“My my, you truly do believe it. Interesting. No. To answer your question. Of course not. DARPA and the DoD have no interest in murdering scientists, just funding them.”

“He was Indian. Ethnically and nationally.”

“Atif was a citizen of the world. According to his file he was probably more loyal to Britain than India. He had no nationalistic leanings.”

“Perhaps you were scared that he had figured it out. You want the secret of consciousnesses to yourself. Like the A-bomb. Think what you could do with it.”

The DARPA agent laughs easily. “Like I said, given that Atif was chosen specifically as part of our funded program to work on this problem, what sense would it make to . . . eliminate him?” With no answer forthcoming from Kierk he says—“I’ll tell you what. I’ll look into it. Although it certainly wasn’t DARPA or the DoD. And I can’t promise anything. This may just be your imagination.”

“We understand that.”

“Alright, well, I could make a phone call to some friends in the FBI.” He shakes out his sweat-stained Hawaiian shirt, squints up at the sky. “It’s been a pleasure, Kierk.”

“Wait. I never got your name.”

“Well, it’s not like I’m some sort of secret agent,” he says, and lets out a hollow laugh. “Anyways, keep cool. Get out of this heat. I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

Slipping back on his sunglasses the DARPA agent nods promptly to Kierk and then merges into the stream of individual passersby and is quickly enveloped, just one of the crowd, utterly average-looking, until Kierk loses sight of him.

Wandering, smoking, watching, Kierk eventually heads over to Washington Square Park and begins to trace out a continual circle around the fountain as the families and street performers play around him and the arch dusks itself orange before the curtain of dark is drawn down over the city’s game of faces. The conversation has left Kierk spun; he’s become a revolving galaxy of thoughts, watching a future history bloom on fast-forward as considerations of post-biological group minds run away with him, clash with the normality of the busyness of the park, the comings and goings; he feels like he has just brushed up against something beyond that is straining to get in, a Second Coming hundreds of years hence that could not be described as either beautiful or horrific for it will be just a roar beyond human comprehension, speeding toward them all backward in history, its manifestations echoing in retrograde through time like ripples spreading out in the small pond of space-time. And who will cast that first stone?