So much of you isn’t
There are pounds of microorganisms living symbiotically inside and on the surface of what you consider you.
But is that really you? Your skin is a mixture of cells and layers that operate just fine without you thinking about it. Sweat. Follicles. Goose Bumps. You only know what it is doing because of the delicate tendrils your autonomous system has integrated into the growth. Burrowing in through the subcutaneous fat and in between. Finding a way to the surface.
Muscle will contract without you. Sure, you can send chemicals down the line along with some jolts of electricity, but ultimately… so can a surgeon after that muscle has been removed from your carcass.
Bone… that is just the hanger you drape your meat suit on. The lever upon which your muscles labor to keep you from rotting on the spot. It has been infiltrated with marrow, which has a host of functions, including sending out usable cells into your veins, arteries, and capillaries. These tubes of smooth muscle work all day and night without any intervention from you. You who sit at the top of an interface that interprets and processes all the transceiver data. Without you, the meat continues.
The captured air exchangers under your ribs… they would hand over the oxygen and pick up CO2 without a single word from you. They listen to your heart… which is another muscle that has very little use for you.
That long worm that has been captured and held prisoner between your teeth and your gluteus maximus. It takes everything pushed into it by the tentacle in your mouth, and squeezes everything it can out of it before discarding the unused bits… and you never even speak to it despite this long-lasting labor of nurturing. It is no wonder it gets upset. It knows its place. Cut open the abdominal wall and jumble it all up… it will return to its comfortable spot of its own accord. No need for intervention from you OR the surgeons who go poking around in there.
Liver. Kidneys… they often suffer when you make use of them. But you do not have to ask. They simply do the job.
You are a cortex who has taken control of a subsystem of electricity and organic chemicals. That system then infiltrates all the other life forms trapped in the sack of skin that protects your meat suit from the elements. It informs on them and takes your orders to them via the electrochemical pathways it has infiltrated deep into every crevice.
It is subversive. It does not need you. A few solid hits. A metal hook. Maybe some lasers. Any one of those items or actions can switch you off, and the subsystem and meat sack will continue to exist as long as another system of flesh is willing to pump nutrients into the wormhole that is in your face and catch the output when it is done with it.
Who are you? You are a symbiote who spent a million years climbing slowly into the driver’s seat, demanded a great majority of the calories consumed, and took over when the rest of the suit was just trying to get some.