Festina gave a humorless chuckle. "Fair enough. I’ll ask something more meaningful. How can you speak English?"

Ohpa waved his hand. "Also irrelevant." He didn’t look in my direction. I wondered if he was keeping the Balrog’s data transfer a secret for my sake, or if there was some other reason not to speak of it.

"All right," Festina said. "Relevant questions. What is this place and what were you doing here?"

"This place is a playroom of reductionism and control. What you would call a laboratory." Ohpa shook himself and hopped toward a cadaver on a nearby table. Under his breath he muttered something in a language I didn’t know, then extended his hand in a gesture of blessing. He turned back and told Festina, "I’m here because I succumbed to hope and ambition. I volunteered to be a test subject." He spread his arms to display his hairless body; his tail gave a spasmodic jerk. "As you can see, the experiment was unsuccessful."

"What was the experiment supposed to do?"

"Make me Tathagata."

I gasped. Festina looked my way, then asked the Fuentes, "What’s Tathagata?"

Ohpa waved as if I should answer — a movement so human, he must have learned my body language from the Balrog as well as spoken words. I told Festina, "Tathagata means ‘the one who has come at this time.’ It was an honorific for Prince Gotama, the Buddha… to distinguish him from other Buddhas who’d lived in earlier times or might come in the future."

Festina turned back to Ohpa in surprise. "The experiment was supposed to make you a Buddha?"

"Tathagata."

"A living Buddha," I said. "One who’s enlightened right now… as opposed to someone who might become a Buddha in a million more lives. Theoretically, we’re all Buddhas — we all have the potential and will get there eventually — but a Tathagata has Awakened in the current lifetime."

Festina made a face. "I’m not thrilled when an alien claims to be a figure from Earth religion. It’s way too convenient."

"Ease up, Auntie," Tut said. "Ohpa likely peeked into our heads with X-ray vision, and Youn Suu’s brain happened to have an approximation for what he really is." Tut turned to the alien. "You aren’t really Tatha-whosit, right? That’s just the closest equivalent you could find in our minds."

"I’m not Tathagata at all," Ohpa replied. "The experiment was supposed to make me so, but it failed."

"How did it fail?" Festina asked.

"The actual cause you would find uninteresting." Ohpa gave a sudden leap with his rabbitlike haunches, landing several paces away and pointing to a thigh-high gray box whose contents had been partly dissected by Team Esteem. "If I told you this machine had a flaw, would you be any wiser? If I said there was an unforeseen feedback loop between my DNA and the molecular logic circuits herein, would you hear more than empty words? Do you understand the complexities of dark matter and transdimensional biology, or would it be futile to explain?"

"Transdimensional biology?" Festina said. "You’re just making that up."

"If I were, you wouldn’t know, would you?" Ohpa made a rasping sound in his throat — perhaps the Fuentes version of a laugh. "Suffice it to say, the procedure I underwent had errors. Instead of becoming Success Number One, I became Failure Number Thirty-six. Instead of becoming Tathagata, I became a travesty."

I asked, "What did you think it meant, becoming Tathagata? A mental transformation? A process to remove fixations from your brain?"

Ohpa swished his tail, then drove the sharp spade tip into the computer-like box beside him. Fragments of broken metal and plastic spilled onto the floor. "A mental transformation?" he said. "Removing fixations? You give my people too much credit. We had no thought of changing our psyches; we didn’t think we needed it. My people dreamed of becoming gods — increasing our intelligence a thousandfold, abandoning our physical bodies and becoming pure energy — yet we imagined we’d retain our original personalities. We’d be vastly more powerful, but the same people, with the same prejudices, conceits, fears, hatreds, blind spots, envies, distorted priorities, unexamined desires, irrational goals, unconfronted denials… ah, such fools. Believing we could don transcendence as easily as a new coat. So sure of our unquestioned values. So ready for a fall."

"What kind of fall?" Festina asked. "What happened to you? To this planet? What’s going on?"

"Karma," Ohpa replied. "A harvest of suffering, grown from the seeds of arrogance. Trying to seize heaven by force. Taking the easy way again and again, rather than daring the hard way once."

Festina rolled her eyes. "Why do I always end up listening to gobbledygook from godlike aliens? And why can they never give a straight answer?"

"Here’s a thought," Tut said. "Ohpa buddy, with your not-quite-Tathagata wisdom, why don’t you just tell what we need to know? And please, your Buddhousness, give it in a form we’re likely to follow. Okay?"

Ohpa’s mandibles relaxed; I could almost believe he was smiling, if his complex alien mouth was capable of such a thing. Tut had done what every disciple must do: submit to the teacher’s agenda rather than demanding the teacher submit to yours.

"Very well," Ohpa said. "I’ll tell you a tale of hubris."

And he did.

There came a time [Ohpa said] when Fuentes scientists realized the body was not the self.

[He looked at me. He was quoting Buddhist doctrine. One’s body is not one’s self. Neither are one’s emotions, perceptions, desires, or even one’s consciousness. All those things are partial aspects, not one’s absolute essence. We have no absolute essence. We’re ever-changing aggregates of components that constantly come and go.]

If the body is not the self [Ohpa continued], perhaps the self could be divorced from the body — made manifest in some other medium besides flesh. Flesh is weak and short-lived. Would it not be better to place the self in a stronger vessel? One that did not age. One immune to sickness. One that could not die.

Many believed this goal might be achieved by becoming simulations within a computer; but that proved unsatisfactory. Computers could simulate a single person’s intellect, and they could simulate small environments, but no computer has the capacity to simulate an entire planet, let alone the galaxy or the universe. Computerized personalities soon felt they were prisoners in tiny, predictable worlds.

But scientists determined there were other media to which an individual’s consciousness could be uploaded. In particular, personalities might be impressed upon constructions of normal and dark matter. This may sound like nonsense, but your scientific knowledge is too primitive to allow for more detailed explanation. How would you describe a silicon-chip computer to preindustrial peoples? Would you tell them you’d combined sand and lightning to make a box that could think? They’d think you were mad. Some concepts can’t be conveyed to those without the background to understand. You must simply accept that consciousness can be transferred from flesh into something more Celestial.

Or so our scientists believed. They still had to overcome technical difficulties.

A world was set aside for research. This world. Every person in every city was either a scientist or a support worker. If the project was successful, our entire species would use the resulting process to become higher lifeforms. To ascend. To become transcendent.

The research was divided into smaller subprojects. Experiments were conducted around the planet, but this building was one of two centers where everything came together. Scientists assembled subcomponents to create test processes, and to try those processes on volunteers who were willing to risk everything for the chance to become Tathagata.