I was in London when I got the call from the hospital. I landed in Ottawa Sunday night on what was probably the most expensive trans-Atlantic flight they could legally sell. They discharged you on Monday and you took the week off to rest. Your speech came back almost immediately, but you were tired. Depleted. You read, finished a book of Sudoku, ate a lot of fish as per the doctor’s suggestion. You liked to double down on anything you deemed productive, and because you believed in the power of regimes it became haddock for breakfast, tuna salad for lunch, and sole for dinner.

On Thursday you had a follow-up appointment in the middle of the afternoon.

“I hate this; it just cuts up the whole day,” you said as you locked the front door of the house.

“Well, it’s not like you have anything else planned.”

“I do, actually, thank you. I have errands.”

“Like what?”

“I need to pick up a birthday card for Carol’s son Luke and a card for Javier from work. His wife just gave birth.”

“Okay, well, we can stop at Dollarama on the way.”

As we paced the wall of cards at Dollarama, I asked if you were Javier’s boss.

You shook your head. “We’re both project leaders.”

“On NEST?”

You nodded. “NEST is just one of our projects though.”

“And NEST is the artificial brain, right?”

You took in a deep breath, as if to say: This is the last time I’m going to explain this to you so please fucking listen this time. “It’s an artificial neural network of about two billion nerve cells, which simulates just a fraction of the neurons in a human brain.”

“Which is like —?”

“About eighty to a hundred billion.”

“Right. Wow.”

“About as many stars as there are in the Milky Way.”

I recalled that was where our last conversation about your work ended up — with you trying to explain inconceivably large numbers to me with the aid of various cosmological analogies.

“So you’re making an artificial brain.”

“What we’ve made, it takes forty minutes to generate the equivalent of a second of an average human brain’s processing time,” you explained as you pulled your reading glasses out of your purse. “And that’s with about eighty-three thousand processors. The simulation — each one eats up about a petabyte of system memory, which is one quadrillion bytes.”

“That sounds like a child making up a big number.”

“So you know a terabyte?” I nodded. “It’s a thousand of those.”

“So then how much processing power does a human brain have?”

“Your question is flawed,” you said, adjusting your glasses to read the inside of a card as if it were a legal document. “First of all, what is a human brain? You’re presuming all human beings have the same brain.”

“An average brain, then. Like, the median human brain.”