Kierk wakes up suddenly, startling. A sound is receding, unidentifiable. What had woken him? There’s light through the window, but checking his phone he finds it blinking 6:00 a.m. A long low groan . . .

Kierk has been sitting in lab since early morning, paper spilling out over his desk, each page covered in notations and equations and diagrams, the whirring of his multiple computers heating up the area around him like thermodynamical demons. Nearby undergraduates sit fanning themselves. The first paper, an overview of theories of consciousness and the application of them to a computer model of the cortex, is a mess. The truth is that it felt like wrestling sheets of balsa wood in high wind. And Kierk wrestled those flat, wide, bendy, wind-catching sheets across a field one at a time, trying to construct something, anything. The most hobbling issue was that the measures were so vague, so nonmathematical, that it drove Kierk to fits of frustration, and he found himself trying to formalize the theories, building on them even though he knew they were wrong, just so that there would be something definite to disprove. Except even in his efforts to improve them so that he could disprove them they would give way, the materials were no good, and the balsa sheet would fly off into the field and he would watch it go tumbling away, a piece of matter so animated in making its escape it seemed almost ambulatory, wood becoming an animal that would live as long as the wind kept blowing.