We were, in effect, seeing a repeat of Patient Zero. Her postnatal stretchmarks, then her redundant-body, and eventually her cancer, returned. She did not survive.

But Patient One showed none of the other symptoms suffered by Patient Zero. He was in no pain, and the scar itself was lighter than the redundant-self's. If his biological body was not returning, what to make of this scar? Was this some kind of unforeseen epigenetic event, the redundant-self seeking survival, not by returning as cells, but by encoding itself, scars and all, into the nanites' DNA? Can the redundant-self come back forty years after making a full transition?


Day Two.

Finally, the police let us do our own survey of the ... crime scene? Rapture scene? God, I hate language, and I hate writing even more. But I must try to make sense of this, and the language of writing is the only way I have of looking at my own thoughts, and writing by hand—I feel like a cavewoman making marks on the wall—forces my mind to slow down enough to let the thoughts marinate just a little more.

There is no way of knowing how much the police have contaminated the storage space at SATech where Patient One disappeared. (They are still refusing to let us examine the clothes he left behind; who knows what kind of mess they're doing to that key piece of evidence.) Patient One—oh, just let me call him One—disappeared right outside a storage room for the Singularity Lab.

Apparently, he'd been doing some long-term follow-up research on an artificial intelligence project he had led when he was PI at a research group at this lab. Something about an AI that reads poetry. (Am I remembering correctly? That sounds too ridiculous to be correct.)

He entered the room at noon and "exited" at one, precisely when everyone else at the lab was out for lunch. Nobody saw him enter or leave. He had the key codes, and the storage room is separate from the lab's main facilities. The room is in the basement, while the lab's offices are on the fifth floor, and their mainframe servers are on the second. Logs show that One accessed mainframe resources from the storage room. Cloud processes, mostly. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that would literally turn him into a cloud himself ...

We swept the room for traces of nanites: just some duds. We knew that One tended to shed duds the way Redundants shed skin cells and hair. Where was the rest of the nanite swarm?

I entered these facts and speculations, as dryly and clinically as possible, into One's official file. I needed to write a report for the board of the institute.

But what else could I say? Every explanation I could think of was absurd, each one sounding more ridiculous than the next. Which is why I used the driest wording possible in One's patient file and am writing my real thoughts down in this notebook instead.

Dispersal. Kidnapping.

Rapture.

I might as well propose that the biblical Rapture happened and he was the only one of us pure enough to be taken. Because his sins were washed clean by the fact that all of his cells were replaced by blameless nanites, turning him into some kind of angel on Earth.

Excerpted from Toward Eternity by Anton Hur. Copyright © 2024 by Anton Hur. Excerpted by permission of HarperVia. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.