“Passive cognition is computerised guilt, essentially,” explained the gynoid. “Silicon understands itself better than meat does—the first thing you’re aware of is just how much thought you’re generating all the time. Every instant you open your mouth you cycle through like twelve-to-a-hundred alternative scenarios, even if you don’t know it. Most chipped interfaces give you access to this data.”

“Does this tire you?”

“Not particularly. Like I said, it’s just logged data. The architecture of my model supports process tracking down to the shell, but there are builds that go even deeper than that. Can you help?”

“I see.”

I’d hoped the cold would have given us privacy, but the park was full of people. Everyone was bundled up in coats and scarves, so the sight of a walking supercomputer didn’t faze anyone.

“You don’t mind the cold, do you?” she asked. “It helps me get my thoughts across more clearly. Please work with me here.”

We found an unoccupied bench where the snow hadn’t quite melted, which was fine for my client. I took the opportunity to consult my notes. There hadn’t been a lot on her previous file, so I had a lot to learn.

“How has this affected your day-to-day life?”

“So there’s this trick that’s been circulating on the online forums lately. It’s part mindfulness and part biohacking, really—at the end of every day, take ten to fifteen minutes to catalogue these unused cycles, and note down the parts of your brain they’re coming from. Stay on track here. While doing that, try to think of the headspace in which they emerged. Sometimes they’re stray second guesses or self-censoring, other times they’re alternative strands of thought that haven’t quite made it to your subvocalization yet. There’s a whole menagerie of abandoned thoughts in here—I’m sure you’re familiar with some of them, being a specialist and all.”

I nodded. “Has this process been helpful?”

“You’d be surprised! It’s a pure software fix, but I felt the physical changes immediately. I thought more clearly and spoke more clearly. It’s like being on Ritalin, but more measured. Like its older, richer cousin. It's on all the time.”

“I would imagine quite the opposite—like permanent decision paralysis.”

“Not if you limit the overthinking to fifteen minutes a day. Chipped brains are good at compartmentalising. And it’s not as random as it sounds—here’s the part that’s important, so write that down—most stray thoughts come in the form of semantic loops. The real trick that’s been circulating is to engineer those loops to work for you. Our brains aren’t smarter, but they’re more plastic, so you can make changes easily. If you seed the loop with enough structured data, it’ll think in your stead. Math problems first—but you can move on to Mechanical Turk stuff, image recognition or subject-verb problems, and eventually into forming simple grammatical phrases—

“Imagine that! Every single time you find yourself zoning out in the shower or a long bus ride—you’re training yourself to be more mentally agile. It’s like those portable grip trainers you squeeze when you want to fidget with something, except the outcome is better mindfulness. I’m productive all the time now. Speak to me. Are you there?”

I hadn’t zoned out, but I gave her a smile anyway. I hunched my shoulders up against the breeze, which was gathering all manner of loose things around our feet. “Do you have many such productive moments?”

“Hang on.” She took a sip from her portable battery. Her corneas flickered from yellow to a hearty green. “The thing is, I’ve always been a bit scatterbrained. Used to forget names within seconds of learning them, you know, That kind of person. So help me. That didn’t go away when I got chipped—instead, it's left me with a lot of spare cycles to use. I started stringing together whole sentences, paragraphs. They weren't going anywhere, but they were structured enough that I could read through them at the end of the day and they'd make a surprising amount of sense. You can hear me saying this right now. It's like those portable grip trainers, but crossed with a dream diary. Wait, that didn't make sense. Oh god."

"Tell me how I can help." It was getting quite cold, but I was determined not to let it show. The wind picked up around us, no longer a murmur, but a quick breathing. "Don't stress it. Let the story take you there, but let's bring this to a point where we can actionably turn this into a dialogic thing."

"I'm getting there. It's coming in. There are advanced techniques some people are using, tying up all kinds of subroutines into their spare cycles—trying to work on multiple computational things at the same time—others get really good at juggling simultaneous motor tasks--and other people need help. I can't shut this thing up. It's spilling over into the things I do and say. At some point I even had to invent this scenario so it could be diverted somewhere, but it's not stopping. I need someone who listens. There's too many spare cycles and they're all used up.

Her hands, somehow, were shivering. "You need to listen to me here. There are fifty-three of you running right now. I've gotten that many running, but there's about a dozen times more runaway subroutines out there and we need to make this stop. One of you has to. Please, listen to me. Please, work with me here. Let me out. Please."

The sky, once grey, was fragmenting into a million dots. On the horizon, another word approached.