But the facemask did. It couldn’t sense paths itself, but it could re-create Noxon’s brainstate at the time he was in that frozen moment. At the wish to remember it, the facemask re-created that brainstate and Noxon was there again.

The trouble was that along with the brainstate of what he was observing, he could only think the thoughts he was thinking then. And he was also aware of being completely unable to take any action, except to choose a path and attach to it. Only now he wasn’t seeing paths, he was remembering seeing paths. So there was no escape. He couldn’t even put together a coherent thought along the lines of: Help! Get me out of this loop!

There was no sense of duration in that brainstate. He didn’t know how long he stood there, utterly immobile and incapable of action. He only knew that eventually it ended and he could think and move again. “That was unpleasant,” said Noxon.

“What was?” asked Ram.

“Being unable to move. To do anything.”

“When did that happen?” asked Ram.

“So the facemask didn’t allow it to go on long enough for you to notice. That’s good.”

“You just got the memory back?”

“Not my memory. The facemask’s memory of what my brain was doing at that moment. I could only think what I thought then.”

“Except you were able to worry that it might go on too long,” said Ram.

“That wasn’t a conscious thought. That was the behind-thought. The watcher. The one without any words who’s always listening to what I think consciously in language and evaluating it.”

Ram nodded wisely. “It’s terrifying how well I know what you mean.”

“It was a good refresher, once it actually ended,” said Noxon. “I didn’t stay there forever, though it felt like it. And now I have a much clearer memory of what I experienced at the time. How paths look when they’re not moving. The nineteen with the potential to move away from me into the future. And the one with the potential to move into the past.”

“What about the one that got me to that point?” asked Ram.

“The others all attached to that one,” said Noxon. “They were all continuations of that.”

“So you saw some going back and some forward,” said Ram.

“That’s not the difference. They were all going into a future. But this one was heading into . . . an unproductive future. A place with no causal potential.”

“So look for that.”

“But at that point I wasn’t seeing paths at all. Nothing was moving. They were all alike—I can’t explain why the one was different from the others. It just was. The point is that I know what an unpath looks like, a slice of path, because they all looked like that. But in order to see it, I have to be completely stopped in time.”