The universe was a giant eye calmly looking at her.

She woke suddenly. Her forehead was wet. She wasn’t sure if it was sweat or dew. He hadn’t slept, always at her side silently looking at her. Sitting on the grass in front of them, the model of the brain had exhausted its battery. The starlight that pierced it had extinguished.

Above them, those stars hovered as before.

“What are ‘they’ thinking?” she asked, breaking the silence.

“Now?”

“In these thirty-four years.”

“The twinkling the sun originated could just be a primitive neural impulse. Those happen all the time. Most of them are like mosquitoes causing tiny ripples on a pond, insubstantial. Only those impulses that spread through the whole universe can become an actual experience.”

“We used up a lifetime, and saw of ‘him’ just one twinkling impulse that ‘he’ couldn’t even feel?” she said hazily, as though still in the middle of a dream.

“Use an entire human civilization’s life span, and we still might not see one of ‘his’ actual experiences.”

“People’s lives are bitter and short.”

“Yes. People’s lives are bitter and short….”

“A truly insightful, solitary person.”

“What?” He looked at her, uncomprehending.

“Oh, I said ‘he,’ apart from completeness, is nothingness. ‘He’ is everything. Still thinking, or maybe dreaming. But dreaming about what …”

“Let’s not try to be philosophers!” He waved his hand as though he were shooing something away.

Out of the blue, something occurred to her. She got off of the broken wall. “According to the big bang theory of modern cosmology, while the universe is expanding, the light emitted from a given point can never spread widely across the universe.”

“In other words, ‘he’ can never have even one actual experience.”

Her eyes focused infinitely far away. She stayed silent for a long time, before speaking. “Do we?”

Her question sank him into his recollection of the past. Meanwhile, the woods of Mount Siyun heard its first birdcall. A ray of light appeared on the eastern horizon.

“I have,” he answered confidently.

Yes, he had. It was thirty-four years ago during a peaceful moonlit night on this mountain peak. A feather-like figure in the moonlight, a pair of eyes looking up at the stars … A twinkling in his brain quickly propagated through the entire universe of his mind. From then on, that twinkling never disappeared. That universe contained in his brain was more magnificent than the star-filled exterior universe that had already expanded for about fourteen billion years. Although the external universe was vast, the evidence ultimately showed it was finite. Thought, however, was infinite.

The eastern sky grew brighter and brighter, starting to hide its sea of stars. Mount Siyun revealed its rough contours. On its highest peak, at the vine-covered ruins of the observatory, these two nearly sixty-year-old people gazed eastward expectantly, waiting for that dazzling brain cell to rise over the horizon.

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