to delve deep.”
“Frankly, a waste of time if that’s all I’m going to do,” Sophia admitted.
“No more so than most summer internships,” Enoch confided in her.
“What I’m really aiming to do is to tee up a senior thesis project.”
“Ah.”
“And if I can show progress on that, a year from now, when I graduate, then hopefully it segues into grad school or a job.”
“You’re igniting a career.”
“Gotta start somewhere.”
They were interrupted by a brilliant lightning flash and a slow rolling thunderclap that took forever to settle down. Enoch seemed to take it as a cue to shift gears. “Suppose all of that comes to pass, Sophia, and you get that job and embark on that career. Twenty years from now, how will you know if you have succeeded?”
It was not a question she had ever asked herself and so it wrong-footed her. First because she lacked an answer and second because of slow-building embarrassment. She should have thought about this. She’d never done so.
“It’s okay,” Enoch assured her after her silence had grown awkward. “Few people actually make decisions on that basis. I was curious in a more general way about the big questions. Where it’s all going.”
“Brain research, you mean?”
“Oh, that’s been going on since at least Tom Willis. I am referring to the branch of it that seems to aspire to becoming a consumer product.”
“Bringing brains back to life in the cloud,” Sophia guessed.
Enoch nodded and turned his head to gaze out the window into the storm. “I’m a go-between. On the one side is Elmo Shepherd, who believes fully that brains can be simulated—and that once the simulation is switched on, you’ll reboot in exactly the same state as when you last lost consciousness. Like waking up from a nap. On the other side is Jake, who believes in the existence of an ineffable spirit that cannot be re-created in computer code.”
“What do you believe, Enoch?”
“Jake’s opinion is based on a theology I do not agree with. But like a lot of theologies it can do duty as a cracked mirror or a smudged lens through which we might be able to glimpse things that are informative. I don’t know about an ineffable spirit, but I do have a suspicion that there are aspects of who we are that will not come back when our brains are scanned and simulated by the likes of Elmo. It’s not clear to me that memory will work, for example, when its physical referents are gone. It’s not clear that the brain will know what to do with itself in the absence of a body. Particularly, a body with sensory organs feeding it a coherent picture of the world.”
“The picture has to add up,” Sophia said, just thinking aloud. “It has to be a coherent and consistent rendering of the world.”
“Of a world, at any rate,” Enoch said.
The storm passed over at some point during the night and they awoke to a clear sunny morning, much cooler than yesterday. After a vending-machine breakfast and robot-brewed coffee, they got back into the fully charged car and headed west. It would be all interstates, all day long, until they got to the turnoff for Moab. Compared to the traffic they’d seen yesterday on the road to Sioux City, this had fewer and fewer vehicles of the Ameristani type the farther west they went. The western plains had been tough to live on even in the cooler, rainier heyday of white settlement and were now well on their way to becoming a desert. They simply couldn’t support that many humans, and the flat land and sluggish rivers held no appeal for recreationalists or builders of vacation homes. It was drive-over country. Wind turbines were gradually supplanted by photovoltaic farms as the day went on and the Rocky Mountains began to crumple the horizon. During the morning, as they hummed across the plain at the car’s maximum speed, the four Princetonians “worked,” which meant that they lost themselves in a stew of academics, internship prep, and whatever their editors threw at them in the way of news, social media, and entertainment. Sophia “drove” and Enoch rode shotgun. For, since he lacked glasses and had nothing to do besides stare out the windshield, it seemed polite to let him have that seat. They had a sophisticated and cosmopolitan lunch in downtown Denver followed by a couple of hours’ traversal of the Rockies: a mosaic of expensive recreation opportunities, speckled with little high-density communities where the servant class