Elijah Smith's overcoat was open and flapping in the wind as he climbed the stairs up to the platform that had been erected in front of the building that bore his name. The sun was bright, but the air was cold. Smith, however, was warmed by the pride he felt that day. This building that he had sketched on a napkin at a bar so many years ago now defined the very skyline of downtown Schenectady. Smith himself was hardy and robust, his cheeks almost as red as the ribbon across the door to the building behind him. The little aches and pains he felt in his arms and legs were still easy for him to dismiss as natural consequences of aging.

His staff had assembled to hear him dedicate the building and representatives from SmithCorp facilities across the globe had flown in to be present for the inauguration of their new flagship building. The Mayor and the City Council were in attendance. Members of the general press were present and he could see the froth of flashes from the cameras that were documenting his every move. Reporters and photographers from the more specialized media outlets -- technology shows, medical journals, science magazines -- had been offered preferential placement nearest to the stage. Placing these lesser known journalists in the most desirable spots from which to document the event was an unveiled nod to those that he considered his brethren in the pursuit of knowledge for the benefit of men. Smith was well known for symbolic gestures of this sort.

The tired looking reporter from the Schenectady Gazette had no photographer, just a notepad. He was not offended at having been placed toward the back of the press area. He really just didn't want to be there at all. He cursed his life and wished he was dead instead of standing in the cold among a crowd of sycophants who all seemed so certain that with wealth came wisdom. Julian Waterstone was too old to believe that anymore. He just wanted to go home.

As Smith approached the podium, he could hear the applause of the spectators. Taking his place at the podium and looking out at the gathered crowd humbled him. All these people had gathered to hear his words, but his passion was not words, it was science. The fact that this passion had ultimately rewarded him with material success meant little to him. He had no children, no wife, no one to leave his vast fortune to. There would be no legacy. The value of his work-the reward that satisfied him-was the recognition that his company was making people's lives better. The fact that the assemblage had greeted his approach to the podium with applause was proof that his efforts were appreciated.

He reached into his coat pocket and felt some stiffness in his elbow as he pulled out his notecards. He blamed it on the cold and on the fact that he hadn't buttoned his coat. He cleared his throat and began.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he started in the only way he knew how, "thank you all for coming. I promise that my remarks will be brief and then we can all go inside and have some hot chocolate. But before we do, I just want to express my gratitude to all of you for being here. I have dedicated my life to science and technology, not for my own self enrichment, but in order to better the lives of people the world over." He paused to let the audience applaud politely before continuing. "As most of you know, in the last 20 years or so, SmithCorp has led the way in technologies to assist doctors in the treatment of serious illnesses, rehabilitative technologies, bio-engineering, genetics, security, and home comfort systems for the critically impaired and much, much more. We have the worlds best minds at SmithCorp, engineers, designers, programmers. We now hold more patents than any other company in the U.S., and quite possibly in the world."

There was applause from the audience again, and Smith let the applause run its course before continuing.

"This building," he said, pointing at the highrise behind him, "though it bears my name, is not intended to be a legacy for me. It is a legacy to all of the amazing, creative, and talented people who made SmithCorp what it is today. And so to everyone in the SmithCorp family, I dedicate this gorgeous building to you."

He paused again to allow the applause to pass.

"Let it forever be a beacon for all those who put their faith in technology," he continued, "an altar for all those who know that the ultimate salvation of mankind lies in the pursuit of knowledge. And though its spires point upward, the answers lie right here; not in the unknowable mysteries of the heavens, but in the measurable and quantifiable elements and forces of nature.

"So as I cut this ribbon, do not consider this to be a dedication to cement and glass and steel, but a dedication to what this building represents to me, what all of SmithCorp represents to me: the limitless capacity of men to learn and study and experiment and ultimately bring forth a glorious future for mankind."

As soon us he uttered the last word of that last sentence he reached under the podium and drew out an oversized remote control to cheers and enthusiastic applause. "Mayor?" he asked, looking for a particular face in the crowd. He quickly spotted the familiar face he was seeking and motioned to the Mayor to join him on the stage. "Come on up and join me in the honors!"

The Mayor was all too happy to jump on the stage and wave to the cheering crowd. The Mayor walked to the podium and gave Smith a warm and genuine hug. After all, the construction of this building had already brought hundreds of new jobs to the city and the promise of thousands more.

"On the count of three!" Smith shouted.

The assembled crowd began to count off, "One, Two, Three," and at three the mayor and Mr. Smith, with exaggerated sweeps of their arms, pushed the button on the giant remote control.

A loud crack and a puff of smoke came from the big red ribbon which had been set across the door to the brand new building. The ends of the ribbon blew apart and the doors to the building were opened releasing hundreds of balloons into the sky. Mr. Smith and the Mayor turned to leave the stage and lead the crowd inside. Smith stumbled a little on the way down the stairs because his leg had stiffened in mid-stride. I'll have to get that checked out, he noted to himself as he quickly regained his balance.

Julian Waterstone also noted the nearly imperceptible stumble and recorded it on his pad: Smith appears to be stiff

That day, though many years had passed since then, was the proudest day of Elijah Smith's life. And on that day, he had no doubt in the truth of the words he had spoken. But that was before the number of days yet before him had been quantified. That was before he became trapped in the hospital bed in which he would ultimately die. It was before the wheelchair, and before the walker. It was even before the cane.

As the number of days measuring his life became fewer and fewer, the words he had spoken that day became his own devout petition. He recognized the irony in the fact that his declaration of the supremacy of science was indistinguishable from a prayer. It was a desperate prayer that somewhere, within technology's reach, a procedure or mechanism could be devised that would keep him tethered to the world of the living. It was a prayer that the number of his days did not end at zero.

A desperate mind is capable of superhuman achievement, and Smith's achievements, even before he became desperate, had been exceptional. There are endeavors of such incredible complexity that most people dismiss them as being impossible. Smith was not one of those people. He had spent his entire life dissecting complex endeavors into small component parts and in doing so had repeatedly done what most had believed could not be done. It also made him very, very wealthy.

Smith had the discipline to view his desire to stay alive, even as his body withered, as nothing more than another such complex endeavor. And as he did with any complex endeavor, he had started it on a spreadsheet.

Smith saw the blank sheet before him the way a painter sees a blank canvas. He could envision what the page would look like when he was done. He just had to translate the idea in his head into the columns on the chart. First it would be a sketch with broad concepts and lots of entries that just wouldn't look right. Finally, it would present a complete picture that made perfectly clear what he wanted.

Just looking at the empty spreadsheet excited him, as it always did. But this time, the excitement had an electricity to it. A spark. A spark that made his whole deteriorating body shake. Six years ago, he wouldn't have noticed that spark, but, as his body began to do nothing but disappoint him, he became more and more fascinated by his consciousness. He had no problem abandoning his body, but he could not bear the thought that his thoughts and feelings would be buried with it.

Smith brushed his hands across the laptop's keyboard, delighting in both the sound and the sensation of his fingers on the keys. Even though his fingers were stiffened from his disease and the pain punctuated his every move, he smiled as the word MODEL appeared in the first column of the first row of the spreadsheet, bold and capitalized just as he had envisioned it.

The more he typed the less aware he was of the pain. For a time, he even forgot he was dying. Under the word "MODEL" he watched long lists of words appear on the screen as his fingers translated his ideas into words. Brain, hemispheres, lobes, cells, neurons, nerves, blood vessels. Some of the words became column headings in the spreadsheet and some of the words were grouped together under other words. Finally, his fingers would not move anymore and the pain blurred all of his thoughts. He stopped typing and let his mind wander. "In the beginning there was the word," he thought, vaguely remembering something he had heard in church as a child.

He had always hated church. He was a man of science and faith seemed antithetical to science. Once you accept something as a matter of faith, that is the end of inquiry. Smith was never satisfied with the “just because” answer he heard so often from religious men. “Take it apart,” was what he perceived to by the answer to every problem he encountered. “Take it apart more. Keep breaking it down,” he often told his staff when they came to him for advice.

He had never failed to find a needed answer when he had the patience and resources to strip things down to their bare essentials. Even as a child he would disassemble his toys until he understood exactly how they worked. Once he knew how they worked, he could easily put them back together and sometimes even make them better. As he grew, he learned that the same principles that applied to his toys also applied to plastic models, fast cars, powerful computers, and ultimately even to the acquisition of wealth.

He had often proved the theory that once it could be understood how the smallest elements of any system work together, even the most complex system becomes simple. He attributed his success in all of his business and scientific endeavors to this belief.

As he rested his hands and contemplated the words and columns on the computer screen before him, he remembered the first project that had earned him international attention. When he was in graduate school, the stumbling block in robotics was to program a robot to go into the woods and build a simple structure, a bird's nest was the usual example, from the available materials. The task was seemingly impossible since the robot would have to recognize random items not for what they were, but for what they could be.

Two schools of thought prevailed and the answer seemed to be in some combination of the two. The "bottom-up" approach involved programming the robot with as much factual information as possible so that the robot could "look" at an item, compare it to a database of information, define the item according its qualities, and use the item in a manner consistent with its definition. This thing is brown, slender, pourous, and has such and such a density. Therefore, it is an oak branch. An oak branch can be used for this or that defined set of tasks.

The second school of thought defined itself as the "top-down" approach. Rather than creating a database comprising a virtually infinite set of definitions, the "top-down" programmers created algorithms by which the robot could learn by experience and observation, in effect building its own database of knowledge as it gathered information about its environment.

Smith was not a student of robotics. He was a student of biology. He figured that the task required thought rather than programming. At the time neuroscience could not explain "thought", but biology could see all of the different elements of a brain capable of thought. His insight was to build the brain from scratch. Not a physical brain, but a virtual one. He used the brain of a European Quail. Each cell in the Quail's brain was already mapped and described in everything from chemical composition to electrical discharge. Smith took the existing data and created a computer simulation of each cell. He then began situating the simulated cells according their arrangement in the biological brain. He simulated blood flow, oxygen use, electricity, protein bonding, and everything else that was observed to happen in a quail's brain. His theory was that by copying all of the measurable parts of the quail's brain he would have a machine that displayed quail behaviors-- including nest building.

The university could not fund the project to completion, but the theory itself put Smith in the spotlight for a while and he knew that one day he would try again.

Now the word model had replaced the word "simulation" in his thinking and the word "model" glowed in bold type in the upper left hand corner of his computer screen. He rubbed his aching hands. "Model" was the better word, he thought. His project was about an artificial brain. A working model of a human brain. The word "model" explained the difference between his project and an artificial intelligence project far better than the word "simulation".

Artificial intelligence is about programming a computer to do what a human brain does. It is about creating an instruction set which can emulate a brain. Smith had more respect for the brain than that. He reasoned that a computer could not be programmed to do what a human brain does, because a human brain can react to seemingly infinite inputs and process a seemingly infinite number of variables. Given an eternity and and all the programmer's in the world, no computer could be ever programmed to process so much information among so many criteria as the human brain does in a nano-second. Infinity, even if only just an illusion, was an obvious problem.

But, although measuring in the billions, or even trillions, modeling each measurable component of the brain and ascribing a set of values and functions to each part certainly fell within the realm of human capacity. Creating a model of the human brain was a finite endeavor. In theory, by replicating the human brain, the mind too would be replicated.

He knew that he would have to map out his strategy before he would lose his ability to communicate just as he had already lost his ability to walk.

When his body started to fail, his home was transformed into a medical facility. When he first stopped walking on his own, he could still wheel himself to the elevator to reach the upper stories of his mansion. When he became confined to bed, his entire world shrunk to the size of his living room. Though his living room was huge by any standard, he hated living so confined to such a small space. He found it ironic that he was already formulating a plan to make his entire universe smaller than this one room. The furniture was replaced with two beds and numerous medical machines. One of the beds was Smith's electric hospital bed. The second was a bed for his live-in nurse, Hermelinda Posada, who treated him gently and never left his side.

The sicker he got the fewer people came to visit. Rather than resent those who did not come, he grew more and more attached to and dependent on those who still did come. He had long ago decided that he was madly in love with Hermelinda, and he correctly read her devotion to him as a reciprocation of that love.

Myra Shiltz was another frequent visitor. She had been his personal assistant for nearly ten years. He had barely noticed her until he became less and less able to conduct his affairs on his own. Now he recognized and genuinely appreciated her ability to anticipate his needs and carry out his instructions-- the same qualities which had made her virtually unnoticeable to him in the past. Now, she was truly just an extension of himself. His staff saw her as an extension of him too. Because of that Myra was able to control office affairs even with Smith gone. Smith once quipped that because of Myra he could be dead for five years before anyone at the office would notice. He trusted her completely notwithstanding the fact that he had no other choice.

Alice, his night nurse, kept watch over Smith when Hermelinda couldn't. Even though Hermelinda was there most of the time, she had to watch the monitors while Hermelinda slept. She was a cheerful, middle-aged Filipina. She habitually updated Smith with the latest celebrity gossip. Though he had no interest in news of the latest Hollywood breakup, her lightheartedness gave Smith a special cheer and he always listened to her stories intently. Almost every week she would bring fresh fruits and vegetables from her own garden for Hermelinda to enjoy or juice for Smith.

After Alice, his most frequent visitor was Dr. Bayron, his co-conspirator in the artificial brain project. Smith particularly enjoyed Dr. Bayron's visits. He felt they spoke a language that no one else quite understood. Not just the language of science, but another language known only to them that grew out of their still-secret project.

He also got occasional visits from Sam Takahashi, an old childhood friend and Smith's personal lawyer. Sam's visits began to taper off when Smith could no longer raise a glass and enjoy a drink. Sam was a famous alcoholic whose benders were legendary. Smith did not fault him for not wanting to spend good drinking hours entertaining a dying man. Smith once explained to Hermelinda, when he was still strong enough to hold full conversations, that in life a man will have very few friends they can call to pick them up in a strange city in the middle of the night with no questions asked, and that Takahashi was that friend to him. "We know each other for over 50 years," Smith assured her, "he'll be here when I need him, and no one will be able to keep him away".

The two beds in what had been the living room were close together. They had not started that way though. Smith had instructed the furniture movers to place the beds on opposite sides of the room so that Hermelinda could have some sense of privacy and personal space even though she had to be in sight of her patient.

After just a few weeks of sleeping on opposite sides of the room, Hermelinda pushed her bed across the room right next to Smith's bed. She said she was tired of having to walk across the room every time Smith or one of his machines needed attention, but Smith thought she just liked being near him. Sometimes, when it didn't hurt too much, he would reach over to her bed and stroke her hair. She seemed to make a purring noise whenever he did so.

She did not make an excuse when she stopped sleeping in her own bed altogether and began climbing into his.

Smith liked having her close at night. He could smell her and she smelled nice, a little like roses, a little like jasmine, and a little like ... coconut? The smell made him feel safe. He wished that his body still worked well enough to be able to make love to her, but that function was one of the first to fail on his now almost completely useless body.

On a bright Monday morning Myra arrived, promptly, as usual, at 9 a.m. "Good morning, Mr. Smith," Myra said as she pulled a chair up close to his bed.

"Okay, okay everything hurts today, so let's just move the ball forward as much as possible before Hermelinda drugs me up and puts me out."

"Alright. We actually got a lot accomplished," she said. "With the additional staff and processing capacity, Dr. Bayron has changed his time estimate to one more year."

"Doesn't that son-of-a-bitch know I'm dying now? What the hell else does he need?" Smith began to move his arms as he said this in an effort to emphasize his point, but the pain that showed in his face as he tried to move his arms made the point for him.

"Relax, relax, relax..." Myra said looking to Hermelinda to see if she was at all concerned by Smith's outburst. And in fact, when she looked at Hermelinda she saw Hermilinda looking at the monitor near Smith's bed. The two women smiled at each other, each recognizing that they shared the same concern for the man in the bed. Smith relaxed, so Myra continued, "There's more." Smith had noticed the glance between the only two women in his life and forgot what had angered him in the first place. “Dr. Bayron has been in contact with a Russian research team at the St. Petersberg Neurological Institute who are also modeling a human brain,” Myra continued. “They want to collaborate. Dr. Bayron told me to tell you that these guys already have a complete model of a hypothalamus and are well underway with the hippocampus. He said that combined with what he’s gotten accomplished, we could have a complete model in just about six weeks.”

"That was not my plan. I am very concerned about that," said Smith.

"I'll get him on the web-cam right now." She said as she pulled her laptop from her bag. She pressed a few buttons on her computer and the lights in the room went dim as a large display mounted to the wall lit up with an image of Myra's desktop wallpaper of a sunset over the ocean. Myra adjusted a small webcam on Smith's notebook computer until his image appeared in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Moments later another image filled the remainder of the screen: the image of Dr. Bayron, a frayed, black spiral notebook on his desk in front of him.

Every time she saw him, Myra noticed new details about Dr. Bayron’s transformation since he first began working with Smith. When she first met him, he was tall, dark, and handsome. A quiet and mysterious stranger of the sort she would have liked to have swept her off her feet. But under Smith's crushing demands, he had largely stopped taking care of himself. His face had begun to sag for lack of sleep. His movements became listless due to lack of exercise, his hair unruly for want of a haircut, and his posture stooped from too many hours hunched over a microscope.

No one in their right mind would sacrifice so much of his own life for his employer, not even someone paid as handsomely as Dr. Bayron. But Myra knew that Dr. Bayron shared her employer's obsession.

Smith spoke first. "Can you hear me?"

"Yeah. You got the news?"

"I did."

"Well, what do you think?" Bayron asked.

"I think I want more facts." Smith said.

"Like what?"

"Don't play dumb with me Bayron. You know I'm not giving you these obscene amounts of money to model any old brain. I want a model of my brain."

"I know that, but I also know time is running out. Look, I don't even know if their code is useful. It could be complete crap for all I know. Just authorize the information sharing for now. It costs you nothing and we may be able to speed our process by studying theirs. I think you need to give me a little latitude on this. Trust me, if I don't need it, I won't use it."

"It's your code, Doc. If you want to share it, that's your prerogative. Just don't go mixing up my brain with someone else's. You don't want to go creating a Frankenstein. But if I were you, I'd speak with legal before letting anything out of that lab. Between your time and my money, it's got to be worth an awful lot."

"If I thought the way you did I'd be richer than you." Bayron quipped. "I'll call legal in the morning."

Myra piped in, "Should he call in-house legal, or should he call Takahashi?"

"Nah," Smith said, Keep this in house. "Takahashi hates paperwork. I'll tell Takahashi in my own way. Bob Hanover in legal handles the intellectual property and patents. Give Bayron Hanover’s extension. Someone in-house should know what we're doing anyway."

A short but clear silence followed as Bayron and Myra contemplated the fact that the project had been kept strictly need-to-know until this time.

Smith broke the silence himself, "...and don't forget to upload your progress to me." The instruction was completely unnecessary.

"Don't micromanage me Smith." Bayron said with a smile.

"Hey, remember, I'm the rich one. Don't tell me how to do my job." They both laughed, but the pain from the laughter cut Smith's chuckle short. Smith winced and lost his breath. Hermelinda came rushing to the bedside. Bayron opened the notebook on his desk and wrote some shorthand notes.

"I'll call you later with that number," Myra said into the webcam and then abruptly terminated the conference to give Hermelinda space to tend to her patient.

It was evident to both Myra and Hermelinda that Smith always enjoyed his conversations with Bayron. Bayron was smart, personable, and driven. But he especially liked talking to Bayron about the project. They had their own language for discussing the things which just a few months ago had been nameless and virtually unimaginable. That lexicon was a natural part of many of their conversations. Sometimes, when talking to Bayron, Smith felt like a visitor in a foreign country who finally hears his native tongue and at once feels -- even if just for a moment -- home.

"Hermelinda," Smith called out her name as loud as he could, even though she was right next to him, "be a dear and give me some morphine. My neck hurts."

In another part of the world, another man was also in pain, and he cursed his pain. He had suffered a life of ugly and difficult work and, in his own opinion, he had earned his pain and had also earned the right to curse it. He was not the unfortunate recipient of some unfortunate disease that chose its victims, like Smith, at random. He had pain in his hands and fingers and he accepted that he deserved that pain for having used his hands in horrible ways. He could not remember how many times he splinted his own broken fingers or dressed his own wounds when proper medical care was not an option.

He rubbed a medicated menthol gel into his twisted, arthritic, and abused fingers and as he did so, each irregularity that he could feel in his bones brought back memories of a time when he was young and an intolerance for pain seemed to be a luxury afforded only to the old and the weak. A dent below the second knuckle on his left hand reminded him that some doors are made out of steel and cannot be punched through. The lump that had never fully healed on his right hand taught him that sometimes the person holding the gun is at a disadvantage in close combat. That lesson had nearly cost him his trigger finger, which snapped back and practically broke off when an American tried to kick the gun out of his hand. His scars, both internal and external, were the only medals one could earn in his line of work, and he cherished them, even as he cursed them.

The fingers on his left hand still moved reasonably well, but the fingers on his right hand hardly moved at all anymore. This made it difficult for him to open the child-proof lid on his extra-strength Tylenol. He poured four Tylenol into his huge but barely functioning right hand and tossed all four into his mouth, washing them down with a large belt of Imperia Vodka straight from the bottle.

Vladimir Vakhrusheva had successfully adapted the skills that he had learned and perfected for the benefit of a now-defunct government to the new free-market economy which now dominated northern Asia. He had learned quickly that those skills were exceedingly valuable to his new, powerful, entrepreneurial benefactors. But still, the only mark of his success in Russia's post-perestroika free-for-all, was his rather quick transition from cheap Polish potato vodka to the finest quartz-filtered, Imperia Vodka made from the rarest wheat according to Mendeleev's original formula.