Kierk sits at his desk professionally, mulling over the meetings he’s had so far this morning with Max and Karen. He’d told them he wanted to delve into pure theory, examining consciousness from a fundamental perspective. They’d disagreed, and now Kierk was thinking about the compromise they’d landed on for a first paper. The idea is to write up a review paper of the extant measures of consciousness, using his old computational model of the cortex as a test case. If the measures fail in application to give sensible values for a model of the cortex, such measures cannot be correct and a new one is necessary. So Kierk just needs to adapt the handful of measures invented by other theorists into heuristics he can apply to his simulated network. Since most had never been subjected to a test, the idea was to separate the wheat from the chaff in the literature. According to the committee, Kierk must complete this first paper to receive his PhD. But he knows the paper is pointless. Everything in the literature is chaff. Trying to communicate that . . . had been difficult. It’s been too long since he’s had a real professional conversation. Being alone for so long with only his notebooks, Kierk’s wondering if he has become an island ecology unto himself, if the population of his thoughts had become isolated, if the genetic bottleneck of founding effects had amplified into a full-blown speciation event and all that remains are centaurish forms, hopeful monsters.

He gets a text from Carmen that tells him to meet her and Atif. After hunting down the room Kierk finds the two sitting on a couch facing an empty chair, which Atif gestures at, smiling. Instead Kierk squeezes between them on the couch, the three now sitting in a row awkwardly.

He immediately leans down to tie his shoe. “We wanted to talk about—” Atif leans forward, then backward, to get line of sight, “—about doing some kind of joint project.”

“Why ask me?” Kierk calls up.

“We have both read your papers. Obviously, we think such a pairing would be beneficial.” Atif’s voice is tinged with amusement.

“It would look good for the program if people coauthored,” Carmen says as Kierk finally comes up, everyone shifting their weight on the squishy couch. “And—excuse me, Atif, sorry—also our skills are well matched.”

“What would it be about?”

“Well. Atif and I have been discussing your research.” She holds up a heavily highlighted printout.

“Why bother?”

“Fine. You don’t want to look back. That’s fine. But let’s come up with something, the three of us. We have Atif’s experience with primate research. My experience on decoding brain signals. And your experience on the theory side of things. Let’s do something outlandish, attention-getting.”

“What, like hook up all the monkeys’ brains to one another?” Kierk says sarcastically.

“Actually . . .” Carmen pauses. “Actually, Kierk, that’s an incredible idea.”