“Oh, it’s obvious from the photo,” Kierk says distractedly as he pulls out a game from the shelf. The plastic in his hands makes him feel nostalgic for his fifteen-year-old self and there is a delay before he speaks again. “You were living together. The whole aesthetic is different than here, far livelier, more plants. It’s softer, tempered, a good aesthetic alloy. Your intellect, his heart, that kind of thing. And that photo has a lot of love in it. You know? The things with love in them are so vulnerable to criticism, you can always tell.”

Alex is staring at him from behind the kitchen counter, paused mid-sip. Kierk holds up the plastic green container, shakes it.

“Hey, so I’m pretty high. Do you want to drink beers and play Halo?”

Alex just laughs—“I knew you did other things than read. You’re just like everybody else, you big poser.”

“Think what you want,” Kierk says, putting in the game, “just be ready to back up your shit talk with action cause I’m ’bout to get my PhD in brutality.”

Alex takes a controller as the high-definition intro starts up on the big screen and the music blasts out of his subwoofers but his thoughts have returned to an old problem, which is suddenly being reexamined. That hypothetical that had seemed so tenuous to him had been treated like such an obvious fact, injected into his thoughts by Kierk like dye into a river, spreading everywhere from a single focal point, and he’s so shook that he gets blown up by a grenade right away.

“Get it together, Alex!” Kierk yells as he unloads an entire clip of ammunition.

Kierk’s pacing back and forth in the box of his apartment in the early morning hours, pulsing with a tired energy, a feeling of great psychological change building up.

From the frantic work of the weekend there is paper all over the floor. On the pages the Turing machines were in bloom, sending their long tongues of ticker tape in tangled ropes across sheets. Over the white landscapes specimens crawled, like the beasts of mechanical rovers, some had the extending proboscises of limbs, von Neumann machines, looking ready for reproduction, crawling about like low-slinking cats.

The revelation . . .