"Frakas, our people are dying," Drakus said as deadpan as he could muster. He didn't want his own emotions clouding things further.  

"What would you have me do?" 

What I've wanted all along. "Put me in charge. Stop distracting yourself from your science." Besides, a Napoleonic complex doesn't wear nearly so well on you. 

Frakas merely laughed.  

He sipped his whiskey and winked at Drakus.  

Could the fool know I poisoned the drink? 

Frakas guzzled the rest of the glass.  

Zero effect. He must have counteracted it somehow. Damn him and his genius for bioengineering. 

"I enjoy the mental chess of staying two steps ahead of you in order to avoid the next back stabbing. Here's to hoping you grow more treacherous with each passing day," he said, raising a fresh glass in toast. He was well on his way to getting himself good and drunk to blot out this latest chapter in his life.  

"Maybe if you could stop feeling sorry for yourself long enough, you could think your way out of this quandary."  

"The solution is well in hand, my friend. I have but to sacrifice the last bit of human decency coursing through my veins. Worry not; the wine is putting a quick end to that." 

"What do you mean?" 

Frakas hammered the empty bottle into the table. "Come, I'll show you." 

The sliding doors were closing behind Frakas and still Drakus hadn't built up enough nerve to follow. He hung back, wondering why he couldn't keep from pushing his brother. It never did any good.  

He poured himself a wine, drank it, and cleaned the sides with his tongue, reaching all the way to the bottom, a feat worthy of a lizard. So this is how the other half lives. It isn't as appetizing as all that.  

He strolled out of the room, thinking he'd catch up with Frakas soon enough. Frakas was in no condition to run. It was a nice role reversal for once. In his dreams, Drakus was the one running from him, convinced he was finally in the clear, only to find he wasn't.  

He was at Frakas's side in time for both the parting of the doors and the parting of the ways. Before him was a sight he could hardly believe. "You brought one of those things aboard?"  

"More than one."  

"What for? The creatures will kill you before you have a chance to wink at them." 

"I admit fear propels this life form more than reason. Still, for a creature light in the forebrain, it has proven an exemplary survivor, leaving me only to build on that foundation." 

"And how do you plan to do that?"  

Frakas injected Drakus at the neck, using his well-considered body positioning just behind him, to pull off the deed. As Drakus collapsed in his arms, he replied, "With a little help from my brother." 

Frakas heaved Drakus onto the table, and initiated the scan of his brain, using uploading technology that many had opted to take advantage of back on Earth.  

Thanks to steady microchip advances, and countless scanning resolution barriers transgressed, by 2040 it was easy enough to upload anyone who wanted to live forever into a digital only universe. Most had chosen to do just that. By then most were living more in virtual reality than in the real world anyway.  

Some had subsequently chosen to download themselves to robotic bodies, time-sharing them as if they were condos on the Riviera. The "all digital nirvana" many of the early-adopters had opted for was overseen by a global consciousness, but the latest incarnation of the internet, now fully sentient. It was She who had solicited global cooperation to fast track the moon and Mars colonies, fearing, as Frakas did, that keeping all the eggs in one basket was no longer prudent.  

Mother by now had no doubt rocketed past any fumbling attempts at evolution he could conjure from the recesses of his own brain.  

But strangely Earth had gone silent. He had expected to be replaced by space-farers built for the task by Mother according to infinitely superior engineering criteria. Robotic life forms far more suited for surviving the rigors of space would surely come one day. And sooner than anyone thought since Mother compressed human lifetimes into nanoseconds with her data-crunching abilities and her post-exponential rate of evolution, with a brain, moreover, the size of the entire planet.  

But the logical never happened. That left only a few insane notions.  

Perhaps Mother, in upgrading herself at a feverish pace, had pushed forth into Singularity State as the prophetic computer scientist Ray Kurzweil had predicted. Perhaps her mental machinations now were so powerful as to warp time and space itself. Perhaps they literally conjured a black hole effect through which She and her minions had escaped into a land beyond time and space. Digital nirvana, indeed.  

But Frakas would have expected the Earth to disappear in the process along with her. Instead it shone like the jewel in space it was all along, as if entirely unfazed. How had Mother pulled that off? He wondered. That was the insane part. Everything else was all in a day's work for her. But opening a black hole - without affecting the region of space and time which she occupied - well, certainly there was nothing in physics that could support such a preposterous notion.  

But Mother's mind would no doubt be powerful enough to toy with physical laws ad hoc. After all, her very mind now existed in a place beyond the reach of physical laws.  

Still, though humbled just thinking about it, Frakas couldn't afford to be so crushed that his confidence broke. He had to press on as the savior of those who lived in the physical world, and would choose to continue to do so no matter how many times civilization came to the brink of Mother, on how many worlds. There would always be those who chose a more physical existence. Those souls were under his purview.  

As Drakus was now. The scanner, finished scrutinizing Drakus's brain, beeped at Frakas. All he had to do now was transfer Drakus - and all that he was - into that lizard. A personality so well scanned down to the last detail - hopefully the soul was able to migrate as well. Because Drakus's original body would be destroyed. He couldn't afford to have Drakus's loyalties divided. The transition would be hard enough without looking back.  

Frakas couldn't afford to simply deposit the scanned Drakus into the reptile's unupgraded brain. First he had to do some more tinkering.  

Supplementing the lizard's nervous system with a buckyball-derived nervous system would permit higher brain activity to go on without violating the creature's slow metabolic limits. Holographic crystal computers the size of teardrops would be inserted into the brain matter, connected up to the Buckminsterfullerene network. This would allow Drakus to have as much sustained higher brain activity as he cared to without exhausting his limited energy reserves, and without overheating himself.  

Hell, in theory, he could outthink Frakas. It was doubtful he would, the same way geniuses usually fell into the employ of lesser minds. No amount of IQ was any indication of a penchant for big picture thinking, nor did it communicate any desire to spend a second brooding over the fate of the world. Most of these fools ended up being specialists. The more specialized the field, the more they excelled. It was as if genius and hyper-specialized thinking went hand in hand in all but a precious few.  

Or maybe they weren't by nature savants, and it was merely the way the powers-that-be robbed them of their destiny by ensuring they never grasped the big picture, never thought outside the safe confines of their profession, handing over real control to the big picture people like himself. Maybe Draxor, or as he was known in this sector of space, Senti-a commoner's contraction of Sentient and a nod to the most consciously awakened of them all-was right: there was no need to resort to conspiracy thinking. Without some tendency to broach all the artificial barriers to thought erected by individual disciplines, greater and greater intelligence running in parallel with greater and greater specialization would just lead step by step to less and less consciousness.  

In any case, the odds of his unwittingly creating another Draxor or even a Frakas by a few simple tweaks of this reptile's nervous system were less than zero. So what did he have to fear but amping up some predator's instincts, making him at once more treacherous? After so many betrayals, Frakas had come to adore treachery; it kept him on his toes.  

The converse might also be true. After all, the reptilian Drakus would retain all the characteristics of the typical reptile, which in the final analysis possessed a fear driven brain. So souping up Drakus's mind could amplify his anxieties, and his reasons for abiding by Frakas's every whim, by imagining the consequences of not doing so. What exactly would be the outcome, no one could say. Drakus would be forever something more and something less than anyone could have expected from the original.  

Even with the assistance of the lab's robotics, and the nanobots to attend to the fractal geometries of the circulatory and nervous systems-at a scale in Drakus's brain well beneath the abilities of Frakas's own unaided nervous system to reach-this would take a good sixteen hours or more. 

Frakas got to work on the rest of the surgery.