She stares out into the rain at the barely visible entrance to the church where the Following Brothers of Christ are supposed to be meeting. What the hell is she doing here? Of course she can account for the material sequence of events: that night, the train, the email from Atif’s mother, the investigation, Kierk’s finding of the pamphlets. But these were merely the surface occurrences, not explanations of her own motivation. Carmen knows that even for a simple artificial neural network, trained by humans to, say, identify pictures of cats versus dogs in photographs, expressing the why behind any decision it made was in many cases mathematically impossible. A dark truth that made the naïve ways people tried to explain human behavior nothing more than a series of fads and post-hoc explanations, from Freud to therapy couches to the physiological analogy of “trauma”—what hubris, to think that what was impossible for a few hundred lines of code was possible for the brain! Perhaps the true prime mover of her motivation could only be found in some memory hidden deep down in the weights of connections between neurons, a delicate piece of neural lace that if held up with the smallest of tweezers would appear barely a gossamer strand of a spider’s web, but if unraveled in some still-unknown way would contain a single memory: as a girl she’d been given D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Carmen the little girl had splayed it out on the floor almost every night, and leaning over it had flipped through those colorful pages, hypnotized by tales of gods and monsters and titans and men and women, and within those pages one had been a colorful sketch of a woman surrounded by impish monsters, a woman who had seemed the epitome of beauty to Carmen as a child, a woman who was drawn inexorably to a box, haunted by it, until she had finally thrown it open. While for the adult Carmen, approaching this mystery in a scientific way is important to her—gather evidence, be open to possibilities, rely on both deduction and induction—those scientific methods don’t account for her abiding certainty that there is something to investigate, no, that certainty came from that young girl crouching over the colorful pages. There are boxes in the world that contain mysteries, and they must be opened; such irrational faith is what exists behind all of science.

“Brrrrrr,” Carmen says, pacing from one side of the overhang to the other, crossing in front of the giant red letters.

Then through the rain she makes out a form sprinting across the street, and after clearing a knee-deep puddle by the curb in a giant flying leap Kierk is under the overhang, completely soaked like he had just emerged clothes and all from a pool.

“Oof!” he says, as she hugs him, laughing.