Neil nodded, as though at some inevitability only he could fathom. 'Only partially. I still experience things, after all. It's just a radically different experience, one far more sensitive to the fragmentary truth of our souls. One without volition, purpose, selfhood, right or wrong.'

Thomas frowned and whistled. Part of him understood the monstrous implications of what Neil was saying, but it seemed little more than an amusing abstraction, like boys with sticks playing guns. The greater part of him wondered, even revered. What would it be like to walk without self or conscience, with plans indistinguishable from compulsions, one more accident in the mindless wreck that was the world? What would it be like to act, not as something as puny or wretched as a person, but as a selfless vehicle, a conduit for everything that came before?

'Fucking wild, Neil. Too fucking wild.'

Neil's grin was genuine and contagious—one brain communing with another through the ancient choreography of facial cues. Looking at him, Thomas thought of the intervening years, the fine chiseling about his eyes and dimples, the painstaking brushwork of his salting hair. And it seemed to Thomas that he always knew this moment would come, from their first meeting in their dorm room. From Neil's first sly and appraising smile.

It was so good to see him!

'I'm the world's first neuronaut, Goodbook. And you're about to join me.'

Neil bent over the keyboard, peered into a computer screen. 'As much as I'd like to keep you in a happy place,' he was saying, 'some things have to be done the old-fashioned way.' An affable glance. 'Especially if you want them to stick.'

Clickety-click-click-tap-tap…

Thomas's ebullient mood slowly faded away. Then the dread came, slowly, oddly, as though some inner, oxygen-starved limb were prickling back to life. What was happening? What was going on? The memories of moments ago suddenly seemed impossible, like a graft from some more innocent chapter of his life. But they were real: the thoughts, the feelings, all of them as real as real could be. The words…

Frankie! Frankie? No-no-please-dear—

'Neil!' he cried.

'Shhhh,' his old roommate said. 'It's totally natural that your brain's in high alert. All it has are its evolutionary defaults, and lord knows the environmental stressors have been piled high—'

'You didn't!' Thomas cried.

'Right now it's cycling through million-year-old circuits, producing various failsafe behavioral outputs. Grief. Panic. Christ, it wasn't designed to recognize itself for what it is, so how could it possibly recognize its own potential? As far as it's concerned, this is nothing but a stone-age confrontation.'

'Tell me you didn't kill my boy,'