“Aww, thank you, Solly!”

“Huh?” C-plus asked.

“We D’Aulaires’ fans have to stick together,” Solly explained, and winked at Sophia. For the two of them had long ago bonded over their shared love of those books. “Anyway. Dodge’s Brain. My god. All of those different data formats at war with each other. Each of them encoding someone’s pet theory as to how the brain works. It’s no surprise you spent the whole summer just getting oriented. The only thing that matters is that the Forthrast Family Foundation didn’t give you the sack. You came back. You were able to do some new things here, in this department. Now, tell me in your own words what you did, and we’ll bang it into a form that is acceptable as a senior thesis. Which”—and he checked his watch—“is due—”

“In a week. I know.” Sophia threw her head back in embarrassment. “I just don’t know where to begin.”

“‘Dear Mom,’” suggested Solly.

“Huh?”

“That’s how to begin.” Solly made a sort of exaggerated pointing gesture, apparently trying to draw her attention to the pad of paper. “‘Dear Mom.’ Write that down.”

She wrote it down.

“‘I’ve been working on digitally simulating my great-uncle’s brain,’” Solly continued.

“I’ve been working . . . ,” she muttered, writing as fast as she could. “. . . brain.” Then she looked up expectantly.

Solly shrugged. “I have no idea what to say next. You know your mother, and your project, better than I do.”

She wrote a sentence.

“Now we’re cooking,” C-plus said. “I like this plan. Read it back to us.”

“‘When I got back to Princeton in September, thanks to all the help from C-plus, I feel like I knew my way around DB pretty well,’” she read.

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Corvallis said.

“Tell you what,” Solly said, manipulating some kind of UI. “Why don’t you dictate it. Saves time. I just turned on voice capture.”

“The connectome was a Tower of Babel,” Sophia began, speaking slowly at first, then warming to the task. “The same basic set of connections, interpreted and expressed in dozens of different ways. In order to even get started, I had to write code that would walk through all of those files and spit out a connectome that I could at least work with. During the summer I’d laid a lot of the groundwork, but the code was slow and buggy. I cleaned it up and got it to run faster. By Thanksgiving break I had something I could use.”

“Use how?” Solly asked.

“I just mean that it was compatible with the neural simulation algorithms that I had access to here at Princeton. Until then it had been a total ‘square peg, round hole’ problem.”

“But by Thanksgiving you were in a position to get the peg into the hole.”

“Yeah, so then I fired it up on a small scale during December. Meaning, I got the simulation algorithms to run on a tiny subset of the connectome.”