In this moment I understand the world is filled with bodies-­within-bodies, bodies conjoined, in states of becoming, merging, emerging, consuming, being consumed, cocoons, pregnancies, intercourse, dwellings, people within rooms within buildings within cities. To say “New York City is alive’’ is no more of a metaphor than to say “I am alive.” The city and my body are both made sentient and functional by innumerable smaller bodies, smaller units of sentience housed within us. And in the same manner that human beings place higher on Robert’s sentience quotient than the paramecia inside our cells, so too would New York City place higher than any single human, and so too would the Internet and any other body of which human bodies are composite.

The military drone is a composite body comprised of the warhead and its human operator, who lends the warhead sentience. And it is not just the operator in his or her bunker under the Nevada desert who belongs to the composite body of the drone but also the operator’s superiors in the chain of command, the entire political apparatus that gives the drone meaning and intent, that guides where it glides through the air, what it hunts, and when it strikes. It is a body without a person, without any one person to take responsibility, without any one person to feel guilt or consequence. By being a composite body, it does away with the limitations of personhood. It acts through us and we act through it to achieve godlike acts.

We become part of all manner of bodies, with or without having any choice in the matter. The drone operator goes home and kisses his son’s forehead and makes love to his wife, touches her body with the same hands he used to take away a life in a distant desert, the life of a man who also had a wife he made love to, and in this way the drone operator’s family becomes part of the body of the target and his family. And the friends the drone operator’s son plays with and the lovers he will grow up to have — they too will enter this body.