The two women walked through the jungle as the men set fire to the village. They waited at the helicopter while the men ensured no flames spread. At twilight the helicopter rose with all aboard. Abby looked down at her village. Her entire history was burning in two dozen smoldering orange rings. Behind her, nighttime had fallen. Ahead, the sun would rise on a world she had never known.

5

Damien Cleary sat on the back row of a thousand-plus crowd crammed into the ballroom of Chicago’s Hotel La Salle. He wasn’t fond of large gatherings in physical space. He had argued against having people physically present for the unveiling; it always increased the risk of the unexpected. But Bryson Nichols had insisted. And this was Nichols’s show.

Nichols hadn’t physically appeared before the Foundation for the Advancement of Transhumanity since starting the organization fourteen years earlier with a handful of technological visionaries and philanthropists. Now almost every scientist of note in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, and genetic engineering was a member, as well as a bevy of do-gooders who financed the nonprofit side of Nichols’s endeavors.

Not that Nichols needed the money. As founder and CEO of Nichols Technology Inc. (NTI) and the leading artificial intelligence innovator of his time, he could easily launch and finance any project he wished. It had been Nichols’s plan all along, however, to involve the nonprofit and governmental spheres. His vision wasn’t simply the development and marketing of a fantastically profitable new AI technology; he sought the transformation of humanity itself. To date, the plan had worked like clockwork. Which didn’t surprise Damien Cleary. Everything Nichols touched worked like clockwork.

Cleary disagreed with Nichols’s approach. He was contemptuous of the foundation’s nonscientists—sycophants who felt important by hobnobbing with the world’s scientific elite. Such a technological leap as he and Nichols had achieved, Cleary believed, would create its own momentum. Given sufficient motivation, the world would follow their lead into humanity’s next stage.

Despite his misgivings, Cleary wasn’t about to miss this event. He, Nichols, and Ray Caldwell had been the brains behind the accomplishment to be unveiled. Only a few in the audience knew of Cleary’s key role, perhaps most notably Hutch Hardin, a political operative and consummate Washington deal maker whom he had befriended in the early days of the foundation. To most, Cleary was just another face in the crowd.

As head of the Contingency Planning Unit at NTI, Cleary worked in the shadows. He aimed to keep it that way. “Contingency planning” was an antiseptic way of saying, “What if we lose control and our work ends up threatening the planet?” No one wanted to acknowledge that such questions even had to be addressed.