If it meant abandoning his flesh and becoming the Vajra Fortress, Shen Cong was willing.

He would of course have preferred to go on living between heaven and earth as a human being. But if it really came to carrying on as a machine — well, so long as it gave him great strength and a chance of evolving into a Transformer, why not?

Giving up the body of flesh was no great matter.

Some people pursue every kind of material enjoyment — fine food, beautiful women, clothes, jewelry. Shen Cong might have his own appetites for food and beauty too, but what he wanted more was to be strong, to explore an unknown new world, to reach the sea of stars.

So whether or not he kept a human body mattered less than any of that. As long as his awareness, his ideas, his thinking, his feelings were still his own, the rest could go.

His original idea had been to become a metal life, keep a metal body, and go on enjoying whatever the world still had to offer, while the Vajra Fortress evolved into a Transformer and carried him roaming the Earth. He had simply not expected his body to fail this quickly, leaving him no choice but to make the Vajra Fortress the vessel for his awareness.

It was rather like the situation in the film Chappie.

The protagonist designs a robot called Chappie. Chappie is unlike other robots — it develops intelligence — and after a great many twists the protagonist is nearly beaten to death. To save his life, Chappie transmits and uploads the protagonist's awareness into the program of another robot.

And so the protagonist becomes a robot.

What Shen Cong wanted now was exactly that: to package up his own awareness, keep it inside the Vajra Fortress's Superbrain, and become a wholly new mechanical metal life.

And then find a way to evolve into a Transformer.

Unfortunately it was not easily done. He tried everything he could think of, and still could not keep his awareness inside the Superbrain and let the…