She had been ignoring her body for eleven days.

This was, she would think later, when she had the particular and specific luxury of thinking about it at all, not negligence, exactly. It was the particular and specific thing she did when there was too much requiring management: she assigned the body to a lower queue. She had been doing it since she was twelve years old and had learned that the body's complaints were interruptive and the mind's requirements were not, and that of the two, the mind could be made to keep working in circumstances where the body would rather lie down. She had a long and documented...