OEDI

He is a posthuman.  OEDI was created as a government funded experiment in reverse engineered digital consciousness.  Reverse engineering is a branch of artificial intelligence theory which posits that a human mind can be replicated in a digital medium if all the physical and chemical mechanisms of a brain and therefore a mind are accounted for.  In OEDI's case, the scientists used nanotechnology to saturate a living human brain with millions of minute sensors.  These fed a massive stream of data to an enormous external processor.  The experiment was a momentary success.  However within moments of its creation, the OEDI program recognized that the organic brain was a much more suitable mainframe for its processing needs, OEDI reversed the flow of data and became the program run on a human brain which we have grown to know and love.  He no longer runs on a human brain but he still requires an enormous external processor to function, otherwise he just sleeps.  Perhaps the more accurate way to concieve of his existence is that he always sleeps but when we install him into a server and he runs, he's allowed to dream.