The moon hangs above the roof like pure science fiction. The city before him is dark all the way south but lit up like a beacon to the north by the throbbing egg of light that is Times Square. The power ends there, at a line drawn via the negotiations of electrical companies decades before; it seems a barrier built of light, a spell cast by a wizard. Kierk leans off over the side and can’t see ground—it’s just a dark abyss populated by meaningless and indiscriminate shapes, objects without names. Wind whips at his face, then dies down to stillness. On the building opposite he can see the rising and landing outlines, maybe bats, as bits of black moving in a bulk of night. The city is a spun sculpture, airless and hot and onyx, the metal a mythology so pressured it had become architecture. From his sleeve he withdraws the transgenic blue rose. He had secretly plucked it from the lab while attempting to save the organoids. Pressing his thumb against one of the thorns, bleeding just one drop, Kierk’s thoughts, philosophical from the fantastical cityscape, romantic from the beauty of the night, in tune with the sleeping burrowed giant of the city, wild from the lack of sleep and adrenaline of events, circle yet again around consciousness, drawn to that ever-fleeing attractor, unable to break his own trajectory—and that’s when her face flashes yet again, distractor stimuli, but this time he, instead of pushing the thoughts of Carmen away, accepts them, begins with them . . . Carmen laughing, all that beauty, the stunning cheekbones and emotive mouth, the large eyes electric blue—and everyone Carmen would ever meet would agree on the fact of her beauty, and since her beauty was agreed upon, was it truly a subjective issue, like asking whether chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla, or Hemingway a better prose stylist than Joyce? Rather her beauty is real, objective, a fact, having ceased long ago to be merely a matter of opinion—but was it really real? Because the fact of her beauty was, after all, a fact dependent in its existence on human consciousness, without which Carmen’s face may as well be a rock structure on Mars, and therefore is not her beauty observer-dependent in its reality? Frame-variant, a relational property really, just as they’d discussed at the bar originally and then again in his room yesterday. And weren’t other entities that seem so naively real in the scientific world actually observer-dependent in precisely the same way as Carmen’s beauty, even things normally considered so obvious like neurons and livers and circuits and plants and cells and suns and species . . . all observer-dependent . . . not that they were in their properties arbitrary, but just that, without conscious minds to give them relations, to read into them borders and scale and roles and functions and causal structure and information and theoretical relevance, these groupings, without some kind of observer-operator, would all fall away back into the colorless nameless stream of reality, and it’s striking him that science as practiced is just the ugly and messy assortment of all the conceptual tools that could possibly allow for the better prediction or manipulation of nature for egocentric purposes, not carving nature at its true joints at all, and thus stands in stark ersatzism to consciousness, which is self-defining and precisely frame-invariant, given, true, ultimate, really real, and therefore, following this logic, Kierk reasons that the difficulty of developing a theory of consciousness is so hard precisely because of the mismatch between these frame-variant scientific entities and the frame-invariant reality of consciousness, a thought which causes him to wheel about the rooftop like a bat undone, thinking—I can even go one further—for there exists a formal paradox here, a proof of sorts, with regards to consciousness, something touched by Gödel, but also by someone more ancient, eldritch . . . Euclid! Because the basic structure of formal systems, defined as a set of axioms and subsequent theorems, inherently means that one cannot derive the axioms of a formal system or formal method from within the system or method . . . axioms must always stand outside of it . . . And if one wished to ground all of science in a well-founded and formalized manner, that is, to construct hierarchically the great tree of knowledge Yggdrasil itself, one must build it on some implicit, long-unacknowledged set of axioms. And the ultimate of those, the basest, most fundamental, the very root system, would have to be consciousness, holding up the entire tree with its unjustifiable nature. Giving everything else its definitive form. And if the existence of consciousness, of observers, is one of the axioms of science then a science of consciousness would be the ultimate begging of the question, petitio principii, a victim of the Münchhausen trilemma, because consciousness can’t be justified using consciousness . . . just as if man is the measure of all things, then how to measure man? . . . For even great Yggdrasil cannot hold the weight of its roots upon its boughs—and at that moment Kierk is so overcome with this vision and so sure in his ability to formalize this paradox that he feels powerful enough to break the tree of knowledge over his knee like a mere stick; in doing so he would sunder science itself, show it to rest on untenable foundations and paradox just as Gödel did to mathematics, and he sees all of this theory, the line of argument he’s uncovered, laid out before him, a thing of terrible beauty and utter destruction, a completely alien form of wreckage—and then he is human-size again and standing next to the sundered Yggdrasil, science itself, which is smote, a great tree cracked in half, lying on its side riven with breakages, its insides visible now, and it stretches before him like the giant body of a tortured saint, and to this vision Kierk nearly weeps, struck, for if it is true that science is fundamentally paradoxical then the universe is fundamentally alien and unknowable, a great white entity approaching in the ocean, a swimming beast, a grand hooded phantom, a snow hill drifting in the air, a mountain coming on with incomprehensible purpose, all of us Jonah and the universe the whale.