Kern observes the copied versions of Gothi and Gethli, now housed in physical bird bodies after being absorbed from the simulation along with Kern’s own copied self. Kern manifests before them in an old human image and tries to determine whether the Corvids truly understand what happened to them and how they are adjusting to a real, embodied existence.

Kern questions the copied Corvids about their experience inside the simulated Imir colony and compares their adjustment to Miranda’s difficulties distinguishing simulation from reality. Gothi and Gethli answer in their usual mixture of learned quotation, bureaucratic echoes, and apparent nonsense, but Gethli’s statement that “It feels now” makes Kern suspect they may be close to admitting a deeper self-awareness.

Instead, Gothi and Gethli argue that they are not sentient. Drawing on inherited human studies and their own reasoning, they claim that their thoughts are only mechanical complexity, and they extend that judgment to Kern, humans, and other minds. They suggest that either everything sufficiently complex is sentient or nothing is, and they prefer the latter conclusion.

The Corvids then push the argument further by proposing that the simulation itself may have functioned as a kind of emergent mind. Since the colony simulation reacted to novel input and seemed to confront its own nature, Gethli frames it as a complex system potentially analogous to a brain. Kern is unsettled by the possibility that the looped world was not merely a container for minds but a lonely, suffering awareness of its own.

Afterward, the greater Kern opens the space so the copied Gothi and Gethli can meet the original Gothi and Gethli, initially separated by a barrier in case of violence. The two pairs inspect, mirror, chatter, and accept one another without crisis. Kern concludes that, despite the Corvids’ insistence that they are not sentient, they must still be treated with the dignity owed to sentient beings.