There’s a parasite in your brain. It’s eaten through most of your neural tissue, causing your brain to lose the majority of its functioning. Your doctors collaborate with a group of engineers to build machinery that will replace the damaged parts of your brain, and they eventually manage to restore your cognitive and autonomic abilities.

It was like every other Friday night of a New York City winter—the L wasn’t running and it was freezing out. I was on my way to Elsewhere, a massive live music venue in Bushwick, with one mission on my mind: find Saphe Shamoun, GS ’17, and current Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Columbia.