It is flat and bright yellow in the sun. Occasionally it is turned over and a fresh yellow replaces the diagonal loops and small mountain ranges of black ink. Behind it are tufts of wilting grass amid dirt, the puckered prepubescent nubs of anthills. Ants in swarms like around the mouths of holes, armies amid the sparse grass. Visible also is an oblique curve, the rubber tip of a sneaker. Kierk has snuck out to lunch with a yellow legal pad pilfered from the department office because he’d forgotten his notebook at home. Pen in hand he is sitting on the grass of Washington Square Park. The pages are filled up with discrete probabilities distributions, calculations of the Earth Mover’s Distance and diagrams of causal models; some even have rings around them of possible worlds ordered by Hamming Distance. He’s been trying to figure some good way of measuring emergence in physical systems between bites of a pastrami sandwich in a Styrofoam to-go box. He leans down like the face of God over the busy lives of the anthills, observing the patterns of the insects running to-and-fro like strings of zeros and ones, making in their movements a superorganism, a living thing built of other living things. And not only that, but a thing consisting only of pheromone trails, the scent paths that allow ant colonies to forage, learn where food is, respond to threats, retreat, rebuild, migrate . . . similar then to neurons releasing their chemical packages of neurotransmitters, because, after all, what was the brain but a huge network of micro-plants entwined together communicating in puffs of chemicals, which of course foregrounds the much bigger question: if organized groups of small living cells can somehow create/instantiate/express a consciousness over the entire group, couldn’t organized groups of small living creatures create/instantiate/express a consciousness over the entire colony? If so, what would the qualia of an ant colony be like? Would it feel, in its temporally slow manner, sluggish thoughts of success, being hungry? Angry? Horny? All just from the lingering traces of pheromones, literally a conscious smell. And what happens to the micro-consciousnesses of the ants? Are they unaffected or somehow subsumed, replaced, by the colony . . .? And if this city, Kierk thinks, finally rises to consciousness, what happens to the consciousnesses of the people within it? Would we all carry on, unknowing, as we might be carrying on now? Or would some great sublimation occur that left everything different in some imperceptible way, everything in the same place but with a different meaning? A similar kind of subtle change to if you woke confused, but unsure what you’re confused about. Because your love is at your side. Your child is in its crib. Stretching after this restful sleep feels so good. You move your legs to the cool section of the sheet. You notice in the calm night that the whole house is silent and illumed with moonlight. You can see the alarm clock blinking. You can hear your lover’s breathing and hear your child turning. You wonder where you were before you awoke. Are you somehow out of time? Hadn’t things been different? Surely that had all just been a dream, a dream of you aging . . . Everything around you makes so much sense you don’t question it and so you just smile at the moon and turn to your sleeping lover as your child shifts safely again—unaware you are now in heaven.