Kierk upends the nearest heavy table in a single movement, blocking its momentous downward swing with his foot, then, the table on its side, he shoves in those metal rings that keep its legs from collapsing, getting one up before moving to the next, but it won’t budge, so Kierk, with a grimacing glance up at Mike, slams it in with his heel to a resounding clang.

Deadened lights. Trouble with the microphone. Kierk has his Hello Kitty notebook over his knee. The lecture by Max (who introduces himself as “Dr. Pierce” to a scoff by Kierk) is on optogenetics and in vivo controllability. Kierk already knows this stuff so he sits in the back and amuses himself by writing avalanching sentences that come down the mountain and flatten the tree line.

Max is describing the full process that Kierk and Carmen had initiated in the surgery of the transgenic mouse last week—a virus is injected into the mouse embryo which inserts a gene into the DNA of neural precursor cells, a gene which is eventually expressed in the development of those cells’ ion channels. This gene makes channels express rhodopsin, the same molecule found in the light-sensitive rods of the eye. These mutant rhodopsin sit like tiny alligator eyes all over the surface of the neurons. Kierk imagines the ever-dark of that organic jungle, the nocturnal glia, the thoughts curled up like napping jungle cats, a thousand sleeping thoughts with their claws retracted, the little mutant channels doing nothing in the natural dark of the brain. But one day there is a loud drilling and bone dust sprinkles down and then—for the first time—light coming in through a crack in the world, something beyond (but what could be beyond the world?) peeking in, the giant faces of Kierk and Carmen wearing surgical masks, a view which is immediately swallowed up by a snaking fiberoptic cable, which descends like a predator and then waits. Weeks later, after the healing process has run its course, some sleep-deprived graduate student says—“Let there be light.” And with that the fiberoptic cable blinks on, illuminating the fibrous cave, and those rhodopsin channels open and the genetically designed neurons start firing. Max shows a video at the end of his lecture of a rat with a cable snaking from its head, and everyone chuckles as it runs around in clockwise circles.

“And to the left . . . annnnd to the right now. It’s remote control.”