No one beats the machine, not in the end. People have tried and failed—psychologists, psychometricians, psychopaths; mentalists and hypnotists, experts in deception, spies and spymasters, even schizophrenics and paranoids. The only person who came close was a madwoman. That was what the paperwork said: a mind turned inward upon itself, bouncing off its interior walls. Too much information in too wild a flow between the hemispheres of the brain. Radical intervention was prescribed—and in the end she was wide open to the machine, as if it had sliced her head into pages and turned the leaves on her spine. She was put back in the world afterwards with a proper right-thinking brain and she had to make a completely new life as a new person. Not one of her previous relationships survived the compulsory healing. How could they? None of them made any sense now that she was ordinary. Not that she was ordinary. She was just differently strange. Poor pale Anna was ripped apart. I liked her. Of all the things, I wish that hadn’t happened.