When he had woken up in Carmen’s apartment on Saturday the first thing he had seen had been a framed drawing. A self-portrait by Carmen. Maybe an exercise from a class of hers, and an amateur work, yes, but the shaping of the white space into the elegant form of a standing figure with one leg back, along with the determined nature of the charcoal that filled the rest of the image, gave the central form an undeniable power, carved from the black page like a statue from marble. It had slowly come into focus, and his waking thought, that first fully formed cogent experience, had been—you can draw using only negative space and so cannot I root out a theory of consciousness from where it hides by solely drawing the negative space around it? If he could charter the problems of each approach to consciousness a global outline would emerge, something from nothing. Yes, he had explored many things before. But he hadn’t used them to create a web of commonalities of failure.

Thus, he had started with computation. After a weekend of work the conclusion was what he had known already. Computation alone could not explain consciousness. Any system of sufficient size and complexity could be interpreted as running any number of programs, all at once, an interpretation that is dependent on an observer. And thus the loop was closed—because how could consciousness depend on some observer, on another consciousness? Proof of impossibility by infinite regress . . .

With computation thrown out he had spent Sunday on its more general cousin, information. He’d examined the exchange of bits, the changing of states, considered the fundamental equations of information theory. But measuring information required specifying both a state-space and probabilities. Yet what state-space? That, he had finally concluded, must be delineated by an observer as well. And what probabilities? In the basement of probability theory there were also observer-based decisions being made about token versus types and reference classes and probability as degree of belief. His reasoning is that if probabilities and state-spaces aren’t objective, there’s again proof of impossibility by infinite regress.

With these two proofs of impossibility constructed he felt he had filled in some small part of the drawing. But progress had felt slow. So Kierk had grown depressed, anxious in his febrile dreamings of automatons, disgusted by himself, by his egoism and his failure. He had doubted his genius at every turn. He had paced the distance between shadows like Eratosthenes. There was a fermentation taking place within, he knew, but it was stymied. He had felt like a fly flitting from wall to wall, slowly mapping the contours of a bottle it couldn’t possibly understand. He wanted to scream so loud and for so long it would travel from earth outward and outward until it became part of the cosmic background radiation and was forever.