Or at least it had seemed like a hot topic to some there who had never taken an introductory philosophy course. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century neurologists who had thought about, and done empirical research on, how the brain actually worked had tended toward the conclusion that there was no mind-body problem. The whole notion was devoid of meaning. The mind couldn’t be separated from the body. The whole nervous system, all the way down to the toes, had to be studied and understood as a whole—and you couldn’t even stop there, since the functions of that system were modulated by chemicals produced in places like the gut and transmitted through the blood. The bacteria living in your tummy—which weren’t even part of you, being completely distinct biological organisms—were effectively a part of your brain. According to these neurologists, the whole notion of scanning brains taken from severed heads had been—for lack of a better term—wrongheaded to begin with.

Which led to interesting questions about what actually happened when those brains were rebooted as processes. According to this model, such “brains” wouldn’t be able to make sense of anything—they couldn’t function, really—until and unless they had rebuilt the missing parts of the system from scratch.

That much was imponderable and unknowable until they had better tools for making sense of the Process—which explained why Elmo Shepherd was pissed off about Sophia’s reluctance to share access. In the meantime, one thing they could make all sorts of progress on was improving the quality of the scans themselves. Between the scientists from the Waterhouse/Forthrast camp and those who worked for El, there was vociferous agreement that the word “brain” needed to be banned from learned discourse, or put in scare quotes. They had to move beyond the practice of chopping off the heads of the deceased and throwing away the rest. Henceforward every client would be scanned in toto, heads to toes, and efforts would be made to collect data about their microbiome and any other non-neurological phenomena that would be overlooked by an ion-beam scanning system that only cared about neurons.

“I beg your pardon,” C-plus said. “You have clients. Some of them are no longer among the living. You have been subjecting their remains to the most advanced protocols available.”

“As have you.”

“Of course.”

“People die,” El said. “Some of them want what Richard Forthrast wanted.”

“How many?”

El shrugged. “More than a thousand.”

Corvallis didn’t quite believe it. “You mean, that many have signed up?”

“No, I mean that we have actually scanned and archived that many.”

“I had no idea.”

“That is frankly a little hard for me to believe,” said El, “given that in South Lake Union you have done the same thing to—how many?”

C-plus shrugged. “I haven’t checked recently. A couple of hundred?”

“Three hundred and forty-seven,” El corrected him.