2 Chapter 1: Man Proposes and God Disposes

In the most advanced surgery room of the best hospital on Unified Earth, a procedure is being carried out, one that will be etched in the annals of humanity. It is the first 'soul and brain' transplant ever performed on a human.

In the room, two teams can be seen working in parallel, performing exactly the same procedure on two different bodies. However, one of these bodies appears very weak and unhealthy; its age is indiscernible due to its condition. It seems to lack any muscle or fat, resembling a skeleton with skin, and one would doubt it is alive if not for the machines indicating it is.

The other body looks completely healthy, with muscle and body fat levels perfectly suitable for someone who engages in constant physical activity. It appears to be between 20 to 25 years old and, except for being connected to many monitoring machines, nothing seems out of the ordinary.

"Alright team one and team two , we begin in one minute," said the coordinator of this operation's teams. When the order to commence the countdown was given, the assistant AI immediately activated a one minute countdown timer.

The seconds, which would normally pass in the blink of an eye, felt eternal. Nevertheless, the entire medical team remained still as if time had stopped while those seconds ticked away. When the countdown reached zero, both teams simultaneously began to open the skulls of both bodies and perform the same movements as if they were in perfect synchrony, and the operation to extract the brains from both bodies began.

As the hours passed, the nerve endings of both brains were cut with the utmost delicacy and care to preserve the parts and functions needed from both bodies.

On one hand, in the unhealthy body, the priority was to protect the life of the brain at all costs, while on the side of the healthy body, the life of the brain was disregarded, giving absolute priority to maintaining the body and the nerve connections to the brain that are being severed in optimal condition.

Both teams are progressing as planned, and no complications have arisen so far. Time and the procedure continued to advance until finally, teams one and two finished cutting all the brain connections to their respective bodies.

Although at first glance both teams finished their work, in reality, only team two has finished, as the brain of the body they are working on requires no special care or procedure. In contrast, team one has to keep the extracted brain alive and move it to the body that was operated on by team two.

"Team three in position, technical team, I need the soul frequency measurements," said the team coordinator.

"The soul frequency is stable, Doctor. There's a slight degree of disturbance, but given the situation, everything is normal. We have the green light to move the brain," said the leader of the soul measurement team.

The soul was such a delicate topic of debate until 350 years ago. A religiously fanatical scientist showed the results of the research to which he dedicated his entire life, which was reproached by everyone in the scientific field: 'the study of the soul'. At that time, its existence was completely doubted until said scientist, after two and a half centuries of obsessive study, finally managed to create a machine capable not only of proving the existence of the soul but also of measuring its resonance frequency.

This opened a new field of study and gave rise to the possibility of explaining and understanding many phenomena that previously had no complete explanation. But not only that, thanks to the contributions of that scientist, this brain transplant procedure is possible, as it was discovered that the soul is strictly linked to the human brain. If a brain is transplanted from one body to another, even if the connections are completely successful, if the soul does not move or, worse still, passes to the beyond, then the brain will never reactivate, and it would mean death.

Therefore, before moving the brain and beginning to reconnect it to a new body, it is necessary to monitor the state of the soul at all times. With the approval of the soul measurement team, the team coordinator gave the order to continue.

Team one began to move the brain from the previous body to the new one, and with that, they finally finished their task. Now team three would take over to continue the procedure, which is to reconnect the brain to the clone body and would present the last stage of the operation.

Several more hours passed while team three continued with the connection, and everything seemed to be going well. That was until the last nerve connections were about to be finished; at that moment, the problems began.

"The soul is destabilizing; if it continues like this, we're going to lose it," said the leader of the soul measurement team, who saw how the alarms suddenly activated on the measurement machines.

"Quick, ask the Prayer team to pray for the soul's well-being; it's time for them to put all their faith in their prayers," ordered the operations coordinator.

Among the many advances in the field of the soul since its discovery, it was proven that prayers made by a certain number of people and with a certain amount of religious belief are capable of affecting the frequency of souls. This gave a new rebirth to the power of religious institutions in the world, where it was now proven that not only does the soul exist, but faith and religion have a power that previously could not be proven by science.

Therefore, for any medical procedure involving a soul, requests would also be assigned to religious institutions to pray and petition for the patients, and this has often guaranteed success.

For a surgery of such magnitude and historical level, it can be said that all the great religious institutions of the planet agreed to pray for the health of Alex, and this resulted in an event that no one could have foreseen.

When the prayer team signaled that it was time to pray with all they had, all the religious institutions on the planet united for the first time to pray for the same cause, or rather, for the same person.

It didn't matter what religion it was, all had agreed to ask for the same person, and without knowing it, more than half of the world's population joined in praying for a single person.

In the operating room, Alex's soul frequency had stabilized, and the brain had been completely transplanted. Everything was fine, and the surgery was about to finish; it only remained to reactivate the vital functions of the body and for these to respond correctly to the nerve impulses that the newly connected brain had to send.

But at that moment, when only the easiest procedures remained to be finished, all the machines of the soul measurement team began to sound their alarms, warning that the soul frequency was increasing at an exponential rate and subsequently began to malfunction. It was as if they were victims of an energy overload.

The event was sudden, but team three, which was still working on its part of the operation, showed its professionalism and did not stop working until it finished its part.

While this was happening, the team coordinator had requested an immediate replacement for the soul measurement devices, and these were replaced in a matter of minutes.

In the time it took to finish replacing the soul measurement equipment, team three had finished activating the vital functions of the new body, and everything had gone well.

They only needed to measure that the soul was fine and had not been negatively affected by whatever had happened; that was what everyone was expecting.

But unfortunately, when the newly brought equipment was activated, they showed that despite everything, "Man proposes, and in the end, God disposes," as there was no sign that Alex's soul was still in the new body, nor in the operating room.

And if the equipment were powerful enough to measure on a global scale, then they would have realized that his soul was no longer in this world.