After shaking hands—“So what did you want to show me?” Even as Kierk says this he hears the briefest of scrambles and his attention is drawn to his left. There is a mouse at chest level to him, not even two feet away. It is crouched on a flat disk that rotates and wobbles with its movements—it is affixed at its head to a metal beam that gives enough space for the mouse to crouch between the beam and the disk, while the disk itself is on top of an adjustable stand, all of this part of what Kierk recognizes now as a giant amped-up microscope, nearly as large as Kierk himself, a thousand times as large as the mouse, towering above the scrabbling mammal trying to keep its balance with splayed-out feet; a machine with so many buttresses and overhangs and protuberances that the mouse looks like a biological outgrowth of the machine itself, a fact especially vivid because the top of the mouse’s skull has been scalped away, even the bone, and a glass skull has been surgically installed instead. The technological eye of a giant camera extends down to just a few inches above the affixed mouse. The mouse with the glass skull, thrust into a surreal situation beyond its ken, is surprisingly calm and adapted—it follows the movements of the pink giants with glass black orbs.

Vlad’s accent cuts out rough Russian syllables—“It’s a calcium imaging setup. Since the mice are transgenic they express green florescent protein intracellularly at the synapse. It fluoresces when it encounters calcium. So neurons fire, calcium is released internally to trigger synaptic vesicle release, the florescence gets triggered, and I can watch in real time the neural activity of thousands of neurons with the microscope. It’s a ten-hour operation to replace the mouse’s cranium with glass. And I can see activity across all six layers. See, I also embedded thin prisms in its brain when I performed the initial surgery. The prisms span the entire cortex and reflect up whatever cortical layer I want onto the ’scope. I can image millions of neurons, in theory.”

“I remembered your story, Kierk,” Alex interrupts. “One of the reasons I called you up here. The one you told about the Greek gods making a robotic man with a window in his head? Look at what we can do now. Greeks gods got nothing on us.”

Kierk leans over to get a view directly over the mouse and there it is, the transparent curving pane, not bone but pure glass, the open wound of a craniotomy clearly visible underneath, the rosy pink of the tiny brain within.