When the answer came to him, it came from a surprising quarter. Corvallis attended a meeting at the headquarters of the Forthrast Family Foundation in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle. The meeting’s purpose was to go over some dry but necessary legal matters with people representing Elmo Shepherd’s nonprofit. After several years of intensive R & D, and the expenditure of nearly two billion dollars pooled by Forthrast-, Waterhouse-, and Shepherd-funded entities, they’d finally constructed an ion-beam scanning device capable of capturing the full connectome of a human brain, and the “back end” of hardware and software needed to process the data that would pour out of such a machine. Fifteen hundred patent applications had been filed: enough to keep a phalanx of patent attorneys and paralegals busy for years. Twelve different major universities and medical centers were involved. Brilliant young lawyers were building their entire careers around the attendant complexities. A few of them were in this meeting, presenting ready-to-sign documents on which they’d toiled for years. Corvallis, Zula, and others were there just to sign them.

One of the people on Elmo Shepherd’s side of the table was pretty senior—surprisingly so given that all of the big decisions had already been made by this point. He met Corvallis’s eye from time to time, and checked his watch, and gazed out the window in a manner that seemed significant, and indeed when the meeting concluded he approached Corvallis and inquired in the most gentle and polite way whether he might have a moment of private time with him.

His name was Sinjin Kerr. Depending on who was keeping score he was Elmo Shepherd’s first-, second-, or third-most important legal henchman. His role was generally that of Good Cop. In his appearance and grooming he was a straight-from-central-casting Harvard/Yale product with swept-back hair, rimless glasses, and an impeccable suit, protected for this occasion under an overcoat.

They ended up strolling down to the lakefront and, seemingly on the spur of the moment, renting a little electric boat from a business that catered to the tourist trade. Business was light because spring was being a little slow to turn into summer. It was cool and the lenses of Sinjin’s glasses were already flecked with tiny droplets of rain.