To clear his head Kierk has laced up his sneakers and bolted down the stairs out into dew-laced New York, the sun a white bowl hovering, the morning light angular and precise. Breathing and small-puddle hopping become priorities; everything is lost in the pace of his sneakers and the lope of his stride, his body happy to be used. As he runs he introspects on his consciousness, the majority of which is not the sense data of how hard each heel strikes or the cool air on his legs, but the feeling of control, of access, the feeling of availability composed of the fluid shifting of counterfactuals and the navigation through them—left leg, right leg, jump, lean in, go hard now, ease back, turn right—all in a realm of control far abstracted from the domain of twitch muscle-fibers and synapses calculating how much acetylcholine to release. He spends a little while working out how problematic this is for theories of consciousness—for why would it be at one particular spatial and temporal level that experience makes its home at, why not any other, why not Planck time and space, and why these exact contents specifically? In what scripture are such rules written?

After finishing the subsequent shower Kierk stands in his living room where all the boxes have been torn apart and books are everywhere. His legs are achy and feel twangy and used. Kierk loves the feeling. Not just for the pleasure/pain of it, but also for the concept: having broken down, having torn and ripped, his entire frame was now riddled with micro-tears throughout—but it is only by tearing everything down that one can build anything that lasts . . .

Notes have been piling up on the floor in the form of scribbles, drawings, equations, the tentative tendrils of his latest assault on consciousness. Crouching down on the balls of his feet in the middle of it all, idly turning over a page of notes, Kierk glances around before speaking to the empty apartment.

“How do you like it now, gentlemen?”