While the engineers worked on all that, he researched the hell out of the pharmaceutical side. A lot had been learned since Maeve had started in on this. Some of the drugs she’d used to soften up her brain now seemed dangerously wrong. Some were merely useless, others had become mainstays. He tried to take enough of the right ones to give the effects he wanted while not losing the parts of his brain he needed to do his job—running a significant part of ALISS.

Not needed for ALISS were parts of his cerebellum involved in motor control and visual processing. This made it more and more awkward, as time passed and he got closer to death, to extricate himself from the device. He slept in it, dreaming of flight, hallucinating the afterlife. In the morning he opened his eyes to photons coming not from the sun, but from a rig that pretty convincingly simulated it.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” Zula asked him.

She was far below, standing on a patch of grass—a mountain meadow that in reality was a green paint square on the hangar’s concrete floor. Her voice was raised over the roar of the fans, currently simulating a thermal. Corvallis banked in the updraft. Which was to say that he thought of trimming his wings in a certain way, and it happened: the thing on his head read his mind, the simulator calculated the effects of the movement and made it so, feeding control signals to the servos that tightened some cables while loosening others, to the fans that made the wind, to the infrared panels that simulated the warmth of sunlight, and to the audiovisual simulation running in his headgear. He wheeled to bring Zula into view, pulled up, dove, flared, perched on a branch (actually a steel pipe mounted above the green paint square). Now he was looking at her sidelong from just a few meters away. The fans shut down, creating a silence in which he could hear his engineers applauding and hooting at how neatly he’d executed the move.

“You have huge fans in both senses of the term,” Zula observed.