The Corrections

your back. You hurt your back.”
    “Please, Gary. Do me a favor and call Dr. Pierce.”
    “Admit that you’re lying, and I’ll talk about anything you want. But nothing’s going to change until you admit that.”
    “I don’t even recognize your voice.”
    “Five days in St. Jude. You can’t do that for a woman who, like you say, has nothing else in her life?”
    “Please come back to me.”
    A jolt of rage forced Gary’s eyes open. He kicked the sheet aside and jumped out of bed. “This is a marriage-ender! I can’t believe it!”
    “Gary, please—”
    “We’re going to split up over a trip to St. Jude!”

    And then a visionary in a warm-up jacket was lecturing to pretty college students. Behind the visionary, in a pixilated middle distance, were sterilizers and chromatography cartridges and tissue stains in weak solution, long-neckedmedicoscientific faucets, pinups of spread-eagled chromosomes, and diagrams of tuna-red brains sliced up like sashimi. The visionary was Earl “Curly” Eberle, a small-mouthed fifty-year-old in dime-store glasses, whom the creators of the Axon Corporation’s promotional video had done their best to make glamorous. The camera work was nervous, the lab floor pitched and lurched. Blurry zooms zeroed in on female student faces aglow with fascination. Curiously obsessive attention was paid to the back of the visionary head (it was indeed curly).
    “Of course, chemistry, too, even brain chemistry,” Eberle was saying, “is basically just manipulation of electrons in their shells. But compare this, if you will, to an electronics that consists of little two-and three-pole switches. The diode, the transistor. The brain, by contrast, has several dozen kinds of switches. The neuron either fires or it doesn’t; but this decision is regulated by receptor sites that often have shades of offness and on-ness between plain Off and plain On. Even if you could build an artificial neuron out of molecular transistors, the conventional wisdom is that you can still never translate all that chemistry into the language of yes/no without running out of space. If we conservatively estimate twenty neuroactive ligands, of which as many as eight can operate simultaneously, and each of these eight switches has five different settings—not to bore you with the combinatorics, but unless you’re living in a world of Mr. Potato Heads, you’re going to be a pretty funny-looking android.”
    Close-up of a turnip-headed male student laughing.
    “Now, these are facts so basic,” Eberle said, “that we ordinarily wouldn’t even bother spelling them out. It’s just the way things are. The only workable connection we have with the electrophysiology of cognition and volition is chemical. That’s the received wisdom, part of the gospel of our science. Nobody in their right mind would try to connect the world of neurons with the world of printed circuits.”
    Eberle paused dramatically.
    “Nobody, that is, but the Axon Corporation.”
    Ripples of buzz crossed the sea of institutional investors who’d come to Ballroom Β of the Four Seasons Hotel, in central Philadelphia, for the road show promoting Axon’s initial public offering. A giant video screen had been set up on the dais. On each of the twenty round tables in the semi-dark ballroom were platters of satay and sushi appetizers with the appropriate dipping sauces.
    Gary was sitting with his sister, Denise, at a table near the door. He had hopes of transacting business at this road show and he would rather have come alone, but Denise had insisted on having lunch, today being Monday and Monday being her one day off, and had invited herself along. Gary had figured that she would find political or moral or aesthetic reasons to deplore the proceedings, and, sure enough, she was watching the video with her eyes narrowed in suspicion and her arms crossed tightly. She was wearing a yellow shift with a red floral print, black sandals, and a pair of Trotskyish round plastic glasses; but what really set her apart from the other women in Ballroom Β was the bareness of her legs. Nobody who dealt in money did not wear stockings.

WHAT IS THE CORECKTALL PROCESS?
    “Corecktall,” said the cutout image of Curly Eberle, whose young audience had been digitally pureed into a uniform backdrop of tuna-red brain matter, “is a revolutionary neurobiological therapy!”
    Eberle was seated on an ergonomic desk chair in which, it now developed, he could float