The year is 2084. Professors Ariana Laplace and Greyson Landon, both physicists at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and Dr. Michael Mazzanega, Director of Neurosciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, are collaborating on what had been called for nearly a century “the hard problem.” And rightly so. It was the problem of consciousness. In the history of science, never had so much been written with so little to show for it. Tens of thousands of papers had been written, experiments performed, books published, seminars given – and still no consensus had been reached on how the human brain and consciousness were related. Did consciousness emerge from the human brain? In classical terms, were there neural correlates of consciousness? Or was consciousness quantum mechanical? Or, even more extreme, was consciousness fundamental, somehow distinct from the neurology of the brain, neither classical nor quantum? Neuroscience was still divided on the issue, and when physics weighed in, there was still no consensus. The mystery endured. This was, after all, the hard problem. Now, however, thanks to the discovery of the chronon—the constituent quantum of time—in 2079, and the friendships and collaborations that ensued, real progress had been made. The hard problem was finally yielding its secrets – only to unveil something even more bizarre and unexpected….