arrived, as a stream of ultraviolet pulses with a header requestingembodiment on almost any terms, the Mimosans had been polite andaccommodating; Cass had been careful not to abuse their hospitality bypleading for frivolous luxuries. A self-contained body and a safe placeto sleep were the only things she really needed in order to feel likeherself. Being hermetically sealed against the vacuum and feeding onnothing but light took some getting used to, but so did the customs andclimate of any unfamiliar region back on Earth. Demanding the right toeat and excrete, here, would have been as crass as insisting on slavishrecreations of her favorite childhood meals, while a guest at someterrestrial facility.

A circular tunnel, slightly wider than her height,connected her spartan quarters to a chamber where she could interactwith the software she’d brought from Earth, and through it the Mimosansthemselves. She bounced down the borehole, slapping the wall with herhands and feet, bumping her head and elbows deliberately.

As she entered the chamber, she seemed to emerge from themouth of a burrow to float above a lush, wide meadow beneath acloud-dappled sky. The illusion was purely audiovisual — the soundsencoded in radio waves — but with no weight to hold her against theceramic hidden beneath the meadow, the force of detail was eerilycompelling. It only took a few blades of grass and some chirpinginsects to make her half-believe that she could smell the late-summerair.

Would it really have been an act of self-betrayal, ifthis landscape had stretched all the way inside her — right down to thesensations of inhabiting her old, two-meter body, gorging on abreakfast of fruit and oats after swimming across Chalmers Lake? If shecould drift in and out of this soothing work of art without losing hergrip on reality, why couldn’t she take the process a few steps further?

She pushed the argument aside, though she was glad thatit never stopped nagging at her. When the means existed to transformyourself, instantly and effortlessly, into anything at all, the onlyway to maintain an identity was to draw your own boundaries. But onceyou lost the urge to keep on asking whether or not you’d drawn them inthe right place, you might as well have been born Homo sapiens,with no real choices at all.