The Reflex

The incident with the hot pot had happened three days before Grujla's first visit. Crivsola had been reaching across her worktable for a jar of dried herbs and her palm had brushed the side of a pot that had been sitting over the coals. Her hand jerked away — sharp, fast, involuntary.

Then the pain arrived. A beat later. Unmistakable.

The sequence troubled her. According to her model, a feeling-signal should travel from hand to head, the commander should decide to pull the hand away, and a command-signal should travel back down. Feeling first, then movement. But that was not what had happened.

The hand moved before the pain reached the head.

Two Models

She described the problem to Tszuvok, and together they constructed two explanations.

The first: the Fast Head. Perhaps the commander in the head was simply faster than Crivsola realized. The feeling-signal raced up to the head, the commander processed it in an instant too brief to notice, and the command-signal raced back down — all before the conscious experience of pain had time to register. The head handled everything, just very quickly.

The second: the Shortcut. Perhaps the signal never reached the head at all. Perhaps, for certain dangerous situations, the signal-path had a turning point somewhere before the head — in the arm, perhaps, or the torso — where the feeling-signal was rerouted directly into a command-signal without the commander's involvement. A shortcut. An automatic response built into the path itself.

The Case for Speed

The Fast Head model had simplicity on its side. It did not require any new structure — no turning points, no rerouting mechanisms. It used the same paths and the same commander that Crivsola had already established. The head was just faster than expected. Perhaps much faster.

And the pain arriving late was easily explained. Processing a danger signal and deciding to act might happen faster than assembling the conscious experience of "this hurts." The commander could issue the retreat order before finishing the paperwork, so to speak.

The Case for Shortcuts

The Shortcut model had a different appeal. Crivsola thought about timing. A signal from the hand had to travel up the arm, through the torso, up the neck, into the head, be processed, and then travel all the way back. That was a long path. With hot metal, every fraction of a heartbeat mattered. A hand that waited for the round trip to the head might suffer real damage.

If the body could reroute certain urgent signals before they reached the head, the response would be faster. The hand would pull away sooner. The body would survive better.

It was the kind of solution a clever engineer might build — a local response for emergencies, bypassing the central command.

The Honest Answer

Tszuvok asked which model she believed.

Crivsola hesitated. She wanted to believe the Shortcut. It was elegant. It made engineering sense. The idea of a local relay — a signal turning around before it reached central command — was satisfying in the same way the Loop Model for blood had been satisfying. The body, she had learned, tended toward efficient solutions.

But elegance was not proof. She had warned herself about this before. The Soaking Model for blood had seemed less elegant than the Loop Model, and she had been right to prefer the loop — but she had also been careful to note that her preference was not the same as evidence.

"I do not know," she said. "Both models explain what happened. I cannot design an observation from outside the body that would distinguish them. Not yet."

Tszuvok looked almost disappointed.

"That is not a failure," Crivsola said. "It is honesty. A model you cannot yet test is not wrong. It is waiting."

She filed both models away. Perhaps one day she would find a case — an injury, an illness, a patient like Grujla — that would break one model and confirm the other. Until then, she would hold both in mind, and resist the temptation to choose the one she liked better simply because she liked it.

There was, however, a stranger problem that neither model addressed. The commander in the head received all its information through signal-paths. It sent all its orders through signal-paths. It sat inside a sealed dome of bone, in the dark, never directly touching the outside world.

What kind of existence was that?