How a question travels through the brain
Eight short scenes. The map on the left changes as you scroll; every number in the text is read from AIR’s own records.
Scene 1
The public record
Every federal contract and grant AIR has held since 2007, as USASpending.gov holds them: 791 of them, each with an agency, a start, an end and an amount.
Nothing here is inferred. Every dot is a public document.
Scene 2
Sorted by who signed it
Group the awards by the agency that signed them and the shape of the institution appears: Education, Health and Human Services, National Science Foundation, USAID, and Labor, and a long tail of others.
The map keeps the 12 agencies that sign the most on its outer arc.
Scene 3
What it holds
Around the ring: 1,122 publications, 1,965 news stories, 430 articles, the impact stories and pages from air.org, 18 funders read out of that material, and 459 people.
Inside it: 4 focus-area categories, the areas under them, and every person clustered by the area they work in.
Scene 4
Ask it something real
Type a question the way you would ask a colleague, or press the orb and say it.
The question lights the parts of the map its words name before the brain has read a single record.
Scene 5
Watch it think
Each lookup lights the ring segment it reads and places what it found where the data puts it: a publication beside its area, a person at their own dot, an award beside the agency that signed it.
The trail on the right is the same thing in words.
Scene 6
The answer, sourced
The answer arrives with a numbered marker after each claim a source backs, and the same numbers land on the map.
Every source is a link into air.org or USASpending.gov, and any answer downloads as a Word document ready for a proposal.
Scene 7
Or say it
The orb opens a live line. The brain answers in its own voice and puts the whole cited answer on the screen, placed on the map like any other.
Interrupt it, follow up, end the call when you have what you need.
Scene 8
Where it stops
Everything it says is sourced. Every gap is named. Proposals, project records, staffing and utilization sit behind AIR’s login, and none of it is here.
That is the boundary the brain keeps, and the reason every answer can be checked.
The trail replayed in scenes 5 and 6 is a real answer captured once from the AIR brain.