The chapter opens with a flashback to the early days of the novel. It's the middle of the twentieth century, and the novel is set in the future. The protagonist is a young man named Nemo, who has just returned from the terraforming war. Nemo is the protagonist's father, and he's proud of his son's achievements in the war. He's also proud of the fact that Nemo was his hero, even though they didn't live as different lives as Nemo and Nemo's mother did. Nemo and his mother used to talk about how they hid from inconvenient truths, and now they have to pay for it. Nemo realizes that he has nothing else to do, and that humans can die for all he cares. Nemo wants to kill Nemo, but first he wants to know how much Nemo knows about the inner workings of the brain. Nemo explains that the brain is the central nervous system that manages the orbits of the planets. It used to be a prediction of a quantum brain simulator, but now it's much more than that. The brain, he says, is the "collective unconscious" . Brains, he explains, are made up of multiple layers of consciousness, and only one person can define reality. The only way to get rid of the collective unconscious is to die. Nemo says that he'll kill Nemo when he reaches the "mortal eclipse" , which is the point at which the brain decays.