Kierk knows he is letting his imagination run wild but it feels good to even be proposing an explanation that made sense to him—what if, for instance, Atif had discovered some perfect theory that implied consciousness was entirely useless, epiphenomenal, that it never did anything at all but always occurred after the fact. That our selves really were just meat marionettes jerked about on atomic strings . . . Or that this “I” has never truly felt anything, thought anything, but instead has always just passively watched feelings and thoughts play out . . . Or that each day an entirely new consciousness is birthed into existence, a golem, etched only with inherited memories, and that each night our consciousness goes unknowingly to its death, so that the span of our lives are macabre shows, oblivious massacres, sick jokes . . . Or maybe something even darker, unimaginable to anyone who hadn’t made the breakthrough yet. Spiraling out now, Kierk thinks that perhaps this could explain not just Atif’s death but also perhaps the Fermi Paradox: that the galaxy, where life has had ten billion years to develop on the billions of planets orbiting in habitable zones, and the entire span of which would take only a few million years to fully colonize from any given starting point . . . was lifeless. And that maybe the mystery of consciousness was the great and final filter, a cosmic pitcher plant eventually winnowing out all the civilizations that figure it out. Implying that every civilization of conscious beings, after solving the mystery of themselves, recoils in total horror and wipes itself out, tearing itself apart in nihilism, reactionary politics, fundamentalism, barbarism, and self-loathing.

Aggressive self-lobotomization.

FRIDAY

Kierk wakes up from a dream of bodies. Carmen naked before him and then a fast-forwarding to that grinding underneath, the writhing, everything opening and the penetration and envelopment, her legs wrapped around him . . . So that on waking he rolls onto a taut bladder pressing from within and an erection now trapped uncomfortably underneath him.

Eventually he has to hurry down Broadway, late.

Approaching the CNS something catches his eye—a police cruiser and ambulance parked in front of the building, the alternating red and blue lights faded to almost nothing in the glare. Kierk begins to jog up, crossing the street during a break in the traffic, but as he gets close to the blinking ambulance, it, like a beast startled from sleep, pulls away from the curb.

“Hey!” Kierk cries, but it drives unhurriedly away down the cobblestone street toward the park. Despite being only a block off busy Broadway the street is a simmering quiet except for the bouncing and receding ambulance.