She knew that Olivia had given her Brainwashed to help her undermine the hypnotic power of neuroimaging, on which Lucy had found herself, as her scans came around, understandably but morbidly fixated. In a sense Olivia’s efforts were misguided. There was no doubt that MRIs could detect structural abnormalities in the brain and there was no chance, alas, that Dr Gray was going to ring her to say that her brain tumour turned out to be a smudge on the lens. At a more subtle level, though, Olivia was right that she must stay rooted in her own sense of well-being and not allow the limited authority of neuroimaging to disembody her. The Keppra had her seizures under control, her mobility was unimpaired, she was not in pain and her mind was lucid. These facts should impress her at least as much as her quarterly glimpses of an iridescent image on a computer screen. The further trouble with a brain tumour was that the dominant physicalist doctrine made it seem to be a mind tumour. How could you get your brain off your mind when your mind was purportedly in your brain? Equanimity or acceptance, or humour, or detachment, or profundity might give you a chance to get another tumour off your mind for a while, but a brain tumour was much more prepositionally intimate: it needed to be taken out of, not merely off, your mind. Under the physicalist dispensation, that could only be done with a surgeon’s knife.

Hunter had told her this morning about the way Saul used to get obsessed with the ‘explanatory gap’ between experience and experiment, between science in its current form and subjectivity in its perennial form. To them, it had been a talking point, but to Lucy it had never seemed more urgent or more real. A physicalist, like Moorhead, who was content to reduce consciousness to cerebral activity, created the problem of why there was any consciousness at all, why the brain bothered to generate this distracting display of mind when it was doing all the real work on its own. This so-called ‘zombie problem’, which might keep zombies awake at night, didn’t worry Lucy any more than the problem of why her television went to the trouble of generating the news. It was simply a false description. Who was it who had said, ‘Consciousness must be a strange kind of illusion if you have to be conscious to have it’? Consciousness was primary and everything else we knew, including data about cerebral activity, derived from it.

‘Hi, Luce,’ said Olivia, stepping into the White House. ‘Wow, this place is so like the movie.’

‘Yeah, Hunter got the same people to do it. Didn’t you bring Francis?’

‘No, he’s off seeing that Tantric slut, whoops, I mean incredible human being, Hope Schwartz, as well as Jim “Titan” Burroughs.’