“Not so different, though,” she insisted. “They’re just like us, in many ways.”

Now Sagara laughed softly. “Just another reason to be afraid,” he remarked.

Then he shook his head. “I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the concept of all of this. You seem to accept it so readily, but how could consciousness be something that’s affected—let alone merged—by this phenomenon?”

“Perhaps collapsed is a more helpful word,” Park said. At his look she said, “Or compressed. You accept that the Fold—or various forces, really—collapse or compress together space, don’t you? Or gravity?”

“I suppose,” Sagara said reluctantly. “But consciousness isn’t gravity.”

“It depends on how you look at it,” Park said. Her head spun with the effort, but she could feel herself thinking hard, the rotors of her brain working overtime. “If we’re going by Taban’s hypothesis, consciousness, like gravity, is an invisible force that has an influence on the external world. Unlike gravity, we haven’t made the appropriate steps to prove it—but we are aware of its effects. We know that particles on a quantum level change their behavior when being observed—that the very act of observation, by human or machine, changes something fundamental about them. We know that human intention influences how plants and fruit flies in otherwise identical environments grow; that it can affect the molecular vibration or pH of water samples; that it can seemingly cause tumors to shrink, or the bio-photons in leaves to respond and glow. Why has the ‘placebo effect’—in other words, the human power of belief—had such a marked and undeniable impact on all the studies we’ve ever conducted? Why has it cured physical illness, or . . . why can monks make fields of animals simultaneously move around or lie down just by staring at them, thinking at them? Why does the identical clone of a rat, when told it’s stupid, behave so poorly in a maze, when it’s otherwise treated exactly the same as its clone that was told that it’s smart? And panpsychism has existed as a philosophical concept for, what, thousands of years?” She cleared her throat, aware of the thumping in the back of her head. “Looking at all of that, I would say that consciousness could be a force, a field—even a dimension of its own, higher than time and space—”

“—perceiving and defining both,” Sagara echoed along with her.

Park paused and licked her lips. She could not remember ever talking so much without interruption.