He turned off the flashlight. In the dark, he pressed a switch at the base of the structure. A dazzling burst of quickly moving bright dots filled the structure, as though tens of thousands of fireflies had been loaded into the tiny, hollow, glass globes. One globe lit, then its light propagated to surrounding globes. At any given moment, some portion of the tiny globes produced an initial point of light or propagated the light another globe produced. Vividly, she saw her own analogy: a pond in the midst of rain.

“Is this a model of the propagation of twinkling among the stars? Oh, so beautiful. Can it be … you’d already predicted everything?!”

“I’d guessed that propagating the twinkling among the stars was a universal phenomenon. Of course, it was just intuition. However, this isn’t a model of the propagation of stellar twinkling. Our campus has a brain-science research project that uses three-dimensional holographic-microscopy molecular-positioning technology to study the propagation of signals between neurons in the brain. This is just the model of signal propagation in the right brain cortex, albeit a really small part of it.”

She stared, captivated by the sphere with the dancing lights. “Is this consciousness?”

“Yes. Just as a computer’s ability to operate is a product of a tremendous amount of zeros and ones, consciousness is also just a product of a tremendous amount of simple connections between neurons. In other words, consciousness is what happens when there is a tremendous amount of signal propagation between nodes.”

Silently, they stared at this star-filled model of the brain. In the universal abyss that surrounded them, hundreds of billions of stars floating in the Milky Way and hundreds of billions of stars outside the Milky Way were propagating innumerable type A twinklings between each other.

She said lightly, “It’s almost light. Let’s wait for sunrise.”

They sat together on a broken wall, looking at the model of the brain in front of them. The flicker light had a hypnotic effect. Gradually, she fell asleep.

THINKER