I played the whole thing through, one more time. Rourke was remarkably eloquent – and almost charismatic, in his own strange way – and everything he’d said was relevant. But the private terminology, the manic outbursts … it was all too weird, too messy and confrontational.

I left the take unused, unquoted.

I’d gone on to another appointment at the university: an afternoon with the famous Manchester MIRG – Medical Imaging Research Group. It had seemed like too good a chance to miss – and imaging, after all, lay behind the definitive identification of partial autism.

I skimmed through the footage. A lot of it was good – and it would probably make a worthwhile five-minute story of its own, for one of SeeNet’s magazine programs – but it was clear now that Rourke’s own concise notepad demonstration had supplied all the brain scans Junk DNA really needed.

The main experiment I’d filmed involved a student volunteer reading poetry in silence, while the scanner subtitled the image of her brain with each line as it was read. There were three independently-computed subtitles, based on primary visual data, recognized word-shapes, and the brain’s final semantic representations … the last sometimes only briefly matching the others, before the words’ precise meanings diffused out into a cloud of associations. However eerily compelling this was, though, it had nothing to do with Lamont’s area.

Toward the end of the day, one of the researchers – Margaret Williams, head of the software development team – had suggested that I climb into the womb of the scanner, myself. Maybe they wanted to turn the tables on me – to scrutinize and record me with their machinery, just as I’d been doing to them for the past four hours. Williams had certainly been as insistent as if she’d believed it was a matter of justice.

She said, “You could record the subject’s-eye view. And we could get a look at all your hidden extras.”

I’d declined. “I don’t know what the magnetic fields would do to the hardware.”

“Nothing, I promise. Most of it must be optical – and everything else will be shielded. You get on and off planes all the time, don’t you? You walk through the normal security gates?”

“Yes, but—”

“Our fields are no stronger. We could even try reading your optic nerve activity, via the scanner – and then comparing the data with your own direct record.”

“I don’t have the download module with me. It’s back at the hotel.”

She pursed her lips, frustrated – obviously dying to tell me to shut up, do as I was told, and get inside the scanner. “That’s a pity. And I suppose you’d have problems with the warranty if we improvised something – our own cable and interface…?”

“I’m afraid so. The software would log the use of non-standard equipment, and then I’d be in deep trouble at the next annual service.”