Hardwiring didn’t change, only the technology to hand.

Faultless logic, but shit understanding of how the real world worked. So far as Axl was concerned, Tsongkhapa was living proof that machine intelligence was overrated. He liked logic units where they belonged, in the handle of a gun or operating his fridge.

‘Okay,’ said Axl, flipping the peeled plum into the air, ‘how does this work?’

‘Plug and play,’ said the cabin chief brightly.

‘Yeah, right...' Axl fumbled a catch and caught the eye just as it was sliding off his lap.

‘Here.’ The cabin chief lent across and took the sticky ball. There was a quick hiss as the toy yanked the tab on a courtesy towel, breaking it out of its vacuum-packed silver foil, and then he was wiping grit and cotton fluff off the eye.

‘Just put it in,’ suggested the toy when he handed it back.

Axl did.

Pulling open his right eyelid Axl pushed and his new eye slide home with a wet slurp. Pain flared as tiny feelers burrowed through the damaged tissue of his eye socket like shoots, grappling the inferior rectus, lateral and superior oblique muscles. Cells divided, wasted muscle tissue started to regrow.

Specialised shoots found and tapped what had once been the working optic nerve to Axl’s right eye. A complex pattern of send and receive began between the new eye’s control chip and Axl’s visual cortex, as the optic brought itself into sequence.

Black faded to grey and then blinding white. All Axl felt was sick and frightened. Deep down sick for the first time in more years than he could remember.

Around him the dazzle of static faded and downward lines solidified into a grey bulkhead hung with a Bokhara carpet. Flat rectangles turned to seats, all empty. There were no real windows, but a Tosh screen framed by folded-back wooden shutters came into focus to show African children rolling in the waves on the edge of a beach.

It didn’t look like something found on a shuttle.

Axl pushed the thought to the back of his mind and kept looking round. He was seeing the world in monochrome low/Res with the colour, contrast and brightness turned right down.

‘Okay?’ The cabin chief was watching him. A child’s face with pouting lips and wide eyes offset by a sly smile. Blond hair probably ... it showed up pale in B&W anyway.

‘Yeah,’ said Axl, ‘just fine.’

‘Good,’ the cabin chief said blandly. ‘Let’s do the rest of it’

Axl looked at him.

‘Your arm, that rig glued to your head ...”

Oh, that stuff. Axl nodded, glancing down at the implant in his wrist, flesh puffed up around its edges. He couldn’t see the rig he was wearing and didn’t even want to think about the spike in the back of his skull, but something told him those wouldn’t be any better fitted either.

‘You want to do this unconscious?’

No, he didn’t.

‘Whatever.’ The toy lent over and yanked out all four wrist feeds at once. Axl was pretty sure that wasn’t how disconnections were meant to be done.

‘Forehead’s going to hurt,’ the cabin chief said. It didn’t sound upset about the fact.

The cabin chief was right too, but it didn’t hurt for long. A quick hiss of foamBone, a burst of cold and analgesic skin had been sprayed over the open wound almost before it had a chance to bleed.

The movement was practised, maybe too practised. Axl looked at the toy again. Pouting, pretty, vacuous and quietly vicious, the cabin chief looked like the real thing. Maybe they were all trained in battlefield medicine or maybe this one was a special, something kept in reserve. Alternatively, maybe the Cardinal had just requisitioned it from the Vatican. If the Enquirer was to be believed, the city was filling up with vicious little blond boys now Joan was gone.

‘Spike,’ said the cabin chief and Axl tried not to freeze.

‘You know how to remove it?’

The toy looked at Axl, eyes cold. ‘I put it in,’ the cabin chief said shortly. ‘Chances are, I can get it out again… Can’t do a foamBone heal though, not for a spike. The plug shouldn’t give you problems so long as you don’t try to pull it out.’

Instant trepanning.

Well, it went with all the other enlightenment shit. Axl didn’t know any real reason why he might want to remove a skull plug from the back of his head and he didn’t bother to ask. He just wanted off the shuttle. Followed by some sleep, maybe some food and a weapon. He’d never felt so naked in his life.

Axl had no gun, not even a boot blade. All he did have were two tiny DNA polymerase wet chips, matched to Father Sylvester’s genome. Plus another two for Joan’s sister. Modified standards. Any body fluid from either would do—snot, blood, whatever. Drychips could have handled skin flakes, dirt and hair but they were bigger, more obvious. And besides drys weren’t Red Cross standard issue, while wet chips were. He had two dozen of the things. Only four of those were specifically modified, the rest cheap mass-produced refugee fodder. The kind of chip that told you if you were dying of flu or the retro Virus a couple of days ahead of it actually happening.

‘Okay’, said the cabin chief. ‘Final shot.’

There was a hiss cold against the side of Axl’s neck and then the darkness began to roll back in.

Its detractors might call Samsara a victimDisney themepark, but Vajrayana still had some of the best medical and legal AIs that money could hire.

Axl woke only once, realised he wasn’t on a shuttle and tumbled back into darkness. At first sight, the demons that inhabited the dark were almost anachronistical Freudian, full of red snakes that twisted tight around his wrists or ate their way under his flesh until only their tails could be seen poking from ragged gashes in his skin.

Only later, days later, did he realise that a mediSoft on Samsara had been reprocessing his blood. Siphoning it off to mix with interleukin-4, before adding heat-killed bacterium and retrovirus triggers to dentritic cells to sensitise them, feeding the mix back to his body to repair what was left of its immune system.

Not a cheap process and the mediSoft did it before it even knew if the ‘fugee crimes board would allow him to stay.

The old man nodded, nothing else. No questions were asked. In fact, so far as Axl could tell, the man with the odd-shaped felt hat kept his eyes shut throughout the interview. Though the abbot did stop chanting just long enough to mutter something that made even the small boy who’d led a staggering Axl into the cold, vast chamber look surprised.

‘Metal Monkey.’

It sounded like a surf band, something West Coast classic that Axl just knew he’d hate. Chopping Gibson Les Pauls, rhyming verses and some over-easy, cheesy-listening bridge, all masquerading as garage chic. He hoped metal monkey meant something to the boy, because it sure as hell meant nothing to him.

In total he was in the ice-cold room about five seconds, but given the length of the shivering queue he’d been bumped to the front of, Axl was surprised he’d got that long.

And then it was on to a smaller, more clinical room to see someone else.

‘Are you a war criminal?’ The question was in English.

Axl thought about it. Most of his brain was taken up with trying to remember. Except that while he was still hitting recall the young paralegal sat on the other side of the desk repeated the question, only this time in German.

Axl was still thinking about it when the man asked again in Norwegian. Only this time Axl didn’t recognise the language but it didn’t matter, because by then he’d forgotten the question.

Finally the man gave up asking if Axl had committed warcrimes and concentrated on finding a language in common. Not knowing he’d already achieved a hit rate of three out of seven.