Thomas breathed deep, smelled sun-on-dust and the memory of breakfast bacon. 'So, when we choose, or decide, or hope, or fear, or whatever, it's the same as when we see or hear: the brain drops out of the picture. We don't experience what makes experience possible. All the neurophysiological machinery that generates choosing, hoping, hearing, and so on, processes without itself being processed. For us, each thought comes from nowhere, constitutes a kind of… absolute beginning, so that it seems we somehow stand outside the nets of cause and effect that entangle everything about us, including our brain. Consciousness is like a hamster wheel, always moving, but somehow stationary as well. For us, it's always now, always here. We always feel we could have done otherwise because our choices always seem to stand at the beginning of events, rather than the middle.'

'Ooookaay,' Mia said dubiously.

'Here, look,' Thomas said, reaching back and dragging a quarter from the counter-top. 'Watch.' He opened his hands to show Mia they were empty, then closed them. When he opened them the second time, the quarter gleamed dully in the center of his right palm.

Mia laughed. 'Cool,' he said.

'Seems like magic, right?'

Mia nodded, his expression suddenly thoughtful. 'Like you pulled something from nowhere.'

'Now watch,' Thomas said, doing the trick again, this time at a right angle so that Mia could follow the quarter the whole time. 'Our thoughts are no different. They seem to spring from nowhere, but only because of a neurophysiological sleight of hand, because the brain is baffled by its own tricks. They seem magic. Special. Supernatural.

Spiritual. Pull aside the veil of bone, and that magic evaporates.'

'But there is a difference,' Mia said. 'We are our thoughts.'

Thomas nodded. 'Exactly. That's what we are. Brains glimpsing themselves through peepholes, seeing magic where none exists.'

Mia seemed to stare past him, as though testing his words against the immediacy of his own experience. 'So you and I, sitting here…'

'Are just two biomechanisms, processing inputs, churning out behavioral outputs, which in turn become further inputs. All the reason, the purpose, the meaning, is simply the result of the fact that the neural machinery responsible for consciousness has access to a mere sliver of what our brains process—a sliver that it confuses for everything. Outside that sliver, there's no reason, no point, no meaning. Just…' He shrugged. 'Just shit happening.'

Scowling, Mia regarded him for a long moment. 'So when I go to the mall, I'm surrounded by herds of… biomechanisms? They only seem like people?'

Thomas wondered what Neil would say. Would he tell stories of how he had played this or that alleged terrorist like a puppet without them having the faintest clue? Or would he simply grab Mia and give him a first-hand demonstration?