Jacob sat on the couch, forlornly staring at the wall in front of him. He was unemployed. Again. 40 years old, unemployed, and he didn't know what he was going to do about it.

Things had been acceptable for the past few years. After spending most of his thirties doing contract work or biding time with non-profits, he'd finally found that first step to something better. He was a Marketing Manager. Or a Product Manager. Or a Project Manager. Jacob smiled, a mixture of sadness and frustration on his face. He was whatever the company had needed him to be. And because of this, his resume was absurd. 

Nobody wanted someone who did a little of this and a little of that for their job. Jacob made being invaluable to the company his goal over these past years. Evidently, he'd failed. He'd learned how to build a website, helping the company take control of the web domain and moving it out of the hands of the contractors who cost far too much for the results they provided. He'd mastered the art of keeping the products his company sold in stock across multiple warehouses and online stores, while expanding the Amazon store footprint worldwide. He'd become a customer service rep on the forum and support staff on Zendesk. He'd learned how to manage software projects on JIRA and Trello and how to do command line updates in Github. He expanded the social media presence and even made ridiculous how-to videos on Youtube. 

In the end, it hadn't mattered. He didn't blame the company. The COVID downturn had ultimately cost the company too much money. Someone had to be on the chopping block, and firing the developers who actually wrote the code made no sense. 

So here he was. On the couch. Because he worked for a start-up, there was no contract. No golden parachute for him. He had stock options, but no money to exercise them. Even if he got a loan, the company was still private. It's not like he could sell the options to anyone and make a profit on the sale. 

He thought again about his resume. What do you put on a CV, when your job for the company is "the guy who does everything else"?

He would lose the apartment. That was certain. He'd lose the apartment and the choice then would be to move back in with his aging parents as a 40 year old loser or - what, live on the street? Jacob didn't know. He didn't want to think about it anymore. He needed some air.

Jacob hoisted himself to his feet with effort. Since taking this job, he'd let his weight and health deteriorate substantially. A few months back he'd had to get a new scale. Evidently, standard scales stop and 400 lbs. He really didn't want to know what the scale read these days.  Jacob crossed the apartment and tossed open the window closest his couch. The July heat radiated onto his face. It felt good. Even at 6pm, the sun burned a bit. He welcomed that little bit of pain distracting him from the roiling in his stomach. 

He inhaled sharply. The smell of tar, baking cement, fumes, and grass assaulted his senses. He relished that mid-summer swelter. How many weeks had it been since he'd last gone for a proper walk outside?

He stayed that way, staring out at the brick and cement buildings, allowing the air conditioning of his apartment to escape for far too long. Lost. Blank. His fears had circled in his mind, over and over, and they were still there, somewhere, but it was as though he'd entered the eye of the storm in his mind. There was no peace. No tranquility. Just emptiness, waiting for the turbulent thoughts to return.

And then the phone rang. 

This was strange. He normally had the phone on vibrate. He couldn't remember turning the ringer on, but then, after learning of his fate, the last hour of work and the drive home was a blur. He couldn't really remember much of the past few hours. His mind had simply turned off. 

Jacob turned back to the couch where his phone lie buzzing an unknown number. He thought about sending it to voicemail, but decided against it. Maybe he'd left something at work. Better to find out about it now and get whatever it was over with.

"Hello?" he said, after answering. 

"Hey, Jake? Is that you?"

"Uh, yes, I guess, who is this?"

"Oh, sorry, new phone! Well, not that new, got it like 5 years ago, but since we haven't talked in... gosh, has it been 12 years now? Since we haven't talked, I guess you don't have the number. This is Jessie. Jessie Coleman?"

Jacob blinked. He remembered Jessie. They'd gone to business school together. They hadn't been particularly close, more friends of each others' friends. 

"Hi Jessie, um, how can I help you?"

"Well, it's interesting. You know your thesis?"

"My what?"

"Your thesis, y'know, from grad school," Jessie said impatiently.

"Y...eah, I guess I do. What about it? I haven't thought about that thing in, what, 15 years?"

"Yeah, well it turns out, it's kind of important."

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"But, how? Why? It was a narrative review thesis. I didn't even do any actually research."

"Well someone did. You proposed an alternative model to heuristic processing, and my boss actually tested it. The results have been... well, look, I'm in town, have you eaten dinner? I'd love to chat with you about it."

Jacob was flummoxed. He remembered that paper well. It was garbage. He knew it. His advisor had left for another university midway through the research, presumably because the work Jacob was doing wasn't interesting enough. No. Presumably was the wrong word. There'd been a meeting. Jacob had been cornered by his advisor and the college chair. 

It was funny, actually. That day may have been one of the worst of his life. He'd spent the next several weeks dreaming about losing his teeth. Today was in the running to rival that day. The confrontation at work had not been so bad as that day, but the reality of being 40 with no prospects might actually be worse. 

How? Why had someone picked up his thesis? He had assumed it long buried and dead. It had never been published anywhere but the local college thesis publication. Finding it would have to have been near impossible. 

Still, for all that that day 15 years ago had been awful, the college had eventually graduated him after giving him a new advisor and forcing him to attend another semester. His new advisor had been kind, and his final thesis, while a mere narrative review, had nevertheless been something he was proud of. 

He made a decision.

"I haven't eaten. And I know a pretty good Italian place a few blocks from my place, if that works for you."

An hour later, after washing his face and otherwise cleaning up, he was sitting across from Jessie Coleman. She looked exactly how he remembered her. He self-consciously tried to straighten his shirt over his round belly and she smiled at him.

"How have you been, Jacob?"

Oh boy. This would have been an excellent question yesterday. Today, he had no idea how to answer it honestly, so he lied.

"Oh, good. Can't complain. How about yourself? And what brings you to this backwoods little town? You're in... marketing or something like that, right?" Jacob had very briefly scanned her social media before heading out. Like every job these days, her title had been very specific and completely unclear.

Her smile grew a bit brighter, "Or something like that sounds about right. My job is to sell what my employer does to politicians, so we can keep doing what we're doing."

"And what are you doing?"

"Cognitive and neuroscientific research. We poke brains and record the results," she grinned.

"Neat." 

Before they could continue, the waiter came around. Each ordered. Jacob briefly wondered how long he'd be able to pay for restaurants like this, and lost in his thoughts he missed her next statement.

"Hm? What was that?" he asked.

"Poking brains. I joke a little, but that's actually why I'm here today. In addition to marketing to politicians, my job is to reach out to interesting individuals."

"Oh, like a recruiter or a head hunter or something?"

"Again, something like that," she gave faint smile, this time as if acknowledging an internal joke. "A higher up at the company read your paper, was impressed, and tested the outcome... on mice."

Jacob frowned. "On... mice? How do you test heuristic processing on mice?"

Jessie waved her hand, "Above my pay grade. I only share the results and explain why they're important. The simple answer is, our company bought out a competitor a year or so ago that had been developing some interesting tech. It allows for measuring neurological impulses and chemistry in real time without some enormous machine and gigantic magnets."

Jacob was impressed. "That sounds cool. I never did learn much about the biological side of how the mind works, but it definitely sounds pretty cool. So are you here for me to... what, review the study and give my input or something?"

"Oh no, the company has a shoebox full of geeks for that. I'm here for something much more interesting.

"First, let me make sure I have my terminology right. Heuristics are just mental rules of thumb, right? Like, if you are driving and you see a red octagon, regardless of what's written on it, your brain will automatically think it's a stop sign. Is that basically correct?"

"Sounds about right. It's honestly been 15 years since I've studied this, so we're going on some pretty old memories, but that's about how I'd describe them."

"OK, and there are a lot of things that sort of control how our brain uses heuristics. Like, with the red octagon, we might automatically think it's a stop sign when driving or on a road, but the heuristic might not activate if my spaghetti sauce here were to accidentally form into the shape of an octagon."

"Heh, right again."

Jessie nodded. "Good. So basically anything in our brain that's a shortcut is a heuristic. Like, if you read a sentence, but someone forgot to write the word 'an' and you don't notice, because your brain is too busy reading and you just subconsciously fill in any missing letters or words, that's your brain employing heuristics."

Jacob was impressed. "Very well said! Did you get a degree in research psychology while I wasn't looking?"

A quick smile. "No. I'm just very good at speaking about 5 minutes worth of the language. We go much deeper and I've got nothing. Great for parties and impressing politicians though!"

Jacob laughed, "I'll bet."

"Anyway, the prevailing theory is that while heuristics can be learned, they can't be stopped. The more taxed the mind is, the more likely we are to rely on our little brain shorthands. And your alternative theory was simply that this idea is true... until it is not. There comes a point where the mind is so taxed that we can't even use our brain shorthand. And the question becomes, what happens next? What happens when we cross the event horizon? What happens when we lock ourselves out of our heuristics? Are our brains like computers that just lock up? Or does something more interesting happen?"

Jacob had stopped eating. She'd repeated his questions in the thesis right back to him. He had forgotten. 15 years was a lot of time, but it all came flooding back.

After the ambush by his advisor, he'd gone to his bedroom, his mind racing, completely unable to process anything. The world around him was a blur, much like today. He couldn't think. He could barely breathe. While sitting on his bed, the world had locked up and he had collapsed. But in that moment before everything had gone to zero, there was a moment that was crystal, like he could see and feel the structure of the universe. 

It had been a hallucination, but it had haunted him. He couldn't get that fraction of a second out of his mind, and in writing his first thesis draft, he'd asked the question, "What if?" What if you could overwhelm a mind, moving infinitely toward zero without ever quite reaching it? What would tap dancing on the edge of the black hole of the mind look like?

Jacob refocused on Jessie, who was still smiling at him. "So... you..."

She nodded. "We figured out a way to do it. To mice. Now we want to try it on a person."

Fighting for air, Jacob asked, "Who? How?"

A quick grin. "Are you free next week?"