"It doesn't make sense to me," Viral said.

"Yes, the world has become quite prosaic," Dr. Hackman said, scratching the bare skin of his bald patte.

"What does she mean Tyler was learning to create viruses from math?" Viral asked.

He stood open-handed in Dr. Hackman and Farooq's room as the chill of morning began to creep into his bones. It was 3:30 am, the witching hour Lron called it, the hour that Saadguru had said spiritual energy becomes most manifested in the mind. If there was God to be found in the moment, Viral doubted He lie in the gaping yaw of Farooq's slack and snoozing open mouth.

"It really is quite extraordinary what that young man Tyler has managed to do," Dr. Hackman said.

Viral pounded his fist into his hand. "Please help me understand," he said.

An hour earlier Viral had sat in a bed adjacent to Monica's listening as she unspooled the fall of the house of Osterhauf. He had been brought to the the women's college and then the Ramada, she told him because of the promise he held to unlock Tyler's algorithms. The most dizzying part, Viral thought, was that he had just met Tyler Osterhauf mere hours before the federal authorities descended on his loft. That he had been in the wrong place at the right time for agent Treyna to scoop him into custody and uncover his Westinghouse recognition was coincidence of divine order.

Dr. Hackman cleared his throat; Farooq snorted in his sleep. Lowering his voice to a whisper Dr. Hackman said, "The logs of Tyler's trials are a mess."

"I know," Viral nodded, "Monica showed me the printouts."

"No, mathematically they're a mess," the doctor said. Viral's squint said uncertainty so Dr. Hackman went on. "Tyler had accepted the premise that mathematics is the language nature uses to communicate to man. As nucleotides and viruses by extension are elements of nature, Tyler posited that he could conjure genomics from math."

Viral raised his fist to his forehead. The exhaustion of the past three days had begun to settle in. "I don't understand why Monica thinks I can help unravel this knot. I'm just half a freshman," he said.

"Half?" Dr. Hackman asked, looking up from the toenail he studied at the edge of his bed.

"I don't take my first year finals until May," Viral said.

Dr. Hackman scoffed.

"What is it?" Viral asked, thinking the doctor had found a comically simple solution in Tyler's jagged spaghetti code.

"You're not going back," the doctor said. Viral didn't follow. Dr Hackman continued. "Most people your age, the least preternaturally dense, have by now concluded the vapidity of a college education."

"I'm not going to drop out of college to join some start-up --" Viral began, but Dr. Hackman interrupted.

"And yet that sentiment, of foregoing higher education, while still in vogue, though as you've noted presently declining, will pale in comparison to the transformation erupting in our midst."

"Huh?" Viral said; it was all he could muster.

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Rolling the loose leaf logs of Tyler's code, the doctor fashioned a baton with which to scratch his shoulder. "You're not going back, none of us is going back," Hackman said. "This pandemic has broken the American spirit, has fractured the American dream."

Viral disagreed. "This is our generation's moon-landing," he said, "This is the moment where America re-emerges as the city on a hill."

Dr. Hackman waved his finger. "I'm old enough to remember what came after the moon landing. Black bodies chewed by dogs in the streets, nuclear fallout drills in grade schools, the assassination of a president..."

Viral watched as Dr. Hackman looked out the window at the blackest black before the dawn. Viral wondered if the old man was focusing on the past or his decrepit reflection in the glass.

"Gould said evolution happens in short bursts that punctuate eons of stagnation. We are evolving, and this chaos is the crucible.". Dr. Hackman turned his eyes back toward Viral's. "You're not going back to school, Viral. At least not as you remember it. Nothing will be the same again after we leave here."

"If we leave here," Viral added.

Dr. Hackman frowned. "That's pessimistic," he said.

Viral couldn't help but laugh. The doctor, following his spiel on the collapse of the world order, had the gall to call Viral hopeless. Defensively, viral said, "A concise summary of your thoughts."

Dr. Hackman shook his head, stood, and readjusted his robe. Glancing over his shoulder, he checked on the sleeping Farooq. "You misunderstand, Viral," the doctor said, "I speak of madness as new beginning. Things fall apart but they also rise again. Creation is the genius sprouting from entropy."

Reaching into the waistband of his briefs, Dr. Hackman scratched what Viral imagined to be very scaly balls. "Where'd I put that water?" Hackman asked himself.

Viral took the empty glass from the professor's night stand and handed it to the doc. "Ah, thank you, Viral," Hackman said. Taking the glass he shuffled into the bathroom. Viral listened as the doctor ran the faucet and tried to coax his prostate into compliance over the toilet seat.

Still sleeping, Farooq breathed once heavily, then smacked his lips, and muttered what sounded to Viral like the word "entropy."

Entropy. From the armchair in which he sat, facing the double beds of Dr. Hackman and Farooq, Viral turned to look for what Dr. Hackman found in the distance. All that met Viral's eye was the blinking red light of a cell phone tower miles in the distance. Entropy, he recalled from his high school physics class, was a tenet of thermodynamics. Systems decayed from higher energy states of order to lower energy states of disorder. Entropy was why he could not uncrack an egg. He remembered the example giving by his high school teacher.

Yet in college, in a section on natural language processing, Viral learned of a new meaning of the word entropy in the context of information. Entropy was, in essence, the opposite of information his teaching assistant had told the students gathered at 4pm on a Friday, the most difficult classes insisting on the least desirable hours for advisory. In a communication system where computation separated input from output, entropy became catalogued by a heat equation. Heat, in communication, being noise.

In the wee small hours prior to the sun's arrival, realization dawned on Viral. What Treyna had handed him had been the equivalent of noise, the disjointed, tattered Python code from Tyler's neural nets. What he needed was order, order from chaos, enthalpy not its counterpart. Viral heard the tap water stop in the bathroom, and Dr. Hackman returned drinking from his glass.

"No flush?" Viral asked.

"Nothing to," the doctor said, resigned.

A moment's hesitation fell. Viral watched and listened as Dr. Hackman moaned and his body creaked climbing back into his bed. "Time to get some shut eye," he said. "Pull those blinds tighter, would you?"

Hackman burrowed beneath his covers while Viral drew the shades. The blackness that fell over the room was total. But a single red light still called Viral from the corner of his eye. It wasn't the distant cell tower, however. Now it was the icon indicating an alarm set on the clock radio. Despite the hour it was time to wake up.

Viral felt his way through the darkness. When his hands landed on their bounty they shook. Bouncing like deflated basketball in the sagging mattress of the Ramada, Farooq woke. "It came like that I swear!" he called, startled from his dream. Viral put his fingers to his lips. Farooq squinted. "Viral?" he said.

"Yes," Viral said. "I need you to get up."

Farooq checked the clock. "Jesus, I fell asleep like twenty minutes ago," he said.

"Good, so you're rested," Viral joked. Then, more seriously, he said, "I need you to show me how to make a neutral net."