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his.
    Besides the fact that they were intellectual blood brothers connected through the European Quail, another major reason that Bayron had signed on with Smith was because Smith was adamant about modeling the brain from scratch. Smith wanted the project started from scratch because he only cared to have a model made of his own brain. Bayron, on the other hand, wanted to start from scratch because no other human brain modeling project had been commenced with a data system that permitted the assignation of attributes to his beloved empty spaces. That is, no other human brain modeling project other than his and that of a particular team in Russia that had let him know they were modeling according to his own theories.
    At first Bayron justified his decision to share his data with the Russians by telling himself he just wanted to see their data. He wanted to observe their processes to perhaps help him improve his. He hadn't intended to cheat his friend by using the forbidden Russian hypothalamus. But just to look would be no harm.
    The arrival of the Russian model made a memorable impression when Bayron signed for it just a few days later. Few people in the world have ever had to consider how much physical storage media all of the specifications of a single human brain would take up when translated in into bits and bytes. At well over 100 petabytes, electronically sending the data for the hypothalamus alone would take days or even weeks. And so, the Russian model was burned onto plain old consumer grade blu-rays (thousands of them), put in boxes, and mailed. The number of boxes in which the disks arrived was a testament to the incredible efficiency of the biological brain.
    When he was very young, Bayron had read the story of Flat Stanley, a little boy who was able to fold himself up and mail himself in an envelope.
    Opening the first box made Bayron remember that story. Here he was opening a box containing, at least in concept, an actual person, with all of that person's loves and hates and desires and idiosyncrasies. Was it any more farfetched to think that the essence of self could be contained within a gooey mass of brain than in a cheap, Russian, cardboard box?
    Atop the thousands of disks was a letter addressed to Dr. Bayron from Dr. Vadi Petrovsky of the St. Petersberg Neurological Institute, the large SPNI emblem splayed across the top.
    "Dear Dr. Bayron," the letter began in excellent English which soon deteriorated into not-too-bad English-as-a-second-language. "It is with great pleasure that we look forward to beginning our great collaboration. Unlike your subject, we modeled according to the brain of healthy, 30 year old subject. You will find detail in attachments. Subject was also predeceased of our study so invasive technique was possible and employed. We have set up collaboration website secure server at SPNI.RU/Petrovsky/collaborations/us/3dmodeling where you will find all technical and esoteric information as well as anecdotal and narrative."
    The letter was signed, in a friendly scrawl, "Dr. Vadi."
    Bayron made a mental note to try to find out what Russian-to-English dictionary Dr. Petrovsky was using as words like esoteric and anecdotal were clearly not of the meanings Bayron believed Petrovsky to have intended.
    Petrovsky gave no name for the "healthy" but "predeceased" 30 year old Russian subject, so  Bayron decided to name him Stanley after Flat Stanley from the story. If Stanley was healthy, he wondered, why was he dead? He considered, of course, the possibility that Stanley had died from corporeal trauma or penal execution. In any event, as long as the brain was healthy, it didn't really matter. At least not to Bayron.
    Bayron removed the disk which was marked 1/6575 and put it in his optical drive. A message box appeared on Bayron's computer screen: "This disk contains compressed data in tarball.gzip format. Please confirm unarchiving mode."
    A few keystrokes later Bayron was looking at a page of data.