What would they do, if they realized the Adjustments that were supposed to make me a meek little herd animal didn’t do anything? Even as a kid I knew not to trust the Matrons. I learned fast to downplay my abilities, keep my mouth shut and try to blend in. There were other kids with mods at the orphanage, but nothing like that. It all seemed perfectly natural at the time.

Forty meters off the ground, watching ships thirty thousand kilometers overhead, with senses that could pick out radar pings and comm chatter as easily as the ships themselves.

When I was little I used to climb up to the highest branches of the housetree at night, and watch the starships docking at the orbital stations high above. My name is Alice Long, and I’ve always known I was different. If anyone could recommend something similar (in terms of worldbuilding) I would be overjoyed.Perilous Waif ( Alice Long #1) by E. The novel isn't overtly sexual but does deal with some mature themes so viewers beware. The MC Alice Long is an unapologetically a power fantasy character but a fun one. Basically, it sorta makes hard fantasy magic systems in a Sci fi universe. Gene editing/cybernetics (in most cases they pretty much go hand in hand) is also highly present, ranging from transhumanist super beings to unisexual societies to Weebs making catgirls (which isn't handled as poorly as I thought it would be).

He has sort of pushed back the singularity by making it so that making an AI smarter is very difficult (even for AI) along with some other things that are kind of spoliery. AI goes from simple bots that we could make today to super AI that are thousands of time more intelligent than today's average human. Finally, unlike most sci fi he includes liberial use of AI and gene editing. It has the same effect on future technology that electricity has on our own current tech, as in, it's everywhere. The second piece is momentum exchange, which is a bit like the mass effect from Mass effect but a great deal more effective. Each of the dimensions has different properties so they are more than just a way for ships to go faster. The higher dimensions are smaller than our own by a factor of pi^2 of the dimension below it, as they 'stack', lower dimensions are larger than our own by the same factor.

The first 'magic' tech is the FTL system which allows the user to jump to 'higher' and 'lower' dimensions that are layered 'above' and 'below' our own reality. The first being he allowed himself two pieces of 'Magic' tech and the second being the way he treats genetic engineering and AI. I think a big part of this is the rules he sets out for himself when he wrote the novel. Perilous Waif is simultaneously very soft sci-fi and very hard sci-fi. Brown is a pretty odd duck and the content of his novels tends to also go in that direction.

Perilous Waif by E. William Brown