The lightning rod for Hayles's critique of transhumanist disembodiment, and indeed the original impetus for her entire project, is Moravec's speculation on how a mind-upload procedure might work, ‘a roboticist's dream that struck me as a nightmare.’ With equal parts revulsion and fascination, Hayles recounts Moravec's ‘fantasy scenario in which a robot surgeon purees the human brain in a kind of cranial liposuction […] the patient, now inhabiting the metallic body of the computer, wakens to find his consciousness exactly the same as it was before.’ It is difficult to say which aspect of the passage troubles Hayles most – the nightmarish staging of the scene itself, or the intellectual wrong-headedness of the premise it purports to illustrate. In either case, Moravec's graphic depiction of the annihilative scanning of a human mind serves Hayles as a vivid metaphor for the casual and often violent excision of bodies in posthumanist discourse on subjectivity.

Like Hayles, Greg Egan finds Moravec's scenario irresistibly compelling, if not unproblematic – so much so that he deploys it as the foundational premise for his novels Permutation City (1994) and Diaspora (1998). The latter relates a strikingly similar, and similarly horrific, scene of a human body being disintegrated while the mind it hosts is imported to a computer. In place of Moravec's ‘robot surgeon,’ Egan substitutes a swarm of hungry nanobots that tunnel into a man's flesh as they scan – which only intensifies the graphic horror of the Moravec operation as conceived by Hayles.