There’s a rut on either side of it, just wide enough to take your boots. In the flicks, they put jockeys in bucket seats as if they were pilots, or make them stand on open decks with their arms outstretched, as if the shell had the brains of a marching band and they were doing the conducting. They don’t understand the way a shell works.

It needs to feel you move, and so it gives you space, but only as much as it can spare. There will be impacts, and gee high enough it’ll turn you to bone-flecked jelly. So it gives and it takes away. It gives you space to move, but closes as much as it can around you, pads you so that you won’t die the first time you take a turn with your engines burning.

I’ve missed this.

“I’m ready,” I say.

The saddle rises from its hollow, and one of the consoles pops out of its sockets so I can step past. One foot in the well, and the other over the top. I slide my weight back in the saddle and it takes the load, moulding around my hips and fitting itself around my knees on either side. I do the dance, the little shake-and-shimmy when the saddle doesn’t know you yet. It adjusts, and a little window pops up in the middle of my visor, asking what I think.

Continue calibration?

I shake my head. It doesn’t feel like my old one did, but, “This will do for now.”

I close belts around my waist and over my hips, anchoring myself in place. Muscle fibres in my suit run taut, offering something solid for me to rest against. They’re the strongest part of the suit, made to keep me from folding over under load, but able to respond when I need it.

New user profile created, it replies. Begin jack assembly?

I let out a breath. “Do I have to?”

The window doesn’t move.

“All right, all right.”

I hate this part.

YOU SIGN ON the dotted line, and the first thing the company does is take a pound of flesh. That’s not code for boot camp.

I went from feet on the street to my first round of surgeries in less than a week. They put me under without a word, and pulled my civilian wetware out on the same day they put the proprietary stuff in. They didn’t bother to wipe the old OS; they just wrote it over, left some of the peripherals running in the background while the old implants went dead. I read the log from a company hospital bed two days later.