Sitting back down with everyone, Carmen recognizes that it may be difficult to ever get back up. She hasn’t eaten dinner (a yogurt only, scarfed down standing before she headed out tonight), so four drinks in she begins to gulp water in an attempt to make that feeling of weightlessness leave, that spinning where she circumvolves around an internal axis. Carmen wonders abstractly whether she would go home with Kierk if he pursued her tonight. Her expectations have a color to them now and she can feel them in her body.

“You are all very rambunctious,” Leon says, adding another drink to the glass castle he has raised around him.

“Leon, we are not splitting this bill up evenly,” Kierk says in laughter. The waitress brings over a tray of shots, starts distributing them to rising noise.

Carmen—“Alright, alright, shot time. Hey! Hey! Shot time. Everybody. Everybody. You ever do a neuroshot?”

“This is so sad and uncool I want to die,” Kierk gets out before Carmen hushes him.

“Okay!” she says, looking around brightly, everyone’s gaze on her. “You take the shot, and then, for a chaser, you recite the twelve cranial nerves.” To all the protests—“No, no, it works, it works! Alright. Ready. Set. Go!”

The whiskey burns down their throats, and then, in a drunken chorus searching for synchrony:

“Olfactory, Optic, Oculomotor, Trochlear, Trigeminal, Abductens, Facial, Vestibulocochlear, Glossopharyngeal, Vagus, Accessory, Hypoglossal!” they finish together, wiping their mouths, making faces.

“Oh Oh Oh, To Touch And Feel Virgin Girls’ Vagina And Hymen,” Carmen yells, doubling over.

Alex holds up a hand, waits for marginal silence and then says—“On Occasion Oliver Tries To Anally Fuck Various Guys. Vaginas Are History.” Leon finds this particularly funny, pounding the table so hard the drinks dance.

Atif, kindly, turns to Greg, who hasn’t spoken much since his last attempt, and asks him what kind of research he was doing lately. Greg has been nursing a sweating glass of water, and sips it nervously before answering.

“Um, the first project that kind of got me where I am was on artificial neural nets and learning, we were—” the hose is passed around him, “—trying to get the neural networks to be able to distinguish between male and female crabs. Like, photographs.”

“Wait, wait,” Carmen says, leaning in, looking around. “You trained neural networks on crab porn?” The table explodes into laughter. “Like, what grant paid for this? Did they know they’d be giving you money to make neural networks that can watch crab porn?”

Greg has become quickly uncomfortable, and instead of answering he just blushes violently—the conversation sees it, turns away.

“Are you excited to meet some of the guest speakers?” Jessica kindly asks into the air, with Mike immediately answering in the affirmative.

“I heard that Antonio Moretti might speak,” Jessica says. Everyone looks over at Kierk, who shrugs his ignorance.