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can’t be good. She paused at the look on his face. It wasn’t you? I knew it. Is Brewster hijacking your work?
    Why would you say that? Has he ever hijacked your work?
    My work is not that interesting, I build robotic insects, she said, sitting up and craning her neck to see the images on his screen. How do you tell anything from these MRIs? I mean, how can you even be sure they are meaningful?
    Sunil said nothing. He wouldn’t admit it, but Sheila’s question had touched a raw nerve. All this time and he still had nothing to show. Putting the thought out of his head, he turned his attention back to the screen and the MRI images.
    There were two groups of MRIs, the test subjects and the controls. All the test subjects were inmates of the same prison and the controls were kids from the same university, a fact that seemed important at the time but in retrospect didn’t matter at all, as it ended up not affecting the process at all. His prison subjects were all serial offenders. They were the perfect study group because while also having committed many small crimes, they usually had one major crime they returned to over and over. It was the pattern of these major crimes and their triggers that held the most promise for his work.
    To generate the MRI images that were meaningful in any way, his test subjects were shown different sets of photographs, sometimes concurrently, sometimes consecutively. The sets included photos of flowers and sunsets and children laughing and also horrific and often bloody images: one moment flashing a flower, the next a mutilated human body. The MRI took scans of the brain, and the accompanying computer program tracked what parts of the brain lit up in response to the images. The variances were what Sunil studied.
    Sheila finally broke the silence.
    Are you happy with these new MRIs?
    Yes, he said.
    Compared to your test subjects, mine are harmless, Sheila said.
    You’re right, Sunil said. My subjects are unsavory and I must admit many people would find this kind of research difficult.
    But not you, she asked.
    No, he said. That wasn’t entirely true, but he shrugged off the small nag from his subconscious.
    Sunil’s research was part psychological, part chemical. He was studying the causes of psychopathic and other violent behavior with the aim of harnessing and controlling that behavior. To turn it off and on at will, as it were, with a serum or drug of some kind.
    For Sunil, though, the work at its core was redemptive. He wanted to find cures, ways to help.
    Brewster laughed at him when he expressed that sentiment. Redemption is easy, Sunil, he said. Restoration, now, there’s the kicker.
    Sunil hated that Brewster was right. Redemption was easy—that momentary flash of conversion, the road-to-Damascus moment. Turning it into a lived thing was what made it restorative and that was hard.
    Don’t kid yourself, Sunil, Brewster said. There’s a reason only the U.S. Army will fund your research. This serum you’re developing is to weaponize the condition.
    Is that even a word, Sunil thought. He hated words that ended in “ize.” They never led to anything good: weaponize, Africanize, terrorize. Weapons, all of them.
    His research, in comparing notes from his control subjects and his prison group, seemed to indicate that at least 5 percent of the general male population of the United States was afflicted with the condition. These were successful psychopaths, successful in the sense that they had found ways to live with the condition, either by sublimating desires or by being smart enough not to get caught.
    Like other researchers in the field, Sunil was sure that the condition had its cause in a defect in the paralimbic system, a network of the brain stretching from the orbital frontal cortex to the posterior cingulate cortex. These areas were involved in processing emotion, inhibition, and attention.
    The brain scans on his computer were the