“Of course. So that it would scale.”

“Very good. And then?”

“Then I scaled it.”

“You flipped the switch.”

“Yeah.”

“The big red-handled blade switch on the wall of the mad-scientist lab.”

Getting into the spirit, she said, “Yeah. I hooked the jumper cables up to the neck bolts.”

“You turned on the whole DB at once,” Solly said, “and the lights dimmed in Ephrata, or something.”

“Maybe. I’m not so sure about the lights dimming.”

“What happened then?”

“Little wiggles.”

“Hmm. I’m afraid you’ll have to do better, Sophia.”

“Okay . . . an oscillatory phenomenon?”

“What precisely was oscillating?” C-plus asked.

“The burn rate.”

“That is a Silicon Valley term that might not go over well in a senior thesis, young lady,” Solly said, mock-serious. But serious.

She looked sheepish and drew breath a few times as if about to speak. Each time she thought better of it.

“‘Dear Mom,’” Enoch prompted her, and took a swig of beer.

“Yes,” she said. “See, Mom, the thing is, it’s one thing to simulate a brain. It’s another thing to talk to it. We forget this because our brains are hooked up to bodies with handy peripherals like tongues that can speak and fingers that can type. As long as those work, you can always get some idea of what’s going on in a brain. But a brain in a box doesn’t have those. Which is probably another reason that no one has tried this yet.”

“Namely, that there’s no point in doing it if you can’t get meaningful information out.”

“Yeah, it’s like hooking an EEG up to a patient in a coma,” Sophia said.

“That is a useful analogy.”

“The EEG is a legit scientific instrument. It’s definitely telling you something about brain activity. No question about it. But you can stand there all day looking at the strip of paper coming out of the EEG, staring at the wiggles, and still not have the faintest idea whether anything useful is actually going on inside of that brain. Whether the person is conscious. What they’re thinking.”

“And here the EEG is an analogy for what exactly?” C-plus asked. He knew, of course. He was prompting her.