“Three million? How do you arrive at that?”

“I estimate fifty thousand neurosurgeons worldwide. Say we get twenty percent doing this procedure. That’s ten thousand surgeons. They do three procedures a day, one hundred days a year. That’s three million procedures.”

Cleary’s figure was higher than Nichols’s by a factor of three, but it wasn’t outrageous. “Three million procedures a year. So at that rate it would take two hundred years to cover the current U.S. population, to say nothing of the world.”

“Of course,” Cleary added, “we’re unlikely to get more than ten or twenty thousand on the waiting list unless you get it funded by the government health plan.”

“I’m working on that.”

“Any progress?”

Nichols frowned. “Politics. The wheels grind slowly.”

Cleary walked across the room, facing away from Nichols. “The whole conversion process would speed up a thousandfold in a crisis.”

“What kind of crisis?”

“A worldwide pandemic, for instance.” He turned to face Nichols. “A worldwide flu epidemic deadlier than the one fifty years ago. People would rush to be uploaded before the flu hit them.”

Replacement bodies, Nichols knew, could eventually be constructed from nanites. In the meantime, those uploaded would live in VR. “At what speed do you think we could do actual transplants en masse rather than just uploads? Assuming we had the unprogrammed substrates on hand, of course.”

“It depends on how much of the procedure is done by robots.”

“Which we won’t know until we’ve written the software for it.”

Cleary grinned. “Actually, we already know.”

Nichols furrowed his brow. “How?”

“Because we’ve already developed the robotic software.”

“You have?” Nichols stared at his compatriot. He was simultaneously thrilled to have such resources available and bothered that such large-scale activities were taking place without his knowledge. “I’m impressed. But don’t you think you should have run this past me?”

Cleary laughed. “Nichols, you always say how much you value self-starting. That’s what we’ve done. You’re not complaining, are you?”

Nichols thought for a moment, then smiled. “No, I’m not complaining.”

“So, to answer your question: we take half the surgeons on the planet—roughly a million—and provide them our training software. Allow two extra weeks for the nonneuros. The surgeons then supervise robots performing ten surgeries a day, six days a week. That’s three billion surgeries. We could convert the entire planet in three years. Maybe less.”

That was wildly optimistic, Nichols knew. But running the numbers was a thought-provoking exercise.

“Well.” Nichols stood. “The chances of a pandemic are no longer as high as in 2039. Medicine has advanced a bit since then.”

Cleary cleared his throat and slipped down from the examination table. “We wouldn’t have to wait for a natural pandemic, of course.”

Nichols looked at him.

Cleary continued. “What if, theoretically, an alien pathological element was introduced into the human ecosystem?”

“A disease,” Nichols clarified.