Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

The narrator climbs to the top of the rope. The girl says she found her grandfather at the altar. The Professor has a sprained foot, and his granddaughter helps burn a leech off the narrator’s neck. When the Professor asks for food, the narrator gives him what they brought. The narrator drinks whiskey and asks the Professor about the shuffling containing a program.

The Professor begins by discussing his time working for the System. It allowed him to test his theories in practice. One of his theories was that codes are only uncrackable if they go through a black box. The black box is the subconscious of the Calcutecs who went through the shuffling surgery. The Professor compares the mind to an elephant factory that creates a cognitive system, which commands behavior, but the user doesn’t know how the factory works and cannot access it.

The problems that had to be overcome with creating the black box had to do with changes to the consciousness due to the input of new experiences. So, the Professor fixed the black box in time, creating two cognitive systems in one person. He explains the process of collecting the outer layers of one system, freezing them, and putting them in a secret place in the mind.