'So then how is it free? I mean, if it's a product, and it is a product—I could show you case studies of brain damaged patients who think they will everything that happens, who think they command the clouds on the horizon, the birds in the trees. If the will is a product of neural functioning then how could it be free?'

Frowning, Sam suddenly swigged her beer, head back, the way a truck driver might. Thomas watched her slender throat, as white as a barked sapling, flex as she swallowed.

She gasped and said, 'I just chose to drink, didn't I?'

'I don't know. Did you?'

For the first time her face crinkled into a look that was openly incredulous. 'Of course. What else could it be?'

'Well, as a matter of fact—fact, unfortunately, not speculation—your brain simply processed a chain of sensory inputs, me yapping, then generated a particular behavioral output, you drinking.'

'But…' She trailed.

'That's not the way it feels,' Thomas said, completing her sentence. 'It's pretty clear that our sense of willing things is… well, illusory. It started with a variety of experiments showing how easy it is to fool people into thinking that they're willing things they actually have no control over. That laid the groundwork. Then, when the costs of neuro-imaging began to plummet—remember all the hoopla about low-field MRIs several years back?—more and more researchers demonstrated they could actually determine their subject's choices before they were conscious of making them. Willing, it turns out, is an addon of some kind, something that comes to us after the fact.'

Now she seemed genuinely troubled. Thomas had seen the same look on a thousand undergraduate faces, the look of a brain, Neil would have said, at odds with itself—one whose knowledge could not be reconciled with its experience.

The brain, it turned out, could wrap itself around most everything but itself, which was why it invented minds… souls.

'But that can't be…' Sam started. 'I mean, if we don't really make choices, then how could…'

Thomas grimaced in sympathy. 'How could anything be right or wrong? Good or evil?'

'Exactly. Morality. Doesn't morality mean we have to have free will?'

'Who said morality was real?'

She worked her bottom lip for a moment, then added, 'Bullshit. It's gotta be…'

A crimson eighteen-wheeler roared down the street outside the window, hauling who knew what to who knew where. Its diesel roar faded into the sound of a crowd cheering through the tin of television speakers. The Braves, a canned voice said, were on the warpath once again.

'I mean, I make decisions, all the time.'