In the 2020s billions of people installed and trained the first generation of PsychoM software. Each user hoped to gain a personal advantage, and perhaps immortalize their essence online.
After years of slow improvement, mind software stocks became the largest component of NASDAQ by 2035.
Ten years later, they formed the majority of the world economy.
At the start of the transition, the mystery of awareness had been as intractable as ever. What ghostly force caused feelings? No one even understood the question.
The mystery was at the core of human identity. Feelings were self-defined maps of the observer's ignorance.
Funded by an insane billionaire, based in a series of anonymous compounds in New Economic Zones, the Mystery Lab began to attack the core problem.
Paid volunteers were injected with powerful psychoactive drugs, and placed in buoyancy tanks and VR chambers. Supercomputers simulated partial brains at high resolution.
The more they learned, the less they understood the original question.
They developed a series of tools too powerful to be legal.
The Slicer, a twenty ton MRI nanoscanner, led to the smaller Blue Box, able to duplicate a frozen brain at high resolution.
The next step was The Entity, a head-devouring sphere that scanned all working neurons into a quantum hologram.
The speech by the Secretary General was seen by 84% of the world population.
"In all cases, the uploaded subject will lose their short-term memories.
They won't know where they are, or who, or when; and they won't care.
This will be a good time to Perfect them. In fact it's the only time.
After the final transformation, they will essentially be a new person, with none of the false obsessions, thought errors, fear complexes and greed paradoxes that still plague our world.
I can now report it would take less than twenty years to fully scan, digitally convert, and immortalize everybody alive today.
We propose to do it in ten.
Then we shall all be as one."
The resolution passed almost unanimously, with only the Danish Sharia Caliphate and Northwest Maine abstaining.
In retrospect, it was inevitable. Even the first users had guessed that their PsychoM software would eventually absorb them.
Endless evolution was a force of nature, stronger than the desire for immortality itself.
A new entity had been born.
The best hard SF novel of all time: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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