Wasn’t this city itself also dreaming of its own past? In fact, looking up Kierk can almost see the ghost of Walt Whitman taking one of his carriage rides up and down Broadway, from the height of his swaying passage observing the hustle of horses and stands and merchants, men and women in the latest fashions, the gangs of workers in their overalls clamoring out construction, Whitman trying to identify from all these material signs the hidden consciousness of the city. He was right to seek in the city a consciousness, for it seemed to Kierk not impossible that the city might be pacing out a slow oscillatory phenomenology across the decades, following the organismal rise and fall of neighborhoods, that the universe might just allow for such a thing, a steel and concrete teratoma with an inhuman mind subject to sensations beyond expression. Like an oyster slowly building a pearl over centuries. After all, from where Whitman sat on his carriage swaying he would have nodded hello to the walking and bearded Herman Melville—the two had lived in the same few square miles for most of their lives. They never once met but surely must have passed each other, faces bearing the weight of history, a secret electricity leaping from one to the other, unknown to all but the city. The ghost carriage continues out of sight and for the rest of the walk Kierk wonders what has been lost, or if anything was lost at all, if it was still here in this great grid. New York seems to him to be a sworn promise once made, broken, made again, a thing forever imminent but never arriving, and even now Kierk felt the attraction to it, passing the people dreaming Broadway dreams, everyone seeing not the New York it is but the New York it could be, the island waiting to rise again, the Once and Future City.

The seven remaining Crick Scholars are all gathered on the fifth floor of the CNS attempting to find a means of entry to a lab there. Carmen is trying to espy one of the researchers who had first collected their skin samples, Todd, through the big window. She’d emailed him to see if the cerebral organoids were finished in their growth. Todd had replied that they were still relatively young but all the mini-brains had been successfully established in their tanks for growth, and were ready for a visit from their progenitors. For Carmen it is a good mask for an ulterior motive, which is to get Greg alone afterward and ask about the retraction. But Todd was late and now all of them have tried their respective keycards in succession, only to have the door beep in denial—all but Kierk, who just said something about induction and didn’t bother trying his.