We have to celebrate them as heroes, explorers, said the man at the head of the virtual table. If we don't position them as the heirs of the crewed deep space program public opinion will turn on us the first time something goes wrong.
Things will never not be going wrong, replied somebody close to him in the deadly politics of the non-Euclidean seating arrangement. We expect mortality rates higher than the Mars program's. It went unsaid that Mars had gruesomely killed not only every shareholder-colonist gullible enough to move to City One but also any support for space colonies for at least a generation.
So we don't use names, replied the man. The role is what'll be heroic. Soldiers instead of special forces, that sort of thing. We'll focus on how things are improving — won't be hard to improve, we just need one of the assholes to survive for a week — and if we need to put a face on things we pick a net-savvy guy to build up as a test pilot and keep him away from anything dangerous. It's not like we would have made heroes of convicts and encampment inmates.
You keep a journal in your head. It's not really private but it's the best you can do. Every night (you assume it's night when they let you sleep; there are no clocks or windows) you repeat to yourself in silence everything that has happened since the beginning followed by whatever you can remember of the day. The heavy tides of pain somewhere outside your body are no longer worth talking about nor the blinding lights in unnamed colors. Nor the feelings you had never felt before and would kill yourself to avoid feeling again if they had left you any way to do it. Dying would be another way of leaving and you aren't allowed to leave.
You're pretty sure you can die. They are cruel but bumbling. They would kill you to learn something or to meet an arbitrary milestone. Yet the devices inside your head are too new and they are moving too fast for any sort of control. You know this in a way that goes beyond what your body tells you or what you half-understand from the whispers of the vast clouds of servers they are clumsily trying to stitch your brain to.
You can see their eyes when they come to inspect you in person. They are worried that you might be dying and that's a form of hope.
Very few people ever see the interior of a pod cave. They are the alchemical furnaces where commonplace AIs and human brains merge in the hopeful search for the next stage of superintelligence; the grail is an elusive pitch but the price/earnings ratios are already golden so the pod caves have the sort of security people used to reserve for nukes and vaccines.
Doctors and technicians don't enter the caves. Pods are moved by robots to facilities in the infrequent case of a medical or technical issue serious enough to excuse downtime but manageable enough that it's worth dealing with instead of swapping out the pod.
Barring a serious problem a pod cowboy will remain inside it for the duration of their contract. The pods have no windows and the humans aren't conscious. The interface works best in a delicate state between awareness and unconsciousness, a place where most of the brain and its resources are available to the cloud instead of the human. When the equilibrium fails and the subject wakes up the pod identifies the situation and adjusts the cocktail of drugs while its restraints prevent the subject from hurting themselves in claustrophobic panic. Mouth guards keep their screams muffled although there would be nobody to hear them anyway.