I set the reflection to the side and caught the next as it traced across on the glass. I blinked the afterimage of the previous shape over it and flopped it around until I found an orientation that made sense. The two fit, like so many of the others. They had structure, completeness. But still no data. Nothing came of the glimmers even when the slices were overlayed. I tossed the pair and tried with another. I created couplings that had a quality of wholeness, yet they remained substantively empty. No scenes presented themselves. Nothing of the life of the person whose memories I now perceived.

I called them up more quickly, finding pairs, connecting them into larger components. With a heavy nectar habit and so many hours inside the machine, I retained the afterimages in greater detail than before, and began to lay pairs over pairs, soon discovering that those fit together too. Even as I lost touch with the components I’d built, I grasped upon a general understanding of a larger, but still data-free, structure.

It was sort of like Wheel of Fortune, where a contestant tries to guess a word or phrase while only being presented with some of the letters. The patterns and shapes displayed by the dredge was like being given a few of the letters to the larger puzzle. Early on, I didn’t understand what they meant or how they fit together. But over time they began to make sense. I was able to delineate how reflections were organized to form coherent groups – what would be the actual “words” on the gameshow. I came to think of these groups as modules.

Take, for example, the word “abduction.” At first, I needed the dredge to give me every “letter” in order to know the word. But now, with more time on the cord, I was adept at deducing the word without all the “letters”. I could look at a whole series of patterns and have one for every “letter” but the “o”, and guess the word, or module. Once I knew the reflection – or “letter” – that I needed to complete the “word”, so to speak, I could call it up and complete the piece. Soon, it got to the point that I no longer required every single reflection to complete the larger module. A few shapes – or “letters” – were often enough to dictate what the word would be. As I required fewer pieces, my work was easier, faster, and more intuitive. It’s that intuition part that finally breaks my game show analogy.93