The screen flickered. The usual pirate-site graphics—the garish neon colors and movie posters—vanished. In their place was a view of a cockpit. Not a digital render, but real, weathered leather and vibrating steel dials. The sound of the monsoon outside his window was gone, replaced by the roar of a radial engine.
He remembered the roar of the engines during the XF-11 crash—the way the world tilted, the scream of metal, and the sudden, jarring silence of the earth. He had survived, but a part of him remained in the air, suspended in a permanent state of flight.