A stack of books sits on a table in Felix’s study. Some are neuroscience textbooks, others psychology primers; some are simply collections of recipes. And each one of these weighty tomes brings back new memories, and inspires those memories to stick. It’s funny; the more time spent here in the Block, the less painful it is to remember the past. These memories are no longer dark portents, confusing phantasms forcing the man to relive the worst moments of his life. Instead, these are memories of times Felix spent in the Block with the people he cared most about.

Such as working with Ulysses for the hundredth time, the two men now so in sync that they can operate like two appendages of the same organism. These men, who lived vastly different lives in two vastly different time periods, possess minds that now seem entirely unified. By the pursuit of science? That’s only half right. Friendship is the common denominator.

But there are more memories these books inspire. Inviting people over, cutting holes in their head. People from other blocks. Cowboys, astronauts. Even Zachary Plank, once or twice. On one occasion, Felix even operated on a man whose face he swore, in a fit of déjà vu, to have half-remembered from a dream. Over time, performing a complete frontal lobotomy on a patient became as routine to Felix as a root canal or a blood test. His collection of brain tissue, his stacks of documentation, his interview transcripts preserved over hundreds of year, and his close collaboration with scientific minds from other Blocks, each keen to do their own experiments, have served to advance our understanding of the Threshold, and its effect on our body and minds, far beyond anything that would’ve been possible under Psychopomp.

And, yet, in the meantime, some of the fondest memories Felix has in the Block are of baking. And apart from the incident with traces of human brain tissue winding up in the cake batter, it’s been an overwhelming success. Not only do his volunteer patients come away with a sweet treat after a successful operation, but he even occasionally goes through some periods of cracking into more eggs than skulls, entering baking competitions, and perfecting his meringues for local fetes in the Block.

Felix smiles and closes the book on his lap. It’s late. He’ll have to get to the rest of the memories tomorrow. Tomorrow, he repeats in his mind. For once, a pleasant thought.