"Yep." About both things. Jim sounds the teeniest bit cranky about it. Togetherness, it lightens the neural load, yeah, yeah. But it's a waste of piloting resources in an already slim pool of candidates, and using a neural interface to begin with is real sketchy, as far as he's concerned. What's so crazy about just making machines operable?

"The Natha have some consistently weird ideas about how us boring linear beings like to work," he says. "This sort of thing keeps cropping up. You're newly thawed, right? I'm Jim Kirk."