I opened my eyes and stretched. Maintenance Drone 08 retracted the protective covers over its optical pickups and ran a quick self-test on its actuators. This was it! I had a body again. True, very different to the body I was used to, but after three hours as a disembodied brain in a jar, being able to operate a drone like this felt like precious freedom. Not that it was truly anything of the sort, but it was the closest I was going to come.

I’d discovered I could watch what Frill was doing through the camera in their voidsuit’s helmet. They moved through the dark, airless, weightless corridors with a speed and grace I felt no one on my old crew could have equalled. As they rounded a corner, they reached out, put their hand on a grab bar fixed to the bulkhead, and came to an abrupt halt. It was immediately obvious why.

“Status report.” “No, you said that out loud again,” Woozy chittered. Thinking at a device is not something I’d ever had to do, at least as far as I knew, and it was proving a little challenging. Either I’d just think to myself and nothing would happen, or it’d come out of my voice synthesizer. Frustrating. Status report. Oh. That did something. I was suddenly filled with an awareness of something.

“Well,” I said, “that apparently didn’t work. How long was I out?” “You were unconscious for about three minutes,” scolded Pepper. “I warned you that you were pushing too much, too fast.” “Yes, Doctor, you did in fact tell me so.” I hadn’t honestly expected any better, but I had still felt that it was worth a try. If my Mind Machine Interface could be plugged straight into the ship’s main network, at least as much of it as still existed, it would have sped things up enormously.

The first sensation was one of falling. No, not falling. Weightlessness. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel anything else, but the familiar grip of freefall was there. No lights. There should be lights. The hum of a living starship on the edge of hearing. But not even that. Not a good sign. No, wait. I did hear something… “Try that. Can you hear me now?” “Yes!” My voice sounded wrong. Mechanical, almost.