One thing Saul Prokosh was not and never would be was cool. He and Hunter hadn’t really been friends at Princeton, but at least Hunter never gratuitously insulted him, unlike some of their more lock-jawed contemporaries whose grandfathers still sighed longingly at the memory of the golden days when Jews were not admitted to the best hotels in New York and Palm Beach. Saul was now The Lafayette Smith and Bathsheba Smith Professor of Chemical Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and The Realisation of Human Potential at The California Institute of Technology, as it said on his unusually large business card. Currently, he was scanning the brains of people in various allegedly desirable states of mind in order to reconstruct those states in other volunteers, using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. It was proving fiendishly difficult to reverse engineer these correspondences and replicate the effects in the minds of others, who seemed set on having their own thoughts, even when the scans of their brains, after trans-cranial stimulation, showed many similarities to the original neuroimaging. There were no completely clear results up to now, but Hunter had been so impressed by the addictive potential of this new technology that he impulsively offered to make Saul a Senior Vice-President of Digitas and put him in charge of Brainwaves and New Projects.

‘Maybe I’m a visionary,’ said Hunter, texting ‘Wagyu Ragu’ in answer to his cook’s lunch suggestions, ‘or maybe I’m suffering from survivor’s guilt, but I’ve decided that it’s time to give something back. Perhaps “back” isn’t exactly the right word. I’m not talking about refunding the investors who bought my hedge fund for $1.6 billion a few weeks before the stock price tanked; and I’m not giving the five hundred former employees of Midas their jobs back.’

‘It sounds like “back” is definitely not the right word,’ said Saul, looking longingly at Barry Goldwater.

‘In any case,’ said Hunter, ‘I want our products, Brainwaves, YouGenetics, and all the other great ideas we have, to be based on intellectual property that makes a fundamental contribution and wins all the science Nobels across the board.’

‘We gotta leave them some of the prizes,’ said Saul, like a lawyer pleading for clemency.

‘They can have Peace and Literature,’ said Hunter.

For some reason, the two men just cracked up and couldn’t stop laughing.

‘Peace and Literature,’ said Saul, trying to control himself. ‘Why is that so funny?’

‘We’re stoned,’ said Hunter.

‘I know, but it’s still just inherently …’ He couldn’t go on, except to howl ‘Peace and Literature’ one more time.

‘You’ve pretty much nailed the Focus and Relax programs,’ said Hunter, ‘but we’ve gotta do more work on the Bliss algorithm and then, once we’ve got a global craze on our hands, we’ll release the Nirvana helmet.’