Bob rinsed the shaving foam off his face and slapped his cheeks three times. He picked up his towel and dabbed at his brow (one, two), his cheeks (three, four), his chin (five, six), and finally his nose (seven) and mouth (eight), counting under his breath.

He inhaled and told himself he needn't do what he knew he would do next, but it didn’t matter. He did it every morning, and he would do it today.

He looked at himself in the mirror and said in an even voice, as if recording a tape, "Have a good morning, Bob. A good morning, Bob. Good morning, Bob…" until he arrived at the last word – his name – and silence.

He had tried to describe the effect of his routines to Sally. He saw her pained expression when she caught him during one of his rituals, and tried to convince her that it wasn't that bad.

"Ever seen domino stones fall into each other, Sal? The way they fall forward and nothing can stop them? It feels like that to me sometimes. Smooth. Right."

They sat up in bed, holding hands.

"I want you to be happy." She squeezed his hand. "Are you happy?"

Bob sighed. Skin flaked off his fingertips. Her supple, tanned hand stroked his.

Throughout his life, Bob had tried to reason with himself. Touching things in sequence and counting his touches didn’t make sense. Nothing disastrous would happen if he dried his face with Sally's towel or if he dried his nose before his brow. Nothing, except that drilling into the back of his skull, and the dull pain, as if someone pulled a molar out of his brain, and the sickening lurch of the world losing its contours.

Sally had brewed coffee, and poured Bob a cup. Her lips were pale, her cheeks a feverish pink. He sat down, lifted the fork and put it down again, careful to pretend the gesture was casual. "Seems the big day has come, hon."

She smiled and her cheeks glowed, as if she had many more smiles inside her.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Her eyes welled up.

Bob took one, two, three sips of coffee. The hot liquid flowed down his throat, and it felt right. He loved things to feel right. He wondered whether he would ever feel that way again after the operation.

The operating room hummed with activity. Bob, covered in a terrycloth gown, sat on a leather chair. The leather clung to his naked thighs. He arranged his legs in the footrests, wriggled his toes, and wondered why he had to undress for brain surgery.

Dr. Morgan pumped his hand and asked him how he was.

"Not too bad."

"This is not going to be a big deal at all, okay, Bob?" Dr. Morgan said.

"Okay."

Bob folded his hands. A nurse shaved his head. A chill rippled across his exposed skull, even though the air didn’t move.

"Okay, we're gonna numb up the flesh around your skull," another nurse murmured. Bob saw a hand in a rubber glove holding a long syringe. He felt a jab, a quick burn, and spreading numbness.

"The brain doesn’t feel pain," he murmured to himself, again and again. When he caught a glimpse of the instruments being rolled past him on a trolley--laser scalpels of various sizes, ominous like dormant light sabres, and a heap of crayon-like markers--he ground his jaws together.

"No pain," he murmured under his breath. "No Pain. Pain."

Dr. Morgan had mentioned the laser scalpels relatively late in his series of discussions with Bob. He had started with a box-and-arrow-diagram on a whiteboard.

The diagram had been simple. Three boxes formed a triangle. One box said action, another said effect, and a third one, at the apex of the triangle, said, “done?” Arrows pointed clockwise from one box to the other.

"Quite simple, really," Dr. Morgan said, pointing at the tip of the pyramid. "We do something. We decide whether we're happy with the outcome. If we are done, we stop. People with your condition are often programmed with unreasonable resolution criteria, unable to stop an action." He used air quotes when he said programmed.

"That sounds about right," Bob said. "And also... I don’t know." He looked at the sculpture on Dr. Morgan's desk, an abstract rendition of a rearing horse. He wanted to touch it, but didn’t dare, because he would have to polish it first, and one touch wouldn't do, either. "Sometimes I'm done with one... routine, and the next one is already waiting. It nags, won't let me go. I'm tired."

Bob stared at his hands and tried to remember a time when his life had been different, not an endless sequence of rituals that left him on the brink of exhaustion.

During the following sessions, Dr. Morgan revealed to him the culprit, the hard-to-please homunculus who was never done: A structure in the brain called the anterior cingulate, which, according to the brochures, was involved in "goal maintenance" and "success monitoring" during problem solving games such as chess or the Tower of Hanoi.

"Think of your own anterior cingulate as a dog that hasn't been trained properly," Dr. Morgan proposed, leaning back in his chair. "Our approach is to re-train it until it behaves normally. Unfortunately," he pursed his lips, "the procedure has been unsuccessful with organic tissue. However, the progress in neural prosthetics has been amazing in the past decades. Simply amazing."

Bob remembered one of the brochures. "You're going to insert a duplicate of my anterior cingulate into my brain. A… trainable duplicate."

Dr. Morgan smiled. "Exactly."

One evening, Bob and Sally had sat on the couch, surrounded by sheets of paper.

"Look here," Sally said, snuggling close to him. "This is the device we're going to use. They call it the done box. Isn't that funny?"

Bob's index finger flew over the crowded letters on the agreement's last page. "Well, who knows whether it works? Here it says experimental treatment. Or here: no guarantee." He put down the agreement. "You might end up with a vegetable, Sal."

Sally had looked up at him. Fine lines emanated from the corners of her eyes.

"That's not funny."

"No."

"You don't have to do it," she whispered.

"Sal, Sal, Sal." He inhaled the scent of her scalp and kissed her head. "I want to be what you are. Free."

Bob knew the nurses drew lines and crosses onto his skull only because their sleeves brushed his cheeks and he smelled the chemical markers. He didn’t feel his skull at all.

One of the nurses pointed at an array of pictures projected against the wall. "Can you name these objects, please?"

"Cat. Teapot. Squirrel," Bob said. He knew that this exercise was meant to keep the surgeons from damaging his language areas. Wouldn't it be too late when they noticed?

The pictures clicked away, replaced by words.

"And now read the words, please."

Bob felt dull pressure at his temples and at the base of his skull.

"That's just the steel rods stabilising your head, Bob," one of the nurses said. "Continue reading, please."

"Pete catches fish in the lake."

The whir behind him sounded like a dental drill. Bob's torso stiffened. He jerked forward but was held in place by the stabilising rods.

"What…?"

"The laser scalpels are calibrating, nothing to worry about... yet," the tech behind him said. "Zeroing in on the marks now. And... everything's looking good."

"Beautiful," Dr. Morgan said.

Bob forced himself to unclench his fists and breathe slowly. Dr. Morgan controlled the array of scalpels from his computer. The method was precise. Safe.

Bob's heart beat faster. He suppressed the need to vomit and turned to the words on the wall. "Dan dives into a dark dungeon." He spat out the syllables in a high-pitched voice as if he could speed up the procedure by speaking faster.

"Very good, Bob."

The whir shrilled for a second. He smelled something he couldn’t name. His shoulders warmed.

"You will feel…" the nurse said.

Bob's skull vibrated. Tear drops shook on his cheek.

On his first day home, Bob and Sally went to the bathroom. Bob fingered his skull, covered by nascent stubble. As always, he broke into a sweat when he thought about the surgery. Sally held a box, plain grey, no larger than her palm, with a red button in the middle.

"Oh God," she said. "I don't want to foul this up."

"Come, Sal, we tried this in the hospital. It won’t hurt me."

"But in the hospital you were just lying in bed. You didn’t do anything."

"It'll be fine. It’s not as if you're going to fry my actual brain tissue." Bob's voice shook. He sucked in his wet upper lip.

"Okay," Sally said. "Okay. You tell me when... when the compulsion starts. And I push done." She swallowed.

"Okay," Bob said. He turned on the faucet, picked up a bar of soap, and lathered his palms. He rinsed his hands and watched the foam swirl down the drain. His hands were clean. Time to turn off the faucet and towel them dry.

But he couldn’t. The duplicate homunculus insisted just as fiercely as the old one that he pick up the bar again, lather his hands, rinse, lather, rinse, lather... He stared at his pink fingertips. No, no, no... His hand twitched toward the soap bar--and stopped.

For a moment, his mind was blank--what is my hand doing there?--then the feeling spread inside him, calm, warm, and quiet. He turned off the faucet. His hands were clean. He was done washing his hands.

He turned to Sally, who still pushed down the red button. She let go. The sense of completion didn’t go away.

Bob stopped breathing, afraid to destroy the effect. He stared at Sally.

"You're dripping," she whispered.

Bob exhaled and reached for towel. "Ready?"

She nodded, her thumb poised over the button.

Bob had often dreamed what it would be like to shrug off his compulsions. He'd envisioned gazelles racing across the steppe, a dam breaking in slow motion or a rocket lifting off--images of force set free, his true will shooting toward whatever he wanted.

Now his dream became part of his life. Whenever the homunculus tried to ensnare him with a pointless ritual, with the promise of things being right if he only lifted his fork one more time, whenever he felt the lure of counting, Sally and the red button would be there to free him. Zap. Like swapping flies.

The new homunculus learned. The compulsions receded. Hours passed without rituals. Bob was able to return to his job as an assistant in a small frame shop. Sally purchased an ethnic pouch for the done box so she could carry it when she and Bob went out dancing.

Bob mixed paint on his palette, blending white, red and ochre dollops into skin colour. He gazed at the unfinished painting, a medieval battle scene dripping with blood and gore. Horses rolled their eyeballs, frothing at the mouth, and warriors beheaded each other.

It was Bob's first hobby, abandoned because his homunculus never left him enough time. Now he took evening classes in oil painting, and his first project turned out well, even though Sally rejected the notion of mounting it in the living room once it was finished.

Bob filled another sketchy face with skin-colour. Patiently, he added darker and lighter hues, sculpting cheekbones, lips, and nostrils--a human face in agony. It amazed him how the paint transformed into light and texture on the canvas. He inhaled the scent of turpentine, and stood back wiping his nose. What next? Should he paint another face, or have a go at the clouds?

He put down the palette and continued gazing at the painting. The naked canvas peeked out in places. He needed to finish it. Yet he couldn’t gain traction. Nothing called out to him in need of further improvement.
He stood for a long while, paralysed. The sun shone through the window, warming the toes in his sandals. A smile spread on his face.

Of course! He hadn't recognised the feeling because he wasn't used to it occurring without Sally pushing the done button. But it was the same feeling, unmistakable. Warm, calm, and quiet. The painting was done.

He blinked. How could he feel that the painting was done when clearly it wasn't? He reached for the palette, but the sight of the paint globs and sticky brushes filled him with weary disgust. His hand fell beside his thigh, and peace seized him again when he looked at the painting one last time before removing it from the easel.

Sally pointed at the heap of items in Bob's study as if it were self-explanatory proof of his guilt.

"It's just not normal," she said. "Smile all you want, it's not."

Bob twitched and corrected the smile that had become his customary expression during the last couple of weeks. He tried to share Sally's anger at the mess of his study, and deep inside he did share it, but his frustration could hardly stir under layers of blissful resignation.

"Stop smiling!" Sally said crossly. "What are you, some Buddha parody?"

Bob's study was drowned in remnants of his latest hobbies. His infatuations with new pastimes were brief, and growing briefer. For a couple of weeks he had painted, pursued astronomy for a week or so, indulged in clay sculpting for some days, and oscillated between writing, cooking, board games, and web design.

Bob picked up a brush and peeled the hard paint off the bristles. "I can't help it," he said. "I'm not doing it deliberately. I--" He looked at the stacks of CDs on the table, his neglected running gear on the floor, the sculptures crumbling in the sunlight. "It's almost as if I know how things will end the moment I start them," he whispered. "So why should I take all the steps in between?"

Sally took his hand and stroked his cheek. "You're pale, honey." She bit her lips. "You need the doctor."

"I'm all right," Bob said. Did he believe that? "I'm happy because everything is perfect. Complete."

Sally let go of his hand. She dug in her pouch. The sequins shimmered as her fist bulged inside the fabric. Finally, she retrieved the done box.

"This thing damaged you," she said angrily. "You hear? I won't touch it any more. Never."

Dr. Morgan folded his hands and twirled his thumbs around each other. He kept nodding as Sally spat out her perception of Bob's behaviour.

"It's as if he doesn’t care. He doesn’t finish anything. Oh, sure, he doesn't count or wash his hands until they bleed, either. I suppose you'd call that amazing progress. But you know what I'd call it? Delayed lobotomy."

Dr. Morgan raised his eyebrows.

Bob looked at the sculpture--the rearing horse--and again he contemplated touching it. He didn't, because he knew exactly what it would feel like, the tingle of metal on his palms, the heaviness. He felt as if he'd already touched the sculpture. He was done fingering it.

"Bob?" Dr. Morgan called. "Are you with us?"

"Yes."

Dr. Morgan began to draw a network on the whiteboard, connecting a flock of nodes with brisk lines. "Here is what I think happened. Overgeneralisation. A common phenomenon in simulations of neural learning. See, you told me that you used the done box rather often?"

Sally started.

"Please, I'm not criticising you," Dr Morgan said. "Just stating the facts. Now, the primary target of the done signal is the compulsive action. However, the brain being the dense network of neurons it is," and he tapped his pointer against the drawing, "feedback beyond the immediate context is inevitable. Residual done signals might travel backwards to previous actions.

"Example: You say done when you wash your hands, and the immediate effect is that you stop washing your hands. But a little bit of done-ness travels to the act of entering the bathroom, of opening the door, of whatever you did before. You grow more apt to feel you're done in general. Still with me?"

"Like domino stones falling backwards," Bob said. His heart hammered in his chest. He felt sick.

"Exactly! Now, considering how often you used the done box, I'm not surprised at all that you feel a certain over-contentment, Bob. On the contrary. It shows your new homunculus is learning fast. Eager little fellow."

"Bob?" Sally called.

Bob rubbed his thighs. His breath went fast. "Is it happening now? Are the done signals travelling now?"

"The brain is a dynamic system," Dr. Morgan said. "It continuously shapes itself, yes."

"But don’t you understand!" Bob said. He imagined the domino stones falling backwards, faster and faster. "At first it was hand washing and counting. Done! Then it was hobbies and pastimes. Done! Next it'll be eating, walking, getting up in the morning, and then breathing…"

Sally gasped.

Dr Morgan wiped away the network drawing. "No, Bob. No. As I said, the new guy in your head wants to learn. You taught him one thing. Now teach him the opposite."

Back home, Sally started chopping a fruit salad, her way of venting aggression. She peeled and chopped. Juice ran over the counter.

"Teach him the opposite, the eager little fella!" she snarled. "Whip it into shape, that little homunculi-homuncula! Easy as pie! What a quack."

Tears ran down her cheeks. Bob watched the blade of the knife grind into the wooden board, and smelled the scent of oranges. He stood behind Sally and wrapped his arms around her soft shoulders.

"There are still some things I want," he murmured into her neck. She stiffened and stood still, breathing fast.

Bob kissed her greying hair and held her closer. His need of her surprised him. He had been so focused on the implant, on her thumb on the button and the calm sense of completeness, that he'd forgotten about his body. Now, in his state of confusion, it seemed to take over. "I love you," he said.

She took a deep breath and turned around. Her cheeks were flushed.

"We can't, now," she whispered. "We have to treasure feelings like this. Preserve them."

"Feelings like this?"

She nodded. "Feelings of need. Of wanting something. Of... not being done." She blushed.

Bob understood. He took a step back. The urge to hold her again tugged at him.

"Only for a while," she said.

Bob's body proved to be the road to re-establishing a sense of craving, of need.

Sally served him bland food, and Bob, who had never consciously tasted the spices in his dinner, now had to piece the perfect taste together himself.

"No, it's not done yet," he'd say.

And Sally would say, "Good!"

She brought home a bag of white powder. She held a pinch above Bob's head and let it trickle down on him. Immediately, his scalp started itching. Flames licked at his skin, and ants travelled up and down his veins.

"Oh, come on, Sal!"

"Don’t touch it."

"You're sick."

She smiled a sweaty half-smile. Bob's hand twitched with the urge to scratch, just once, just a bit, but he didn't. He tasted the compulsion, its dominance and paralysing urgency. It would feel so right to scratch that itch. But he didn't give in, because once he started he wouldn’t stop. He preserved the feeling.

Sally stuck to their new routine with the same determination that she'd brought to the done box. She proposed he didn't shower until he squirmed with the wish to clean himself. She refused to make love. She fed him liquorice and forbade him to brush his teeth.

"Your smile is gone," she said one night. "No more Buddha." She, too, looked exhausted.

In his rare moments of leisure, Bob couldn’t help but chuckle. Here he was, chasing what he'd run away from in the first place.

When he first started counting again, it felt like coming home. He splashed the cold water in his face and reached for the towel. The cloth caressed his face, exuding artificial ocean scent.

"One, two," the brow, "three, four," the cheeks, "five, six," the chin, "seven," the nose.

And warmth. He was done.

Bob looked at himself in the mirror and wondered when he'd lost himself. Had he ever simply wanted anything that was neither absurd (like saying a number) nor primitive (like having clean teeth)? He thought of Sally pushing the red button.

He washed his hands, the full treatment, until his fingertips shrivelled, remembering his homunculi--the old one cracking his whip, and the new one, too easily moulded. Where was his own will? Had it dried up under the blazing heat of the others' commands, like a rivulet in the desert?

Bob didn’t want Sally to find him before he was done, so he drove to the Fat Racoon trailhead, two hours from home. He made sure no one observed him and walked into the woods. When his shirt was moist with sweat and humidity, he sat down next to a muddy creek.

He retrieved the done box, which looked like a toy in his hand, the red button grotesquely big. A thought pulsed through him--what if it's a decoy? What if it never worked?--but he remembered the effect too well.

He had asked Dr Morgan why he couldn’t push the done button himself. "I thought the point of the exercise was to put me back into the driver's seat?"

For once, Morgan cast aside his genial manner. "No." He pushed the done box out of his reach. "If you signal to yourself that you are done, pushing the button will become part of your done criterion. You'll become addicted. We ran simulations suggesting that an agent signalling to itself will push the button more and more often, until finally they are caught in a catatonic state of saying done infinitely. You don't want that."

Bob put his feet in the mud without removing his shoes. His finger played with the button. He remembered the Buddha-period, the peace it had brought him. Perhaps a catatonic state of being done wasn't bad.

And at least he would be the one pushing the button.

Not the homunculus. Not Dr. Morgan. Not Sally.

He, Bob, decided he was done. He pushed the button, again and again, for as long as he could.

At first, nothing changed. Hot mist rose between the ferns. A woodpecker drilled into a dead tree. A sluggish rivulet trickled through the mud.

Everything around him struck Bob as abstract, old structures too well known. A web of possibilities grew around him, actions he could take, but he had already done everything that could be done. He became entropy, a black hole of collapsed possibilities, cold lava.

Then a whispering sound made him prick up his ears and raise his head. The rivulet picked up strength. Water oozed forward, tentative at first, then faster, glimmering in the sunlight. The clear liquid picked up leaves and twigs, dug its way through the mud.

From afar, Bob smelled his childhood, the abundance of simply wanting. He remembered dried apples, his mother's arms, and running between the cornfields. He sat still, watching the river erupt and saunter down the slope. Finally, he lifted his hand and dipped it into the water.

He was done. His life had begun.

---