“Call it what you like,” says the neurologist. “That adaptation will of course be reflected in a scan of your brain. And as such it will be correctly simulated when a process based on that scan is booted up. Beyond that, to be honest, we don’t know much. Because we still don’t know why souls in Bitworld adopt the forms that they do. And so I simply cannot tell you what shape your simulated body will take. I would hope that it would develop a normal set of lower legs and learn to use them.”

At this point Corvallis looks away, almost wincing, because he knows that the neurologist has stepped in it big-time. But instead of burning him to the ground, Maeve visibly checks herself and decides to educate him. Or maybe that’s the wrong way to think of it. It’s more that she’s thinking out loud—articulating for the first time a set of ideas that have been incubating at least since her first failed startup.

“I would hope not,” she says. Then, perhaps realizing she’s in danger of being written off as a mouthy firebrand, she changes tack a little. “Or rather, I would hope for more than you seem comfortable with. And that’s what I want to push on. Your comfort level. Why it is where it is. How the boundaries could be messed with. Dodge has wings.”

“What!?” He’s caught off balance, not following the shifts.

“Dodge has wings,” she repeats. “We don’t know when he acquired them, because he already had them when the LVU was first brought online. He and the other Mag Zero to Two processes have weird idiomorphic bodies. Some don’t have bodies at all. They were all booted up from scans that we now consider to be lower resolution. Head-only scans—they were all effectively decapitated, weren’t they? Now, that’s what I call an amputee! So they had to regrow bodies. They made them up as they went along. The new processes, on the other hand, are based on better scans—all the way down to the stumps—and at the same time we see much less freedom, much less creativity if you will, in body shape among the Mag Three to Four processes. How can we regain that freedom?”

“Freedom to . . . have a nonhumanoid body?”

“Yes, I want wings.”

The neurologist glances nervously off camera. Years later, watching the video, Corvallis knows exactly who he’s looking at: a couple of El’s people, standing there silently, observing this conversation. This makes him nervous because everyone knows, by this point, that El has been creating winged souls—angels?—in Bitworld. It’s one of those things that’s widely known among the kinds of people who go to ACTANSS. But most of those people prefer to whisper about it in bars. Only Maeve is willing to be so indiscreet.