Sophia nodded, feeling her face get slightly warm, as she had in fact been thinking of names from D’Aulaires’ as suitable passwords. Instead she typed in “IsasdftFffiI13da!,” for “I stole a shower daisy from the Forthrast family farmhouse in Iowa 13 days ago!” As she did so, Uncle C demurely looked away. The app asked her to reenter the password just to make sure, and she did. Then she slid the tablet back across the table, maneuvering it carefully between coffee cups and cream pitchers. “Done,” she said.

“Great.” C-plus spent a few moments working in the virtual space that he could see through the lenses of his glasses. He scanned the results for a few moments, then nodded. “Okay. Congratulations. You now have unlimited read-only access to Dodge’s Brain. As long as you remember that password—and no one steals it.” Meaning that she could read all she wanted and write programs that would pull data from the files, but not alter them.

“And are we going to stick with old-school passwords?” Sophia asked.

“No, we are not,” C-plus said. “Over time you want to migrate over to a DID protocol.” Sophia knew what it meant: Defense in Depth. Instead of all-or-nothing access to a whole system, you sort of had to work your way in, proving and reproving who you were using various factors. To make a long story short, it wasn’t very useful unless it was hooked up to a PURDAH-based system. Because that was the whole point of anonymous holography: your identity was verifiable not because you happened to know a password but because of your “handwriting”—which here meant just about every way in which you made an impression on the world.

“So the password will expire in a few weeks. You need to have switched this thing over to your PURDAH before that happens. Which should take place automatically as you use it and it gets to recognize you. What you do then is up to you, of course. You have a plan?”

“Learn my way around the connectome files. Use some of the tools that my professor’s group has invented to parse them—to ‘ring them out,’ as he likes to put it.”

“That’s probably a few weeks’ work right there.”

“More than likely,” she agreed. “If that works—which is a big if—then start actually trying to run neural simulations on a subset of that connectome. See what happens.”

Chapter 22

Chapter 22

Ten months later

As she walked down the hallway to Solly’s office, she could hear two men laughing and talking through the half-open door. No noisy open-office environment, this. Solly had enough pull to set himself up with an interdisciplinary gig, endowment funded, not tied to any one department. He hung out in an old pseudo-Gothic building on the Princeton campus, within striking distance of both neuroscientists and computer geeks. His office looked out over one of the campus’s many green quadrangles. It was big, book lined, and quiet.