“Let me show you some of the raw data.” Vlad summons up various videos. “First is when the animal is under anesthesia. See, I put the mask on him.” Vlad gestures to a plastic tube that protrudes toward the mouse, mounted on small wheels with a hose sticking out the back, calibrated in size to be pushed forward and encompass the mouse’s face. The playback under anesthesia is just a grainy image flecked with white against a black background. “So nothing, right? But then, see, the animal is waking up.” On the recording a spot on the grainy surface lights up into a small white blob, small tendrils snaking out. Nearly all at once, hundreds of other white blobs flash and then fade—and then they are firing intermittently against the background gray of the interstitial space, and under each wave of firing the dendrites and axons come into view briefly like the structure of the network was being photographed with paparazzi flashes as groups go on and off. The whole thing looks as random as the blinking of white Christmas tree lights.

“Mmm,” mutters Kierk.

“What’s that?” Alex points to a two-prong device that looks like it can be medievally wheeled in.

“I show it images on the screen here. When it sees one type of image, it is trained to lick to the right, and for the other it licks to the left.” Vlad’s tongue flickers out in a mouse-like slurp, testing the air one way and then quickly darting the other way. Alex laughs, catching his balance on Vlad as he’s righted. Under the florescent light Kierk frowns, and as Alex continues speaking to Vlad, Kierk bends down to closer investigate the mouse, which causes it to scramble at its wobbling wheel. To Kierk the whole setup seems almost ontological in its significance—the mouse is crouched, splayed on the wheel, which rests on the adjustable pedestal, which rests on the microscope bolted to the table, which rests on the floor of the boxcar-size room, which rests on the entire superstructure of the CNS with all its levels and rooms underneath, which rests on the underground sewage and waterways and abandoned pneumatic tube systems and ossuaries, which rests on the Manhattan bedrock, which rests on sight-unseen worm-ridden earth until even that fades away and there is just an endless nothingness that somehow in its black bulk supports the whole edifice, a great layered tower, a biological totem that ends in this pinnacle: the small, fast-breathing, eye-darting form of the mouse with the glass skull. All of it hangs in blackness . . .

There is a squeak that breaks into a tinnitus-inducing hiss. The mouse is contorting, as much as it can with its head still tightly affixed, and then it suddenly freezes, not even breathing, its whiskers rigid, the wheel underneath it trembling.