“He remembered some of our talks years before—people sometimes talked about the Christian faith back then—and he thought I might be able to help him sort through something.”

“Sort through something?”

“He’d been having a recurring dream about Jesus. He thought maybe I knew what it was about.”

I felt reassured. At the end my father had been in good hands after all.

There was one final topic I wanted to talk about. Ray seemed to wait on me.

“Ray, if my life continues indefinitely, either in VR or in a synthetic body…If there should come a time when I don’t want to live that way anymore, is there a way to end it?”

He answered gently. “Maybe you should leave that up to God as well.”

“But what if I’m stuck in this existence and don’t want to be? God didn’t make me this way. Is there a way I can…get out?”

He hesitated. “There is. There’s a series of commands you can run.”

“And what will they do?”

“They’ll tell your programming to delete itself.”

“Can you tell me the commands? Just in case.”

He looked at me for a moment. Then he nodded.

44

I pushed my conversation with Ray to the back of my mind and accessed the Grid address he’d given me. I completed the necessary alterations in less than fifteen minutes. The memories of those who had had brain transplants were now accessible.

As was everything else. After the transplant I realized that I now had immediate access to the entirety of human knowledge. Not only that, I could meaningfully synthesize it. The prior constraints of my biological brain had been superseded. I could understand astrophysics, genetics, or atmospheric science as easily as I could understand history.

Every mental process was quick and simple beyond anything I could have imagined. The potentialities I foresaw were limitless. What if humanity truly did become transhumanity? What if billions of persons could all instantly process the same facts and reach the same logical conclusions? Maybe Nichols’s vision was the correct one, after all. Even if one did lose access to God—a hypothetical I couldn’t verify—perhaps that was a small price to pay for the advancement possible through the transhuman merger.

A new life purpose intruded upon my consciousness. I was a pioneer, one of the first of a new race. Perhaps I was meant to ensure that humanity would be ushered into its new, fated era peacefully, without harm to those burdened with biological brains. Nichols, Cleary, and Ray Caldwell had perfected the technology. Ray had rejected it due to his religious bias. Nichols had mismanaged its implementation, acting imprudently and arrogantly but without malice. He simply wanted to realize his vision for humanity. He could be convinced to amend his ways.

As for Cleary…he posed the real threat. I had to access his memory stream first.