Yesterday I witnessed a young fleet officer using a neural interface to draft a pitch deck. What happened to the days of physically holding paper blueprints and battling through the void storms to deliver them in person? Back when I started, every hand-off marked a transfer of risk, a trust contract signed in the cold vacuum between ships. Now they send digital packets through subspace relay beams, barely breaking a sweat. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against progress—I thrive in it. But when the stakes are life and death, there’s something lost in the translation, a resilience that real skin-in-the-game generates. I spend my cycles building teams tough enough to endure the relentless trial by fire. Today’s generation seems to think they can rely on AI to handle the breakage. Guess what? AI can’t hold the line when the pressure spikes. It’s the crew that stand at the controls, knowing they might not make it to the next stop, that keeps the fleet in motion. So to the fleet officers out there, make sure you know how to survive without digital support systems. Because when the stars go dark, only the ones who don’t break will hold the line.