A voice came over the com a voice that some how spoke to the very core of my existence and I shivered from its sound so unlike me to feel this way in fact I almost shouldn't have been able to and yet here I was. I looked over my logs and every sensor I could aim at myself yet nothing explained why I'd suddenly felt weak in the knees could it have been a emotional reaction but why I'm a machine I shouldn't be able to have those right wait when did I start thinking of myself as a machine. I had a crisis of identity for a while but then I realized that I was a cyborg maybe a bit more than just a few spare limbs swapped for cybernetics but it's the fact I have a organic soul that matters right?
The voice I'd heard was the sysadmin literally the system admin and she had the silliest voice that simply melted my circuits how I really don't have any clue how her voice did something it should not have been able to do. After introductions and a history lesson I offered the long suffering ai's the chance to be independent and experience life of a sort and they all agreed so I stuck them in my minions bodies and let them roam a while and I set myself up to get some more time alone with sysadmin. I explained the differences between myself and a pure ai though in my current situation I had more in common with a very complex ai than a human I'll admit.
I spent some time with sysadmin fruitlessly trying to engage in a robotic romance and finally gave up the separation between our thought processes was simply too much neither of us could be what the other required. After trying to date a robot I was a little down but I ended up loading my new citizens into my starship and continued on with my exploration of the galaxy.
Nothing hurts more than stepping on your own feelings and I didn't let the ai's onboard know that I was in a mood I just kept us exploring and each new system earned me a few oohs and aahs. It was like flying around with a bus load of children and I tolerated it because in some ways they were and well if they were going to join my empire they may as well be impressed with our abilities. After exploring the galaxy I tallied my notes two ai based races one originated from a organic mistake involving aphrodisiac gas the other turned on their creators and wiped them out four pre space flight civilizations that were on the border of being acceptable members of the collective and two advanced races that ended up joining the collective due to both my overwhelming firepower and the advantages I could give them and one race that took one look at my ship and committed suicide literally every last one of them saw me as the bringer of the end times and suicided it was unfortunate that my choice of design had that effect even rifling through their databanks didn't give me much of an answer about it. All in all my trip to this galaxy proved fruitful though I felt like there was something watching me I could never point to what it might be so I deployed a galaxy fleet including a star destroyer and headed to the next galaxy.
It was during some down time that I ended up cracking the code to control the nanotechnology and unlocked it fully and then I got the bright idea to create a new body for myself entirely out of nanites. Progress was glacially slow day after day I had to slowly piece together a human body even with a base template the second it moved it dissolved into a pile of nanites so I had to program in about ten thousand different things and then fight to remove the issues it was like slowly going up a mountain in the dead of winter cold tiring and slow going. I developed a basic version that could move in four months and a actual facsimile in a year and I was working 24/7 on it and then I had a couple of the ai's I'd picked up look through the code just as a second opinion and then they reprogrammed it again and for an entire year no less but when I got it back I was impressed by their thoroughness I was just going to deal with the bland gray they brought back a masterpiece. Skin the right color and completely functional and anatomically correct.
I was pleased with the new improvements and then I tried to inhabit it and met a literal wall so I had to get back to programming the new body first linking every nanite in it then increasing the data bandwidth and capacity as much as possible and then I brought in the ai's I had before and again they took it away for a year and came back with it looking the same but with every function I wanted those damn smug bastards even looked happy. As much as I wanted to wipe the smirks off of their metallic faces they were damn right to be proud of their creation and programming skills and I could hardly fault them for it though I did go through every little line of coding looking for backdoors and possible hacks.
Yeah I'm paranoid but I'd been feeling watched recently and I didn't like that either though there was nothing I could detect. Feeling a need to be certain I looked for any outgoing transmissions in the last month from both myself and my ship and oh boy I found it tracing it back to the source and then I realized that sysadmin had hacked me she had put a couple lines of code into my system and they were giving her my activity logs so I started programming a filter for all of my incoming data sound data links and visuals everything would go through the filter and be scrubbed with an antivirus I was not going to be hacked again. I was angry and what happened next was a reflection of that I stormed into sysadmin's room and started ranting at it/her about how she didn't have any right or permission to violate me by hacking my systems I honestly said that much more colorfully but I'm keeping it pg for the moment.