Maybe a lot of good material in this story, but they lost me at "black matter", "the grid" and "artificial intelligence". I literally stopped reading at that point.
Maybe some people are ignorant and so they'll believe anything -- but to me, it's as stupid as telling me they're going to put my spirit in a toaster and control it.
Sentient toasters aren't going to control me or anyone else -- neither is a computer!
I'm not just a computer programmer/software developer since 1992. I also have a pretty good knowledge of computer hardware, electronics -- I understand computers at a very fundamental level. There is ZERO mystery -- hence zero magic -- in how computers work. It's not all amazing magic to me. Quite the contrary. To me, a computer is about as mysterious as a hammer or screwdriver.
I know all too well how rock-stupid computers are. Every bit as stupid as they were in the 1970s, just a lot faster.
And I don't care if the government builds a supercomputer with state-of-the-art technology -- it will just be a PC like you can buy from Dell.com, only 10,000 times faster. So what? Still a glorified pocket calculator. All they will EVER be able to do is set bits to 1 and 0.
I am also an ex-seminarian who took some philosophy at the seminary. The reason humans are intelligent is because God gave us that power. It's how He "made us in His image" -- intellect and Free Will. Intellect is to be able to extract the essence of things and manipulate it in our minds. We can extract and create abstracts or "concepts" in our mind. Language is an example of this. Concepts of past/present/future. No other animal shares this power. It's what makes us near-complete masters over God's creation.
Sorry, but man can't create life AT ALL. Not today, not ever. Not in a 1000 years. Not in a top-secret government program, not under ANY circuмstances.
The human soul can't be plugged into any machine. All bad guys can do is mess with our PHYSICAL body in the PHYSICAL realm -- psychology (manipulating our physical brains), emotions (which we share with animals), drugs (which affect our physical bodies), torture, brainwashing, stuff like that. Attacking our physical frames. The soul itself is out of reach, even for demons.