The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon, #6)

by Dan Brown

The afterlife is a shared delusion…created to make our actual life bearable.

“I’ve got a student with a one forty-eight IQ,” Langdon recounted, “who insists the earth is six thousand years old. So, I took her down the hall to the geology

department and showed her a three-million-year-old fossil. She simply shrugged and said, ‘I believe God placed that fossil on earth as a trick…to test my faith.’ ”

Faukman stood alone in his office, casting a wary eye at his computer. He’d seen artificial intelligence apps, of course, but he’d sworn publicly never to use them. An existential threat to the noble craft of writing! PRH was already receiving submissions that clearly had been written by robots, but they were getting alarmingly harder and harder to spot. Faukman had taken a defiant stand—urging his fellow editors to boycott all AI products in the face of the coming literary apocalypse.

Faukman had written: To save a single keystroke by typing “gud” instead of “good” is not only indecorous, it is an abomination of indolence.

In recent years, their enemies had needed only the most rudimentary social media tools to influence the minds and decisions of millions upon millions of people. His agency had tracked measurable foreign influences over elections, consumer habits, economic decisions, and political trends.

The most important point in the research, however, shows that those who do not fear death, for whatever reason, tend to exhibit behavior that is more benevolent, accepting of others, cooperative, and caring about the environment. Essentially, this means that if we could all free our minds of the burden, of the terror we feel about death…” “Then we would find ourselves in a dramatically improved world.”

The spiked halo adorning America’s Statue of Liberty was the same ornament that had crowned enlightened minds for millennia. The seven spikes, each over nine feet long, were said to symbolize the rays of enlightenment that would radiate outward from this young country and illuminate all seven continents. It’s the precise opposite, Katherine believed, seeing them as rays of enlightenment that flowed inward…representing the stream of cultures, languages, and ideas from the seven continents, all coursing into the melting pot that was the mind of America. This nation, after all, had been created as a kind of receiver, pulling in disparate souls from around the world, all of them flowing inward toward a shared experience.