Sophia nodded. She had begun moving her hands while she talked, in a way that suggested she was working with a user interface. Marcus and Zula both took the hint and put on their glasses. They saw a carousel hovering in the middle of the office, displaying a few thousand photos that Sophia and her friends had apparently captured during their cross-country drive. Zula recognized some exterior shots of the Forthrast farmhouse in Iowa. Then Sophia spun it forward and finally zeroed in on some more recent pictures.

The landscape of central Washington State was distinctive with its red-brown basalt, purple haze of sagebrush, and deep blue Columbia River water. On the shore of that river, on a flat triangle of alluvial ground at the mouth of a slot canyon, was a big dusty building ensnared in a web of power lines. It had a large parking lot, made for a blue-collar workforce that no longer existed, currently occupied by all of three vehicles. One of those was a pickup truck marked SECURITY, and standing next to it was a burly man in mirror shades, watching Sophia—or whichever of her friends had taken the photograph—and no doubt recording her.

“And that is what is happening at Hole in the Wall Coulee,” Sophia was saying. “On the outside it looks the same as any other processor farm. Electricity and cold water go in, bits and warm water come out. But behind the walls of this old factory, the amount of useful computation that’s happening is thousands or maybe even millions of times in excess of what you’d see in old-school processor farms just up the river.”

“Got it,” Marcus said. “So I see what you mean that this is a game-changer in terms of the ability to run a big neurological simulation.”

“Not my insight,” Sophia admitted. “Solly—one of my professors at Princeton—brought it up a few months ago, when this thing came online, and said basically, ‘Look, we might actually be able to do it now.’”

“Meaning, run a simulation of something more ambitious than a cubic millimeter of one mouse’s brain,” Zula said.

“Yeah. And I just thought to myself, when I heard that, ‘Hey. DB is part of my birthright. Opportunity knocks.’ And that’s when I applied for this internship.”

Marcus was nodding. “Does your professor know about this? Is he or she part of the picture?”

“He. Most definitely. It’s Solly.” Which in a lot of tech nerd circles would have been sufficient. He was one of those guys who had been around forever and played roles in tech companies going at least as far back as Hewlett-Packard.

But Zula wasn’t really a part of that culture. “Rings a bell,” she said.

“Solly Pesador. Old-school tech geek turned neuro hacker.”