So they had taken precautions. A steel chair had been bolted to the floor, and Kira was immobilized in it more securely than any human had ever been immobilized in history. She sat in the middle of a thick plexiglass cube that looked like a transparent racquetball court, with enough sleeping gas to tranquilize a herd of elephants poised above her head, ready to be triggered by any of her observers. In case her enhanced mind was able to direct her body’s enzymes to metabolize the gas before it could affect her, the chair was rigged with plastic explosives that were also controlled from the outside. She had insisted upon this herself.
In the past year they had recruited dozens of top people from every field, carefully vetted according to Desh’s plan, who had made breathtaking discoveries that would soon transform the world. But the original five who were gathered together now still formed the core leadership, and it seemed only fitting that they be the sole witnesses to the greatest experiment of them all.
Inside the plexiglass enclosure, Kira gasped. She clenched her teeth in agony. The transformation had begun.
David Desh watched his wife helplessly as her agony intensified for almost thirty seconds.
Just as suddenly as it had begun, the tortured expression left her face and was replaced by a look of serenity more complete than any Desh had ever witnessed. There was a radiance to her now; an ethereal glow. Desh knew that while her outer demeanor was utterly peaceful, her mind was now churning at an inconceivably furious pace. He shook his head in awe and trepidation. Through what new galaxies of thought was she now traversing?
The five minutes ticked by with agonizing slowness. Kira’s vital signs were being monitored, and her breathing and heartbeat had become as steady as an atomic clock; a sure sign she was in the enhanced state. Her eyes had been closed since the transformation had begun, and she hadn’t moved a centimeter; nor had she uttered a single word.
Without warning her vital signs lost their perfect rhythm. She was back! She had returned from her extraordinary voyage.
Desh blew out the breath he had been holding for some time now, relieved.
The countenances of his three friends all brightened beside him as well.
But there was a hurdle yet to jump, Desh knew. Would she be the same woman with whom he had fallen in love, or would this experience, this new reordering of her neurons, change her in unpredictable ways?
Forty seconds passed and her eyes remained closed. David Desh suddenly found it hard to take a breath. Had something gone wrong?
He checked the digital clock counting down on the monitor next to her still-strong vital signs. They had agreed not to enter her cell until a full ten minutes after the effect appeared to have reversed, just to be sure. Desh’s desire to rush in and hold her, and confirm that nothing was amiss, was so all consuming it took every ounce of his will to suppress it.
He stared at the digital clock as the seconds continued to pass; willing them to go faster.
Kira slammed into normalcy like a starship traveling at warp speed crashing into an immovable object. The return to normalcy had been jarring before, but nothing could compare to this.
She shook off the shock of it and hastily searched her mind. Had she contemplated evil acts while on this transcendent plane of intelligence? Had she found Nietzsche’s will to power even more difficult to resist than before? Had she been even more contemptuous and dismissive of the species Homo sapiens?
Memories flooded back to her. They were but a pale shadow of a shadow of a shadow of her thoughts during the five-minute period—which had seemed to her to last for many hours—and the memories were in clumsy English rather than the precise and expansive symbolic logic her mind had been able to effortlessly manipulate while transformed.
But these wisps of memory were enough! She knew! Their greatest hopes had been realized. Their greatest fears put to rest. David had been right! Compassion and pure intellect were not mutually exclusive. And as her normal mind brushed over the faint echo of the conclusions she had reached while transformed, feelings of profound joy and contentment surged through her.
The baseline level of human thought was so plagued by emotion and instinct, so limited in power and rationality, that individuals could be readily fooled into believing almost any conjecture. At the first level of enhancement with which she and her team had become familiar, faith did not exist, and any logic that called for the existence of a deity was quickly seen to be fatally flawed. At this level of thought it became clear that existence was without meaning, and selfishness became an imperative.
But now, having achieved a second level of optimization that was truly staggering, she had gained a perspective far different from that she had achieved at the first level. She marveled at the preposterous hubris she and the others had exhibited at this level. Incredible. Now that she had achieved a truly transcendent plane of thought she was sure of only one thing: she understood absolutely nothing!
The universe was infinite, and there were most likely an infinite number of universes. To sit on one tiny planet in an ocean of infinite infinities and believe you understood anything about the true nature of existence and reality was absurd. The convictions of the arrogant minds of those at the first level of enhancement were just as flawed as any they had replaced.
Was there an afterlife? Maybe. Perhaps there wasn’t even a need for one. Perhaps all consciousness was already immortal. The widely embraced Many-Worlds interpretation of the bizarre experimental results found in quantum physics suggested that whenever different possibilities for the future existed, all of them were realized. The universe was constantly splitting into multiple universes, like branches on a tree, with each branch continuing to branch an infinite number of times.
In the past a bullet fired from a helicopter had been hurtling toward Jim Connelly as he stood in a clearing. In this universe it had missed killing him by a few inches. But as the bullet was hurtling toward him the universe had branched. There were now an infinite number of universes in which the bullet had killed him, and an infinite number in which it had missed entirely. But within these infinities going forward, until the end of time, there would always be at least one universe in which the colonel’s consciousness survived.
The possibility of quantum immortality was accepted by a number of mainstream physicists as they used their normal human faculties to understand the fantastic implications of quantum effects. But there were possibilities her alter ego had glimpsed that human scientists had not even begun to suspect. There were at least as many reasons to believe in the existence of immortality or an afterlife as there were not to.
Was there a God? It was impossible to answer this question for sure, but the level of human understanding was so insignificant it was the height of arrogance to rule it out. She had posed the question: if God could exist without need of a creator, why couldn’t the universe? But the converse was also true. If the universe could exist without being created, why couldn’t God?
But even if God existed, there was no guarantee this being would have all the answers; would fully understand the nature of reality. An omniscient being could be all-knowing and yet have far more to learn. Infinite infinities yet again. Even if God’s mind could grasp and contain within it the infinity of numbers between 0 and 1, there were still an infinity of numbers outside of this set.