'No thanks,' Thomas said.

'Are you shooooor,'

Thomas shook his head and chuckled. 'What would you like to know, agent?'

She set the bag down and shrugged. 'Neil, Neil, and more Neil, I'm afraid. What you shrinks call an obsession, we Feds call "paying the rent".' She paused, as though realizing that her bantering tone was simply making things worse. 'I need to know the world he lives in,' she continued more seriously. 'I need to crawl into his headspace.'

'No easy feat,' Thomas said. After a moment's hesitation he added, 'You understand the Argument well enough, don't you?'

'I think so,' Sam said pensively. 'I just don't understand how anyone could… could…'

'Believe in it.'

Sam nodded. 'According to what you said yesterday, Neil sees himself as some kind of missionary bent on spreading the Bad News. That's why I was so excited. I mean, as important as motives are to you psychologists, they're pretty much the end-all-be-all for us investigators. Without a motive, nothing makes sense.'

'And so?'

'Well I was thinking last night… Neil can't be a missionary, can he? Wouldn't that mean he actually had a point? And isn't that what your Argument is all about, the fact that everything is pointless?'

Thomas watched her for a bemused moment, debating the futility of what he was about to say. People were hardwired not only to be biased and closed-minded, but to think they were the most unbiased and open-minded person they knew. Humans were literally designed to be easily and irrevocably programmed. Knowing this made precious little difference. No matter how much research you showed them, they continued to fault the other guy, the other claim, the other book, what have you, with the regularity you might expect from a machine.

He wanted to think Sam was different—almost as much as he wanted to think he was different.

'Like I said, crawling into Neil's head won't be easy.'

'It never is.'

Thomas paused, searching for the right words. The muttering voice on the radio said, '… and that sparked the foreign reserve crisis.'

'Remember what I told you in the bar,' he started, his tone thoughtful, 'about the brain and evolution?'

'How we should expect consciousness to be a deceptive mess? Because of its youth or something, right?'

'Exactly. Evolution's a messy, opportunistic process, one that requires eons to work out the kinks. As a relatively recent adaptation, you would expect conscious experience, or whatever it is you and I are sharing this very moment, to be a relatively crude, low-resolution affair. And like it or not, this is exactly what cognitive science is discovering.'

Thomas paused, mentally rummaging through the bag of tricks he used to make this point to his students. 'Just for instance, tell me how much of your visual field is in color.'