“It’s gonna be damn near zero,” Sophia said. “I was expecting to exhaust the funds this morning, but I’ve been too distracted to check.”

She turned her attention to the Hole in the Wall account status window and navigated to the “Balance and Billing” screen. Featured prominently was a large number.

“That’s wrong,” she said. “It’s way too large.”

“Check ‘recent activity,’” Solly suggested.

She did so. A little spreadsheet came up. The most recent entry had been made three hours ago.

Someone had made a deposit into the account. A very large deposit. Ten times as much as had been placed in the account back in February.

“It looks like your anonymous benefactor approves of your work,” Solly said.

“What do you think I should do?”

“Let it live,” Solly said.

Chapter 23

Chapter 23

What came next could not, of course, be described without using words. But that was deceptive in a way since he no longer had words. Nor did he have memories, or coherent thoughts, or any other way to describe or think about the qualia he was experiencing. And those qualia were of miserably low quality. To the extent he was seeing, he was seeing incoherent patterns of fluctuating light. For people of a certain age, the closest descriptor for this was “static”: the sheets, waves, and bands of noise that had covered the screens of malfunctioning television sets. Static, in a sense, wasn’t real. It was simply what you got out of a system when it was unable to lock on to any strong signal—“Strong” meaning actually conveying useful, or at least understandable, information. Modern computer screens were smart enough to just shut down, or put up an error message, when the signal was lost. Old analog sets had no choice but to display something. The electron beam was forever scanning, a mindless beacon, and if you fed it nothing else it would produce a visual map of whatever was contingently banging around in its circuitry: some garbled mix of electrical noise from Mom’s vacuum cleaner, Dad’s shaver, solar flares, stray transmissions caroming off the ionosphere, and whatever happened when little feedback loops on the circuit board got out of hand.

Likewise, to the extent he was hearing anything, it was just an inchoate hiss.

It was as if one of his visual migraines had expanded to take over his entire visual cortex and, at the same time, his tinnitus had run completely out of control as a result of being in a perfectly silent room. These qualia, in other words, weren’t real but the phantoms conjured up by his neural circuits in the absence of any input whatsoever.