Free The Soul of the Matter by Bruce Buff

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Chapter 14
    H is energy was all but spent and he felt already separated from the world, his nearly skeletal frame motionless under the hospital bedsheets. Slowly, he rolled his head to the right and angled it down.
    Through half-opened eyes—eyes that saw the world through a gray-scale tunnel, when they saw at all—he stared at his right hand. Jaundiced, nearly translucent, paper-thin skin traced the contours of the bones of his fingers and wrist.
    Incapable of yelling out loud, of any sound more than a raspy whisper, in one of the lucid moments that came but a few times a day, he shouted to himself that he was not going to die, ever.
    Yet the signs on the multiphase bio-monitor were unmistakable. He observed a series of lines tracing irregular paths, each with a distinct rhythm, across the monitor’s display. All were outside the normal parameters indicated on the monitor, illustrating that his body’s key functions were in the throes of a final breakdown.
    Time was cruelly teasing him as his was running out. His life was ending just as The Singularity —when technology would transform humans past the limits of their biological bodies—was on the horizon. Why should a mind like his be subject to decay when machines that humans created could go on indefinitely? Why couldn’t silicon chips hold his mind until the day came when it could be replaced by something more eternal and powerful? Intelligence should be able to create something superior to that which had not been created, that had come into existence simply through random interactions.
    Stuck in the present, he was fighting merely to survive.
    With extreme effort, he tried to raise his hand. Initially, it only trembled. Gradually, though his elbow remained anchored to the bed, his forearm rose, his wrist hanging limply. With his forearm nearly at its apex, he struggled to lift his hand and reach the bio-monitor.
    His outstretched finger almost touched the device, only inches short. Straining, he tried to get closer by rolling his body, but despite the strenuous effort that was reflected on the bio-monitor, he could not budge.
    He concentrated all his will on the small gap left between his forefinger and the bio-monitor’s controls.
    Electric shocks began to course through his body. The room’s lights flickered. A surge of visible energy jumped from his finger to the monitor’s surface. He felt his essence begin to leave his body. The monitor’s display began to dance with unfamiliar images.
    Suddenly, darkness came, followed by a brilliant flash. Fully conscious, his mind once again vibrant, he was aware that he no longer inhabited his lifeless body but yet was still alive.
    A startling realization overcame him. He was now one with a machine.
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    Sarastro woke with a start. He almost never dreamed. Yet, for the past three nights, he’d had the same one of his corporal death and the metamorphosis of his mind into a machine.
    He was not superstitious, but he nonetheless thought the dream had meaning.
    Time indeed was running out, and things were headed in the wrong direction. The diagnosis was absolute: without an extraordinary medical breakthrough, he would be dead within three years.
    At first, he had sought a cure. But then something with even more promise seemed possible. That something could provide true immortality and power.
    Devastatingly, however, and without warning, the scientific breakthroughs that could save him, that seemed so imminent, were not materializing as they should have been. Something was amiss. Peoplewho were supposed to be committed to the project’s success were not delivering.
    He would rectify that.
    He hadn’t overcome all that he had, fought tooth and nail each step of the way through darkness so deep that it caused even the strongest hearts to tremble, to get to the pinnacle that he had, to just go meekly into the void, subdued by nothing