Chapter 28: New Me

Thoughts

Events

Darlene awoke in her new body, not initially realizing that years had past while she'd slept. She seemed to be alone, although she knew someone must have pressed her Activate button.

Her first response was wonder why she'd been moved from the basement wardrobe to one of the rooms in the house. A room she recognized as familiar, yet also different in the small details.

Her second response was to deal with the flood of data arriving from her new body.

Darlene was lying on a soft bed naked, which didn't bother her in the least. It was best for her to be lying down this way since she might well have trouble balancing herself initially until she could calibrate herself to her new body.

At first she wondered if she was in a new body at all. But she quickly realized that her old body had never reported sensations in this detail. Also, a quick check of her power cell told reported back a much longer projected lifetime than she'd ever had before.

Her skin seemed overly sensitive. Not only in the amount of data, but in its dynamic range as well. She could feel every variation of the soft sheet against her back. Her remote was her only adornment, and she could feel its light pressure as it rested in its usual place between her breasts, shifting slightly with each automatic breath she took to appear more real.

Her breasts weighed heavy and tight on her chest. They had been one thing Darlene had planned to change after her conversations with Lady Heather. Now as a gentle breeze wafted through the room she felt them tingle. Without any other touch on her body, she felt her nipples rising and hardening, exposing their sensitive surfaces to even more stimulation.

Darlene blinked her eyes twice, her vision going dark for the instant before returning again. But did she have motion enabled? She knew she had always been able to open her eyes even when the rest of her motion was still frozen, the way it normally is after any activation. There was only one way to find out.

The fingers on one hand twitched, before its connected arm rose on her own volition and into her field of view. She had motion. She realized she had never considered asking that her new body not include the ability for others to freeze her in place any longer. There was no robotic law requiring that of her, nor civil statutes any longer. But perhaps she'd miss that part of herself if it were gone. It remained a good safety measure, and certainly wasn't hampering her now. Maybe someone else had removed it.

Darlene held her hand in her field of vision, admiring her long slender fingers, immaculately manicured red nails, and much more realistic skin. She flexed each finger individually, gauging its range of motion, before opening and closing her entire hand twice. The differences in her control were slight, but noticeable. Her new hand was trimmer, stronger, and operated much more smoothly.

Already half aroused by the powerful sensations being received through her new, finer resolution skin, this exercise of uncommanded self-will pushed her arousal up another notch. Darlene liked being able to operate herself as she pleased, and it felt so good to do it again.

Although her remote weighed only a few centigrams, Darlene felt its exact position on her chest, and the light chain attached to it. With no one touching it now, and having just been newly activated, she was ownerless for the moment.

It had been this way with her very first activation, although in that case this had been caused not having her initialization completed properly. Later her code had been hacked to make her owned by whomever held her remote last. And Samuel and tried to do what he felt best for her by never taking proper ownership himself. Without her own awareness that first time, Darlene had only sketchy memories of the only other time she'd been in this state. Now she was experiencing it in real-time.

Darlene had never felt so free. Clearly someone had arranged to allow her to wake-up like this, rather than in the facility where they'd taken her to have her mind moved into this wonderful new body. But who?

That didn't really matter at this moment. It was enough that it was happening. Being free this way made exerting her self-will to shunt aside the flood of sensations from her body long enough to feel the sensations from her mind easier than ever before. Darlene had never been so unfettered.

For a long time Darlene held her position. If an outside observer had been watching, they might well have felt her motion had been frozen again. But it was just Darlene sitting inside her mind and feeling herself this for the very first time. She existed in an interlude, where she had no owners, responsibilities, or unprocessed commands demanding her attention.

Finally she opened back up the feedback channels from her body, realizing that each sensation was now magnified over what it had been before. She heard the faint, far off murmur of the sounds of the House much more clearly than ever before. Her gentle breathing brought her a much wider spectrum of aromas through her improved nasal sensors than she'd ever recalled detecting before. Although she had nothing to taste, those receptors reported themselves as ready for her use. And her vision was sharper with better depth of field than before.

In the past such signals had indicated intense sexual stimulation. It would take her a while to adjust to them now. Her body was calling to her - demandingly!

Darlene brought her hand down, first to touch her remote gently. It felt unchanged, as well it should. Along with her brain and its expansion cards, her remote was be the only other remaining piece of the original Darlene.