“And that’s where we are now,” she concluded. “As of an hour ago.”

“Like it’s stuck in some kind of repetitive cycle,” C-plus said. “That’s my takeaway from your graph.”

“That’s what worries me,” she said. “Or maybe it’s waking up, building to some level of activity, and then going to sleep again.”

“I would not recommend putting that kind of anthropomorphic language into your thesis,” Solly said.

“Of course.”

“A very basic question: can the connectome self-modify?” Enoch asked.

“Self-modification is a vast, separate thing from what I’m trying to do at this stage!” Sophia exclaimed. She glanced at Solly and C-plus and read in their faces that they were both as taken aback as she was by Enoch’s question. Oh, it was a fascinating topic to think about. But way out of scope for this project.

“‘Dear Mom,’” Enoch repeated.

“Okay. Okay. Mom, keep in mind there’s a huge difference between this simulation and a real brain. A real brain is a Heraclitean fire. Never the same brain twice. You can take a snapshot of the connectome at the moment of death—which is what we have done here in the case of DB—but that bears the same relationship to a real brain as a freeze-frame does to a movie. In a real brain, every single time a neuron fires, the brain rewires itself a little bit in response to that event. Frequently used connections get strengthened. Neglected ones atrophy. Neurons get repurposed. Things get remembered—or forgotten. And none of that is happening in my simulation.”

“Why not?” Solly asked. He knew the answer perfectly well but was still acting as devil’s advocate. Also, helping to shield her a bit from Enoch’s weird and transgressive line of questioning.

“Well, first of all, because I didn’t feel like I was ready. I had to get it running first. To see what happened. Whether it would work at all. Secondly, because it’s more expensive—it would consume more memory, more processing power, and I was afraid of running out.”

“The algorithms you are using have the self-modification capability built in,” Enoch pointed out. “Unless you went to the trouble of ripping it out.”

“No, I didn’t rip it out. I just turned it off. Suppressed it for now.”

“I don’t think anyone here is arguing with that decision,” Solly said, with a sort of quizzical glance at Enoch. “You’re right that you had to simply get it running first—to see what would happen. And no one will blame you for being conservative with your expenditure of resources.”

Enoch said: “But it’s hardly surprising, is it, that you’re seeing repetitive, cyclic behavior. That it’s stuck in some kind of loop.”

“Freeze-framed,” Sophia said.