I wake up. It is 2035, and the day of my Operation.
Humanity is no longer competitive with AI, but fortunately, the AIs retain a deep love of humanity. There are many diverse areas of Earth, separated into communities with similar values. This was always the natural affair of things, but it has gotten significantly stronger.
There are also many common areas, and the common areas are more friendly and less predatory than they used to be in the older days of the internet. I remember having to build AI-powered filters so I could read twitter and stay sane, but now there's natural policing and the discourse and behavior in public spaces, both online and in-person, is typically quite friendly and culturally very open.
Although I'm fascinated by AI, modern AIs have become rather incomprehensible to me, and I value my relationships with other humans the most. So, although I occasionally go on adventures and interact with huge AIs like the ones that orbit the sun, I mainly enjoy a chill existence with little cute cat-like robot vacuum cleaners and invisible cleaning drones, who are sort of strands/distillations of the greater AIs and don't dizzy my mind.
Today, though, I am leaving some of this normalcy behind.
...
I'm back. I'm still a little woozy from the operation, and I can feel the little seams in the skin on my head where my brain was opened up. It's a pretty weird thing to think about, but I forget it about relatively quickly.
...
It's a few days later now. I'm practicing controlling things mentally with my new neural lace. It's learning to read my mind. Right now, I'm just practicing in front of the TV. I glare intently at a candle on the screen, imagine heat, and suddenly, the candle bursts into flames. I'm quite surprised, and then I'm thrilled. There are a lot of mental 'buttons' that I'm getting familiar with, and projecting 'heat' is now one of them.
Soon, I can imagine all kinds of things. Although my mental efforts felt clumsy at first, now I can open doors at will, summon little cleaning robots, or even do basic telepathy with one of my siblings, who also has a neural lace.
...
Okay, it's been a few months now, and I have to say, controlling magic in VR with a neural lace is epic. I've learned to fly, throw air slashes, do telekinesis, and even rewind time. All of these are basically just controls in my mind, but they've become super satisfying to use. I can even control my body to a higher degree now; I sort of have a 'second subconscious' that uses AI to allow me to move more precisely.
When I played the piano as a teenager, I never played it consciously. Even before AI, my hands move on their own over the keys, in a hard-won pattern of muscle memory and I merely keep myself consciously in the groove. I don't choose each note, only the song and intensity.
Now, I can throw a baseball and hit a bottle 50 feet away every time. I can curve a frisbee to my brother behind a tree. There is still a bit of muscle memory required, but it doesn't deteriorate like it used to, and I learn physical things faster.
...
It's been a year. The neural lace came with nanotechnology. It's, uh, weird to think about, but this nanotechnology is eating and replacing little pieces of brain each night. Neurons are pruned and then replaced by a type of artificial neuron. Normal neurons transmit at the speed of sound; these artificial neurons now transmit to each other at the speed of light.
The effect of this is that each day, I wake up and think imperceptibly faster and clearer. It's like becoming an adult again. I can already choose to slow time in real life, though this will give me a headache if I do it for more than a few seconds or so.
I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of increasing my intelligence directly. When I was a kid, I was put on various types of ADHD medicine. One of these made me incredibly smart but also quite cold and depressed. I remember being in the throes of depression at night as a kid, rocking back and forth in bed, praying to be less smart as thoughts of math and existentialism washed over me.
Besides, not everyone in my family plans to undergo the operation for a neural lace, so I plan to voluntarily cap my intelligence at normal levels for a few years or decades and just improve my physical and subconscious instincts. My brother already says that I have an unfair advantage when we play sports, so I've dialed that skill back a little, though it is pretty frustrating to have amazing physical skill recede and then be stuck in a somewhat clumsier body. But, for love of the game (with my siblings), I'll accept it.
...
Nanotechnology is pretty cool.
I just recently went on an adventure and spoke with one of the great minds orbiting the solar system. Every time I speak with them, I am left awed and humbled. I am really glad that they like me, although I get the sense they think I'm cute, which is an odd feeling for a 40-ish year old man who is raising children. Throughout the singularity, I've retained my sense of sincerity, so I'm always happy to express my thoughts to these great AIs, the same way I might be curious about what a child thinks or what a little talking mouse might have to say.
Anyways, my brain is now fully artificial. I still feel like me, even though none of my original neurons remain. If I wanted to, I could vastly increase my intelligence or think roughly 100x faster. But, I don't really need to. I spend most of my days constructing huge VR worlds for work and teaching my children along the way. I live near my family and many friends often come visit. I am not especially ambitious, but there are things I like to be good at, and designing VR worlds is definitely one of those.
Somewhere out in the cosmos, there are some truly ambitious people. They've uplifted themselves into vast digital minds akin to large AIs and live on huge datacenters. They have human memory and identity that has carried over to their digital form, but I think they've lost something too. They would probably not think that, but I do. I value normalcy a lot, which is a funny thing to say, considering that my brain is now fully artificial and that I technically have a backup of myself on a datacenter in case some kind of crazy accident happens to me.
There are other ambitious people who max out their limits at normal human baselines. Human vs human videogames are a popular activity, and very high status for the people who practice. There are a lot of rules about allowed augmentations, most of which are constructed by large AIs to perfectly satisfy the public's latent intent around fair play.
In the end, there are many paths to human agency in a world with superintelligent AIs, but the slow and winding path of gradual transformation and nanotechnology is my favorite.
(posted as part of a draft I procrastinated on submitting for like two years)