Yes, yes…The taint of his own impatience sent a ripple through him that was its own punishment. He would soon learn to control these vestigial emotions; without a body, they were more than useless, they were disturbing. The pain is gone. But so is my body.

No need.

Lanier absorbed and processed images of the Earth below. It did not look at all the same now; it seemed covered with glowing, shifting strands that reached out to darkness, twisted, and vanished…What are they? I can hardly see the planet, there are so many of them.

All those being gathered, large creatures and small. Watch where the light goes.

It ties into a kind of knot…I can’t follow it.

Harvesting the lives. Gathering all the memories and patterns, all the sensations and recollections.

Souls?

Not as such. There are no ectoplasmic bodies or souls. We are all frail and temporary, like wilting flowers. When we are gone, we are truly gone—and the universe is empty, desolate, shapeless. Unless at some time those with the power decide to arrange a kind of resurrection.

Who’s doing this?

The Final Mind.

Our descendants save us?

With reason. The observations of living things are a distillation of the universe, a conversion of information to knowledge. All sensation, all thought, all experience, is gathered, not just at death, but throughout one’s life. That knowledge is precious; it can be distilled even further and passed through the tiniest fissures of connection between this universe, as it dies, and the new universe that is born out of it. The distillation imposes itself on the new creation, like the passage of seed, guides it away from chaos, impressing a pattern. The new creation can then develop its own intelligences, who will in some way or another repeat the process when their universe grows old.

Nothing dies?

Everything dies. But that which is special in all of us is saved…if the Final Mind succeeds. You see the urgency of my mission?

Lanier’s memories of all the years of pain and death came to him as if spread out in an album of three-dimensional pictures. Everything dies…But the Final Mind was burning galaxies at the beginning of time, to power this effort to recover all that was finest in all the things that had ever lived. Not just human beings, but all living things; all things, at any rate, that converted information to knowledge, that learned and observed and came to know their environment that they might change it. From the scale of microbes to the living Earth itself, all levels harvested and encoded, selected and

Saved.

He savored that thought, tasting it, delighting in it, sobering at what it really meant; not the resurrection of the body, not the salvation of any individual, but the merging and transcendence of the whole. That which is best in all of us.