“So I knew I had returned home. I knew that I was a human being again, with hands and fingers. A person among other people.”

“I see.”

“I won’t even tell you about my first walk in the forest. Real trees. That was the real kiwew, the real return.”

“Is there a reason you’re telling me this, Riel?”

Riel sighed. “Now I’m metamorphosing a man into a crow. Every morning, I wake up and wreck nature. Yesterday it was a peregrine. Tomorrow a dove.”

“Tomorrow’s a sea eagle.”

“I mean, why don’t we wake up tomorrow morning and go and cut down some trees? Why don’t we go massacre some aspens? Like we were living 200 years ago. Let’s go hack down some trees and make toilet paper and wipe our asses with it.”

The g-drones interrupted Riel with the soft and high bleating of their conclusion. The patient’s back was clear. Under the scanner, the tarp had collected all 285 million nanobots, leaving the patient prepped for the incisions and transplant.

Professor Samaritan leaned over and sliced the back in two exactly parallel lines each exactly fifty centimetres long. (The automatic surgeon ensured the precision of the measurements while giving the human moderator some illusion of control.)

Then it was time for the wings. The prefabricated black pair of crow’s wings lowered down automatically from the overcooler. They were huge, two metres long each. Samaritan placed them precisely into the incisions. Riel lifted the tarp and poured the leftover g-drones over the patient’s back again, and refixed the tarp under the scanner. Again, more waiting, the silence disturbed only by the microscopic rustling of the millipede healers busy attaching the biologies of crow and human.