Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,234

and she wouldn’t; it had just developed along those lines. Under a pseudonym, she had maintained, for three years, a blog called “Luxury Crossover SUV as Prosthesis” in which she reimagined the elite-mom lifestyle as a centaurlike existence in which one’s body, and hence identity, effectively merged with the vehicle in which one spent several hours a day stuck in traffic between various child-related errands, or spiraling up and down immense multilevel parking structures while absorbed in podcasts or engaged in Bluetooth-mediated telepathy with other such persons. She had pursued a thread originating in Greek mythology, according to which centaurs were in some cases benevolent nurturers linked to the healing arts. The blog was witty but a little too unsparing and scary-smart to attract a wide audience—she had maybe ten thousand followers at peak, but they had a tendency to age out as their kids got into their teens. Anyway, the era of the awesomely huge gleaming luxury crossover SUV was coming to an end. Like Tolkien’s elves fading away and going into the west, they were dissolving into the used market as many families were downsizing their fleets in favor of ride-sharing services, and then fully autonomous vehicles that were owned by no one and everyone. So by the time Maeve’s and Corvallis’s kids were in the nine to twelve range, she had stopped writing the blog and, intellectually/artistically, gone dark for a decade.

And then suddenly the kids were out of the house, and Maeve, like a butterfly unfolding itself from a chrysalis, had begun to unfurl some of what she had quietly been making of herself in that darkness. And much of that was hard to make out even for Corvallis. It had got its start in her identity as an amputee and a user of artificial legs. But it would have been reductive and patronizing to say that was all there was to it. The amputee thing was only a thin crevice into which she had, decades ago, inserted the tip of an intellectual prybar. She’d been worrying away at it ever since, listening to podcasts, downloading dissertations, going to the occasional academic conference, and, at ACTANSS, always in the back of the room paying attention and filling notebooks with tiny neat writing. But she hadn’t really got purchase—she hadn’t found the leverage needed to work that prybar and break the thing wide open—until people at ACTANSS had begun talking about morpho-teleology, about whole-body scanning “all the way down to the toes.” Whereupon she had taken to waving her legs in the air and asking, “What about those of us who don’t have toes?”

Much later, when she was not around anymore, C-plus would go back and watch video of Maeve in those days, making trouble during Q & A time at ACTANSS sessions.

“I get what you’re on about,” she insists, to an eminent but somewhat dense neurologist at ACTANSS 4, “but if your thinking becomes normative, and the system expects it, does that mean I won’t have legs in Bitworld? Because when you scan my corpse, my toes are going to come up missing, aren’t they? My avatar will be lacking those, I take it. Once an amputee, always an amputee.”

“Understood,” says the neurologist, “but the nerves that used to lead down to your toes are still there. They are truncated at the knee, yes. But above, where they connect to the parts of your brain involved in motor functions and so on, the connections are still there. Somewhat atrophied, perhaps—”

“‘Atrophy’ is not a word I love,” Maeve cuts him off. “Look, our brains adapt. Mine has adapted to not having lower legs. When I was a child, I had phantom pain; now I don’t. Call it atrophy if you want. To me it’s plasticity. Adaptation. Growth. Eutrophy.”

“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