'A device,' the neurologist repeated. He pressed the remote and a square appeared on the screen. He zoomed to the base of Frankie's digitally reconstructed brain, then rotated the image. Something resembling a beetle blackened the back of the almond-shaped amygdala. 'It's attached to the central nucleus,' he said, fishing a pen from his pocket to circle the spot. 'As far as we can tell it's anchored to a web of nanotubules, electrically stimulating numerous efferent pathways'—he began drawing the tip out into different regions of Frankie's brain—'leading to the lateral hypothalamus, the parabrachial nucleus, and so on.'

'All the regions dealing with fear,' Thomas said.

Horror and wonder suffused him in equal measure, prickling him with sweat, swinging his stomach like a bucket. For all the scars Powski, Halasz, and the others had left on his psyche, they were little more than abstractions now. Nothing could be more real than the pastel graphics on the screen before him. His boy (Frankie!) rewired by his friend (Neil!-what-the-fuck-what-the-fuck—) to cycle through terror after terror after terror.

A soul tweaked like an engine… His son's soul, programmed like a car stereo, the volume cranked, playing and replaying a misery as profound as anything God could dish out in hell.

'You gotta take it out,' Nora exclaimed. 'It has to come out!'

Dr Chadapaddai's look of compassion seemed a little too professional, and certainly too practiced. 'I don't think we can,' he said. 'The brain's own circulatory system has been hijacked to target various neural subsystems. Nano-wires fine enough to thread capillaries…'

'Clean in, messy out,' Thomas said.

The neurologist nodded. 'Of course, we'll eventually have to try something, and I can assure you that we're studying and preparing for every possible invasive option. But for the moment, Mr and Mrs Bible, your son's best hope lies in finding whoever did this.'

Neil. Thomas could see him, sitting across from him on the couch, an apparition in the flat-screen glow, saying, 'I now know more about the brain than any man alive…'

When neither of them volunteered any information, Dr Chadapaddai bit his lower lip. 'None of us has ever seen anything like this. Nothing.'

Thomas knew first hand what it was like to have a field of knowledge dominate his life: the strange feeling of estate and insecurity, like making home in a far greater mansion. With information reproducing like bacteria, no specialist could hope to master all the details of even their own specialty. Still, you liked to think you had at least a rough sense of the floor plan. You liked to think you at least knew what you didn't know.

Dismay struck the breath from Thomas, almost sent him slumping to the floor. Only Neil. Only Neil could undo this. Only Neil could remove the horror he had planted in Frankie.

'Have you an arm like God?'