The thrust of Software is toward a human-bopper fusion. While this fusion seemingly allows humans to experience the benefits of being a bopper, those who undertake it must necessarily surrender limitations and characteristics that are consistent with being human. This trade-off is played up in the conflict between the two heroes in Software, Cobb and Sta-Hi.

Part of the human-bopper fusion in Software is achieved by robots which appear and behave much like humans. On Earth, both Cobb and Sta-Hi are given robot-doubles -- Cobb2 and Sta-Hi2 -- that stand-in for them when they leave for Disky. When Cobb and Sta-Hi arrive at Disky, the bopper society they encounter is an alternative, futuristic society, but it still has similarities to human society in that it is composed of individual beings instead of mindlessly running machines.

While boppers live much humans, and even impersonate humans on Earth, at least one human in Software is given the opportunity to become a bopper. Cobb, the famed bopper designer, is given the opportunity to transmute his existence and reincarnate himself as a robot. Cobb's transmutation is understood as the separation of his software from his hardware, where "hardware" is the physical material making up his body, and "software" is the information contained in the arrangement of that material (Rucker 112). Human hardware, for example, would include the neurons, lipids, oxygen, etc. that make up the human brain, while software would include the memories established by the way those neurons are connected together. Once Cobb's software is separated out, it can be recorded in digital form and become the software for one or more hardware bodies.

Cobb's reincarnation as a bopper, however, requires his death as a human being. To have his software separated from his original hardware Cobb's brain must be extracted and sliced into cross-sections for analysis. This necessary death before rebirth is experienced in surprisingly peaceful terms. Heavily sedated as his death is carried out, a detached Cobb only feels things "come loose" as he becomes a self without a body (Rucker 98). Once this is done, Cobb exists only as digital information archived in the big bopper, MEX.

Overall, boppers in Software are clearly capable of existing much like humans, but there is substantially more conflict around the idea of humans existing as boppers. Having nearly lost his brain to a scavenging bopper, Sta-Hi possesses an almost instinctual opposition to the idea of living life separated from his original hardware. He openly questions whether Cobb's reincarnated existence is life at all. Yet, the very fact of Cobb's continued existence, in whatever form, is a compelling argument for the melding of human and bopper potentials.