Kierk wakes up rapidly expanding from a smaller trickle. He’s leaving a dream filled with only the vaguest outlines, tall creatures lacking all definite form or identity, sensed not by vision but almost as if by vibration. Giant figures that had emitted nonsensical sounds crouched before him. And then some force brought him from the dream and deposited him into sunlight and a fully grown body pleasurably resting under a cool sheet.

The walk to the CNS is so windy it actually slows him down. Above the clouds are streaking and rolling across the sky, furrows and troughs of them, blurring together. He thinks that clouds are all pulling a neat trick on us, fooling us into thinking them separate, when really there is only one cloud . . .

Arriving at the CNS his mind is all maths, the problem of consciousness a great puzzle laid out before him. He feels on the verge of a critical avalanche. There’s a momentum behind everything he’s doing and he doesn’t want to lose it, he wants to keep this cognitive engine running as long as possible, putting in everything to burn, filling it with the buckshot of his meager young life, stuffing it with everything he has left.

Busting through doors suspended an inch from their frame, racing down corridors, bounding off corners. Faces he doesn’t recognize jump out of his way. The text from Alex had just read HELP ME ASAP REC ROOM. Only a brief stop to yell at an undergrad about where the recording rooms for primate research are.

Turning another corner, he sees the door to the recording room just as Carmen skids into him.

“You got the—”

“Go!”

They sprint down the hall together—Kierk body-slamming the last door open so that Carmen can race through—and find Alex standing outside the entrance to a recording chamber in full personal protective gear, his mask pulled down to reveal a wild look on his face.

“Oh, thank god!”

“What’s going on?”

“Mars Bars. It’s Mars Bars.”

Carmen, after a moment where she considers whether she just had a stroke—“Your damn monkey?” She exchanges glances with Kierk.

“We thought—”

Alex makes a face—“What? No. I have a monkey situation. Mars Bars has injured himself.”

“Do you have anyone with actual primate experience coming?”

“I sent the research assistant to get the veterinarian on call. But I have no idea how long it will be.”

“Can we wait it out?”

“What’s the actual problem?”