Get her out," Elvi said.  "I'm pulling the plug."

"No," Cara replied.  The girl's voice was still shaking, but the words were clear.  "I can do this."

Cara's brain function showed in seven different datasets on twice that many screens.  The data from the BFE - the technicians' pet name for the Jupiter-sized block of green crystal that was the only feature of Adro system - showed beside it.  Advanced pattern-matching protocols mapped the two together in six dimensions.  The instability had passed in both datasets, the seizure - if that's what it was - falling back from turbulence to a more stable flow.

All around the lab, the researchers and techs turned wide and uncertain eyes toward Elvi.  She could feel the desire to keep pushing forward from her whole staff.  She felt it herself.  It reminded her of being the RA in her graduate dorm house and having to shut down the hall parties.

"I am the lead researcher.  She is the test subject.  When I say we're pulling the plug, we're pulling the plug."  As her team sprang to life, closing down the experiment, she turned to Cara, who was floating over the bed of imaging sensors.  "Sorry.  It's not that I don't trust you.  It's that I don't trust any of this."

The girl with the pure black eyes nodded, but her attention was on something else.  Cara's visual and audial cortices were lit up like Paris at New Year's, and a deep, slow pulse was passing through the girl's postcentral gyrus that matched the energy readings coming from the BFE's southern hemisphere.  Whatever Cara Was feeling just then, it was taking up more of her attention than Elvi was.  She had the sense that she could scream in Cara's ear right now and still be a tiny minority of the information flooding the girl's brain.

Or for that matter the girl's body, which was part of the issue.  Elvi had studied somatic cognition theory, but the degree to which the BFE seemed to want to present its information to Cara's whole nervous system - muscles and viscera included - was complicating things.  She spooled back through the data as her team ran the shutdown procedures and brought Cara back to merely human reality.

The Falcon, Elvi's private and state-sponsored science ship, was the most advanced single-function laboratory in thirteen hundred worlds.  Which sounded really impressive until she remembered that most of those thirteen hundred worlds were the equivalent of 1880s European dirt farmers trying to grow enough food to not slaughter half their cattle at the start of every winter.  The Falcon was the only ship that had survived the attack that killed the Typhoon and Medina Station, and the scars showed everywhere.  The decking was subtly mismatched where threads of darkness that had been somehow more real than reality had ripped a third of the ship's mass away.  The power and environmental systems were all patchworks of the original and rebuilt.  Her own leg had a line across it where the new skin and muscle had grown in the softball-sized scoop that had vanished in the attack.  Working on the Falcon was like living inside a trauma flashback.  It helped Elvi when she could focus on the data, and on the BFE, and on Cara and Xan.