She also remembers an article she’d read about an animal rights spy who had infiltrated one of the top primate labs in the world, the Max Planck Institute. Carmen flips to a new page in her notebook and writes at the top CANDIDATES FOR THE INSIDER/DOUBLE-AGENT OF SAAR IN THE CNS. She chews on her pen. It can’t be one of the Crick Scholars. They arrived too recently for any sympathies or effective collusion to be established. That leaves faculty, an unlikely option, and staff, which is much more likely. A janitor or security guard? No, she thinks, the ideals of SAAR are too abstract to gain serious blue-collar converts. She can’t imagine anyone not educated at a $80,000-per-annum school nodding along to “the intersectionality of animal research and multiculturalism.” Which leaves students. But not graduate students, for the same reasons that excluded professors and postdocs. Which leaves undergraduate researchers. Plants. Looking up the process online it certainly seems pretty open. You just had to declare a science major, which you could do at almost any time. But what science undergrad is going to appear to be the perfect little scientist for their entire undergraduate career, while at heart believing the moral calculus worked out firmly against research? So applying Occam’s Razor she knows that spy must be an undergraduate staffer or research assistant, or someone who very recently switched over to the neuroscience, psychology, or biology major, i.e., someone with an incongruence between what they are doing now and their previous classes.

She flips to a pristine page and draws out her deductions in logical form from premises, listing where she applies the Razor, which facts are contingent, and after the whole structure narrows down to the conclusion of her semiformal proof she writes Quod Erat Demonstrandum in big elegant letters at the bottom. She takes a photo and texts it to Kierk.