The man doubled back a hundred meters later, walked out the west gate of Jiao Tong, and onto Huaihei West Road. He walked the kilometer to Hongqiao Road, his umbrella held high against the on-again-off-again drizzle. In the aftermath of the spasm that had shaken Shanghai two weeks ago, vehicle traffic remained minimal.

At Hongqiao Road a car met him. A darkened window rolled down. A hand extended, and the man passed over the bag.

The car drove west, three more kilometers, before pulling into an alley, and then slipping between the retracting metal doors of a building bearing a flag of orange, white, and green.

The flag of the Republic of India.

By then Li-hua was on her way home, daydreaming of her reward for this and the other data and specifications she’d passed on.

Soon she’d be rich, and famous, and Distinguished Professor Qiu of Quantum Computing, Indian Institute of Technology, Bangalore.

4
Meditation, Interrupted

Saturday 2040.11.03

Three thousand kilometers away, in the mountains of Thailand, north and east of Bangkok, beyond Saraburi, beyond Nakhon Nayok, beyond Ban Na, a lean, wizened man in orange robes stood against the balustrades of a monastery carved into the nearly sheer rock, a calm smile on his face, his hands folded calmly into his sleeves, the pinnacle of his life’s work around him.

Professor Somdet Phra Ananda looked out into the lovely narrow valley before the monastery: the gorgeous green topped mountains above and ahead, with their grey flanks, the lake below with the perpetual waterfall streaming out of it, bringing the ever welcome tranquil sound of running water, the ribbon of river running far below that, nourishing rice paddies to the south, before emptying into the Gulf of Thailand. Nature was truly sublime.

He closed his eyes, and what he felt was even more sublime: Many hundreds of monks, across a score of monasteries now, all meditating in concert, breaths synchronized, hearts synchronized, thoughts synchronized, consciousness merging, unifying, walls of Maya receding as something wiser and purer than all of them emerged from their intertwined minds, something greater than the sum of its frail, human parts.

It coursed through him for a moment, washing away all else. This was what he’d worked for all his life – a merging of neuroscience and Buddhism, of their tools and goals, to advance humanity, to advance peace, to advance harmony, to make something like nirvana real on Earth. It was, he believed, what the Buddha himself would have worked for, if he could have conceived of neural circuits and carbon nanotechnology and radio-frequency-proxied synaptic signaling.