Neil's smile was at once skeptical and genuine. He turned back to the nearest table, lifted a beaten hardcover from a sheaf of papers. Thomas glimpsed Through the Brain Darkly embossed in gold across its black fabric spine. Neil opened it to one of several orange sticky notes that drooped like tongues from the closed pages. Holding it out and up like a preacher, he read, '"If we know anything, we know this: the regions of the brain implicated in consciousness can only access a minute fraction of the information processed by the brain as a whole. Conscious experience is not simply the product of the brain, it is the product of a brain that can only see the merest sliver of itself."' He looked up, eyebrows raised. 'So you no longer agree with that?'

Another unsuccessful attempt at a shrug. 'Facts are facts. Look, Neil—'

But he had continued reading.

'"The magician's magic depends on the audience remaining oblivious to her manipulations. As soon as we look over her shoulder, the magic vanishes. Consciousness is no different. Oblivious to the manipulations that make it possible, experience makes do with what can only be called illusions. Consciousness is always 'now' because the neural correlates of consciousness, though quite adept at processing time, cannot process the time of this processing. Consciousness is always unitary because the neural correlates of consciousness, though quite adept at differentiating environmental features, cannot differentiate their own processes. Again and again, the fundamental features of experience only make sense when we construe them as the result of various incapacities…"'

Neil closed the book, recited the rest from memory. '"And this is why consciousness disappears whenever we dare look over the brain's shoulder. We are little more than walking, talking coin tricks."'

A silent moment passed between them, filled only by the drone of some fan buried in the machinery above Thomas's head. The smell of ozone and cooking rubber soaked the air.

'Um,' Thomas eventually said, 'is there any way I could get a beer?' Games were games, sure, but he was getting fucking thirsty.

'That,' Neil said, obviously referring to the passage, 'was the kicker. It was easy enough to see other people for what they were—even Mom and Pop. But how could I do the same with myself? I mean, look at you, trying to cajole the man who murdered your son into having a beer—and thinking it as natural as natural can be! Ultimately, I'm no different. I'm just as much a mechanism as you, just as much the output of processes over which I have no control. And back then I was just as apt to be deluded, to be certain that I knew otherwise, that if I were plugged in the way you were, things would somehow be different, that some spark or some residue of spirit would light up and allow me to transcend my neurology…'