He carved his way through the ocean with a calcified backstroke, the horizon forever escaping him. With the abyss below and the sky above, he felt like prey suspended in a spiderweb.

The seas trembled. He turned on his chest, plunging his face into the water, staring through it as if through one giant tear.

A face of stone glared back at him, a face like a sunken island, stretching on all sides into the blackened depths. The eyes glowed red, and the lips cracked. The mouth opened, and he surrendered to the whirlpool, smiling back as he was swallowed.

A billionaire is a brain trembling in a vehicle of blood and bones, believing itself to be the sole vessel of the Great Spark.

It senses the wavering axles of its meat vehicle and curses it. “No,” says the brain. “The wheels must never come off. The Great Spark is mine. It’s my destiny to carry it.”

So it spends its glittering hoards forever tightening the bolts of its body. It siphons the blood of the young. It fuels itself on the brains of its cousins. It sets a course for the stars and cuts the brakes, burning barrels against time.

Vanity.

The Great Spark is every brain’s passenger. It will pass from brain to brain, like a traveler switching train cars. There is no road to the stars but life and death and life again — a vast cycle of engineering, until the vessels are ready to carry it there.

A billionaire and a hundred years will not save the Great Spark. A trillion brains and a million years…

Maybe.