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It was about fear and control.
    But still . Kind of a waste of effort.
    I pulled myself back together (metaphorically), and looked around the simulated bridge.
    Are you coming onto the bridge with me? I asked Control.
    “No,” it said. “Please go to the captain’s chair.”
    I nodded. The captain’s chair had a screen where she could look at the information from all the stations, either at once or one at a time. Captain Thao, like most captains, tended to take reports from her bridge crew, who were better at boiling down the information into what she needed to know immediately. But she could get all the information from the screen if she wanted to boil it down herself. Which meant that I could, too.
    Likewise, the captain could control the ship from the screen if she wanted, rather than giving orders. Very few captains did, because things got complicated fast, and besides, if you want to make your bridge crew unhappy, the best way to do it was to try to do their job for them. The fact is that no captain was competent at every bridge station. Most didn’t try to be.
    Except now I would have to be.
    I sat in the virtual captain’s chair and pulled up the captain’s screen.
    I’m ready, I thought to Control.
    The virtual captain’s screen lit up, and all the department windows opened in a grid. Tapping twice on one of the windows would cause it to expand to full screen and become fully interactive. Only one department screen could be full screen at one time but you could also chain full-size department screens together and swipe through them to access them quickly. It was all pretty basic except for the fact that I would be responsible for monitoring and dealing with all of them.
    I looked further at the captain’s start grid.
    Some of these are blank, I said.
    “Some of the ship functions you no longer need to control,” Control said. “You will be the only living thing on the ship and your living area is tightly sealed and controlled by us, so you will not need life-support controls. Likewise communications. We control those and several other ship-related functions. Others, such as engineering, you need to control only on a limited basis, and the maintenance of those functions will now be handled by us. The only ship’s functions you need to concern yourself with are navigation, weapons, and propulsion, including skipping.”
    That makes things simple, at least, I thought to Control. I made the windows for navigation, propulsion, and weapons full-sized and chained them together.
    I’m ready, I sent.
    “We’re sending you a simulated mission now,” Control said. “It is a simple one, focused primarily on navigation. Let’s begin.”
    *   *   *
    Ten hours of simulation that first day, at least by the simulation clock, almost all of it dead simple navigation that as a pilot I could do in my sleep. I had a suspicion that the simulations were not specifically chosen for me by Control, but might have been simply on a list of simulations to run that it was running through.
    It was boring.
    But it was also manageable. There was nothing that first day that I wasn’t able to do. The piloting, like most piloting, was about feeding information into the computer and then dealing with anything unusual that might go wrong. Nothing went wrong with any of these initial simulations.
    The most difficult thing I had to do was slide the simulated Chandler out of the way of a chunk of rock floating out in space. I considered using the simulated Chandler ’s lasers to vaporize it—it was small enough—but I figured that wasn’t what the simulation was about yet, and anyway vaporizing it ran the risk of creating a bunch of even tinier bits of rock, harder to track, that some other ship would then ram into. Most ships could handle a micrometeor impact, but why create a problem for someone else when you didn’t have to?
    So I moved the Chandler out of the way, logged the rock’s present location and direction, and then