Samantha yanked her hands out in a warding gesture, shook her head. 'Come on, professor, this is just too crazy.'

'Oh, it goes deeper, trust me. Everything falls apart, Agent Logan. Absolutely everything.'

Sam watched the streamers of bubbles in her beer. 'So it has to be wrong, doesn't it?'

Thomas simply watched her.

'Doesn't it?' she repeated, her tone somewhere between wonder and irritation.

He shrugged for what seemed the hundredth time. 'Free will is an illusion, that much is certain. As for other psychological staples like the now, selfhood, purpose, and so on, the evidence that they are all fundamentally deceptive continues to pile up. And if you think about it, perhaps this is what we should expect. Consciousness is young in evolutionary terms, a jury-rigged response to a perfect storm of environmental circumstances. We're stuck with the beta-version. Less even. It only seems slick because it's all we know.'

'You mean,' Sam said drily, 'as far as science is.concerned.'

Thomas took a long drink, exhaled heavily out his nose. In his freshman classes, attacking science was hands down the most common response to the threat posed by the Argument—as well as the weakest.

'And science is a mess, sure. But it's the only mess in recorded history that has had any success at generating and deciding between theoretical claims—not to mention making everything around us possible as a result. In historical terms, it is absolutely unprecedented. What are you going to believe? A four-thousand-year-old document bent on tribal self-glorification? Your own flattering intuitions on the fundamental nature of things? Some hothouse philosophical interpretation that takes years of specialized training just to understand? Or an institution that makes things like computers, thermonuclear explosions, and cures for small-pox possible?'

Samantha Logan stared at him for a long and lovely moment. Someone jacked up the volume on the flat-screen above the bar. A silky whisper fanned across the tables, extolling the wonders of Head & Shoulders.

'Because when your hair shines, you shine…'

'But there're truths outside of science.'

'Are there? I mean, there's a lot of non-scientific claims floating around, that's for sure. But truths? Is the Bible more true than the Quran? Is Plato more true than Buddha? Maybe, maybe not. The fact is we have no way of knowing, even though billions of us jump up and down screaming otherwise. And the more science teaches us, the more it seems we're just duping ourselves altogether. Our internal yardstick is bent, Agent, we know that for a fact. Why should we trust any of our old measurements?'

Most people simply nodded and dismissed the Argument. Most people found their fables too flattering to seriously challenge. A thousand sects, cults, religions, and philosophers agreeing on nothing, and yet each thought their ticket held the winning number of beliefs. Why? Because they held it. Somehow their personal experience of speaking in tongues, of remembering past lives, of having this prayer answered or that premonition come true was the only experience that mattered, the only one that made true…