In Threshold’s bio lab, Katherine Solomon studies a machine resembling a hydroponic incubator and questions whether the lab could be growing or building artificial neurons. She asks Robert Langdon to check the manuals while she searches the lab’s drawers for protocol documentation.

Katherine finds a hidden flat-tray drawer containing a thick black binder stamped Top Secret and marked as CIA property. Skimming it, she is stunned to see the work attributed to Sweden’s Laboratory of Organic Electronics (LOE), a world leader in artificial-neuron research, and she fixates on a section claiming a solution to neuronal “ion modulation” using mixed ion-electron conducting polymers.

As she reads, Katherine realizes the binder details a method using synthesized BBL as an organic electrochemical transistor, including chemical steps and conductance tweaks that mirror her own manuscript. When Langdon presses her to explain, Katherine states plainly that her book theorized how artificial neurons could be fabricated and woven into a neural “mesh” that could be placed over the brain, and that Threshold appears to be doing exactly that.

Langdon grasps the broader stakes: artificial neurons could enable full human-to-machine integration and profound new abilities, including direct experiential sharing. Katherine, however, focuses on why she was attacked; she insists this is not parallel invention but theft, arguing that Threshold’s protocols match her design.

She then delivers the key revelation: the design was not just a recent idea from her manuscript. Katherine says she first proposed and documented the exact artificial-neuron design in her postgraduate thesis twenty-three years earlier, concluding the CIA must have taken her work and targeted her to protect the secret.