And then suddenly the kids were out of the house, and Maeve, like a butterfly unfolding itself from a chrysalis, had begun to unfurl some of what she had quietly been making of herself in that darkness. And much of that was hard to make out even for Corvallis. It had got its start in her identity as an amputee and a user of artificial legs. But it would have been reductive and patronizing to say that was all there was to it. The amputee thing was only a thin crevice into which she had, decades ago, inserted the tip of an intellectual prybar. She’d been worrying away at it ever since, listening to podcasts, downloading dissertations, going to the occasional academic conference, and, at ACTANSS, always in the back of the room paying attention and filling notebooks with tiny neat writing. But she hadn’t really got purchase—she hadn’t found the leverage needed to work that prybar and break the thing wide open—until people at ACTANSS had begun talking about morpho-teleology, about whole-body scanning “all the way down to the toes.” Whereupon she had taken to waving her legs in the air and asking, “What about those of us who don’t have toes?”

Much later, when she was not around anymore, C-plus would go back and watch video of Maeve in those days, making trouble during Q & A time at ACTANSS sessions.

“I get what you’re on about,” she insists, to an eminent but somewhat dense neurologist at ACTANSS 4, “but if your thinking becomes normative, and the system expects it, does that mean I won’t have legs in Bitworld? Because when you scan my corpse, my toes are going to come up missing, aren’t they? My avatar will be lacking those, I take it. Once an amputee, always an amputee.”

“Understood,” says the neurologist, “but the nerves that used to lead down to your toes are still there. They are truncated at the knee, yes. But above, where they connect to the parts of your brain involved in motor functions and so on, the connections are still there. Somewhat atrophied, perhaps—”

“‘Atrophy’ is not a word I love,” Maeve cuts him off. “Look, our brains adapt. Mine has adapted to not having lower legs. When I was a child, I had phantom pain; now I don’t. Call it atrophy if you want. To me it’s plasticity. Adaptation. Growth. Eutrophy.”