All throughout the study session, he scratches with increasing fervor. Some point on the back of his head, it seems, has become a nexus of raw itch. Like a wasteland marred by cataclysmic keratin cyclones, or the marching of lice-entious (not what that word means, the other one realizes later up) armies, or maybe the wrath of the god of male pattern baldness.

Whatever the cause, the scratching continues. Until, finally, he says to the other one, “Uh, dude… uh, you got a second?”

Taking off his headphones (although nothing’s been playing for a couple minutes), “Sure.”

“Could you, uh, you know, gimme a hand?”

“With the…?”

“Look, I think I’ve got a thing or something on my brain, could you look in there for a second?”

They’ve been friends for a while. But the other one is still quite taken aback. He’s heard of brain-working, sure, but…

“Don’t you need like a doctor or a masseuse or—”

“No, no, it’s just a, you know, little check.”

“Uh… sure.”

With that, the other one gets up and stands behind him. “Do you see the little white hair, there, just above it, like right above it,” pointing emphatically, “hit the button.”

Sure enough, there is a little white hair, standing out like those nonexistent white squirrels they mention in biology class when speaking on natural selection. And above, an acorn-like nub, which the other one tentatively paws at.

“You gotta like, mash it dude”

He mashes it. A cranial trapdoor springs open, and there, bare as a writhing, screaming newborn, is the grey matter.

“You see anything?”

See anything? What doesn’t he see.

There is, of course, the hair that sprung up immediately once the skull-door opened, a graceful blond arc stretching between the occipital and parietal lobes, perhaps bridging the parts of the brain that dealt with sight and touch respectively, beaming borrowed photons directly into the fingertips, though actually the photons aren’t really inside the brain, it’s electrical signals, so perhaps the hair is like a powerline, in fact the other one swears he can make out little dandruff spy-birds perched along the thrum of raw brainpower, cooked up in mitochondrial power plants (powerhouses, teehee) fed on glucose unethically imported via pipeline from the Fourth World, the desolate, meaty plains lying outside of the viciously competing First, Second, and Third Worlds of the Neocortex-Limbic-Lizard triad, Weapons of Neuronal Destruction aimed at each other, gunning for the domination of the others over the long millennia — it will not be long until war breaks out, he thinks in the back of his head, the other one’s head that is, the back of the head not currently exposed to stale library air, accumulating dust and debris floating like rubber duckies on the film of cerebrospinal fluid that stretches oilslicklike across the cosmopolitan bubblegum bridged only by the aforementioned hair, which, given the above revelations about the imminent war within the brain, perhaps is the arc of the first ILFM, Inter-Lobal Follicle Missile, which surely could only be the work of the Federal Neocortex government (“come on, dude”, the other one will say later, “that just sounds like totally fashy, like Robocop or some shit, right?”), obsessed as it is with control over the world, in fact over itself, because that missile is being fired from one part of the brain’s outer layer to another, perhaps fired out of the mountainous bunkers of screen-deadened primary visual cortex, known in the biz as Brodmann area 17, or V1, which was, of course, the predecessor of the first long-range ballistic missile, the German V2 rocket, Vergeltungswaffe Zwei, designed to cow the advancing Allies into submission in the crimson autumn of 1944, as doom swiftly approached the Reich, and the other one now realizes that what he’s looking at is the final warzone, the Plains of cerebral Armageddon, and he is watching like God, and like the old man upstairs he has unknowingly taken out his phone to snap a picture, you know, anything for the insta…

“You see anything?”

Were this a less civilized age, he would’ve heard the click of the other one’s camera, but, you see, we are living in the future baby, and, much like a certain guided missile, you don’t hear it until it’s too late.

Reilly Pryma is a second-year at the University of Chicago studying philosophy and creative writing.