I pull up the code editor. Six hundred lines of clean, careful, wrong code.
My hands find the keyboard. And they know. The way they knew at nineteen. The way they knew in Luke's lab. The code flows out of my fingers before my mind finishes forming the thought — restructuring the sequence, breaking the full-body recalibration into anchored steps. Find the most stable limb. Lock it. Build from there. One at a time. Like a dog actually getting up.
Eric stands behind me. I feel him there. I don't look up.
Twenty minutes. My back aches from leaning forward. My eyes are dry. I don't care. I haven't felt this alive in six years.
"Run it," I say.
Eric takes the tablet to the testing bay. I follow. The dev team is already there — a dozen engineers clustered around the K-9 prototype, a metal do
