Her mind churning with such thoughts she again approaches Kierk. About to speak, she pauses, thinking—but what if Greg had nothing to do with it and I am about to spread that he faked results . . . It’s enough to ruin his career here, and who really knew the whole story? Carmen couldn’t let that happen without knowing for sure. Two years ago she had attempted to replicate a famous neuroimaging experiment. But Carmen had failed to find the effect, indeed, her data hinted at the exact opposite hypothesis. The advice from on high had been to drop it. Everyone she had talked to paid due respect to replication of course. “The backbone of science!” they all declared, but at the same time she was told that it would take months to make the replication attempt ironclad, only to submit it to a bottom-tier journal where it would be peer-reviewed for publication by the author of the original study who would tear it apart in revisions anyways. Since then she’s watched the original result rack up a string of citations, filling her with more doubt than a case of outright fraud—an example of the huge gray area of statistical analyses and leading questions and unexamined assumptions. Scientific methodology, she was beginning to feel, was not more special and self-correcting than anything else: garbage in, garbage out.

She regrets not publishing her failure to replicate. But she also doesn’t want to start a witch hunt without knowing all the facts first.

Before reaching Kierk all this goes through her mind in an instant, a nonverbal conceptual structure activating memories without needing to replay them, a turning of some high-dimensional object faster than language or logic.

Instead she just says to him—“Sorry to bother you again. Can I bum a cigarette?”

Kierk looks up at her, rolls up the paper he’s been reading and punctuates each word by slapping the desk with it—“This. Paper. Is. Horrible.”

Kierk is wandering the city after work, his feet a steady rhythm into a thready evening red, a spillage of light bisecting the grid. It is as if heavenly forces were about to trumpet in and charge from the west. Men and women move in outlines from dark to red and back again. He’d left work with his mind spinning, and he’s been steering his way by the spire of the Empire State Building against a sky streaked with bleeding cirrus clouds.