She is life-size, reclining, on silk, in a rosewood and Venetian glass case. Her head is thrown back. Her lips are parted. She wears a string of pearls, and her hair is real human hair, set one strand at a time.

The chest lifts off. Under it, seven further layers, each removable in sequence: ribs, lungs, heart, diaphragm, viscera, uterus. In the uterus, a foetus.

She was made as a teaching instrument, so that medical students in a Catholic city could learn anatomy without a body. She is more accurate than a cadaver, because a cadaver is one person and she is the consensus of many, corrected, idealised, and available in June.

She is also, unmistakably, in ecstasy — which is not required by the teaching function and was not an oversight.

Set her next to the file of seventy billion numbers. Both are the averaged interior of a great many people, assembled by specialists, rendered in a substrate their sources were not made of, more legible than any of the sources, and finished with an expression that was not in the data.

She has been on that silk for two hundred and forty years, waiting for the model that would finally make sense of her.