"Come on," he said through dry lips, not to anyone in the room but to the system, to the math, to the one thing in his life that had ever answered cleanly. His right thumb hit the brake sequence with a sting through the already-cut knuckle. His left hand rode the trim wheel for anchor correction while he shifted his grip to keep the slickness from costing him. A warning ribbon flashed across the curved display and vanished before he finished reading it. Return envelope spread. Control lag. Frame slip.

He already knew.

He had already lost command of the machine.

He tried the emergency braking routine a second time, slower now, forcing precision into shaking fingers. Input. Confirm. Lock. The cradle shivered under him. For one bright instant the outside blur seemed to thin. He saw the townhouse service wall beyond the machine age twenty years in a breath, the concrete patched over, then cracked, then gone behind a clean white skin and climbing green. A stairwell moved. A support column vanished. New light wells opened where no light wells had been. The city above the buried lab flickered through forms too fast for any ordinary eye to hold: low roofs drowned in rain, towers rising, towers gone, scaffold forests, blackouts, solar skin, flood marks far above old street level.

Then the brake bit at the wrong point in the curve, slipped, and flung him harder forward.