Think, Albert. Look back at all the tragedies that marred human life, ever since our dim beginnings. Sickness stole your loved ones. Starvation scythed your tribe. Blighted by ignorance and coarse of speech, you couldn’t even share what little you managed to learn. Or take the frustrating clumsiness of your hands and slowness of feet. Or the curse of having to be just one place at a time, when innumerable things needed doing! None of these problems were solved by the prescriptions of shamans and priests. Not by patronizing mystics or condescending monks.

Technology. That’s what made things better! In fits and starts — and often horribly abused along the way — that’s where we found answers that were consistent, dependable, uncapricious. Answers that applied to lord and vassal alike. Answers that improved life across the board and never went away.

So, why not use technology to solve the greatest age-old riddle — immortality for the soul?

I admit, I’m starting to understand what drove Yosil Maharal. Heaven help me, I can grasp his dream.

With each passing moment, I learn more. Explicit facts and abstract theorizations pour in, sponged out of ditYosil as he works unsuspecting nearby, striving to finish before attackers break in. His knowledge — the work of a lifetime — comes to me unearned and disjointed. I can encompass the glazier’s beauty, for example, at an aesthetic level, before the underlying equations make any sense. The uneven pace of understanding is one reason why I’ve held back from meddling. So far.

Examining all those fragile glimmers out there, I believe I know what holds them apart — a raw dread of losing individuality! Of being smeared out. Of getting lost. People approach and then avoid each other in a mad dance, fearful of both too much isolation and too much intimacy.

I remember that dance, too well. But the fear is gone now, burned out by my ordeal in Maharal’s tormenting machinery. In becoming many, I no longer dread the prospect of sharing a Standing Wave.

Am I like some bodhisattva, then, returning from Nirvana with compassionate aid for the unenlightened? Is it compassion I feel, so eager to intervene?

I yearn to reach out, to embrace all those dismayed flickers, to waken and encourage and liberate them. To stoke their wan fires and force them to acknowledge the starkness all around.

It’s not the humble version of compassion we’ve been taught to admire. Unlike a buddha, I brim with ambition for myself and all of my benighted species!

Some honest corner of me calls this “arrogant.”

So? Doesn’t that very honesty help qualify me for the job?

For sure, I’ll make a better god than ditYosil.

Algae on a barren shore. Increasingly, I find that metaphor apt. For we seem very much like the first creatures that climbed awkwardly from the sea to colonize bare land, underneath a blazing sun.

The nearly empty soulscape beckons, like a new frontier. One filled with far more potential than sterile outer space with its mere planets and galaxies. Science and religion only hinted at the immense potential here! If we can make it happen.

I can make it happen! I suspect this with growing excitement. There are just a few things to figure out first …

Wait. I see it now! A truth that Professor Maharal realized weeks ago. His ghost actually tried to explain it to me, with analogies from quantum mechanics. I never understood then, but now it seems so clear -

The body is an anchor.

That paragon of organic evolution, the breakthrough marvel of human flesh and brain that made self-awareness, abstraction, and the Standing Wave all possible — the body comes well equipped for those wonders, but also saddled with animal instincts and needs, like individuality, craving the insulation of I and thou the way a fish needs the surrounding stroke of water.

To finish climbing ashore, leaving the sea for good, we must abandon the carapace of flesh!

This realization must have terrified Professor Maharal, triggering a split between his rig and rox, between man and golem, copy and archetype, ditto and master. realYosil saw self-murder looming as a natural consequence of his own research. He may even have agreed, in abstract. But the body would defend itself, flooding his real brain with panic hormones, sending him plunging across the desert in blind and futile flight.

Of course then realAlbert had to follow him in death. Both the rider and the mirrors must be un-anchored. Another small price of deification. I see it now.

Only suddenly I fathom something else.

It won’t be enough to sever just two body links.

More souls have to be cut loose, soon, in order to feed the glazier’s hungry process.

More murder … on a grand scale.

Images pour into me … things ditYosil had pushed to a corner of his mind. I glimpse a symbol — a trefoil of blood red scythes — accompanied by words: airborne contagion. Then another quick impression of missiles … trim, efficient rockets, stolen and assembled, ready to fire on an urban trajectory. At a moment that’s approaching soon.

I need to know more!

Whatever ditYosil has planned may be justifiable. Evolution doesn’t happen without pain or loss. A lot of fish died, in order for a few to stand. The price may be worthwhile …

… but only if the benefits can actually be achieved!

Yosil has already been much too careless. The experiment veered off its planned course, or else why would I feel this growing tide of power and ambition as the number of my perfect duplicates keeps multiplying, gathering energy like magma under a volcano? I am the one getting ready to ride the Big Wave … something ditYosil never anticipated.

If he made one mistake, he might have made others. I’d better check, and quick.

He really shouldn’t be allowed to slaughter so many innocents.

At least, not till I’m sure there’s a high probability of success.

Crawling slowly after a trail of footprints in the dust, propelled through blazing agony by little more than stubbornness, dragging the dead weight of this dying body with just one good arm and a half-functioning leg … I couldn’t help wondering what I ditto deserve this.

My aim was to chase Beta, to catch the basdit before this body of mine dissolved, to thwart his evil scheme — whatever it might be. And if that proved to much to ask? Well, then, maybe I could inconvenience him a little. By biting him around the ankles, if nothing else.

All right, it wasn’t much of a plan. But my other motivation, curiosity, which had kept me going for two grinding days, didn’t serve anymore. I no longer cared about the secret struggle among three geniuses — Beta, Kaolin, and Maharal — only that they all must think they were rid of this cheap green copy by now, and damn if I wasn’t going to show them otherwise!

Anyway, that’s how it felt as I crawled past the main part of the old vacation house and into the mountain, following Beta’s footprints across the uneven floor of a cave … a natural limestone grotto that must have attracted Maharal to build here in the first place, erecting his cabin over the entrance, then using the cavern to establish a clandestine scientific redoubt.

Glowbulbs cast long shadows across stalactites and other drip features that shimmered along their dewey flanks. Water beads glistened as they fell. If my ears were functioning, I’d surely have heard a rhythmically pleasant plinking as the drops struck cloudy pools. One sound did penetrate, a low vibration I felt through my belly while creeping across the stone floor, growing more intense as I pursued Beta’s trail downward at a shallow angle … easier for me than climbing, I suppose.