The late-afternoon session had been on the topic of mind reading. The thumbnail image in the program was a still from Star Trek, portraying Spock with his hands all over Captain Kirk’s face, using the Vulcan mind meld to read what was going on in Kirk’s brain. At the beginning, El’s people had conducted a virtual boycott, clustering in the nest of sofas around the fireplace where the robot had planted itself. They’d assumed, based on the title, that the subject matter was pure fluff. Indeed, the speaker—a brain scientist from USC, invited by Solly—had warmed up the room with a few such pop-culture references. But then she had asked, in all seriousness, how we could really know what was going on inside of another mind—be it a biological brain or a digital simulation. We took speech and other forms of communication for granted. Computer geeks tended to see those as add-on modules, separate from the brain per se—peripheral devices that could be plugged in, like a microphone or a printer, when some input or output was desirable. Brain scientists considered the input and the output as more fundamental, woven into the neural fabric of the brain. No one really knew what to make of the Process, which purported to simulate activity in a brain but was not actually hooked up to anything except a bank account.

The presentation was inconclusive by design. She was asking questions, not reciting answers. And it was bracketed in the usual disclaimer that Sophia, foolish undergraduate that she was, had done it all wrong. She shouldn’t have launched a whole brain just to see what it would do. She ought to have built it up gradually and figured out a way to connect input/output systems to it at each step.

Halfway through the talk, though, the robot stepped forward and walked up the length of the hall to a position where it could get a clearer view. El’s boys woke up and took notice. No one really knew for certain, but it was generally assumed that the robot—a telepresence device meant to serve as the sensorium of a person not physically in attendance—was being controlled from Europe by Elmo Shepherd.