“I was joking.”

Atif says—“No, I agree with Carmen. Online communication from one animal to the other.”

“And what would I do?”

“Well, what’s your thoughts on it?”

Kierk sighs, but then his hands begin moving as he riffs—“Setting up a big brain made of smaller brains is probably best modeled based on natural brain development. In development brain regions have to come together, integrate themselves into one mind. How do they do that? Feedback. Like a baby finding its foot. All brains start out as many brains. All minds as many minds. They become integrated, rewired into a single entity, through feedback and reward. So we need to design it so that the, ah, monkey group mind, is constantly getting feedback and reward from doing joint tasks, and slowly their brains will interpret the noise they are getting via the implants not as noise, but as signal.”

“How to Build a Hive Mind by Kierk Suren.”

Atif, nodding along—“Starting such a research program would be no small thing.”

Carmen’s eyes are bright tunnels of light. “Listen, people have done brain-to-brain communication stuff but never as part of a systematic research program on consciousness. What’s the bandwidth needed to form one consciousness out of many? And coming from the Crick Scholars! The history, the program, it’s all there. A new frontier in the search for the neural correlates of consciousness.”

Kierk shakes his head. “This stuff is just better and better mapmaking. Or worse, magic tricks.”

“You act like everything is so incredibly problematic,” Atif says, still half-amused.

“Do you know what a pitcher plant is?”

Atif nods. “Of course.”

“Well,” Kierk smiles grimly, “I think some ideas are like pitcher plants. And how happy do you think the one ant is that figures out they’re in a pitcher plant?”

Carmen flings his own paper at him. “God fucking damn it, Kierk.”

Atif looks shocked and unsure, but Kierk just glances down at the paper in his lap, the askew pages with his name on them. Carmen is waiting for him to say something.

“It’s a career move.”

An exasperated sigh. “It’s starting something. Providing a reference point in the literature. Maybe it’s flashy but that isn’t inherently negative.”

“This isn’t how it gets solved.”

Atif—“Do you think we will solve it in this room, now?”

“No.”

“Then why not take the time to do this?”

“If you have strong enough arms, you can bail out a boat with holes in it forever. Even if it’s unsound it never sinks.”

Carmen, visibly frustrated, says—“So you’ll just let it sink?”

Kierk looks down at months of his life in just a few pages of ink.

“Alright. I’ll do it.”

“We don’t want you to do it if it’s going to be—” Atif begins but Kierk cuts him off.

“If I commit, I commit. I’m in.”