The wind rips at his clothing, then subsides. Beyond the lip of the roof the city is a spun sculpture, an airless and hot mercurial expanse. Due to the wind it’s much cooler up here than down in the streets; he could almost be wearing a jacket. He stares out at the metal dream of teeth and steel and contemplates apostasy. All Kierk wants at that moment is to live a good life, no, a great life, to be a Mozart of living. Should he really be here waiting on his project, which is essentially a Rube Goldberg device for biased random number generation? Of late he feels like all the activity of himself and his peers is just playing the Science Game: varying some variable with infinite degrees of freedom and then throwing statistics at it until you get that reportable p-value and write up a narrative short story around it. The banality of it all is crippling to him, nearly sundering his will for the day, and it is all he can do to keep from hiding up on the roof forever, to ride out the storm like a mad ship captain. Still, there might be an efflorescence in store for him here, maybe, if this thing inside of him that he feels building, whatever it is, can make its way out of his mind and reveal itself as seraphim or golem or stillborn.