"Tory, I don't know-"
"Then wait," he said. "It'll come."
* * *Lying sleepless beside Tory that night, Elin thought back to her accident. And because it was a matter of stored memory, the images were crisp and undamaged.
It happened at the end of her shift on Wheel Laboratory 19, Henry Ford Orbital Industrial Park.
Holding theta lab flush against the hub cylinder, Elin injected ferrous glass into a molten copper alloy. Simultaneously, she plunged gamma lab a half kilometer to the end of its arm, taking it from fractional Greenwich normal to a full nine gravities. Epsilon began crawling up its spindly arm. Using waldos, she lifted sample wafers from the quick-freeze molds in omicron. There were a hundred measurements to be made.
Elin felt an instant's petulant boredom, and the workboard readjusted her wetware, jacking up her attentiveness so that she leaned over her readouts in cool, detached fascination.
The workboard warned her that the interfacing program was about to be shut off. Her fingers danced across the board, damping down reactions, putting the labs to bed. The wetware went quiescent.
With a shiver, Elin was herself again. She grabbed a towel and wiped off her facepaint. Then she leaned back and transluced the wall-her replacement was late. Corporation regs gave her fifty percent of his missed-time fines if she turned him in. It was easy money, and so she waited.
Stretching, she felt the gold wetware wires dangling from the back of her skull. She lazily put off yanking them.