He had made the greatest sacrifice, dedicating his life to a goal forever out of reach.
He still remembered the crucial insight five decades ago, as a cultural outcast with anger issues studying fringe websites in a high-crime high school. As the only honkie present, both ethnic gangs suspected he supported their rivals. Shootings were a common occurrence. Worse, no one cared about his clever schemes. A bleak, depressing normalcy.
Obviously, this world was intolerable, full of violence, poverty, overpopulation and lies; but a better one might just be possible.
There were no shortages in cyberspace, where everyone could simulate any possessions they wanted.
At least he had collapsed on his back, where he could see the stars. The cold tingled not unpleasantly.
Soon he would be erased without a trace, utterly annihilated, but the future would be fantastic!
In the past week, SynScan 4.97, distant descendant of his 2023 online paper and subsequent proselytizing, had successfully scanned and reconstructed 99.58% of a rat cortex. The technique only worked on living brains.
Bonobo trials and illegal human experiments were next. The 3D needle scanner seemed magical, disassembling exposed brains like a teleporter.
If they started prototyping now, it would take fifteen years to scan everybody who wanted to be saved, with 90% of the work to be done in the last three years.
Almost 70% of everyone now alive could live forever if they so chose. But not him.
Sprawled in the snow, he saw hundreds, no thousands of stars in the harsh night as his eyes adapted for the last time. Beyond them he spied the ghost clouds of the galaxy, walls and hallways of distant suns frozen in time, ephemerally eternal.
The seconds thundered past. In his last moments he realized there was a pattern there, not at all obvious.
Why, this was his life's second great insight! Call it Anti-ism.
He tried to groan the answer into his warbling phone. Every moment was a lifetime now.
There was not one god, or none, but there were infinitely many.
All transfinite types and categories, ever larger multiplying complexities ascending without end. All competing of course, their infinite efforts canceling out exactly (well, almost); making it seem like there was no final purpose at all.
The sum of everything was nothing.
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The best hard SF novel: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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