Chatting as they do so, Carmen and Kierk go to get another mouse, trundling the anesthesia cart down the halls, pushing a little too fast, both laughing as the gas tank and monitor sway dangerously around corners and through doorways. Another mouse is retrieved, fished from its cage sleepy with droppings and shavings, put into the glass box, and goes under from the gas while scrambling against the sides. This time they harness it on the surgery table to keep it absolutely still. It looks identical to the last one, as the mice are as close as non-clones can get to a genetic monoculture. It’s also transgenetic, bioengineered from conception to be a tool in research. Kierk opens one of its little milky eyes, uses a penlight to check that it’s deep under anesthesia. First, as Carmen’s gloved fingers pinch the ruff of the sedated mouse, Kierk uses surgical scissors to scalp it, cutting off the top of the animal’s head skin all the way out to the ears. The bloody flap is removed, revealing the pink interior bulb. Carmen swabs away the little rivulets of blood using Q-tips dipped in alcohol diluted in water. Then both begin to scrub, clearing away not only the welling blood but also the slice-thin veneer of muscle and fascia that clings to the skull. Occasionally their hands meet as they both reach for something, sharing space perhaps more than necessary, occluding one another, bloody gloved fingers touching, a digital dance done in red. After a few minutes the mouse looks totally obscene, the most naked an animal can be with its revealed skullcap of solitary bone a shiny bulb reflecting the surgical lamps. Carmen forages for a bottle of bone softener while Kierk uses a scalpel to etch lines in the skull, digging little troughs that will help the bone dissolve easier. It’s the same technique used by construction crews to break up a road. Carmen takes the bone softener and applies it liberally to the etched bare dome. While waiting for it to work she prepares the multi-array optrode implant, which will sit in the mouse’s parietal lobe, serving as both a recorder of neuronal activity with its micro-tetrode core, as well as a diode which will shine light onto the local brain region, perturbing the genetically engineered light-responsive neurons around it. When the timer dings Kierk scrapes away the weakened bone like he’s chipping away the flaking top of an egg. Together they follow the laminated notes over the desk (smeared with blood) for how to lower the optrode in. A complicated claw controlled by dials is used to descend the array to the appropriate cortical depth. Carmen gets the giggles at one moment when both of them are holding three different things in each hand, steadying the limbed machine that positions the electrode, just as the mouse briefly stirs, showing signs of waking, and so Carmen, still giggling, has to lean over and uses her mouth to dial up the anesthesia dosage knob. The knob is cold and awkward in her mouth, both of them laughing now, and Carmen then stands up, not letting go of anything, and, stretching, spits out the metallic taste in her mouth into the sink at her side, getting ready for some flirtatious banter as she turns back. But she finds Kierk lost in thought staring as the little mouse’s belly settles into a steadier rhythm—what marvelous skin and globular eyes you have, and your splayed feet, the obsidian of your claws, the dome of your skull, and, inside that, the oracles of peduncles and ligaments and cranial webbing, and all the textbooks and anatomical drawings unfold before Kierk like a flip book, all primary colors of the capillary structure and strung-out webs of neurons, and then down at the cellular level, a galactic exchange of ions, those millions of little Maxwell demons of transport exchanging one for two, one for two in a steady windup of available work, and beneath that the equations and stochastic mechanics of thermodynamics and the exchange of heat, motion, energy, and below that, still flipping the illustrated pages of the book of existence, the arcana of the collapsing waveform, the quantum phenomena stuck in their multiple coexisting tracks, and Kierk knew that he could spend a whole life, an all-too-short span, sifting through the tottering and holed web of concepts stacked on top of one another in supervenience without ever ordering them correctly . . . that all these levels dropped away like the sea floor, farther and deeper than anyone could hold their breath for—and then he looks up at Carmen.