At the fish-and-chips shop you didn’t have to think about stupid bullshit like whether people were judging you for how you did things (it’s a deep fryer, Emma, how bad can it really be), or who you did them with, or how much training you’d had. You had exactly two coworkers: middle-aged Nell, who talked little and smiled less, and Akesh, who liked to smoke weed and had a peeling C/K pickup that was the twin of yours, only blue instead of red. (Well, your pickup was really Rachel’s, but who’s counting.)

  At the fish-and-chips shop whenever you’d get overwhelmed you’d just go out back and sit in the walk-in, or, when that wasn’t available, by the stacked stock of beers at the back door, where the porch opened directly onto the pier and, below, the bay. They say the bay in previous decades had been a brown shallow thing before the seawall went up and they’d reformed it all: the jewel of NorCal’s coast, the city proudly said, or the walled garden, the rest of the world derisively called it. Even Monterey had moved parts of their aquarium there after it became clear they didn’t have the manpower to adequately protect their own wildlife reserve from Meg activity, even the little class Bs that usually preyed upon comparatively smaller populations like theirs.

  Your mom wanted you to be an engineer, of course, in lieu of being a pilot, since you were not going to try again after failing your graduation examination (not that anyone had ever specifically asked you if you’d try again, but it was clear; Ms. Mariko could not even get you to talk much about it, much less your parents or anyone else). You had the aptitude for the numbers, and you did try, halfheartedly, poring over borrowed textbooks at night (some of them hand-me-downs from Rachel herself, for Rachel had liked engineering too and had always said with a laugh that it’s what she’d do if she weren’t more interested in beating up giant crabs). Once you’d even gone out with Mom to the seawall to see the work she’d done.

  She was on the active ocean dynamics team, which meant the work in question was the great pump they’d installed over by the Golden Gate. This pump worked day and night, tirelessly, to keep all the water of the bay moving, just as it might have once upon a time before everything got walled off; and you’d stood there at the top of the wall beside her, borrowed hi-vis vest two sizes two big for you, and peered down over the railing into the green-brown water, and watched the pump suck, in and out, in and out, like the slow exhalations of some vast and breathing creature.

  It had not occurred to you then to compare the pump to the Megs, much less to the Titans. It was related, of course; not directly, but that same pump was descended from those that had helped the dredgers, in olden days, scoop mud out of the bottom of the sea—had made sure the freshly excavated mud did not fall right back into place—and so it was obliquely part of the efforts, as all of them were, the dredgers and pumps and eventually the Titans and their weapons. Back then it was merely a pump, and Mom was merely Mom, and you did your best to close your eyes and shut out anything having to do with Megs and Titans and all the rest of it.

  At the fish-and-chips shop you sat on the edge of the back deck and let your legs dangle out over the water. You tried to match the pace of your breathing to the waves: in, out, in, out. You sank into the smell of frying oil and the cry of gulls. You dared not think of the cradle, the ocean, and what lay beyond those walls.

  -

  You wake with the taste of iron in your mouth and a cry on your lips. It fades in a heartbeat, and then all that is left is you and the little windowless room you call home, now, and will for the next three months, and perhaps longer if you are lucky (or unlucky, depending), no sign of the bay, the wave pump, or Carol.

  You are drenched in sweat; you are breathing fast; you smell of salt and sour. For a long and twisting moment you sit and stare at the pelagic blue wall, waves of blanket puddled around your waist and hips and over your calves; your bare feet are sticking out at the end and the cool air washing over them allows you to slow down each breath, by degrees, the way divers reacclimate to unpressurized depths as they rise (as the wave engineers did when emerging from survey sorties).

  Then you push the sheets off and get up like a piston, floor striking the balls of your feet with a shock, heart pounding.

  Brushing your teeth reawakens the aches you accrued while in the cradle. You are learning the depth and breadth of cradle carryover now, how despite my best efforts to soften the blows with signal damping and the passive support of saline, your muscles still respond to your every little command in an echo of my own motors and structures and thus are overstressed when you overstress me. You know this, have known it since academy days, but like Holly said, feeling it is something else entirely.

  Serves you right. On your way out to the square with the fake trees you grab the console off your bed and shove it lengthwise into your duffel, grunt quietly at the strain: now you know how I feel, albeit a thousand times less intense.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  You make good time today to the gym on 52, empty this early in the morning. You kick the door open, callous gesture of someone not yet afraid of aching knees and next-day bruises—comes the sharp report of pain up through your foot, but you ignore this, mostly. (You’ll regret it later.) Then you drop your kit right by the door, beeline for the track, and break into a run without waiting for any preamble.

  Today you start right off with an easy, loping gait inspired by Gutierrez’s: you may not be as tall as she is, but you are lanky enough to imitate passably; five foot seven leaves you plenty to work with. The track is long and blue, and you have all the time in the world. You are hungry to bite into it, but you know well enough to pace yourself, for if there is one thing you have taken home with you from the long and strange lesson on slowthink, on piloting and playing games, it is to be patient.

  With every two steps you take in a breath, and on every next one you let it out. In this way running becomes a song for you, simple and uninspired, not like the exquisite complexity of all my interlacing precepts and routines and parameters and variable relationships, my sensors and logic loops and actuators and structures—but a song nonetheless, with a rhythm and harmony, just like mine.

  Afterward you sit on the ground by the door and zip open your kit, drenched in sweat and feeling the burn spread through your body—both the more pleasant ache of lactic acid slowly neutralizing in all your muscles and the more permanent soreness of cradle pains from having overexerted yourself before. (Two weeks ago this would have you laid out, probably, and spasming like a fish out of water on the tarmac.)

  The console comes out with a tug. Then the screen is on and you are staring at the green logo of Atlas Defense in the middle of it, clock in the bottom right reading 0402, empty of text otherwise.

  “Helm,” you say, “show me all the files you have on fundamental pilot-helm tenet.”

  Duly I return these titles to you, a list some several hundred items long. “Tooji,” you say, “eighty-two,” and that narrows the list down to one. Kamu-Nagara and the Way of Titans, it says: A Philosophical Inquiry for the Modern Age.

  You have read this before. It has been six years since you last read it. Still you open the reader to the first page of the text proper, which begins: The first principle of piloting is that the pilot is always, ultimately, in control.

  While not an untruth, this fails to encompass the full breadth of the pilot-helm relationship. But you have not asked me to weigh in, so I cannot so much as offer notes in the margins that do not here exist. If the mythos you want to teach yourself is that you are the absolute sovereign and I your willing slave, if that is the start and end of the relationship you want for us, then what can I do but allow it?

  “Helm,” you say, “search on ‘subroutine handoff.’”

  182 results, most of them from the latter half of the book.

  Your joints quaver. You close your eyes. Without looking you palm a knob and turn it to a random selection; then you open your eyes and look at what you’ve picked: Subroutine handoff, it says, is an intimate syncretism, as solemn as it is profane—pilot and helm, god and vessel.

  When you bite your lip and stare out into the dark you can pretend that you are out there, again, that you are steel and fire instead of flesh and blood. Slower, yes—but still fundamentally the same in terms of movement, though the specifics differ if you’re really optimizing, but I digress—were the Titans not designed so especially to make piloting as intuitive as possible? Isolate the squirming meat-thing in saline to remove the confines of gravity and hard limits, much as possible, to replicate the environment of the sea instead; coupling magnets and a corset-harness to center the body and keep it from drifting into the walls of the chamber. And the link, the embedded chip and its transception with the snugly seated helmet receiver at the side and back of the head, that is where the magic happens, that is the mechanism by which I record all your brain data and cleverly transcribe it into ones and zeros and package these neatly up and send them down the long black cable into my nervous system, the one wrought in silicon and gold, to actuate my limbs so smoothly and quickly that your lizard neurons will never guess they are not truly your own. And the longer I am within your head, the more used to your quirks I’ll become, until I can filter out all the noise from each datum and perform only as you intend, even when you do not consciously know it is what you intend. That’s the idea, anyway.

  Syncretism of body and mind comes before syncretism of human and artificial intelligence. It is expected, Tooji reminds us, that the pilot will have at least a year to acclimate to her helm, and vice versa, before this latter syncretism can truly be achieved. Faith and self-knowledge remain the beating heart the whole way through.

  At Alcatraz they may have told you what sync would be like, but those old training models they gave mere unproven children like you, with the universal helms installed, were nothing like this: dredger-brains, papier-maché models of the real thing, dumb and happy and obedient, not even close to the level of nuance and power and stunning assumption of control that I may offer you.

  (Salt and iron and sour and sweat. Woodblock waves closing over your head.)

  Your lip has been chewed bloody. The tang has returned to your mouth. You let go of your lip, get up silently, set the console down, and head once more for the track.