[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle.

The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused. (318)

Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.

Look, we know, now, that a singularity doesn’t turn into a voracious predator that eats all the dumb matter in its path, triggering a phase change in the structure of space—at least, not unless they’ve done something very stupid to the structure of the false vacuum, somewhere outside our current light cone.

Is not happening yet," contributes Boris. "Singularity implies infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not happened.