You, the querent, sit before the reader at a table draped with a cloth of rich jewel tones. The room is dimly lit save for a smooth orb in the left-hand corner, which emits a warm cadmium glow. Your predicament is shared. The neuromancer leads a conversation that digs deeper into details–characters, affects, atmospheres–and a scan of the nervous system follows. The metal crown hovers above your head and drops a cloak of lightbeams straight down to your toes, forming streams of amber that fall like insistent evening rain. A faint, sporadic knocking turns into a thudding kickdrum, pleasantly hypnotic, until it quietens again when your protons tilt back to their resting positions.

The thin silence is broken by a rush of your speech, internal and uttered. In these moments you feel the weight of uncertainty bear down on you; you're suddenly hypervigilant, a white-tailed deer at dusk. Questions clutter the air between you: Will your lover remain true? Kind, at least? Will you find the courage to leave your stultifying job? Will your child ever be able to see a Bengal tiger? Will democracy survive? Will the magnolia tree? How about your mother, will she survive heartache? Will her city sink, her home submerged by the Jamuna or the Gulf of Mexico, wherever she is? Your gaze is searching, your palms a little sticky as you try to bend your mind's eye over the present, hopeful for a glimpse of the future's silhouette, a taste of its outline.

The neuromancer meets your eye with a twitch of the right cheek and a vaguely raised eyebrow. It is the expression of someone who has become accustomed to the mind's whir of unrest, the clamor for answers in moments of personal crisis and planetary catastrophe. High frequency beeping directs your attention downward as your scan unfurls from the mouth of the machine. You are captivated by every flicker and flare of molten gold and iridescent blue, the live atlas of your consciousness shimmering in front of you. Each voxel measures a micron of your mind in multiple dimensions. You squint and lean forward, searching for rhythm in the vast web of connections. Holograms emerge from the image and you see words and numerical codes appear and then vanish.

"Magnetic fields of great power, yes. You are seeing extremely high resolution topography of the system that houses your memories and desires. An intricate, dynamic landscape, but make no mistake: we cannot see the content."

You sit back to view it differently, watching lines flow and dots jump. Your eyes trace the shapes and you try to extract predictions from the neuromancer while you continue to ask in different forms whether you'll be loved, live long, die well, and find what you think you seek.

"Maps fail us," you are reminded. "Imagine what is lost in the creation of these shapes, these edges. Fierce passions, colossal mistakes, doubt. Hope or devotion. Can we locate these in one corner of the body? Would it matter?"

"Do you think your consciousness stops at these borders? The mind is malleable, embedded, unruly..."

The neuromancer lights a matchstick, producing a small flame under a vial of liquid that begins to bubble.

"Imagination is volatile."

You look between the scan and the holograms and the gurgling potion. You sense something alchemical is happening but you are not sure which is the oracle. The neuromancer creates little lines of smoke by moving the matchstick with a steady hand, that hand that plays with light.

The hand that plays with light. The neuromancer proceeds to ask you questions. You answer: how you survived the wildfires, how you felt during the war, how you celebrated your last birthday. You remember how the knife sank softly through the whipped cream and the way the cherries glistened. You return to your predicament, and the moment when reality seemed to slip off its axis. Your story is fragmented and chaotic, choked with emotion. As the form loses its grip, the neuromancer slides a wooden box, containing the cards, into the center of the table. The words ~ divinatory neuropoetics ~ are written in black by the careful hand of a shy calligrapher.

A portrait of the possibilities of the present. "Alright, say stop when you feel ready." The neuromancer shuffles the cards between thin, deliberate fingers, dry as the underside of eucalyptus leaves.

You try to intuit the moment to select your card. "How do we thread the past and the present to the future?," murmurs the neuromancer, looking intently at you and then up at the scan, while slowly shuffling. You continue to see lines move and dots jump like stutters and glitches. "Remember: what we know is that the brain is an open system. It navigates the unknown and adapts. Its plasticity means possibility keeps on proliferating."

Stop, you say. Before turning the card, you press your hand over it, the way you might press your hand on the ground to feel for tremors.