“If it weren’t for the obvious drawbacks, I would recommend that everyone go crazy at least once in their lifetime,” El said. “It’s the most fascinating thing I’ve ever done. Going about it mindfully requires diligent effort. A kind of spiritual practice. I’m pretty sure that a lot of the old mystics—hermits and prophets who were enshrined by primitive cultures as having possessed some special connection to the divine—were in fact suffering from diagnosable mental illnesses but struggling to succumb to them mindfully. If they’d had access to modern diagnostic manuals they’d have been able to say, ‘Ah, it says right here, here that I am a paranoid schizophrenic,’ but lacking such documentation, they had to self-observe. When certain processes in the mind run out of control, or, at the other end of the spectrum, cease to function at the level needed to preserve a kind of psychiatric homeostasis, the effects are observable to an introspective patient. If you’re a stylite monk, you’re pretty much screwed and you just have to think your way around it. But nowadays, therapeutic options suggest themselves—titrating levels of various psychoactive medications in an interactive manner, talking across the blood-brain barrier, or direct stimulation of certain ganglia using techniques that can reach into the brain and target interesting regions. We have equipment here that can do that. I can stick my head in a magnet and ping a misbehaving neuron. I was doing it ten minutes ago and I’ll be doing it ten minutes after you leave.”

“How long do you have?” Corvallis asked.

“To live? Or to talk to you?” Before Corvallis could answer, he continued, “Probably three years to live. Twenty minutes to talk to you.”

“I wanted to touch base with you about a couple of things.”

“Yes, I assumed there was a motivation for your visit, C.”

“I talk to Sophia. As you must know, she’s a research fellow now. Nominally pursuing a Ph.D. But looking after the Process is more than a full-time job.”

“Delegating tasks to others is what people traditionally do when their workload exceeds their available time,” El pointed out. “I’ve made my opinions clear on this, C. Perhaps I am being ignored because it’s assumed I am out of my mind.”

“You’re not being ignored by me, or others at our board meetings. You are being ignored by Sophia. But she’s not ignoring you because she thinks you’re crazy. She’s ignoring you because she’s stubborn.”

“I don’t understand what she has to be stubborn about, in this case. The Process is a unique and unprecedented phenomenon. It is a gold mine of data about the functioning of the human mind. She is its only token holder. She should open it up, let others have access.”

“It’s a family affair,” Corvallis said, “a personal affair. Dodge died suddenly when she was a little girl.”