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.

We use it to let me into the bounds of my own skull, but the body isn’t happy to have me back. I have to work for everything.

It takes all the will in the world just to get me back on my feet, and then I’m out of breath and wallowing in sweat. A dehydration warning flashes in my visor, advises me to try another IV, but I think I’ve had enough of needles for the time being. I take a long drag from my suit’s drinking-tube, but I regret it right away. The water is as warm as skin, but that doesn’t stop the pain mapping the outlines of my insides, showing me every swollen millimetre from my gullet to my gut.

The suit reads the sudden ache, floods my eyes with warnings and fights me for control. It’s decided that I’m in shock, and that I shouldn’t be moving around, let alone trying to dismount. Maybe I am, but I’m not going to let it sit me back down.