“We’ll clean this up verbally,” Solly mentioned.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’ll help you tidy up the language so that it better befits a Princeton senior thesis.”

“Right. Thank you.” She knew what he really meant: she’d better tidy it up herself, then run it by him. “Anyway, there was enough money in the account that I was able to transfer all of the files from our servers here, where they’d been living, to local storage at Hole in the Wall.”

“Much faster,” C-plus translated, “a more solid platform on which to base further work.”

“Yes,” Sophia agreed, jotting this down. “Then there was a couple of months of tweaking the code and the algorithms to run on their devices.”

“We originally wrote the code to run on conventional computers,” Solly said, translating this. “Quantum computers require different strategies, different optimization.”

“That’s very much a work in progress, by the way.”

“Of course. Fuck’s sake, Sophia, it’s just a senior thesis. A simple but workable port is all any sane person would expect.”

“Well, that’s what I did. The bare minimum that would run. With a lot of help from your postdocs.”

“Who will of course be copiously acknowledged.”

“That’s the only part of the thesis that’s actually written!” she replied, beaming. “The acks.”

“So, now we are up to, what—?”

“Mid-April.”

“About a month ago. You got it running.”

“I got a neural simulation running on the Hole in the Wall system with one neuron. Then two, with the neurons passing messages back and forth.”

“With each being a separate, independent process—that’s important to mention.”

“Right.”

“And everything bolted down nice and proper—the messages all being transmitted through modern cloud protocols, suitably encrypted and verified,” C-plus reminded her.

“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.