It doesn’t hurt. Really. But it is disconcerting to watch your hands dissolve right in front of you. Closing your eyelids won’t help much, since they go next, leaving a dreadful second or two until your entire skull – brain and all – crumbles like a sugar confection in hot water.

Ever since it was proved – maybe a century ago – that the mind exists independent from the body, philosophers have hoped to tap marvelous insights or great wisdom from the plane of pure abstraction. Some try to do this by peering into dreams. Others hope to sample the filtered essence of thought from people who are in a liquid state.

Oh, it’s true that something seems to happen – thoughts flow – during that strange time when your nervous system isn’t solid anymore, but a churning swirl of loose neurons and separated synapses, gurgling supersonically down a narrow pipe two hundred miles long. Giving new meaning to “brain drain.”

But in my experience, these stray thoughts are seldom anything profound. On that particular day – as I recall – my focus was on the job. The most fundamental underpinning of my task as Earthling Advisor.

Maybe they will grow up.

After all, we did, eventually.

It’s the hope we all cling to.

Or so one part of me told the rest of my myriad selves, during that timeless interval when I had no solid form. When “me” was many and a sense of detachment seemed to come naturally.

Which just goes to show you that it never pays to do any deep thinking when you’re in a slurry.

I regained full consciousness on a strange world, watching my hands reappear in front of me as the reconstructor at the nozzle end of the Hose re-stacked my cells, one by one, in the same (more or less) relative positions they had been in, aboard ship.

Did I have that mole on my hand, before? Isn’t it a lot like one I saw on the back of Ohm’s neck…

But no. Don’t go there.

Still, while dismissing that spurious thought, I resisted the urge to shake my head or shrug. Best to let ligaments and things congeal a few extra seconds, lest something jar loose and roll away.

I did shift my eyes a bit to look through a window of the Nozzle Chamber. Overhead, the Hose stretched upward into a cloud-flecked sky, cleverly rendered invisible to radar, sonar, infrared, and most visible light. (I could see it, of course. But then, demmies are always amazed by our human ability to perceive the mystical color, “blue.”)

A final word about slurrying. In its way, it is an efficient mode of transport, and I’m not complaining. Things might have been worse. I’m told that true matter teleportation – where an object is read and replicated or “beamed,” atom-by-atom, instead of cell-by-cell, is a ridiculous impossibility. Quantum uncertainty and all that. Won’t ever happen.