The patient had spent his last years hoping for technology to develop to the point where not only the brain structure but also its contents could be copied to a microchip, but technology was not ready before his biomass failed. Which was probably good since he was quite a freak for an engineer.

“If only there was a way to copy the brain, I would engineer myself a proper synthetic, easily maintainable body that runs on batteries instead of food and air”, used to be his first thought in the morning. Remembering his pre-ALS days struggling with French automobiles, he had decided that he should have at least four hands and nine eyes, two of them telescopic. And since he had full freedom to design whatever he desired, why stick with just one, awkwardly positioned sex organ? Having them all over the body would be so much more convenient…

One of the benefits of intelligently designed creatures was that they would be able to redesign themselves whenever the conditions or requirements change. No need to produce a million offspring, hope for a beneficial random mutation and then wait a decade or two hoping that the random natural selection happens to pick it up. In a way the creationists were right: evolution made no sense. Except as a temporary bootloader to start up something bigger and more sensible. Buddha got partial credit too: life is indeed pain in the ass, but instead of what he taught, the true way to redemption is not through some boring mental stuff but proper engineering. No longer need for the corrupted, medieval profession of doctors to randomly prescribe ridiculously overpriced and tightly regulated chemical drugs according to their gut feeling: integrated self diagnostics would tell exactly what is wrong and which part to change. And no need to feel physical pain to know something to be wrong: output of the physical sensors could be made to saturate before the physical pain gets unbearable.

Better yet, the information content in the brain would not be erased just when it has reached optimum: it could be backed up daily and transferred to a new body if the old one was beyond repair. Intelligence would no longer be limited by the number of telomeres in the cell; it could keep improving for hundreds of years until its owner decided it has had enough. And even then the information would not vanish: the synaptic coefficients would still exist in the backup data and could still be used for data processing with a suitable control program. Brain contents of every deceased individual could be run in parallel by the same control program to produce the ultimate oracle. Children would always be smarter than their parents: the only reason to raise an individual right from the Irish infant level rather than copy an existing adult brain would be an improved brain structure.

Psychologists wanted their say too, but their output was such pseudoscientific bullshit that it only managed to embarrass every other party. Material engineers talked about material selection, computer scientists about designing the microcircuitry and operating system, neuroscientists about the synaptic structure of the human brain and psychologists about how important it is to include psychologists in the project. They were, of course, excluded.