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I'm looking for a short story I've found as a PDF on the Internet once, but I can't remember the name anymore and therefore can't find the story:

It mostly follows a (bodily) young women, who turns out to be an old woman whose body has been optimized by a self-learning, basically all-controlling AI whose aim is to follow the wishes of and protect humankind.

In this story, the AI gains more and more knowledge (e.g. medical know-how to optimize the human body) and learns first to control all kind of machinery (e.g. solar cells to power everything), and then to change/control everything at an atomic level.

Humans basically can't/won't be allowed to die, but there is this 1-on-1-battle-game, where you order the AI not to interfere for 12 or 24 hours, which this woman is good at and plays a lot.

Humans can live out most of their wishes, since the AI tries to accommodate them. And it protects/helps them by e.g. "folding away" (on an atomic level) and "storing" alien civilisations.

The story also roughly follows the question of "when is a human not human anymore" - people whose only "activity" is to have their pleasure center stimulated are first seen by the AI as humans, but not anymore at the end of the story.

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  • Yes, thank you FuzzyBoots for finding the right story so fast and thank you F1Krazy for editing the Question.
    – schleiffelder
    Jul 8, 2020 at 13:36
  • Glad to help. I hope you stick around. This question is being closed as a duplicate, but please note that this is not a censure, just part of our bookkeeping to tie the answers together. You still get all of your reputation gain. :)
    – FuzzyBoots
    Jul 8, 2020 at 14:08

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The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, by Roger Williams, as per Short story about a virtual world. Protagonist is a female who specializes in torture experiences and a few others.

The story of the novella explores the nature of human desire and the uses and abuses of technology in the satisfaction of desire. The story begins after "the Change", in a dream-like post-scarcity society, approximately six hundred years in the future, in which humans have godlike control over their environments, made possible by the supercomputer called Prime Intellect. Prime Intellect operates under Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics, according to its own interpretation, which allows temporary voluntary harm and discomfort. PI has made humanity immortal and satisfies nearly every whim.

Caroline, the thirty-seventh oldest living human being, who engages in a sport known as "death jockeying", whose players die elaborately and painfully for sport, only to be resurrected by Prime Intellect.

Flashbacks set before the Change show the creation of Prime Intellect by Lawrence, a technologist, and its realization of its power, and the past life of Caroline before and after the Change, which happened not gradually but rapidly.

....

After learning that Prime Intellect had destroyed distant alien life as a possible threat to humanity, and having been herself deeply dissatisfied with her post-Change life, Caroline decides to meet Lawrence and confront him....

The full story is available to read online here

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