They both look down at the little animal slowly breathing under Kierk’s hand, its small pouch of a stomach rising and falling. Whenever Carmen sacrifices an animal she says a little prayer, like a Native American kneeling over a kill—thank you for giving yourself so that we might gain knowledge about the universe, and I’m sorry little mouse you had a short and confusing life and here we are at the very end of your mystery but maybe really it’s not ending because time is an illusion created by our primitive mammalian consciousness, yes, that would be nice, then nothing, not even you, would be lost . . .

Kierk puts his thumb in the hollow on the back of the mouse’s neck and grabs its tail with his other hand and with a simultaneous push on its neck and jerk on its tail, breaks its neck, which sounds like stepping on a small branch in the woods. The legs scramble around for a while as Kierk presses it down on the table. As the neurons within the mouse’s half-gram brain necrotize and burst their ionic insides out into the interstitial space, the state-space of neural activity flexes into wild impossible shapes, a hallucination, the smell of its mother, the first and the last scent, her great mouse body curled over him and he is small again and blind in a richness of warmth and wood shavings and his siblings heaving around him like an ocean of belonging—neural networks are structured to be the most creative when they are dying, as if evolution was trying to ease the countless deaths it was built on.

Finally the legs stop convulsing and it lies still under the lamplight.

“I hate it when they do that,” Kierk says, looking down at the still body that somehow already looks smaller. Here is the machine but where is the ghost?

Carmen hands him the trauma shears, which he holds in one hand while the other expertly stretches out the ruff of the neck. He snips the head off. Carmen notices how the muscles in his tanned wrist flex during the movement. He takes the head between gloved fingers, red and slippery now, and walks to the cryogenic storage. A single fat drop of blood hits the white floor.