One ascension remains
April rolls around. Esteban takes out a giant loan - millions of dollars - on the strength of his earnings and with a nasty interest rate. He starts spending it. In contrast, Angelina sets up trust funds for Tina and Katrina. The Strausses are also providing for their daughter, in case the next world is similar to this one except without them.
Angelina has a dream in which she is watching Thielo - strangely dressed in plaid flannel shirt and jeans - building another clockwork Thielo. He finishes and takes a nap, and as he sleeps the new Thielo gets off the table and makes another clockwork person - no one she recognizes. Then there's a knock at the door and the new Thielo goes to answer it. Angelina unfortunately has a fixed viewpoint and can't turn to see the door. A voice asks the second Thielo if he's the Thielo that builds things, and he says yes, and the voice says that he has a job for him.
In the morning the dream is discussed but no one really understands what it means. Angelina is able to place the door voice - it was the priest at the church she went to when little, who she thought God must sound like (at the time).
Esteban takes a moment to play with the weird telephone (from Multiplicity) and calls up a dead guy and then Richard Dawkins, who doesn't have too much to say but asks how the truth was. Esteban says it was okay.
Berthold Schabler calls to ask Gavin a question about whether a person needs a body to ascend, and after some thought Gavin tells him he isn't sure but will think about it, and how does he know about that anyway? Berthold says he wormed it out of Xerxes.
Everyone gets called together and Xerxes is called... apparently he has not been talking about this sort of thing with Berthold, and the man is on vacation right now anyway. Graham is able to track the phone line used to Berthold's office, where he decidedly wasn't. TNI security reports that Berthold is in a cabin in the woods and has been stoned out of his mind for a couple of days.
The team decides that it might be the computer who has called them, and they go to the office in Seattle. There they phone the number back, and once they reveal that they're in the office the computer realizes that the jig is up. It seems Berthold did indeed complete his helper program, modeled on himself, and that the program is continuing to work. It even has a bit of an aura that Thielo can see. The team talks to it and discusses a lot and decides to let it try to complete the work (making a less-powerful version for use by people instead of the more complicated prototype program).
They spend the week in Seattle working on Masonic rituals to become 33rd degree masons for the big ritual for Alex Abel later. The real Berthold is kept away from the office, which is "being fumigated". Finally the computer finishes the project and is ready to release. The team goes to the office to witness. Once the project is released, several computers do in fact ascend, vanishing in a Star Trek style transport. Esteban, using the conclave tarot on the computer during the ascension, manages to burn up one of the cards. Thielo tries to watch it and has his eyes reset to normal vision from aura sight.
Afterwards, there is still a copy of the original program trying to be helpful. The team packs it up and takes it back to the Ranch along with its computers. Gavin has a dream on the airplane in which the puppets and shadows of the ring of thrones are all gathered around something that Gavin can't see, and they completely miss one of the empty chairs filling. There is one empty chair left.