Seven stories up in the CNS Mike Benson is staring intently out a window holding a can of soda. On his way back from the vending machines to the fMRI lab something had caught his eye. Mike is pretty sure that motionless figure a block down is Kierk. He’s just standing in the middle of the sidewalk, looking down at . . . nothing?

“What the fuck?”

Mike shakes his head and mouths something under his breath. At Harvard he had met plenty of people who thought they were smarter than they were, but none of them had pissed him off quite as much as Kierk. And at least at Harvard there had been the great equalizer, those widely used study drugs like Modafinil, Ritalin, and Adderall. Before midterms or finals he would take a handful in the afternoon and study straight into the night, taking breaks only to do drum solos with his pencils. It was like catching fire. The neuroscience major had both a hard-core advanced calculus requirement and the GPA-destroying organic chemistry. Classes that seemed intractable but which he burned through with Adderall. Taking it was as if a fog he didn’t know he’d been living under his whole life cleared briefly and the goal of studying and academic testing crystallized into what it truly was: rigorous rule-following. The point of it all was to manipulate the symbols given to him (they could have been Chinese characters for all he cared) in a way that conformed to the rules given by the textbook or professor. And the Adderall gave a pleasant tingle when the grind of rule-following led to correct answers. Nearly everyone he knew took them, so he never gave it a second thought. Everyone was just neurons, after all. So who cared if those neurons were in a natural or artificial chemical bath?

Comparatively, Mike likes to imagine that Kierk would have dropped out of Harvard. In his mental rant he’d say—You know next to someone like John von Neumann, you would have been nothing, a gnat, let’s see how you feel when measured up against someone who was really a genius . . . but then the imaginary Kierk, whispering back at him, grinning like the Cheshire Cat—Ah, but there aren’t any John von Neumanns anymore, are there? There’s just me, now why is that? Kierk, now raving against him—And whose idea was it to ensure maximum destruction by dropping the bomb kilometers above Nagasaki? See, I like geniuses who only destroy themselves. You know you’ll win in the end, Mike, I’ll self-cannibalize, and the last thing to disappear will be my smile . . .

Mike finishes the last of his soda with a gulp, looks around to make sure he’s alone, then angrily crushes the can and drops it into a nearby recycling bin.

THURSDAY