He finds himself staring at an empty seat in the front row. Atif had always sat up front. Maybe that would have been his seat right there . . . He looks around the darkened rows of quiet figures, all still alive, but suddenly so fragile in the context of Atif’s empty seat. Morbid from boredom, Kierk wonders what Atif had thought at that last moment. What will all these people think? What will they think in that panic-attack moment where the great unfair equation comes into full view? As the PowerPoints run together Kierk can’t help but view everyone around him as mere biological ticking timebombs waiting to go off, some internal imbalance or closure or pressure buildup or asynchrony in their parts, some tiny minuscule mistake in the transcription of an oncogene, to be drunk and woozy in the underground heat while above a storm raged and then to trip or be shoved from behind and land in a drunken and dazed heap as a thing a thousand times bigger than you and made of materials a thousand times harder slams into you with a planetary roar, or for a surgical scar abutting an artery in the back of your throat to aggravate and aggravate until it punctures through and blood spurts out in great arcs in time to your heartbeat.

The lights switch on and everyone perks up, stirring like autotrophs under the glare.

“Time for lunch! We’ll reconvene after.”

People shuffle out, stretching and yawning, bearing Promega tote bags and Promega name tags. Kierk follows the crowd and finds some lunch laid out. As he’s filling up his plate he finds himself across from Max, who nods to him.

“So what do you think of the talks so far?” he says to Kierk, taking a stab at small talk.

“I’ve been more focused on consciousness, lately. Stuff about the molecular machinery of an individual neuron . . . I don’t think it’s helpful.”

“Why not?”

“Because neurons are neurons.”

“That’s a tautology.”

“Look, nearly all that stuff is already worked out. Neurons are just anything that can integrate across thousands of inputs, funnel the input into a single binary output, and that are plastic in certain ways. That’s it. They don’t do anything special that makes minds work. They’re too simple. But when you get millions of them, billions of them, they start to do really, really interesting things. Have you ever seen flocks of starlings?”

“Yes, Kierk, I know about the starlings analogy.”

Kierk continues as if Max hadn’t spoken—“When the flock forms different shapes they’re all acting at once. There’s no hierarchy, no starling leaders. Same with neuronal activity, but it’s not thousands of birds, it’s hundreds of millions of neurons. Neurons themselves are completely uninteresting.”

“I know, Kierk, but there are questions of memory and attention and all these things that—”