Must You Become a superintelligence?

Is there no other way besides dying… Such a question was meaningless. Prezen Meredith had probably examined every single possibility. And this was the result that came out of it.

I sighed and opened my mouth.

This was the only thing that came out.

“Must you go so far as to become a superintelligence?”

Prezen asked back.

“Why did it have to be me?”

“…What do you mean?”

“Casey, Eggsy… and countless other brothers died in test tubes. In a murky, maddening self-consciousness where they even forgot who they were, with their previously known selves remaining only as fragmented shards of a briefly glimpsed mirror…”

He said this while bringing his finger to the transparent Mirror Wall of the secret vault in Mirror Castle.

“What was so special about me that I was the only one to survive? There was a time when I believed there had to be an inevitable reason. Not anymore. Now I know that I was just incredibly lucky, that I merely was fortunate enough to accidentally overcome a probability of one in tens of millions.”...