'Yeah-yeah,' Thomas said, realizing how much he missed shooting the cerebral breeze with Neil. 'Yeah, Mackenzie babbled about that for a bit.'

An appraising look. 'Well, trust me, if you want to get a sense of just how much consciousness—life—is simply a mechanistic output, try going toe-to-toe with a rationalization module. I could literally spend the rest of my life arguing with you, and you would just come up with reason after reason why me shooting Frankie in the head is the most normal, sensible thing in the world.'

What was he talking about? Life was filled with contingencies—demands—that no one had any control over. Even the craziest shit in the world could be reasonable, given the right circumstances. 'Look,' Thomas said, 'I understand how it looks. But Neil, you of all people know that there's always more than what meets the eye.' Even as he said this, Thomas realized it was for naught. Neil was watching him with inward eyes, the look he always had when he was busy thinking about what to say next rather than listening. 'There's always more! Neil. Neil! That's all I'm saying. Look deeper.'

Neil waited with mock politeness, as though wanting to make sure it was safe to continue. 'Would you believe it was dinner at my parents' that finally let me put it all together?' he said. 'You know my Pop, always railing on about this and that, never letting you get a word in edgewise, and never, never acknowledging that he could be wrong. I was just sitting there—Mom had cooked a turkey—and I suddenly realized that his rationalization module was on overdrive, that the only real difference between him and my subjects was that he'd been accidentally-wired. I realized he was just another machine. And Mom too, clucking about how she didn't baste the bird enough. I sat there watching them cycle through their behavioral routines. Can you imagine, seeing your mom as a machine?'

Thomas cackled. 'C'mon, Neil. Listen to yourself! Your mom is not a machine. She's too fucking nutty!'

But Neil wasn't listening. 'I'd reached some kind of threshold, I think, working for the NSA. It had been happening for a while: I would just notice certain behaviors, and think to myself, their caudate nucleus is lighting up, feeding information forward to the prefrontal cortex, yadda-yadda. But after that turkey dinner, I began understanding everything others did in those terms…'

His look drifted inward.

'That was when I reread your book.'

Thomas snorted, though the absence of the accompanying head and hand movement made it sound odd. 'Now you're really scraping the bottom, don't you think?'