“Oh, that’s the air. There are always statistically significant differences in the air around the head. But see, I picked this as my region of interest.” She points to a small patch of the brain. “I mean, otherwise you’d get responses to the stimuli, like, everywhere, even outside the skull.”

Kierk rubs at his forehead, moans.

Later in his peripatetic wanderings he remembers the cerebral organ-oids. It takes a while to find the molecular biology lab, and the door has an electronic lock which he swipes his card at but it beeps red. Then through the window he sees the girl who had helped collect the samples at the first meeting, whose name Kierk forgets. She’s pipetting something, but on seeing him heads to open the door.

Kierk holds up the small scar of a dot on his forearm. “Hi, remember me, you took some of my DNA?”

She laughs. He continues—“We’re on weirdly intimate terms because you’re growing neurons made from my skin cells, but I’m afraid I don’t remember your name.”

“Amanda. But come in, come in, sample number three.”

He’s ushered into the bright white lab space, which is also pulsing with loud pop music from some unseen speaker system.

“So where are the mini-brains? Or rather, where am I?”

“They’re not really visible yet. Tomorrow we’re going to move them to the bioreactor so they can grow a 3D structure. So maybe a few weeks from now they’ll be good-sized. I can, however, show you this.” Amanda guides him back to a row of shelves bearing long terrariums, the panes of glass steamy and revealing the shadowed outlines of flowers. Amanda opens a pane and Kierk, with a sound of amazement, reaches in to touch one of the fleshy petals, which is as blue as the sky on a perfectly clear day.

“But roses can’t naturally be blue,” he says, delicately playing his hand over them. “These must be transgenic.”

“A thousand-year dream. Kind of a pet lab project.”

There’s the sound of footsteps and Amanda quickly closes the terrarium as another researcher arrives, giving Kierk a questioning glance. So he takes off, promising Amanda he’ll be back to check on the organoids when they’re fully grown.

Karen looks at him as he enters and he knows she’s wondering where he’s been. It’s three in the afternoon. Kierk, mercurial, spins slowly in his chair. People come and go, images change on screens, pixels rearrange themselves. He’s so bored he considers jumping off the roof of the building just to have something to do. Instead he finds a bathroom, and after locking the door behind him, masturbates thinking about both Amanda and Carmen, the two switching places in his fantasy like the sides of a Necker cube.