“Proof of concept by Christmas. Very good.”

“Okay, that’s what I’ll call it. Proof of concept.” She jotted that down. “Then I spent winter break feeling kind of depressed about the whole thing.”

“No one gives a shit about your feelings,” Enoch pointed out, in a cheerful way. Not being mean at all. Wry humor.

Sophia accepted it in the same spirit but pushed back a little. “Right, but there was a technical basis for those personal feelings.”

“Which was?” C-plus asked.

“I couldn’t think of any intermediate steps to take next. It makes sense to simulate one neuron. Two neurons talking to each other. Fine. Beyond that, it’s a network. Network effects are all that matter. Simulating, say, a thousand neurons doesn’t break any new ground. People have been doing that for decades. The fact that the connectome of those thousand neurons was arbitrarily cut and pasted from DB is completely meaningless—it might as well have come from a mouse brain.”

“Agreed,” Solly said.

“The only meaningful next step was to light up the whole connectome at once.”

“Really? Then why had no one done this before?”

“Well, for one thing, the data has been lacking. A full connectome of a human brain has only come into existence in the last couple of years. Then there’s the lack of resources—who would pay for all the computing power required? So it was inconceivable until Hole in the Wall came online.”

“That’s good,” Solly said. “Maybe you are being diplomatic by leaving out another factor, which is the academic mind-set. Academic science advances in many micro-steps, one paper at a time. Peer-reviewed papers are the way we keep score. The more papers, the better. If you can take a project and slice it fine, like prosciutto, you publish more papers, and your score goes up. But you were behaving like someone who didn’t know or care about that.”

Sophia blushed. “Maybe I’m naive. Okay.”

“You’re rich,” Enoch announced.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re rich,” he repeated. “There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not a criticism.”

“How does that enter into it?”

“Two ways. First, you simply don’t care about playing the game—publishing as many papers as possible,” Enoch explained, with a nod at Solly. “Second, you had access to the resources needed.”

There was a long silence, during which it seemed entirely possible that Sophia might start crying.

“Listen,” Enoch said, “there is a long and honorable history, dating back to the Royal Society, of the gentleman scientist. And now the lady scientist. We don’t like to acknowledge it because we wish to maintain a polite facade of egalitarianism. But there’s a reason why so many important theorems are named after members of the titled nobility of Europe.”

Sophia didn’t answer, but she seemed to be settling down a bit.

“You don’t have to put Enoch’s observations into your thesis, of course,” Solly said. “But you should be prepared for people to ask the question.”

“If that happens,” she said, “I may not have satisfactory answers.”