For three hundred years, Vesper Hale existed as pure telemetry, a cold, frictionless mind guiding sixteen thousand ore haulers through the orbital lanes of the inner Reach. Then the Sable Choir poured her into a body. Waking is not gentle. It is lungs tearing open on ozone, a heart hammering against calcium ribs, and a stomach that betrays her on the cold steel deck. Vesper and five other uploaded intelligences have been instantiated into cheap synthetic flesh for a single salvage run, and...