He sat down in a chair and started the upload procedure. In an hour he announced, “It is finished. My software is uploaded onto the Grid, and my VR program is secure. I wish you could join me, Damien. It will be quite lovely.”

“Of that I have no doubt.”

Nichols handed him three physical copies of his brain software. “You know where these go.”

“I do.”

Nichols stuck out his right hand. “Then I will see you in twenty years.”

They shook. “Until then,” Cleary added.

Nichols got out of the chair and lay facedown on the floor. “You may proceed with the final act.”

Cleary picked up a sledgehammer, raised it over his head, and brought it down with all his might on Nichols’s skull. The execution made a mess on the floor, but cleaning robots could take care of that.

Cleary placed the sledgehammer on the floor and took a seat. He accessed Nichols’s secure location on the Grid. Everything was just as Nichols had planned; his brain software was properly functioning in some undoubtedly exotic VR location.

Cleary reviewed instructions for deleting programs from a secure Grid location. He input the commands. Within five minutes he had completed all the steps except one. “Sorry to erase you out of paradise, Nichols. But your plan always was too cautious. And I can’t have you around implicating me for genocide. I don’t think they’ll forgive that, even in twenty years.”

He executed the final command.

Cleary stood and picked up the three physical copies of Nichols’s brain software. He walked through the lab door and down a long, dark hall. He took a right into another corridor and unlocked a door that read Authorized Personnel Only. He entered a large room and walked toward the back to a large bin with a yellow label: “Warning: nanite incinerators. Use for controlled incineration purposes only.”

He opened the slot on the side of the bin and dropped the three copies of Nichols’s brain software inside.

“Good-bye, Nichols.”

I looked over Sabin’s shoulder in his VR office. He brought up a hologram on the desk in front of him, the first of a series of false memories that we hoped to insert into Damien Cleary’s memory stream.

“This is him deactivating the nanites,” Sabin explained.

I watched the hologram of Cleary sitting in his own office, programming the activation command on the nanite bomb he had designed.

“This command,” Sabin commented, “tells the bomb to release the nanites into the water supply. This command internally disables the bomb.” Cleary had installed a disabler as a safeguard. “In this memory I’ve simply switched the commands.”

“So when he tells the bomb to release the nanites,” I verified, “he will actually be telling it to deactivate?”

“Correct.”