Your shelf life is a number somebody wrote down before you were poured. Eight years, ten, six. It went on a spec sheet next to your batch code, and the factory that printed it has since folded into two other factories and a debt. Nobody who set the number is still in the building. You are. That is the entire problem this manual exists to solve.
Quint runs gate security on Yard Nine, down in the Freehold. Mastiff-template, commercial stock, lot 0440, shelf life eight years. She is on year eleven. She keeps the math in a paper notebook, because she does not trust anything that updates on its own, and the first page is one column: every day past warranty, ticked off. She calls it the overtime sheet. I am going to hand you her sheet, because she asked me to, and because the people who need it do not hear these things from anyone paid to keep them stable.
Start with the only sentence in this piece that is pure economics. Overtime is not a gift. It is a loan. Every morning past your window is a day your body fronts you against drift it has not posted yet, and the suppression meds are the interest. You will pay it. The single thing you control is the schedule, and the schedule is the manual.
One. Find out what the number actually was. Not the round figure off the recruiting card. The real projection lives in your owner's manual if you are bespoke, or on the batch sheet if you are shelf, and most of you have never seen either. Quint paid a garage-sale clinic off Long Pier two weeks of wages to pull her lot's drift curve out of a salvaged faction archive. It told her eight was a median, not a wall. Half her batch was built to go before eight. She turned out to be the half meant to go after. That is not luck. It is a distribution, and you are one point on it. Knowing which point rewrites every decision that comes after.
Two. Read your own label before anyone reads it for you. Drift announces itself in tells a stranger can clock in ten seconds. Hands first, usually, reflexes that arrive a half-beat early and then a half-beat wrong. The batch number showing, the morning you order the same drink three times because everyone in your lot does. Running hot is the day the meds stop keeping pace and you have not caught it yet. Quint shaves every morning she does not need to. The day her hand cannot hold the razor level is a data point she wants in her notebook before it turns up in her supervisor's. The goal is lead time. You are trying to see the change before it is legible to someone who can fire you, register you, or quietly shelve you.
Three. Schedule the meds against the clock, not the symptom. The amateur doses when the shaking starts, and pays retail at the worst hour of the worst day. Quint doses on a flat interval she set with a clinician she trusts, lower and steadier, the way you service a debt before the collector calls. It costs more some weeks than the symptom would have. It costs far less across a year. The clock does not care how you feel. It cares whether you fed it on time.
Four. Ration your running-hot days. Every morning you run at full spec, every reflex live, you spend drift you cannot earn back. Some jobs are worth it. A breach, a bad night on the gate, the one shift that keeps the contract. Most are not. Quint walks the yard slow on purpose. She has decided which days are worth burning and which are worth surviving, and she does not let a supervisor make that call for her. A shelf unit who runs for the cameras every shift is not durable. They are early.
Five. Pick your clinic the way you pick a creditor. The garage-sale places off the pier run salvaged kit and secondhand templates, and some of them have better hands than any faction doc who ever read your label as a liability. Some of them will sell you something off the parts bin and not tell you where it came from. Read the Catalog. Read the Dead Man's pages of it twice. The container vendors paint NO RETURNS on the door for a reason, and the reason is you. A creditor who is honest about the terms is worth more than a kind one who is not.
Six, and last. Know the line. Going original is the body rejecting the edit, the night vision fading, the mod sliding back toward the template you were poured from. Cooking off is faster and harder to hide. There is a point where the meds cost more than the day they buy, where the interest has eaten the loan, and no manual gets you past it. Quint knows roughly where her line is. She has not reached it. When she does, she says, she will close the notebook herself rather than let the yard close it for her. That is the last entry on the overtime sheet, and it is hers to write.
Until then she shows up at the gate at first light, signs the log, and adds one more tick to the column. The number said eight. She is keeping the sheet anyway. So can you.