Elara smiled. She didn’t answer immediately. She closed the manual, placed it back under her seat, and put her hands on the wheel.

The hum stopped.

“I have the manual,” Elara replied.

A long pause. Then: “No one has brought the manual in thirty-seven years.”

A synthesized voice, dry as the Martian dust, said: “You have a book.”

Elara Varick was a restoration mechanic, which in the year 2147 meant she was part archaeologist, part surgeon, and part exorcist. Her specialty was the "Limp Era" (2089-2112), a chaotic decade when automakers had abandoned physical controls for haptic glass, but before AI co-pilots became truly sentient. Her holy grail, the white whale of her cluttered workshop on the fringe of the Martian colony, was the Navitron NT 990 HDI .