So. Pressure.
And if more than eight lines of awkward dialogue threaten irrevocable awkwardness, silences like the one now elapsing between M and me are an even greater peril. And I am a guy who knows how to measure silences. But whereas in music, a prolonged pause adds power and vividness to the refrain that follows it, pauses in conversation have the opposite effect, of debasing whatever comes next to the point that a perfectly witty riposte will be reduced to the verbal equivalent of a shrunken head, if too long a pause precedes it.
Leading to the question: How long has it been since M and I exchanged our “hi”s?
3.36 seconds.
What! How can so many thoughts and observations possibly have elapsed in so brief a period? An impressionist will answer along the lines of “The distortions inherent in our perception of time,” but to us counters, time is a bore—and not just because too much has been said and written about it. Time is irrelevant to math. Note that I did not say math is irrelevant to time; we hurl math at time in the vain hope of understanding it. The fact that so many thoughts could have gone through my head in 3.36 seconds is testament to the infinitude of an individual consciousness. There is no end to it, no way to measure it. Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world （assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not） because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves. Hence the instant appeal of Mandala’s Own Your Unconscious. Who could resist the chance to revisit our memories, the majority of which we’d forgotten so completely that they seemed to belong to someone else? And having done that, who could resist gaining access to the Collective Consciousness for the small price of making our own anonymously searchable? We all went for it on our twenty-first birthday, Mandala’s age of consent, just as prior tech generations went for music sharing and DNA analysis, never fully reckoning, in our excitement over our revelatory new freedom, with what we surrendered by sharing the entirety of our perceptions to the Internet—and thereby to counters, like me. Strict rules govern the use of gray grabs by data gatherers, but there are occasions when I’m obliged, in my professional capacity, to search the psyches of strangers. It’s an eerie sensation—like walking through an unfamiliar home and being surrounded by objects that radiate significance I can’t decipher. I grab what I need and leave as quickly as I can.
The good news, vis-à-vis 3.36 （now 3.76） seconds having passed, comes via retroactive math: A conversational pause can last a full four seconds before it bursts, as it were, releasing its toxic contents. Up to that four-second mark, it is merely an expanding, tautening bubble of catastrophic potential.
“So,” I say, “what did you think about Avery’s speech?”
“Why are you asking?”
While I’m taken aback by M’s somewhat aggressive tone, I’m also aware that six additional lines of dialogue need to be uttered to get us to the safety of eight, so I hurtle forward: “Well, because you and I work together, and this was kind of a big announcement. I wanted to talk about it with someone.”
“You think it’s Marc.”
“That actually hadn’t occurred to me,” I say, “until this moment.”
“It isn’t Marc.”
“Okay,” I say. “It isn’t Marc. There are two hundred and seventy-three people in our unit—why would I assume it’s him?”
While our exchange is not entirely friendly, there is the encouraging fact that we’ve reached line seven without awkwardness, defining awkwardness as conversation consisting of a series of futile attempts to solve the problem of what to say next.
“Who do you think is helping the eluders?” I ask.
“An impressionist,” she says.
“My sister is an impressionist,” I say.
“Mine, too. But you can’t change your siblings.”