The Alterman Centre is new. It has new funding, new logos and letterheads. A new smell, mildly tainted with ammonia, as though it is a film set made freshly for his appearance and some of the fixtures are held in place with craft glue. The designer has plumped for a contemporary blandness of grey and white. The waiting-area chairs, in which Logan is strongly directed to SIT, are black faux leather and low to the ground. Since the angles inherent in arse-lower-than-knee prevent a person rising with any dignity, he ignores the receptionist’s imperative and stands. He pretends he is doing so to read the posters – and then finds himself reading the posters, which have recently migrated from a public exhibition associated with the International Conference of Consciousness Studies.

For many years the study of consciousness was not considered a respectable scientific discipline. Consciousness was a realm reserved for philosophers and mystics, and deemed outside the remit of scientific investigation. In recent years, however, scientists have begun exploring the phenomenon of human consciousness through a number of different approaches. Scientists at the Alterman Centre have been active in studying Near Death Experiences (NDEs), recollections by patients of events that occurred when they were clinically dead, and have demonstrated the inadequacy of existing psychological, physiological and pharmacological explanations. Though original theories of a ‘God-spot’ have proved oversimplistic, research into Religious, Spiritual and Mystical Experiences (RSMEs) has successfully reproduced them through a complex pattern of electrical stimulation to multiple areas of the brain, driven partially by subjective biofeedback. In other research, creation of holographic—

Dr Logan?

Turning round to face a beautiful woman, Logan knows he should have prepared more thoroughly. A simple internet search would have furnished him with an image and given him time to mount appropriate defences. He hadn’t for a moment imagined anyone named Dr Salmon might be so generously lipped, so exquisitely cheekboned, such a confident inhabiter of eyes he is in imminent danger of falling into. Her hair is at least swept back into a bun, naturally brown (he guesses) but tinged with a deliberately exotic red tint, and a rebellious strand has broken free to frame her face. He needs a moment to reorient himself from his dowdy assumptions, a deep breath to flush out the instant fizzing in his groin.

Dr Salmon. Thank you for meeting me.

Happy to help, she says, her voice playing the melody of the words away from platitude and into an amused assessment of his surprise. Coffee, yes?

Coffee, yes. Bed, yes. Anything you ask, yes. He shakes himself as he follows her out of the building via a long corridor and seamlessly into another, he like a dog with a tick in his ear, attempting to dislodge his animal response and return to being Dr Finlay Logan.

She helps him, once they are ensconced with their cups at a table, with some verbal efficiency.

You’ve read my paper? ‘Creating God in the Human Brain’?