Up ahead a small crowd has gathered, staring at something, and it takes a moment for the thing itself, a transparent cephalopod, to lift above their heads into view: a plastic bag, handles trailing behind. For a while he watches it rise, and then fall, and then skyrocket to rise again, drifting up the evening-scaled sides of the skyscraper, then fall, and now it sweeps across the sidewalk twirling and the children in the crowd follow after trying to catch it but with pirouettes it evades them, letting them get close before darting mockingly away. Kierk, standing apart, viewing the scene through several lenses simultaneously, settles finally on the most physical and melancholic, as befits his mood—that this plastic bag dancing in the wind is an illusion of personality. There is a conspiracy of trains of air and in truth it is not coy, nor playful, nor coquettish, and so, further . . . is not all life an illusion of this nature? Are not organisms similarly mere structured materials pumped full of the wilds of outside energy, of cloying storms and coquettish asynchronies, and cut off from their external sources would not all vibrant life fall just as limp as the bag does now, in the energy doldrums as the wind leaves it, each organism revealing, as it collapses into a rubber mask of its former self, what it has been all along: an inanimate object?

He knows such thoughts stem from the papers he’s been gobbling up. As usual there’s no one to talk to about these things, it’s all internal, a hidden layer between input and output sparking off in convolutions as he walks. The wordy but logical sequence of the dialectic is what comes most naturally to Kierk, so that’s how he often engages these subjects, like he’s having an internal argument with himself, switching to play both parts, as if he were an actor in ancient Rome donning first the crying mask and then ducking backstage to reply with the laughing mask.

Crying Mask: You’ve been spending an awful lot of time trying to finagle your way around the laws of physics, looking for your precious Theory of Consciousness. But the laws of physics are what they are, and there’s no room in there for minds. It’s full, causally complete. Seems to me you’re on a fool’s errand. Stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.

Laughing Mask: How can you say there’s no room for minds because of causal completeness when causation is just another frame-variant phenomenon? Causation requires observers, interveners. Causation requires consciousness. Besides, the so-called laws of physics are just averages that seem to work rather well at predicting simple, two-body systems.

Crying Mask: Predictable that your objections depend on baseless assumptions. Who cares about causation? I’m talking about the wave function. That’s all there is. One big wave function evolving, spinning off many worlds as it does so.