The world is information, and life is an arrangement of information that enables it to grow, replicate and achieve some level of interactive sensitivity with its environment – that much was obvious, at least to John MacDonald. Man was clearly destined to build machines far more intelligent than Homo sapiens. They would become the 3-D printers of the future, in turn building any further machine that the species desired, made out of an informed rearrangement of atoms, which, to all intents and purposes, were in limitless supply. Humanity would be released from the resource anxiety that afflicted men and women less visionary and scientifically rigorous than John. In the rudimentary stages of the escape from planet scarcity (or Planet Scaremongering, as he liked to call it), there might be some value in the kind of information gleaned by Brainwaves, but only while sentimentalists remained attached to the biological substrate that evolution had handed down, with a brain that had not wavered from its three-pound and fifteen-billion-nerve-cell format for over a hundred thousand years, despite the explosion in knowledge that had taken place during this period of cerebral stagnation. Although that seemed to show that the capacities of the mind were not entirely inherent to the design of the brain, and that the mind had been able to evolve without changing the physical basis of its existence, John had plans for upgrading that antique vehicle to something altogether more potent, while keeping it aligned with the interests of the human race – in so far as they could be imagined at this early stage of The Greatest Upgrade in the History of the Universe.

It was a frustrating but unavoidable fact that he would need a great deal of money to make that transition happen and it would involve a deeper collaboration with Digitas than he had originally envisaged, but he had a plan for getting what he needed later today at the launch party.

Father Guido could not resist lowering and raising the brown and purple blinds of his hotel room one more time, using the remote control on his bedside table, while doubting that this was an entirely proper pastime for a Franciscan Abbot. He was not simply giving in to the childish pleasure of playing with a toy that had never been in his possession before, since the act of raising the blind had become entangled in his imagination with the miraculous power of Our Lord when he raised Lazarus from the dead, although, Father Guido reminded himself, Christ had not raised and lowered Lazarus three times; in fact, he had rather bided his time before raising him at all. Guido placed the remote control firmly back where he had found it and promised himself not to touch it again until nightfall, which, at this time of year, was quite soon enough to soften his renunciation with the promise of an imminent return to pleasure.