Painful Lessons

I woke up this morning with a new determination. I needed to understand the technology of this ship and how it functioned. If I was going to be the guinea pig in all this new technology I at least wanted to understand some of it and possibly be able to contribute to some of it, not that I had much hope of that considering how amazing this ship actually was. I informed the ship of my desires and it said it would work on figuring out a way to teach me what I needed to know. In the meantime I went into the habitat to plan some changes in order to allow me to wander in it a bit more, namely, I needed a path to follow, or multiple paths to various locations in there.

Most of the day was spent in planning the paths and personal areas in the habitat. The creatures in there seemed to ignore me for the most part and were not affected at all by any changes. The path was done with stones as to be more natural, it lead from the entrance to my little haven and then to the different areas where there was food. I also had a garden constructed to help me in having some of the harder-to-find things readily available. To care for the garden a miniature probe was constructed to control weeds, water the plants and to harvest as things were ripening. As I gazed around again at this place I remembered that it had only been constructed a couple days ago. It was amazing what the fragments could do in such a short time, especially when combined with advanced technology and a genius mind. Satisfied with today's work I went back to the control room to see how the entity was doing with the plan for teaching me.

As I entered the control room and stepped on the holographic platform the entity showed me what it had come up with. I shouldn't have been surprised really, it had been using mostly types of technology I brought with me that were vastly improved over what they originally were, the only thing about it was I didn't have one of these when I arrived. I inquired of the ship how it learned of skill implants and how it had constructed this one without a blueprint or having an actual implant to reverse engineer. The answer was given simply enough, there were residual traces of the different technologies that had been in the PDA at one time or another and the logs contained more details about the various items, then with the technology I had been carrying it was just a matter of time piecing these different bits of information together, plus, the race of aliens who had constructed the ship had something similar in order to speed up the process of sharing information. Because I was not yet compatible with the alien technology the ship had to come up with something different in order to infuse the knowledge I needed into my head. The most interesting part of the reply was the "not yet" part of the compatibility. I asked the ship what it meant when it said this and it informed me that with the right knowledge and some slight adaptations to the implant I should be quite a bit more compatible which would give me access to some of the advanced technology that the aliens had used when they were on the research station. Satisfied with this answer I grabbed the chip and looked for the inserter, not finding it I asked the ship to give me one to which it replied that this was going to require something a bit more robust than just a simple inserter. As it said this a chair came up from the floor. It had an ominous look to it with straps to hold me down and a massive looking implant inserter. I asked the ship why we needed something like this for the implant and its answer made me shudder a bit. It said that due to the nature of this knowledge and my current condition as a being different than the ones that had this knowledge that there was no way for it to make this process any less painful than it knew what my logs said about inserting things into my head. It continued to tell me that this very likely was going to be worse by far and that it would do its best to relieve as much pain as possible, however based on what it knew so far it was going to be difficult to distract me from the pain. Despite all this information, which I appreciated for its honesty, I placed the implant in the chair and sat down, sweating a bit as the straps locked around me preventing me from moving anything save my fingers and toes. I then took a deep breath and told the ship to start.

I think walking through lava would have been more pleasant. Or perhaps being eaten alive by miniature troxes with dull teeth from the inside out. I won't go into details about the pain, instead I'll try to forget it and instead just put down some notes on what I learned. I didn't realize that there would be so much information put in to my head at one time. The first bits of knowledge I received that I can remember was the language of the alien race, both written and spoken. Then came bits and pieces of understanding about the ship and how it worked. I also began to understand through this information how the ship formed things and how it had modified the technology I had in order to make it more compatible. I also realized that there were many more improvements to be made with the technology in order to complete the compatibility. When it was all done I asked the ship why it gave me so much at once, to which it replied that it didn't give me that much but just enough that I could start learning the rest. What it taught me were just the basics and there were many more chips that would have to be used, however they should become less painful as my brain adjusted to the knowledge. At this revelation I realized what I had to do next, and that was to improve the implant in my head in preparation for the next stage. It was the implant that was going to make this process much easier but it could not be modified faster than what my brain could handle otherwise I would not be able to control the technology it contained. At this I extracted the implant from my head using the chair, no straps were needed for this of course, and got to work using the new information to modify the device before inserting it back into my head.