Hog-tied on the cold metal floor of a van near Brooklyn, Jonas Faukman hears jet engines nearby and realizes his captors are connected to something bigger than simple book theft. He tries to reason out who could be powerful enough to stop Katherine Solomon’s manuscript from being published.

Faukman thinks back to the lunch where Robert Langdon introduced him to Katherine and her proposal. Katherine explains she plans to challenge the standard brain-based model of consciousness with scientific evidence and claims her findings could reshape how people understand reality.

To demonstrate how “impossible” things can become understandable through perspective, Katherine shows Faukman and Langdon two “live feeds” of synchronized goldfish that appear to be in separate bowls. She then reveals a third camera angle proving it is one bowl and one fish filmed from two perspectives, and that the “Yes/No” difference comes from a Markus Raetz sculpture that reads differently when viewed from another angle.

Katherine uses the demonstration to argue that consciousness will seem impossible to explain until the right perspective is applied. The lunch turns into hours of discussion about her experiments and a new paradigm of human experience, convincing Faukman to commit to publishing her book.

Back in the van, Faukman tries to talk his kidnappers into explaining what they want. A captor with a buzz cut says they are not interested themselves, but their employer is, and that they are fueling a plane to fly Faukman to Prague to speak with that employer; the captor adds that he stole Faukman’s passport and cruelly claims he shot Faukman’s cat.