“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.”

“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.”