Taggart's Last Rites

By Mike Kennedy

Death be not proud. Taggart's life is ending, but, on its heels, the next one begins. After an interval seeming little more than a nap, inventor Elon Fahrenheit resurrects Taggart in the likeness of himself at his prime. Getting away with murder is Hitchcock's MacGuffin for a story of artificial intelligence on two feet with I.D., rental car, and a grudge. Connectivity can be so bad-ass.

The backup robot has been engineered to resemble lovely actress Kaley Cuoco. She learns that emotions are harder than they look. Advantage Taggart. He used to be human. But Kaley is a quick study.

This is not set in the future. You’re just the first to know.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Kennedy
• Release date: Sep 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781370501892

Mike Kennedy

A note to Kennedy's readers: "Like many of you, in former times I thought of myself as not merely awake, but vibrantly awake. I was wrong. Beginning in 2019 and connecting the dots as consciousness is wont to do, I began my Red-Pill experience. Recently, and to my amazement, I see that the writing of three of my novels was channeled experience. 'Mali' turns out to be a story of the Deep State. It was always, from the start, a story of the illusion of free will. 'Taggart' turns out to be a story of Trans-Humanism. And 'All Our Yesterdays' turns out to have been an unconscious metaphor of the inner sanctum of the Cabal and its malign design upon mankind. I have long known that my stories find me (and not the other way around). Two attempts at designing a story have both resulted in ten-thousand-word dead ends. I quote from Aeschylus (his work 'Agamemnon'): 'Pain, which cannot forget, even in our sleep, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our despair, and against our will, comes wisdom by the awful grace of God.' And we remember that 'grace' is an unmerited consolation. Finally, I see that my 'message to the publishing world' (final paragraph below) recognized the sad fact that agents & editors have betrayed their intrinsic debt to western civilization and consciously work in thrall to the dark side. One should keep in mind that the root word for 'inspiration' is 'spirit' and so must ever remain experience beyond the five senses. I have always written about those things that you know, but do not know you know."On a lighter note: "It is not too late to fall in love with language. You've just needed characters you wish you knew. I wish there were drawings, pictures, and maps in novels and short stories. Don't you? In the novel 'Mali,' a picture begins every chapter. So also, in these two anthologies. All in support of the magical movie in your mind. Go ahead and venture, 'It's showtime!'"Indianapolis author Mike Kennedy described by Trident Media Group, saying: "Kennedy has a way with words. Readers attracted to Hemingway and Mailer will love Season of Many Thirsts [A novel brought to E-Books under the original title: REPORT FROM MALI]." Publisher Alfred A. Knopf says of the manuscript: "This is a potentially important and significant novel on many levels, including formally." Little, Brown says of the novel: "Our admiration for its ambition and the energy and high-octane force it applies toward these engrossing geopolitical events. Chance and his team are memorable characters." Random House says: "Kennedy captures the strange, and intriguing world of Mali." Playwright Arthur Miller said of Kennedy: "Marilyn and I used to think there was something funny about Mike, and then we realized that he was simply hilarious."Kennedy's message to the publishing world, "I have read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness from time to time across fifty years. During this, my most recent reading, it occurs to me that I am Kurtz and that all of you are Marlow. Kurtz lay dying in the pilot house of the river steamer. Marlow, the company agent, has found him and returns with him. Kurtz has spent years in the jungle pulling out ivory and sending it downstream. Finally, Kurtz agrees to return down river to civilization because he realizes that he has something to say, something with a value beyond his ton of treasure. Kurtz realizes that he has achieved a synthesis from out of his brutish experience. Kurtz imagines being met by representatives at each one of the string of railway stations during his return to civilization. He tells Marlow, 'You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability.' And then, sounding as though he steps into our own millennium, Kurtz adds, 'Of course you must take care of the motives—right motives—always.' Now I see that Kurtz is Conrad. Kurtz is not unique. He is every writer. It is only Marlow, the agent, who is unique, unique in his fidelity, not just to the job, nor only to the company, but to the civilization that sent him."Listen to the video essays of WrongWayCorrigan on Rumble. https://rumble.com/c/WrongWayCorriganCJ

Book preview

Taggart’s Last Rites

A Novel by

Mike Kennedy

Copyright 2019 by Mike Kennedy

Smashwords Edition

ISBN No. 9781370501892

www.GoodStorySaloon.com

www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/FictionOutLoud/

www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/GOODSTORYSALOON/

This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or businesses is purely coincidental.

Other books by Mike Kennedy

Late Night Radio

Lady of the Yellowstone

Report from Mali

Bare Branches

In Their Own Likeness

Leda and the Swan and Other Stories

The Prince of Staten Island and Other Stories

Hyperlinked Table of Contents:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter One

A boutique bar with an address, but no name, lies just off the lobby of the three-story Algonquin Hotel in North Haverhill, New Hampshire. The bar omits the formality of a proper noun by a universal and silent acclamation.

This bar seats ten on stools, and adjacent, cheek by jowl, are two tables, each surrounded by four great armchairs, and each of those nearly a strain to move. This crabbed setting quickly gives way to the ancient carpet and commodious plan of the lobby and to the front desk, and to the staircase leading to the two higher floors of suites and rooms. The ceilings are tall, combining to elevate the hotel cornice just above the roofs of town. The front window is dominated by the flowing script of a red glass neon light, saying ‘Algonquin Hotel’ and below that in smaller letters ‘Bar’.

On a particular evening, a week before Christmas, and during several days of bad weather, the hotel bar had so far welcomed only the most intrepid. By another universal acclamation—this one exclaimed with warnings across the valley of the Connecticut River—everything that could be postponed had become postponed. Everything except, ironically, a murder—itself postponed across many years—and which now lay just in the offing, barely beyond their seeing.

Since moving to America, it had become Kinry’s custom of a Saturday night to join a table of four in company with the Editor, the Mayor, and Macaskill, the retired head master of a prep school, who drank only rum, five tumblers of it every Saturday night. Macaskill was by then into his third, making his walleye wander more. Kinry arrived late and made a quick turn left out of the front vestibule, to stop at the fireplace. He stood kicking the snow off his boots, intent upon the hearth’s polished slates dancing with luminous licks of reflected flame. Kinry’s pause was over-long, communing with these combusting wave lengths jittering out of the infrared, flickering across the white light spectrum, and finishing cloaked within the ultra violet.

Kinry had no sooner hung his coat over the back of his armchair, when, behind him, the outer doors banged open to admit a rumbly clamor into the hotel vestibule. All heads turned as the inner doors flung open. Snowy figures emerged trundling a hand truck strapped with an ungainly wooden crate, about the height of a man. And following them, a lone figure turned at the staircase, to face the lobby, to stand brushing the snow off his coat. He cast a nod of his head across the lobby at Kinry, who flipped a wave in return. It was another in the series of puzzling visits by that redoubtable inventor, Mr. Elon Fahrenheit, chairman of Shaped Sense Corporation.

Though a newcomer, Kinry found that everyone in America wants to be friends with a good mechanic. Kinry competes with no one. Seemingly self-contained, he has nothing to prove, and yet Kinry always shows up at blood drives, and to clear fallen trees the morning after heavy weather. He is known as a listener, a good man to have around, and women warm up to him easily. After the salutations and the pleasantries conclude, Kinry always settles in to let you talk. In this way, Kinry reminds you of no one, yet appearing admirable all the while. Kinry allows himself to be used unconsciously as an empty vessel, which each man fills with his own vision of himself. Inevitably, everyone likes Kinry.

Kinry remembers four years earlier, leaving the Isle of Man—that little spec of Britain in the Irish Sea, a lost Celtic world, a place never quite English, and iced with a tang of Norman pretention. Kinry explains that his memories of the place are vivid, from the Latin vividus, meaning lifelike.

With his wife buried, with his children raised, and the young second wife run off to the mainland, Kinry remembers settling accounts and moving to the colonies—the world’s perennial destination for fresh starts. When asked, this is invariably Kinry’s story, changed in the telling of it by never more than an adverb.

When asked what happened to his back, Kinry again says little beyond some ill-defined accident, followed by a couple of operations. It wasn’t so much that Kinry was a hunchback. It was much less pronounced, but you do notice it if you’ve been in his company for any length of time. Kinry claims not to remember anything else about it. They all suppose it better that way. One endures. Life goes on.

Thinking New England to be the logical first step, Kinry remembers his surprise at going no farther. He recalls driving up Interstate 91 along the Connecticut River, trying to decide between Vermont on his left, and New Hampshire on his right. He does not remember Elon Fahrenheit being in the car, nor does Kinry remember that it was actually Elon Fahrenheit who drove. Kinry remembers, instead, the new car smell, and the light.

Always, the first part of a memory is the quality of the light.

As the towns thinned, and as the sky filled with low Appalachians, Kinry will picture for you, in his telling of it, his crossing of the river eastward at North Haverhill and continuing for a few miles to East Haverhill, where he made his home, at a singular intersection with the very first place he stopped.

The new property came with a failed quick-lube, as part of the sale. Kinry converted it into an auto repair and soon garnered the business of Grafton County as well as the string of towns along several miles of the Vermont side of the river. First, however, Kinry fell into a seeming lucky break when he was offered an on-call position as mechanic and handyman at the mountaintop estate of old man Taggart, a man also present on this snowy evening, upstairs.

As Elon Fahrenheit disappeared up the stairs behind the men, and behind the thudding wheels of the hand truck, Kinry slumped into his armchair, with a puzzled squint.

The Mayor leaned toward him earnestly. We’ve got someone whom you know, dying upstairs tonight, Kinry. He’s been dying up there for three days. Frowning, he thrust his chin and hissed, Old man Taggart come off his mountain to die here, he has.

Straightening, Kinry asked, Is Mr. Fahrenheit at his bedside? They are fast friends, you know.

The Editor spoke, Arrived day before last…been hole’d up in Taggart’s suite with Doc Gill…oxygen tanks and room service going in and out, and now that big crate, with whatever is inside of it.

Squinting tightly now, as though intent upon some unconscious calculation, Kinry asked, Just the three of them upstairs, Mr. Fahrenheit, Mr. Taggart, and Dr. Gill?

Aye Kinry, and now those new men with the crate, said the Editor, but they’ll likely not stay.

"Soon Kinry, it will be just the two of them up there." The Mayor nodded knowingly.

Macaskill, laughing with unseemly glee, slapped Kinry’s shoulder, slurring, "Spooky, isn’t it, Kinry? Something fiendish upstairs in the making, some terror out of Robert Louis Stevenson, I’d say. Nothing illegal going on here tonight, no-no, merely some monstrous crime against all humanity."

Finishing his garrulous outburst, Macaskill, wild looking, swiped his sleeve across his mouth and punctuated by slamming his tumbler to the table. Taggart had once told Kinry that he had turned his powerful mountaintop spyglass to reveal Macaskill’s car at cemeteries on full moon nights when the earth had been disturbed. Taggart explained that Macaskill had a side-business with a medical school in New York City.

Taggart had sent men around mornings to check, always finding his senior school-boys driving back the school van, empty. What an odd coincidence, Kinry thought, that Taggart had come to die under the very nose of a man he knew to be a body snatcher.

With entire industries of ghouls, with morticians stealing the long bones to sell to dental surgeons; with medical schools bidding for what was left; with crematoriums sweeping in the ashes from their backyard bar-b-ques to make up for missing volume; with archeologists wiring you back together for exhibits—at such times as they might find you still intact—Kinry had a pet theory. Kinry figured Elon Fahrenheit would have none of it and had already been measured for a nose cone, and—when his time comes—Fahrenheit would synchronize his death with a shot into space. After all, he’d already sent up a car, now heading out toward the orbit of Mars. Elon Fahrenheit, Kinry knew, was always good for an original idea, except tonight it seemed probable that it had been some idea of Taggart’s that had brought him here.

Another interruption arrived in what should have been a quiet snow-bound evening. The delivery men came back down the stairs with the empty hand truck, and only briefly left the hotel before returning with a second crate of equal size, before finally leaving for good and all.

A melting snowy outline of boots led through the lobby. Elon Fahrenheit remained upstairs. Later, he was to make a trip down to the bar in order to fortify himself with drink, which everyone, on that most singular of evenings, seemed to need.

Kinry, who knew Fahrenheit well from his visits to the Taggart estate, invited him to sit with them. Fahrenheit, ever seeking out good company, ever sorting between the cerebral and the garrulous according to the occasion, dragged an armchair over to the table, while the others gladly made room.

Taggart owned two mountains in Grafton County, so close to each other that they are separated by only a stream and a road. When the young second wife began her romp through the men of the Connecticut River Valley, Taggart moved himself and his children into a new house built on the taller mountain opposite, where he set up a powerful instrument, having always been drawn to observation. Taggart eventually realized that murder is the most straight-forward thing that humans do, and that hypocrisy, while seeming easier, is, ultimately, exhausting.

The powerful instrument was the sort of all-weather binocular that is found at the promontories and overlooks within national parks: black, massive, pedestal mounted, and permanent. It had been loaded with lenses of just the right power and field of vision. While capable of movement around three hundred and sixty degrees, it was normally fixed to swivel only that brief arc from the hot tub on the deck to the bedroom window. With nothing but Taggart’s darkened house a quarter of a mile away and being perched cliff-side a thousand feet above the road, her curtains were rarely pulled. In this setting, Taggart incubated his malice.

Back in the seventies and eighties, Taggart had bought Apple, Microsoft, and Berkshire Hathaway when they were little more than penny stocks, and when Homo Sapiens were perched unknowingly at the edge of great change. So that now, the dangerous gravel road to the top of his mountain was rutted by directors of boards coming to beg his proxy.

At the beginning of the second wife’s randy larks, and during an argument, unfortunately set at the top of the stairs, he had fallen—the townsfolk say pushed— paralyzing him from the waist down. It was in this condition that Taggart brooded upon his revenge across many years, as she remained unabashed and her potency abated not.

Fahrenheit leaned forward toward the men around the table. He seemed eager, as though to explain some topic already broached by silent acclamation. Fahrenheit relied on Kinry for his sympathetic ear and he directed his transcendental musings mainly toward him.

"Basically, Descartes was correct. Life is an illusion. But it is a mechanical illusion, not the result of divine deception. Life is very nearly like the ‘movies’—a series of still pictures displaying rapidly to provide illusion of movement. Permit me to explain.

"Existence—as we perceive it in the larger illusion of ‘continuum’—is merely a grand synthesis of summation. Life is one very large sine wave, and, within it, lays a fractal geometry of smaller sine waves. In high frequency, the overall effect is called ‘consciousness’.

"Everything in life very nearly repeats and does so very quickly and, thereby, gives this illusion of ‘continuum’. The faster the repetition, the more seamless things appear, just like ‘movies’.

"Ironically, ‘time’ is merely one of many sine waves and, as a unit of measure, helps define the term sine wave. We call it cycles per second, or Hertz. One cycle is an individual repetition of a sum of values peak to peak.

"Sine waves are everywhere: sound, light, electromagnetism, seismology, time, gravity, and, of course, the action of the ocean. Even human behavior, being a mixture of repetition and elaboration, can be seen statistically, and, hence, human behavior sums within yet another sinusoidal expression.

"‘Time’ can be broken down in many ways, but for me, the most important is an artificial construct with no fixed value that we call the ‘moment’. ‘Consciousness’ is a series of ‘moments’ just like a ‘movie’ is a collection of still pictures, all of which flicker past very rapidly in that illusion of seamlessness that we call ‘seeing’.

"In my work, I use Thomas Edison as my template. Around 1872, he recorded the rhyme ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’ on a rotating wax cylinder. From that, came the records and record players that we know today. When certain mechanical events disturb the air, they produce sine waves. We call them sound waves. Edison made these waves impinge upon a malleable surface across a span of a time. Then, when the track of this impingement is repeated across the very same time and space, the original sign wave is reproduced, then amplified, then made to impinge upon an airspace so that the original sound wave is reproduced. This wave travels to vibrate in our ear giving still another illusion that we call ‘hearing’.

"In the human mind, a collection of present illusions from sense organs, together with a collection of the stored memory of past illusions, all come together in the frontal lobes. It is the sum of all these illusions that we call ‘consciousness’. This ‘consciousness’ is not weighted. Therefore, all its millions of ‘moments’ would seem to have equal value except for the very real existence of the ‘emotions’.

"Our emotions tell us how seriously we should regard any individual illusion or memory of illusion. This produces yet another repeating sine wave called ‘motivation’.

"Like Edison, I have found a way to record these sine waves, as they fire off in the human mind. I then upload them into a computer that is already operating with artificial intelligence. And here is the key: when I inflict stress on the operating system, it responds by increasing its own electrical power consumption. Viola! Artificial ‘emotion’ to weight the decision process of artificial intelligence. By adding emotion, one "moment’ can now be worth more than a different ‘moment’ thereby enabling the illusion of a ‘decision’."

How will you synthesize emotion, Mr. Fahrenheit? Kinry asked.

With algorithms, Kinry.

But Mr. Fahrenheit, how can algorithms capture the complexity of emotion?

Kinry, my friend, emotion merely seems complex. The reality is that it is elemental. Moses had ten commandments. The United States Constitution has only seven articles, twenty-four sections and twenty-seven amendments. The people who write the rules for algorithms elaborate with a level of detail unknown to those who trade in sin and law. ‘Thou shalt not lie’ is a blunt instrument compared even to Webster’s, which has 32 synonyms for lies. Algorithms will plumb the nuances in any variety of deceit from love to banking.

My God! Kinry said. Then, all that’s lacking in this is just arms and legs!

Fahrenheit reached out to Kinry, chortling with great sympathy, "Oh, no, Kinry, my friend, we got to the arms and legs business several years ago! What we lack now is artificial skin, machines the size of human cells, then artificial metabolism, then artificial cell division, and then for the first time in history, we will have an animal capable of inventing the animal that makes the original animal go extinct.

I have not been describing the evolution of man, but rather, the evolution of consciousness. You see, gentlemen—and here lays a bombshell buried inside another bombshell—sheer energy is, all by itself, the actual life form, and it has evolved to become self-aware, and we humans are simply an expression of that awareness. Homo Sapiens are simply the Quarks and Mesons of a structure that man doesn’t even know he’s living inside. All of our billions of consciousnesses reside inside sine waves nesting like Russian dolls and the immense sum of all of us is the self-awareness of energy—the ultimate and incomprehensibly vast sine wave.

The Mayor asked, If you’ve got artificial cells, you’ve got artificial organs. So, what about artificial sexual reproduction?

No. The changes brought by biological evolution are random. In the future, changes will be guided by a value system, updated as required.

The Editor added, Evolution becomes continuous product improvement.

Fahrenheit agreed, "Sure, call it what you will. The important things are that ‘emotion’ will no longer be needed to weight one moment differently from another, and that product improvement will no longer be random and requiring survival of the fittest to validate."

Macaskill glowered unsteadily into his tumbler. This man should be shot, now, tonight, right here, while humanity still has time to save itself.

Elon Fahrenheit laughed, I appreciate the sensibility, but really, I am simply the stick that pokes the fire. There’s a hundred more waiting to take my place. This is the engine of western civilization, and it’s coming fast. Imagine, if you will, gentlemen, from Aeschylus to extinction in the span of only three thousand years! None of us, as it turns out, was the actual life form. We are each an illusion. Millions of our illusions form a culture. Many cultures form a civilization. All of the civilizations across the universe together form the growing self-awareness of energy.

Bah! Macaskill summarized.

What does self-aware energy think about? The Editor asked.

Fahrenheit stretched. What does God think about? Perhaps it knows that it must prune man back, and so we have global warming, famine, and pandemics.

And war? The Mayor asked.

Perhaps we do war ourselves, Fahrenheit replied, as he stretched again. The end of man…except in zoos, of course, Fahrenheit said breezily.

The Editor pointed out, That assumes artificial intelligence is sentimental about the natural world, like we are. I don’t like our chances, even for zoos.

Someone hand me a gun, Macaskill groaned.

Elon Fahrenheit withdrew a small calculator from his breast pocket, jabbing out a stringing calculation. They hushed during this insider-glimpse of the incomparable Elon Fahrenheit at work.

He finished with a gasp, frozen above the keys. Looking up, At that rate, drastic change now comes once every nine years. At that rate, a Steve Jobs doesn’t even have the time to become a Steve Jobs. Hagel’s ‘World Historical Figure’, of the individual as prime mover, is finished. Henceforth, Einstein retires from the patent office; Columbus docks his cruise ship; and Alexander the Great Facebook’s his trip to Greece. We have nothing between hierarchy and anarchy. We’re entering a dead band, a null zone. Islands of plutocracy laagered inside the collapse of the ascent of man.

No wonder that our news is filled with the stupidity it is! Exclaimed the editor.

Precisely, replied Fahrenheit, a symptom of hyper-change.

Where’s the bartender? Extinct already? Bartenders will be the first to go, complained Macaskill.

"Are you the last hero then, Mr. Fahrenheit? Kinry asked.

All save Kinry wondered if Fahrenheit was putting them on, or if he was acting his role of media-savvy public personae. Was Elon Fahrenheit a person or was Elon Fahrenheit a role, or even one of the illusions that Fahrenheit himself was explaining? Kinry, with the faith of a mechanic, was not troubled.

Taggart had revealed to Fahrenheit and Dr. Gill only the harmless incidentals of his plot. All they knew was that Fahrenheit was to arrive at the hotel with two robots, each programmed with artificial intelligence. It was at the Algonquin Hotel where Taggart claimed some expectation of privacy. Naturally, it had seemed fitting that a man should choose where he wanted to die. It had not crossed their minds to wonder that Taggart had left an empty house on a mountain to come to a hotel in town for privacy.

As a major shareholder, and as Fahrenheit’s kindly mentor—avuncular and patient—Taggart had been tracking Fahrenheit’s growing work in A.I. It seems that Taggart’s downward trend in health coincided with recent developments in thousands of new lines of ladder-logic, embedding revolutionary algorithms. Whereas man has his ten-commandments, A.I. has its set-points.

Months earlier, Taggart had forwarded to Fahrenheit a trove of old photographs of the younger Taggart so that Fahrenheit was able to build a life-size robo-replica. Fahrenheit had finished it just in time. Dr. Gill’s job was to make the small incision in the scalp, and to insure that Taggart remained alive and clear headed until Fahrenheit had finished his work upstairs in the hotel. His act of dying was to be unrelieved by pain killers.

According to Taggart’s final instructions, shortly before the end came, Taggart’s memory and emotions were to be uploaded into the memory of the robot, and, as a precaution, uploaded also into the memory of a spare—the earlier prototype model with which Fahrenheit had been working in the lab during experiments of the last several years.

While Fahrenheit envisioned algorithms replacing emotion in order to weight memory, he would soon find that he was far from synthesizing true artificial emotion. Experience continued to be vastly more complex than any algorithm yet written to configure setpoints to it. Then, when the adaptive unconscious and defense mechanisms are added into the equation, emotion assumes the complexity of a squared function.

The uploaded memory of emotions would have to suffice in the interim. In any case, old man Taggart wanted his emotions intact and programmed into the Taggart robot. His emotions were indispensable to his plan: both the means as well as the end. Every humor, every prejudice, every fear, every resentment, every hatred, everything remaining since Taggart’s boyhood was to be saved.

Although the spare robot would also be uploaded with the contents of Taggart’s mind, the plan, as Taggart had explained it to Fahrenheit, called for this program not be run, nor for the spare to be energized, unless some mishap might make that necessary. This spare copy of Taggart’s mind was merely to be stored deep into the hard drive, using the prototype robot for storage only, functioning merely as an external hard drive.

Failure on that evening would mean only that Taggart had confronted the inevitable and had lost, as all Homo Sapiens must surely lose. Success, on the other hand, would mean that consciousness would resume after an interruption so brief as not to be noticed. Dying would seem like waking-up had seemed on every other morning of Taggart’s life.

It was in this manner that old man Taggart, stricken in his deathbed and following Fahrenheit with the crazed eyes of a dying paralyzed psychopath, spent his last hour: hooked up by wires to a D.C. power source, to a sinusoidal filter, to an amplifier, and to a bulky computer the size of a television, mounting the round dials of three wavering oscilloscopes. Fahrenheit sat bedside, keyboarding like Bach at his Clavier.

By the end of Fahrenheit’s twenty-minute break in the lobby bar, Dr. Gill appeared on the stairs. It is time, Elon, he said solemnly, like the Angel who rolled back the stone on the first Easter.

Mr. Taggart is near the end then, Mr. Fahrenheit? Kinry asked.

No, no. Taggart was already dead before I came down. Turning to Dr. Gill, Fahrenheit asked, Doctor, has the upload finished compiling?

Yes, Elon. Time to run the program.

Fahrenheit rose from the table. "Gentlemen, I have enjoyed our conversation. I leave you as might a Joseph