Bytes aren't real. Bodies are, and also have people living in them a lot of the time. It shouldn't come as a surprise or a concern, I think, that the imaginary

Bytes aren't real. Bodies are, and also have people living in them a lot of the time. It shouldn't come as a surprise or a concern, I think, that the imaginary and trivially simple thing is much easier to comprehend than the category of real and vastly complex things. (Anyway, some obsolete architectures actually did use nine-bit bytes.)