51.12

“Rook?” comes the call from somewhere outside. Somewhere far away. Hail’s voice is thin, stretched out by the distance.

I’m fine, is what I mean to say, but I can’t find sounds to match the thought.

“I’m fine,” says the Juno on my behalf. “I stood up too quickly. Think I’ve pulled something.”

Hail snorts. “You and Salt need to start a club. Want me to come up?”

No.

No, no, no.

But the thoughts don’t find any more shape than that.

The Juno adds a tremble to my voice. “I need a minute.”

“Understood.”

Somewhere, I find a way out of the panic.

Thank you, old bird. I try to swallow, but it takes more control than I can manage right away. I force my swollen tongue around in my mouth, but it’s numb and heavy, enough to make me feel like I’m choking on it. I need another one.

58.14

There’s a voice somewhere out ahead, a thought formed around familiar shapes, but I can’t quite hear it. A window dawns across my private stretch of darkness. Are you sure? it asks, shapes cobbled together by a wetware bridge and projected across the visual centres of my brain. My whole world is in those words.

I almost manage a nod, but it comes out in spasms.

The Juno watches me for a moment more, but when it opens the taps, I can feel more from the machinery around me than from my own dumb muscle.

Worse—it’s an overdose, and we both know it. We’re well past what the company guidelines think is sane, overridden by access privileges that the Juno’s manufactured on demand. One more, and we’d need a crash team on standby, jumper cables ready to pull me back from the dead. I nearly ask for another dose anyway, but a little detail finds its way in through the dark. Enough to know how much trouble I’ve set up for myself. My muscles are the kind of stiff you get after you come out of surgery, locked up and dry-throbbing. Somewhere below me, little sparks mark the places where the nerve-jacks thread my skin, flaring as the Juno disconnects them and retracts the wide bore needles that bond my senses to the steel. I can’t feel the saddle, but pain plots the outlines.

I shiver, and more comes into focus. My head is suddenly too heavy to bear, fighting to tip me over. There’s cold concrete in my lungs that comes up thick in ugly, hacking coughs. For a minute, I think I might turn myself inside out. I freeze and then boil, all the while fighting to keep from hurling into my helmet.

This isn’t working, comes up in one thought.

How about this? follows another.

The suit runs through the steps for connection loss. It starts with the bitter compounds used to get you back in contact with the sync sensors, to get your thoughts running loud and clear enough for the shell to read.