The core body temperature of the bird is a degree or two warmer than that of a human such as Cecilia Winter. The metabolism is dramatically faster. The bird spends most of its time eating, and moving. It flies at speeds Cecilia could never have matched on the ground even in her youth. It also runs, and even when it’s still, it is in a state of high excitement – alert, with its blood pumping fast, ready to fly at a moment’s notice.

The bird’s muscles are all working, all the time, and therefore we find movement around the interior much harder. There’s seldom a tranquil moment. As in a human, the blood vessels are our main routes, but the flow of blood is faster, and the veins move with the muscles, and the pull of gravity changes as the bird manoeuvres at speed in the air.

Some of us have entered the bird’s bones, and here we find ourselves in open space. There are complex struts across the airy passages, but no fluid inside, and we have to move across the bony surfaces.

Others have gone into the lungs, which are a high pressure wind tunnel. Air moves at great speed through the lungs, and on into a network of air sacs. At one point it passes with great force through an organ called the syrinx, and here we can barely hold our positions in the tempest. It is where the bird creates its song, and when this happens we are almost overwhelmed by the volume of sound resonating through our metallic bodies.

Because the bird is small, we are able to populate it entirely, despite our depleted numbers. Inside a human we need thousands of nanobots to create a complete net to monitor and assist all the bodily systems and processes. Just 649 of us entered the bird, but we’re able to cover enough of the bird’s insides to get a good picture of what’s going on.

Winifred asked us the following questions when we first reported in:

Winifred: Have you entered the bird’s brain?

Nanobot team: Yes. The bird is not elderly, and its brain appears to function well. Structurally it is, of course, smaller and less complex than the human brain, and proportionally more of it is devoted to management of physical processes. The optic areas are significantly more developed, and its motor functions are elaborate.

Winifred: Can you comment on the higher functions?

Nanobot team: We have difficulties in this respect in humans, in that many areas interconnect and ad hoc groupings of cells appear to be recruited at unpredictable times to work together on tasks for which we can’t see any outcome.

Winifred: Thinking, I suppose. Or imagining. Or something like that, with no resultant action, necessarily.

Nanobot team: Indeed. The bird does this, to a lesser extent.

Winifred: You conjecture it has some kind of mind?