I don't really make the decision to send you the Intersect until the one second immediately after John Casey shoots me. I mean, that's the moment when I make the decision in terms of "Absolutely no going back now." But, truthfully, I decided to send you the Intersect as soon as I encoded it with our version of Zork, didn't I? No one but you would have cracked that code within a minute. Hell, no one but you would have cracked that code in a week. It would have taken the government or Fulcrum at least that long to figure out what the reference was from and then go through everyone one of the possible actions before they unlocked it.

We're too alike, Chuck. We have been since Stanford. I was you if you had been pushed into athletics. If you had a little more confidence. If you had been privileged and had been told at every opportunity the extent of your abilities.

See, I grew up rich and I grew up an only child to very attentive parents. They pushed me, but not in a negative way. They saw my potential and wanted me to reach it and gave me the means to do encouraged me when I put my mind to things and, well, when either of us put our minds to anything it was hard to stop us. They even encouraged my dorky pursuits, the ones you and I embraced in college with late-night Everquest LAN parties and programming our own Zork games and debating which sandwich would be best to bring with you on a deserted island (Roast beef, Chuck? Really?). They were as for me stretching my mind with word puzzles as they were with me stretching my imagination with Star Trek, and as for me pushing myself physically with sports as they were with me pushing myself intellectually with engineering.

You, man. Your experiences were like a worst-case scenario for how to encourage people with our sort of natural talents. Your mom and dad both leaving, Ellie being older than you and gone at college while you were still in high school. No one told you it was okay to be nerdy until I did the first day we met. No one told you it was possible, much less encouraged you to pursue the idea, that guys as smart as us could be athletic or charming or witty. By the time I met you, it was kind of too late for any of that, and its why I got recruited into the CIA a year earlier than you: I had more natural tools for them to use.

The fact is you were always smarter than me on a purely intellectual level, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised hearing about your scores in Professor Fleming's class. Knowing about your dad, I'm even less surprised. Of course Orion's kid would have a brain big enough to handle the Intersect, even if he didn't have the tools to use it in the spy world.

Truthfully, this was inevitable, you receiving the Intersect. Given who your dad was. Given who I am. Your life has rotated around the Intersect long before either of us knew what that was. Really, that thing was meant for you at the very moment your father realized that he could build it. I made the decision to push you away from it in college, before I understood that.

Under my circumstances, we would have been the same and you would have been my partner in the CIA, but you hadn't. You had to make your own way, and you were a little shy and a little uncertain, but you had obtained such a due north moral compass-- and I knew plunging you into that world would wreck that--- that I couldn't do anything but push you away.

Once I had learned about your father. About Project Omaha. About the Intersect. I still did everything in my power to keep it from you, to keep it out of Fulcrum's hands and in the hands of trustworthy people, but the number of trustworthy people have dwindled down now to the point where I'm the one that's considered a rogue agent, and I've got by-the-book John Casey staring down at me and his bullet in my heart.

I made the do-or-die, no going back decision in that moment, the decision to push the send button. I made the theoretical decision to give it to you of all people when I encoded it with our Zork computer program. I made the obtuse decision to get you involved when I knew the Intersect needed to be destroyed in its computer form and given to someone trustworthy and you were on my shortlist for trustworthy people.

But the decision that you would be the Intersect eventually seems kind of pre-ordained now. I should have known as soon as Fleming told me 98%-- hadn't the highest prior to that been my own 84%?-- I should have given up the idea that you would be untouched by this, then. But it took finding out about your father, understanding Fulcrum, and realizing that you were the last person I had that I could trust, for me to finally come to grips with that decision.

You're a selfless person, Chuck. And it's hard to understand the motives of selfish people like me when you're as selfless as you are. I sent you the Intersect because I needed it safe. I kept you from becoming an agent and got you kicked out of Stanford because I wanted you to stay the person who had become my best friend. I befriended you because I needed someone at Stanford who understood my nerdy pursuits. And everything you've done has only ever been for other people. So, that's why I know you'll keep this thing safe for me, because if I had grown up forced to always look out for others because no one else in my family would, I would do the exact same thing.

We're too alike, Chuck.

But I cherish the ways that we're different.

Don't let this thing change you.

Promise me that.