Prologue

PROLOGUE

RENÉ DESCARTES DIDN’T invent the modern world. But he definitely cracked it open.

He wasn’t trying to cause problems. He just wanted to know what was actually true. Not “truth” because the Church said so. Not “truth” because everyone agreed on it. Just truth you couldn’t argue with, the kind that doesn’t flinch when you poke at it.

So he started doubting everything.

Not in a moody, dramatic way. More like a logic puzzle that got out of hand. If something could be false, he tossed it out. The senses? Unreliable. Other people? Definitely unreliable. His own body? Could be a hallucination for all he knew.

Eventually, the only thing left was the fact that he was thinking at all. That’s it. One guy, alone in a room, realizing he could doubt everything except the fact that he was doubting.

“I think, therefore I am.”

That line gets tossed around like a meme now, but at the time, it was kind of insane. He basically erased the universe and started from scratch.

And yeah, that blew the door wide open.

Medicine stopped blaming demons. Science got permission to go off-leash. People started separating the soul from the body and the mind from the meat. And ever since, we’ve been living in that split. Brains, machines, psychology, AI, all of it.

This is the story of how that happened. The weird, smart, lonely French guy who set it all off. Descartes didn’t mean to start a whole new era. He just wanted to be sure.

But he broke everything anyway.