Terminal Experiment (10 page)

Thursday evening at home. Peter had long ago programmed the household computer to scan the TV listings for topics or shows that would interest him. For two years, he’d had a standing order for the VCR to record the film
The Night Stalker
— a made-for-TV movie he’d first encountered as a teenager — but so far it hadn’t come on. He also asked to be alerted whenever an Orson Welles film was on, whenever Ralph Nader or Stephen Jay Gould was going to be on any talk show, and for any episodes of
Night Court
in which Brent Spiner guest-starred.

Tonight, DBS Cairo was showing Welles in
The Stranger
in English with Arabic subtitles. Peter’s VCR had a subtitle eraser — it scanned the parts of the image adjacent to the subtitles, as well as the frames before and after the subtitles appeared, and filled in an extrapolation of the picture that had been obscured by the text. Quite a find: Peter hadn’t seen
The Stranger
for twenty years. His VCR hummed quietly, recording it.

Maybe he’d watch it tomorrow. Or Saturday.

Maybe.

Cathy, sitting across the room from him, cleared her throat, then said, “My coworkers have been asking about you. About us.”

Peter felt his shoulders tense. “Oh?”

“You know: about why we haven’t been at the Friday-night gatherings.”

“What have you told them?”

“Nothing. I’ve made excuses.”

“Do they — do you think they know about … about what happened?”

She considered. “I don’t know. I’d like to think they don’t, but…”

“But that asshole Hans has a mouth on him.”

She said nothing.

“Have you heard anything? Snide comments? Innuendos? Anything to make you think your coworkers know?”

“No,” said Cathy. “Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

She sighed. “Believe me, I’ve been particularly sensitive to what they’ve been saying. If they are gossiping behind my back, I haven’t picked up on it. No one has said a word to me. Really, I suspect they don’t know.”

Peter shook his head. “I — I don’t think I could take it if they knew. Facing them, I mean. It’s…” He paused, trying to come up with the appropriate word, “…humiliating.”

She knew better than to reply.

“Damn,” said Peter. “I hate this. I really fucking hate this.”

Cathy nodded.

“Still,” said Peter, “I suppose … I suppose if we’re ever going to have a normal life again, we’ve got to start going out, seeing people.”

“Danita thinks that would be wise, too.”

“Danita?”

“My counselor.”

“Oh.”

She was quiet for a moment, then: “Hans left town today. He’s attending a conference. If we went out after work with my friends tomorrow, he wouldn’t be there.”

Peter took a deep breath, exhaled it noisily. “You’re sure he won’t be there?” he said.

She nodded.

Peter was silent for a time, marshaling his thoughts. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll give it a try, as long as we don’t stay too long.” He looked her in the eyes. “But you better be right about him not being there.” His voice took on a tone Cathy had never heard before, a stone-cold bitterness. “If I see him again, I’ll kill him.”

Peter arrived at the Bent Bishop early so that he could be sure of the seat directly beside his wife. The crew from Doowap Advertising had found a long table in the middle of the room this time, so they were all in captain’s chairs. Peter did indeed get to sit next to Cathy. Opposite him was the pseudointellectual. His bookreader was loaded with Camus.

“’Evening, Doc,” said Pseudo. “You’re certainly in the news a lot these days.”

Peter nodded. “Hello.”

“Not used to seeing you here so early,” Pseudo said.

Peter immediately realized his mistake. Everything should have been exactly as before. He should be doing nothing that would attract attention to him or Cathy.

“Ducking reporters,” Peter said.

Pseudo nodded, and lifted a glass of dark ale to his lips. “You’ll be glad to know Hans won’t be here.”

Peter felt his cheeks flush, but in the dim lighting of the pub it was probably invisible. “What do you mean?” Peter had intended the question to come out neutrally, but there’d been an undeniable edge to it. Next to him, Cathy patted his knee under the table.

Pseudo lifted his eyebrows. “Nothing, Doc. It’s just that he and you don’t seem to always get along. He was ribbing you a fair bit last time.”

“Oh.” The server had appeared. “Orange juice,” said Peter.

The server turned to Cathy, her face a question. “Mineral water,” Cathy said. “With lime.”

“Nothing to drink today?” said Pseudo, as if the very concept was an affront to all things decent.

“I’ve, ah, got a headache,” said Cathy. “Took some aspirin.”

There was no end to lies, thought Peter. She couldn’t say, I’ve stopped drinking because last time I got drunk I let a coworker fuck me. Peter felt his fists clenching beneath the table.

Two more of Cathy’s friends arrived, a man and a woman, both middle-aged, both slightly heavy. Cathy said hi to them. “Light turnout tonight,” said the man. “Where’s Hans?”

“Hans is in Beantown,” said Pseudo. Peter thought he’d been waiting all day to get to say “Beantown.” “At that interactive-video conference.”

“Gee,” said the woman. “It won’t be the same without Hans.”

Hans
, thought Peter.
Hans. Hans
. Each uttering of his name was like a knife thrust. Haven’t these people ever heard of pronouns?

The server reappeared and put some reconstituted orange juice in front of Cathy, and a small bottle of Perrier and a glass with a bruised lime wedge pushed into its rim in front of Peter. All nonalcoholic drinks were the same to her, he guessed. Peter and Cathy exchanged drinks, and the server took the newcomers’ orders.

“So how are things with the two of you?” asked the newly arrived man, waving a hand generally at Peter and Cathy.

Cathy smiled. “Fine.”

Why is he asking that?
Peter thought.
What does he know?

“Fine,” echoed Peter. “Just fine.”

“You’ve been all over the TV, Peter,” said Pseudo. “Going anywhere else soon?”

Well, I’m not going to fucking Beantown
. “No,” said Peter, then, “Maybe.”

“We haven’t made any plans,” said Cathy smoothly. “But Peter has an understanding boss.” A chuckle or two from those who knew that Peter was the boss at his company. “I’ve got to see how my schedule is shaping up at work. We’ve got that big Tourism Ontario contract coming up.”

The woman nodded sympathetically. Evidently that particular job was the bane of her existence, too.

The server appeared with more drinks. Simultaneously, Toby Bailey, another of Cathy’s coworkers, arrived.

“’Evening, all,” said Toby. He indicated to the server that he’d have the same thing as Pseudo. “Where’s Hans?”

“Boston,” said Peter, preempting another uttering of “Beantown.” Pseudo looked slightly disappointed.

“Did Donna-Lee go with him?”

“Not as far as I know,” said Pseudo.

“Well, some American cutie is going to get porked tonight,” said Toby, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. People chuckled. Hans seemed to have almost as big a presence when he wasn’t there as when he was. Peter excused himself to go to the washroom.

“Well,” observed Pseudo as Peter departed, “I guess even the rich and famous have to take a leak now and then.”

Peter bristled as he made his way to the stairwell and walked down to the little basement that contained the two restrooms and a couple of pay phones. He didn’t really have to go, but he needed a little peace and quiet, a little time to get his bearings. It was like they were all mocking him. It was like they all knew.

Of course they knew.
Peter had heard enough of Hans’s bragging in the past. Christ, they all probably knew about every one of Hans’s conquests.

He leaned against a wall. A Molson’s bimbo smiled at him from a poster. It had been a mistake coming here.

But wait — if Cathy’s coworkers knew, they’d probably known for months. It was ages since she and Hans had first done it. Peter tried to think back to the last time he’d been here, and the time before that. Had there been any indication that they knew? Were they really behaving differently tonight?

He couldn’t tell. Everything seemed different now. Everything.

He’d be humiliated if they knew. His private life invaded. On public view.

Humiliated. Degraded.

Christ, Hobson, can’t keep a woman, eh?

God damn it.

Life had been so simple before.

This had been a mistake.

He headed back to the table.

He would endure it for another hour. He looked at his watch. Yes. Sixty minutes. He could take that.

Maybe.

Peter and Cathy walked wordlessly up to the door of their house. Peter touched his thumb to the FILE scanner, and he heard the locking mechanism disengaging. He stepped through the door into the tile-covered entry area and paused to remove his outdoor shoes. Four and a half pairs of Cathy’s shoes were already lined up in front of the closet.

“Do you have to do that?” said Peter, pointing at them.

“I’m sorry,” said Cathy.

“I’d like to be able to come into my own home without tripping over your shoes all the time.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“You’ve got a shoe rack in the bedroom.”

“I’ll move them there,” she said.

Peter placed his shoes on the mat. “You don’t see me piling up shoes out here.”

Cathy nodded.

Peter walked into the living room. “Computer — messages,” he called out.

“None,” said a synthesized voice.

He walked over to the couch, scooped up the remote, and sat down. He turned on the TV and began flipping channels, with the sound on MUTE.

“The pseudointellectual was in fine form tonight,” said Peter sarcastically.

“Jonas,” said Cathy. “His name is Jonas.”

“What the fuck do I care what his name is?”

Cathy sighed, and went to make herself some tea.

Peter knew he was being mean. He didn’t want to be this way. He’d been hoping tonight would go well, had been hoping that they could get on with their lives, with things the way they had always been.

But it wouldn’t work.

Tonight had proved that.

He couldn’t have anything to do with her coworkers ever again. Even without Hans there, the sight of those people reminded Peter of what she’d done — of what Hans had done.

Peter could hear the sounds of a spoon hitting china in the kitchen as Cathy stirred milk into her tea. “Aren’t you going to join me?” he called out.

She appeared in the doorway that led to the kitchen, her face impassive.

Peter put down the remote and looked at her. She was trying to be cooperative, trying to be brave. He didn’t want to be mean to her. He just wanted what they had had before.

“I’m sorry,” Peter said.

Cathy nodded, hurt but stalwart. “I know.”

Sarkar Muhammed’s artificial-intelligence company was called Mirror Image. Its offices were located in Concord, Ontario, north of Metro Toronto. Peter met Sarkar there on Saturday morning, and Sarkar took him upstairs to the newly created scanning room. It had originally been just a regular office. There were crushed indentations in the rug where filing cabinets had once been. There had also been a large window, but it had been completely covered with plywood panels to prevent light from coming in from outside, and the walls had been lined with gray foam rubber, molded in egg-carton shapes to deaden sound. In the center of the room was an old dentist’s chair on a swivel base and along one wall was a bench covered with a PC, various oscilloscopes, and several other pieces of equipment, including some circuitry breadboards lying out in the open.

Sarkar motioned for Peter to sit in the dentist’s chair.

“Just a little off the top,” said Peter.

Sarkar smiled. “We are going to take everything off the top — get a complete record of everything in your brain.” He positioned the scanner’s skullcap on Peter’s head.

“
L’chaim
,” said Peter.

Sarkar loosely fastened the cap’s chin strap and motioned for Peter to pull it tight. “Second down,” said Peter. “Four yards to go.”

Sarkar handed Peter two small earpieces. Peter inserted them. Finally, Sarkar handed him the test goggles: a pair of special glasses that projected separate video signals into each eye.

“Breathe through your nose,” said Sarkar. “And try to keep swallowing to a minimum. Also, try not to cough.”

Peter nodded.

“And don’t do that,” said Sarkar. “Don’t nod. I’ll assume you understand my instructions without your acknowledging them.” He moved to his workbench and pressed some keys on the PC. “In many ways, this is going to be more complex than what you did in recording the soulwave’s departure. There, you were simply looking for any electrical activity in the brain. But here, we must stimulate your brain in myriad ways, to activate every neural net contained within — most nets are inactive most of the time, of course.”

He pushed some more keys. “Okay, we’re recording now. Don’t worry if you have to shift to get comfortable in the next few minutes; it’ll take that long to calibrate, anyway.” He spent what seemed a very long time making minute adjustments to his controls. “Now, as we discussed,” said Sarkar, “you are going to receive a series of inputs. Some will be oral — spoken words or sounds on audiotape. Some will be visual: you will see images or words projected into your eyes. I know you speak French and a little Spanish; some of the inputs will be in those languages. Concentrate on the inputs, but don’t worry if your mind wanders. If I show you a tree and that makes you think of wood, and wood makes you think of paper, and paper makes you think of paper airplanes, and airplanes make you think of lousy food, that’s fine. Don’t force the connections, though: this is not an exercise in free association. We just want to map which neural nets exist in your brain, and what excites them. Ready? No — you nodded again. Okay, here we go.”

At first, Peter thought he was seeing a standard barrage of test images, but it soon became apparent that Sarkar had supplemented that with images specifically related to Peter. There were pictures of Peter’s parents, of the house he and Cathy lived in now and the one they’d lived in before it, shots of Sarkar’s cottage, Peter’s own high-school graduation photo, sound clips of Peter’s voice, and Cathy’s voice, and on and on, a
This Is Your Life
retrospective mingled with generic pictures of lakes and woods and football fields and simple mathematical equations and snatches of poetry and
Star Trek
trivia questions and popular music from when Peter had been a teenager and art and pornography and out-of-focus pictures that might have been Abe Lincoln or might have been a hound dog or might have been nothing at all.

Periodically, Peter got bored, and his mind wandered to the night before — the disastrous night out with Cathy’s coworkers. Damn, that had been a mistake.

Fucking Hans.

He couldn’t even shake his head to fling off the thoughts. But by an effort of will, he tried to concentrate on the images. And yet, from time to time, they, too, would provoke the unpleasant memories: A picture of hands that made him think of Hans. Peter and Cathy’s wedding photo. A pub. A parked car.

Nets fired.

They did four two-hour sets of this, with half-hour breaks for Peter to stretch and work his jaw and drink water and go to the bathroom. Sometimes the audio clips would reinforce the visual images — he saw a picture of Mick Jagger and heard “Satisfaction.” And sometimes they were jarringly opposite — the sight of a starving Ethiopian child coupled with the sounds of wind chimes. And sometimes the images shown to his left eye were different than those shown to his right, and sometimes the sound played into one earpiece was completely unrelated to that pumped into the other.

Finally, it was over. Tens of thousands of images had been seen. Gigabytes of data had been recorded. And the sensors in the skullcap had mapped every nook and cranny, every thoroughfare and side street, every neuron and every net in Peter Hobson’s brain.

Sarkar took the disk holding the brain scan down to his computer lab. He loaded it onto an AI workstation and copied everything into three different RAM partitions — producing three identical copies of Peter’s brain, each isolated in its own memory bank.

“What now?” said Peter, sitting backward on a stacking chair and leaning his chin on his arms folded over the chair’s back.

“First, we label them.” Sarkar, sitting on the barstool he preferred to a chair, spoke into the microphone on the console in front of him. “Login,” he said.

“Login name?” said the computer’s voice, female, emotionless.

“Sarkar.”

“Hello, Sarkar. Command?”

“Rename Hobson 1 to Spirit.”

“Please spell destination name.”

Sarkar sighed. The word “Spirit” was doubtless in the computer’s vocabulary, but Sarkar’s accent occasionally gave it trouble. “S-P-I-R-I-T.”

“Done. Command?”

“Rename Hobson 2 to Ambrotos.”

“Done. Command?”

Peter piped up. “Why ‘Ambrotos’?”

“It’s the Greek word for immortal,” said Sarkar. “You see it in words such as ‘ambrosia’ — the foodstuff that confers immortality.”

“That darned private school education,” said Peter.

Sarkar grinned. “Exactly.” He turned back to the mike. “Rename Hobson 3 to Control.”

“Done. Command?”

“Load Spirit.”

“Loaded. Command?”

“Okay,” said Sarkar, turning to face Peter. “Spirit is supposed to simulate life after death. To do that, we begin by paring out all exclusively biological functions. That will not actually involve removing parts of the conscious brain, of course, but rather just disconnecting various networks. To find out which connections we can sever, we’ll use the Dalhousie Stimulus Library. That’s a Canadianized version of a collection of standard images and sound recordings originally created by the University of Melbourne; it’s commonly used in psychological testing. As Spirit is exposed to each image or sound, we record which neurons fire in response.”

Peter nodded.

“The stimuli are all cataloged by the type of emotion they’re supposed to elicit — fear, revulsion, sexual arousal, hunger, et cetera. We look to see which neural nets are activated exclusively by biological concerns, and then zero those out. Of course, we have to go through the images several times in random sequences. That’s because of action potentials: nets might not get activated if a substantially similar combination of neurons was recently triggered by something else. Once we’ve finished doing that, we should have a version of your mind that approximates the way you would be if you were freed of all concerns about meeting physical needs — what you would be like if you were dead, in other words. After that, we’ll do the same thing with Ambrotos, the immortal version, but for it we’ll excise the fear of growing old and concerns about aging and death.”

“What about the experimental control?”

“I’ll feed it the same sorts of images and sound clips, just so that it will have been exposed to the same things as the other two versions, but I won’t zero out any of its nets.”

“Very good.”

“Okay,” said Sarkar. He turned to face the console. “Run Dalhousie Version 4.”

“Executing,” said the computer.

“Estimate time to completion.”

“Eleven hours, nineteen minutes.”

“Advise when complete.” Sarkar turned to Peter. “I’m sure you won’t want to watch the whole thing, but you can see what is being fed to Spirit on that monitor.”

Peter looked at the screen. A monarch butterfly emerging from a cocoon. Banff, Alberta. A pretty woman blowing a kiss at the camera. Some 1980s movie star that Peter sort of recognized. Two men boxing. A house on fire…