Ignoring everything, he shrugged on his black peacoat and stalked out of the Medical Sciences building and across the pavement of University Avenue, which was windy with leaves, moving off under a sky that was gray-white and infinite in all directions.

FRIDAY

Kierk wakes up to a concave whiteness, his body strangely placed, and in his slow movements of coming to he’s shifting his arms and legs about in this slick technologically alien cocoon, above him, a ceiling stretching out in the bright clinical light, and around him, the curved surface cupping his body. The light above hurts his eyes, one hand going up to rub his face. Then he’s suddenly fully awake and fully clothed, startling in his slouched position. Kierk is in the tub.

“. . . What? Why the fuck?”

Amnesiac, he digs around to check his phone. He’s late. With half of him pondering, worrying, the other half rushes from his apartment all the way to lab, sitting down at his desk pretending to be working, still wearing the clothes he woke up in, just as Karen comes out and waves him over to her office.

“How’s everything going?” she asks as he closes the door, still blinking away sleep. “I wanted to catch up because I’m leaving for a conference. I’ll be back next week.”

“I’ve, ah, run into some problems. There’s the issue of exactly how few measurements of consciousness can even be applied. Most are so ill-formed they don’t even make sense to apply.”

“Any good news?” Karen says with a chuckle.

“Actually I’ve been working on this little theory, more like an equation or two, to measure consciousness. Just something new to toy with right now.”

“That doesn’t sound like the first paper that the committee decided on.”

“It might go into a second paper. Maybe where I’m able to present some of my own ideas.”

“I’d like you . . . we’d like you . . . to focus on the first paper for now. That’s what the committee talked about. That’s how you’ll be awarded your PhD. Or alternatively the collaboration you were planning with Atif and Carmen. Everyone would love that. I bet you could get a first-tier journal.”

“One of my coauthors was hit by a subway train.”

“. . . Well, yes. Of course. But Carmen mentioned to me that you two were still working on that project? She said you were brainstorming together.”

“Yup.”

“How’s that going?”

“Real well. Real well. I think we’re onto something.”

“Well okay then. Good to hear. So that’s what you’ll work on when I’m away?”

“Definitely.”