Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,235

ground, Maeve visibly checks herself and decides to educate him. Or maybe that’s the wrong way to think of it. It’s more that she’s thinking out loud—articulating for the first time a set of ideas that have been incubating at least since her first failed startup.

“I would hope not,” she says. Then, perhaps realizing she’s in danger of being written off as a mouthy firebrand, she changes tack a little. “Or rather, I would hope for more than you seem comfortable with. And that’s what I want to push on. Your comfort level. Why it is where it is. How the boundaries could be messed with. Dodge has wings.”

“What!?” He’s caught off balance, not following the shifts.

“Dodge has wings,” she repeats. “We don’t know when he acquired them, because he already had them when the LVU was first brought online. He and the other Mag Zero to Two processes have weird idiomorphic bodies. Some don’t have bodies at all. They were all booted up from scans that we now consider to be lower resolution. Head-only scans—they were all effectively decapitated, weren’t they? Now, that’s what I call an amputee! So they had to regrow bodies. They made them up as they went along. The new processes, on the other hand, are based on better scans—all the way down to the stumps—and at the same time we see much less freedom, much less creativity if you will, in body shape among the Mag Three to Four processes. How can we regain that freedom?”

“Freedom to . . . have a nonhumanoid body?”

“Yes, I want wings.”

The neurologist glances nervously off camera. Years later, watching the video, Corvallis knows exactly who he’s looking at: a couple of El’s people, standing there silently, observing this conversation. This makes him nervous because everyone knows, by this point, that El has been creating winged souls—angels?—in Bitworld. It’s one of those things that’s widely known among the kinds of people who go to ACTANSS. But most of those people prefer to whisper about it in bars. Only Maeve is willing to be so indiscreet.

“Again, we can’t say for certain. I agree that we see correlation between higher-fidelity scans and more conventional humanoid morphology. Does that mean we should deliberately downgrade scan quality? I would be extremely hesitant to take any customer’s remains and scan them at anything less than the best quality we can possibly achieve. And once you have that data? You have to put all of the data at the disposal of the process, you can’t withhold information just based on a vague supposition that doing so would give that process the freedom to sprout wings.”

“Forget sprouting. What if the wings are already there?” Maeve asks.

“I don’t understand what you mean by that.”

“Neurologically. What if the brain is already hooked up in such a way that it ‘knows’ it has wings?”

“Go on. Because to be frank this conversation is fun and interesting but I have no idea where you’re going.”

“My brain started out like yours. It thought it had toes. Then my legs were removed. At first I had phantom pain but then my brain decided it didn’t have toes. If I die tomorrow and get scanned and booted up, that’s still what my simulated brain is going to be expecting.”

“I’m with you so far.”

“What if my brain does expect wings?”

The neurologist can do nothing but smile and turn his hands palm-up. Which is how the conversation ends.

But it was after that that Maeve began to train her brain to expect wings.

Having a lot of free time and a lot of money made this easier. Virtual reality systems had become awfully convincing by that point. She hired a team of programmers, as well as an aerodynamicist who specialized in the flight of birds, and they rigged up a system in a circus school down by Boeing Field where Maeve could be suspended in a harness from a web of cables that were reeled in or paid out so as to move her through three-dimensional space. A VR rig covered her eyes and fed her matching imagery—most importantly, moving images of imaginary wings, which she could see if she turned her head to one side or the other. Embedded in the same rig were sensors reading faint signals from her brain. Years earlier, such systems had advanced to the point where quadriplegics could use them to control wheelchairs or robotic limbs just by thinking, and Maeve had of course read all of the papers that had been