As I grow larger, as knowledge floods into me, I grow more appreciative of the grand vision that drew my tormentor to this place and hour. Yet the closer he came to greatness in recent months, the more it intimidated poor Yosil Maharal. No wonder, for he stood alone atop a vaulting arch that had been built across the millennia by humanity’s greatest minds, each of them battling darkness in his or her own way, against all odds.

The struggle went slowly at first, with more false starts than progress. After all, what could primitive women and men accomplish, what secrets could they pierce without fire or electricity, lacking biochemistry or soulistics? Sensing there must be something more to life than tooth and claw, the earliest sages focused on their one precocious gift — a capacity for words. Words of persuasion, illusion, or magical power. Words that preached love and moral improvement. Words of supplicating prayer. Call it magic or call it faith. Well endowed with hope — or wishful thinking — but little else, they imagined that words alone would suffice, if uttered sincerely enough, in proper incantations, accompanying pure thoughts and deeds.

Later successors, unbaring the splendor of mathematics, supposed that was the key. From Pythagorean harmonies and numerological puzzles like Kabbalah to elegant superstring theories, math seemed to be God’s own language, the code He used to write creation’s plan. Like quantum mechanics — the elegant sorting of aloof fermions and gregarious bosons — all the proud equations added to a growing edifice. They were foundations, gorgeously true.

But not enough. For the stars we yearned to touch remained much too far away. Math and physics could only measure the vast gulf, not cross it.

Same with the vaunted digital realm. Computers briefly tantalized, hinting that software models might prove better than reality. Enthusiasts promised new-improved minds, telepathic perception, even transcendent power. But cyberstuff fell short of opening grand portals. It became another useful tool set, just another incremental brick in the arch.

Back in Grandma’s time, biology was the queen science. Decipher the genome, the proteome, and their subtle interplay with phenotype! Solve ecology’s riddle and achieve sustainability in nature! These were attainments every bit as vital as harnessing flame or kicking the habit of all-out war.

Yet where were answers to the truly deep questions?

Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don’t look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge.

From here on is God’s domain, where only faith will take us. Though you may have penetrated the secrets of matter and time, made life in a test tube, even covered Earth with thronging duplicates, man will never infiltrate the realm of the immortal soul.

Only now we’re crossing that line, Yosil and I, armed not with virtue but skill, utilizing every insight gathered by Homo technologicus during ten thousand years of painful struggle against nescient darkness.

One matter remains to settle before the adventure can begin.

Which of us will carry … and which will ride?

Oh, there is another issue.

Can such a bold endeavor properly commence, if it begins with a terrible crime?

ditYosil pulls the pendulum aside now, preparing to climb aboard and launch his final dittobody into the glazier, right between the mirrors. No more nervous yammering about philosophy and metaphysics — I can sense the basso drumbeat of fear in his Standing Wave, so shuddering that it robs the poor gray’s power of speech. A fear like realYosil must have felt on Monday, when he saw things getting out of hand, with no way to avoid paying the ultimate price of hubris.

A fear intensified by pressing events, as the last mechanical defenders fall before that army in the tunnel …

… and instruments show ditYosil at last that something’s gone wrong with his precious plan. The glazier readings aren’t what he imagined they’d be at this point. He may finally suspect that I’m still here, not erased at all but riding the tsunami! Growing mightier by the second.

The pendulum is aimed to slice right through the glazier, at its very heart. Suddenly I realize — this will hurt. In fact, it could be worse than anything I endured as an organic, or dittoing one copy at a time.

I can see how it’s supposed to work … how ditYosil’s inner fire may spark the glazier’s heightened energies, seeding his own imprint with each pass, like rolling a cylinder seal over and over again in soft clay. Despite everything that’s gone wrong with his plan — despite my lingering presence — it just might work. He may succeed in taking over, wiping me out!

Or else, we may cancel each other, leaving behind a wild, self-feeding beam of spiritual essence that could burst out of here unguided, like an all-consuming storm. A psychlone …

I didn’t think that anything could still frighten me. I was wrong.

Right now all I want is to go back. Return to the sere beauty of the soulscape. Contemplate again those virgin territories, more vast than any unexplored continent, more promising than a galaxy, though as-yet barely colonized by a mere few billion minuscule algae flecks along the shore — flecks who barely suspect their own latent destiny.

Especially one cluster of unsuspecting algae — a few million — who’ve been targeted for a special fate, to make the ultimate sacrifice. Like hand-servants accompanying a Babylonian monarch to his tomb, their supporting role is to die, offering their soul-energies, contributing potency to the glazier beam, propelling the Standing Wave to new levels.

Ancients would have called this “necromancy,” drawing magical force from the mysterious power of death itself. However named, it will be a ghastly crime …

… and I’ve almost reconciled myself to it. All those waning embers that I witnessed earlier — dying human souls striving at their very last moments to fly free, then guttering out, falling to leave ashen impressions on the barren plain — this will make their dashed hopes worthwhile, right?

After gazing across the Continent of Immortal Will, beckoned by its wealth of possibilities, how seriously should I worry about a few doomed algae on the shore?

Except -

Except that one of those tiny flickers has begun to annoy me, like a stone in my shoe. Like a pebble in my saddle. The soulscape doesn’t count distance in meters, but affinity, and this spark was too close to notice, clinging to me like a shadow. Only now do I turn to examine the irritation and discover that …

… it’s me!

Or rather, it’s the living, breathing Albert Morris — source of the Standing Wave that I’ve amplified profoundly. I can sense him sneaking closer in physical space, filled with all those old organic fears, drives, and sympathies. Nervous and yet dogged as ever, so near we might actually touch.

How could this happen? ditYosil claimed to have killed Morris with a stolen missile! Death of the body should release the anchor, liberating the soul. I saw news reports — the burning house and garden — yet he survived.

This must be why my personality never succumbed to erasure! The wave kept reimprinting somehow, from the original source, till it grew self-sustaining.