They said the psychotherapy would take three months to fully affect her. She'd lain on the couch, and idly rubbed at her nanomachine injection sores while the shrink had leant over her and lectured her about the disgustingness of men. How they were fickle lovers. How brutally visceral the whole process was – tissues hardening, ducts reconnecting, mechanical bursts of endorphins. How a man is best at arm's reach. He'd ordered her to tell him of the love she felt for any men in her life, and, having never been in love, she told him about how her uncle used to sit her on her lap when she was little, and then peeled herself off the leather and gone off to lift weights for two hours.

She didn't feel different, and she didn't act differently, either. It didn't make much sense that they were forcing her to do this, anyway; her drive had never been exceptional (and, plus, had that shrink seen the men in her unit, because any woman would find her hands more appealing than those sad sacks) and she'd gone back to the barracks and had a brief conversation with her uncle over the external line about how stupid the whole idea was, then curled up in her bunk watching the single bright spot on the fire alarm rise and jerk about in the dark through her eyelids –

and it was like that, a single bright spot that – there's something moist on her hands and there's this great hulking shape over her, and the voice comes to her, and it's – and she's on someone's knee feeling the hard bone shot right into the back of her and she feels that familiar hot pinch inside her, and – his warm hands are down and warm and cupped over her, and she realises that it's her – it's her Uncle Roy, and it's wrong, wrong to be dreaming, wrong to be feeling this, but she's so close and

the sudden tension curls her body into a C on the bed and she wakes up groaning from a – nightmare, she said, to the concerned face looking at her from the neighbouring bunk, because that's right.

Next day the shrink, clearly fed up with his job, listened as she guiltily told him her nightmare, and he judged her cured and she went down to the range and started shooting.