The day you enlist for the K-ships, you haven’t eaten for forty-eight hours. They give you the injections, and within twenty-four hours your blood is teeming with pathogens, artificial parasites, tailored enzymes. You present with the symptoms of MS, lupus and schizophrenia. They strap you down. Over the next three days the shadow operators, running on nanomech, take your sympathetic nervous system to pieces, flushing the waste out continually through the colon. They pump you with a paste of ten-micrometre-range factories, protein farms and metabolic monitors. They core your spine. You remain awake throughout, except for the brief moment when they introduce you to the K-code itself. Many recruits don’t make it past that point. If you do, they bolt you into the tank at the front of the ship. By then most of your organs are gone. You’re blind and deaf. A kind of nauseous surf is rolling through you. They’ve cut into your brain so that it will accept the hardware bridge known as ‘the Einstein Cross’. You connect with the ship math. You will soon be able to consciously process 15 petabytes of data per second: but you will never walk again. You will never touch someone or be touched, fuck or be fucked. You will never do anything for yourself again. You will never even shit for yourself.

You sign up in a private room at a pleasant temperature: nevertheless, you can’t get warm. You say goodbye to your parents. They give you the emetics whether you’ve eaten or not. Then it’s an hour or two to wait before the injections start. Forty years ago – shivering on the edge of a bed, vomiting into a plastic bowl while she tried to hold around her a hospital gown that fell open constantly at the back – it had come to Liv Hula that she would be able to choose the Einstein Cross, but that she would never, ever be able to unchoose it. So she had put the bowl down carefully, and, speaking to no one, got dressed again and gone back to her life.