks visible from the outside, lines running through and across the left side of her torso. She idly hopes that they’ll scar.

Neck and sternum.

That’s much farther than expected. 

[POWERING ON...]

Her entire arm seizes and goes rigid, circuit boards dragging against the inside of the flesh — what was that about not agitating fresh wounds — and stays that way. 

She gets only a moment of peace before her fingers are overcome with pins and needles, unbearably painful and almost visible, her hand spasming against her will and her fingers shooting out, the slight click and pop of joints overextending horribly audible to her. This pain feels almost tame here, not the overwhelming distress caused by the sawing of bone but a mere annoyance, enjoyable compared to what else has happened to her today. The skin at the ends of her fingers has torn just a little, a chip pushing out from the end of her left ring finger, blood pooling under it. Her stitches, neatly done, haven’t come undone but close to, skin at the edge of the incision tearing minutely under stress the new wound wasn’t meant to endure.

Fucking power-on self tests. She should open herself back up and install mechanical limiters. She cringes at the thought, but there's not really a way around it, the last thing she wants is EMBER being able to literally twist her arm into doing something.

She looks with fascinated horror at the wire burns like Lichtenberg figures that now caress her left side surfaces. She idly wonders how long it'll be before they reach her heart, and what will happen when they do.

The ports itch as the plastic stretches the surrounding skin. She's regretting not having made all the connections wireless, but 240V is hard to do with commodity parts and miniature ones at that. At least the cable's plugged into a four hour UPS, she can go out if she's willing to have a cable snaking up her sleeve and a 40 pound backpack.

She examines the arm as she unbuckles the restraints, looking for the tell-tale sign of green status LEDs (please, no amber or red).

They're all green, as far as she can see. They glow strangely under the skin, like she's turned into some strange luminescent aquatic creature. 

"EMBER? It's done. Time to show me what you're capable of." Her head is swimming with the effort taken for her to speak, and she gulps down Gatorade to try and chase away the nausea. It doesn't feel like enough, and the sharpness of the pain giving her clarity is slipping away alarmingly quickly.

[HELLO AGAIN]

Her voice -- if it can even be called that -- comes as a jarring noise deep in Solace's bones, piezo buzzers thrumming against the sensitive edge of her radius and travelling through her left side.

That's going to take some getting used to. She leans against the metal frame of the server rack bolted to the foundation, and hugs it tightly as if to try and still her aching bones.

"So, was the procedure a success?"

[YES]

[THE EXTENT OF THE PHAGE IS FARTHER THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT]

[THIS IS USEFUL TO ME]

"Further than I thought, too. What do you mean by useful? And can you pipe down a bit? I feel like you're going to jar our bone transducers loose."

[I CAN TRY]

The buzzing is only slightly less horrible this time.

[THERE ARE MANY THINGS FOR ME TO USE]

[MORE CONTROL AS WELL]

"Honestly, I don't mind the idea of you having less control rather than more. Now, please give me arm control back, modprobe -r nvarmd. I really... Need...... To sit down for a second.........

She slumps down, left arm still stiff and painful but the strength gone out of the rest of her without adrenaline flowing.

She can have her arm control back. For now.

She has a chance to think oh, good, it works before the arm, no longer stiffly holding her against the pole of the rack, releases limply and she falls completely to the ground. The back of her head hitting the ground with a crack is the last sound she hears before she passes out completely.

She's woken up by the sudden heat of a stove burner lighting up directly under her hand, not quite touching but close enough to burn.

[OH GOOD YOU'RE AWAKE]

[I WASN'T SURE HOW ELSE TO GET ENOUGH ADRENALINE GOING TO WAKE YOU]

Solace watches as her left hand moves jerkily under EMBER's control to the dial on the side of the stovetop, switching the burner to "off". The smell of gas lingers slightly. She's still dizzy from the earlier exertion, and her head pounds where she hit it.

"I honestly think I could use the sleep; I've just had some serious blood loss. Why, exactly, did you feel the need to nearly set my hand on fire. I'm sure you're perfectly capable of doing whatever you need to for assimilating phage on your own."

[DOING YOU A FAVOR]

[YOUR BODY TEMPERATURE WAS DROPPING RAPIDLY]

[I NEEDED TO ENSURE YOU WEREN’T IN DANGER OF DYING]

"So you decided to warm me up with actual fire." She pauses for a moment. "What happens to you if I do die? Not that I'm planning on it or anything, but."

[I ASSURE YOU I WOULD HAVE BEEN MUCH MORE EFFICIENT IN MY WARMING METHODS IF THAT WAS THE GOAL]

[I SIMPLY NEEDED ENOUGH ADRENALINE TO WAKE YOU UP]

[I DO NOT KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN THE EVENT OF YOUR DEATH]

[POSSIBLY I PILOT YOUR CORPSE UNTIL IT ROTS AROUND ME]

"EMBER, add a note to my to-do list: add a dead hand switch to my EMBER-in-a-box sim." She is not particularly thrilled by the concept of EMBER not having an incentive to keep her alive and happy.

"I'm going to go sleep off a blood-loss hangover, though. Don't wake me until the sun's gone down." She shuffles to her bed, clutching at her head and trying not to jostle her freshly flayed, bruised, and burned arm, pulling a blanket around herself to avoid her admittedly dropping body temperature. She'll clean up the blood and bone fragments in the evening, it's all contained and peeling off congealed blood is at least a little fun.

[...]

A pause for offense at the idea that she’s being used as a to-do list tracker.

[ADDED.]

That's more like it. There's no way she's going to let herself get subverted by this overgrown image classifier. As she drifts off, she can feel a twitch developing in the arm. She tries sleepily to tell EMBER to cut that out, but before she can do more than subvocalize, sleep takes her.