Three changes, all from the same evening on the hardware. **Never adopt an existing link.** `setup_session` skipped connecting when it found the peripheral already connected, which is not a shortcut: it means someone else left it that way, and after a shutdown that ran out of budget that someone is our own previous run. The inherited session answers the handshake and streams battery every five seconds while never delivering a button, which reads as broken hardware — it was diagnosed as a dead pod, a wrong bit map, mis-filed pods and a lapsed Zwift unlock before anyone looked at what the last run failed to close. Any pre-existing link is now dropped first, in all three actors, so every connection starts identical. **A watchdog for the same state, should it arise another way.** Deliberately narrow: a link that is plainly alive — frames arriving inside STALE_AFTER — and has never carried a button since it came up is recycled after 150 s. Not "the rider has not shifted lately", which is normal and would strand a pod that only advertises while awake. A link that has delivered even one press is exempt for its lifetime. **`Y` on the `+` pod shifts down.** Shifting down lived entirely on the `−` pod's paddle, so one pod was a single point of failure for half the drivetrain — and with no on-screen gear control on Android, a rider whose left pod goes quiet is stuck in whatever gear they were in, mid-interval, with no way out. This is RISK-9's documented mitigation and it should have been there from the start. Applied in Rust beside the paddles so a shift behaves the same wherever it comes from; removed from the webview so it cannot fire twice. Mode cycling keeps the `m` key. Verified on the tablet: `Y` moved the gear 12 -> 9, and the pods reconnected cleanly with no stale link to purge. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>