At the CNS Kierk spends the entire day sitting in front of his computer, reading article after article, catching up on everything he’s missed in the field of consciousness research. It feels like unhinging his jaw and sticking a fire hose in his mouth. After hours of marking up research articles and philosophy papers he slowly begins to categorize the dozens that he’s read today, beginning to start some short notes, the making of connections: he sees several which could be made into papers but he feels that this is a waste of his time, too small fish, so he does a catch-and-release program and keeps the ideas for himself on pieces of scrap paper, knowing that they might service something greater. At three in the afternoon he realizes that he hasn’t eaten all day so gets takeout and returns quickly, eating heaps of Thai food at his desk as the articles continue to play across his monitor like the pages of some alien codex.

Bleary-eyed and sporting a headache from the long assault of his low-Hz monitor on his visual system, with one hand massaging at his lower lumbar because of his non-ergonomic chair, Kierk is trying to find Alex, who just texted him TRAPPED ON 11TH FLOOR WITH WEIRDO PLS HALP, quickly followed by JUST COME SEE. After asking some PhD students Kierk finds the bank-vault-heavy door with the blinking sign above that reads EXPERIMENT ONGOING in computronic green. Outside hangs a whiteboard reading COME IN below an evocative drawing in red marker of a mouse’s anthropomorphized head with a cartoon sword and a pirate patch over one eye.

Inside is a windowless boxcar-size room full of shelves of equipment, or rather pieces of equipment, like the entire room had been caught in flagrante during a promiscuous act of creation. Alex and another man are standing in front of a computer screen positioned at standing height on a messy shelf. The heavy door slams shut behind him. Alex beckons him over in the small space—“Kierk, this is Vlad, Vlad, Kierk.”