Terminal Experiment (13 page)

A rare sunny morning in the middle of November, with light streaming around the edges of the living-room blinds.

Hans Larsen was sitting at the table in his breakfast nook nibbling on white toast with orange marmalade. His wife, Donna-Lee, over by the front door, was slipping on her ten-centimeter black heels. Hans watched her bend over to do that, her breasts — perfect handfuls — straining against her red silk blouse, the curve of her bottom tight against her black leather skirt, the leather too thick to show any panty lines.

She was a beautiful woman, Hans thought, and she knew how to dress to show it off. And that, of course, had been why he’d married her. A fitting wife, the kind that turned heads. The kind a real man should have.

He nibbled some more toast, and chased it with some coffee. He’d give it to her good when he got home tonight. She’d like that. Of course, he wouldn’t be home until late; he was seeing Melanie after work. No, wait — Melanie was tomorrow night; this was only Wednesday. Nancy, then. Even better; Nancy had tits to die for.

Donna-Lee checked herself in the mirror on the front-hall closet door. She leaned in close to examine her makeup, then called out to Hans, “See you later.”

Hans waved a slice of toast at her. “Remember, I’ll be late tonight. I’ve got that meeting after work.”

She nodded, smiled radiantly at him, and left.

She was a good wife, Hans thought. Easy on the eyes, and not too demanding on his time. Of course, one woman was hardly enough for a real man…

Hans had on a dark blue nylon sports jacket and light blue polyester shirt. A silver-gray tie, also synthetic, hung unknotted around his neck. He was wearing white Hanes underwear and black socks, but hadn’t yet put on his pants. There were still twenty minutes before he had to leave for work himself. From the breakfast nook, he could see the TV in the living room, the picture somewhat washed out by sunlight.
Canada A.M.
was on, with Joel Gotlib interviewing some balding actor Hans didn’t recognize.

Hans finished the last of his toast just as the doorbell rang. The TV automatically reduced
Canada AM.
to a small image in the upper-left corner. The rest of the screen filled with the view from the outside security camera. A man in a brown United Parcel Service uniform was standing on the stoop. He was carrying a large package wrapped in paper.

Hans grunted. He wasn’t expecting anything. Touching a button on the kitchen phone, he said, “Just a sec,” and went to find his pants. Once he had them on, he crossed through the living room to the entryway, with its bare hardwood floor, then unlocked the door and swung it open. His house faced east, and the figure on the stoop was lit harshly from behind. He was maybe forty years old, quite tall — a full two meters — and skinny. He looked like he could have been a basketball player a decade earlier. His features were sharp and he had a dark tan, as if he’d been south recently. Hans thought they must pay these UPS guys pretty well.

“Are you Hans Larsen?” asked the man. His voice had a British accent, or maybe Australian — Hans could never tell them apart.

Hans nodded. “That’s me.”

The deliveryman handed him the box. It was a cube about a half meter on a side, and it was surprisingly heavy — as if someone had shipped him a collection of rocks. Once his hands were free, the man reached down to his waist. A small electronic receipt pad was attached to his belt by a metal chain. Hans turned around to set the box down.

Suddenly he felt a painful jolt at the back of his neck, and his legs seemed to turn to jelly. He collapsed forward, the weight of the box pulling him in that direction. He felt the flat of a hand in the center of his back pushing him down. Hans tried to speak, but his mouth wouldn’t work. He felt himself being rolled onto his back by the deliveryman’s boot, and he heard the outside door clicking shut. Hans realized that he’d been touched with a stunner, a device he’d only ever seen on TV cop shows, robbing him of muscular control. Even as this sank in, he became aware that he was peeing in his pants.

He tried to yell, but couldn’t. The best he could manage was a faint grunt.

The tall man had moved well into the house now, and was standing in front of Hans. With great effort, Hans managed to lift his head. The man was doing something to his own belt now. The black leather along the left side flopped open, revealing a long, thick blade that glinted in the light seeping in around the living-room blinds.

Hans found his strength returning. He struggled to get to his feet. The tall man pressed his stunner into the side of

Hans’s neck and held down the trigger. A massive electric shock coursed through Hans’s system, and he could feel his blond hair standing on end. He collapsed onto his back again.

Hans tried to speak. “Wh — wh—”

“Why?” said the tall man, in that accented voice. He shrugged, as if it all was of no importance to him. “You made someone mad,” he said. “Real mad.”

Hans tried to get up again, but couldn’t. The big man slammed a boot into his chest, and then in one fluid motion brought the knife up. He grabbed the front of Hans’s trousers and cut them open, the sharp blade easily slicing through the navy-blue polyester. The man winced at the ammonia stench. “You really should learn to control yourself, mate,” he said. Another couple of quick cuts and Hans’s underwear was in tatters. “Guy’s paying an extra twenty-five thousand for this, I hope you realize.”

Hans tried again to scream, but he was still dazed by the stunner. His heart was pounding erratically.

“N — no,” he said. “Not…”

“What’s that, mate?” said the tall fellow. “You think without your Johnson you won’t be a man anymore?” He pursed his lips, considering. “Y’know, maybe you’re right. I’d never given it much thought.” But then he grinned, an evil rictus showing yellow teeth. “Then again, I’m not paid to think.”

He wielded the knife like a surgeon. Hans managed a gurgling scream as his penis was lopped off. Blood spurted onto the hardwood floor. He struggled again to get up, but the man kicked him in the face, shattering his nose. He touched Hans once more with the stunner. Hans’s body convulsed, and blood geysered from his wound. He collapsed to the floor. Tears rolled down his face.

“You might bleed to death as is,” said the man, “but I can’t take any chances.” He leaned in and slid the knife’s long edge across Hans’s throat. Hans found enough strength and muscular control for a final scream, the timbre of which changed radically as his neck split open.

In all the flailing around, Hans’s severed organ had gone rolling across the floor. The man nudged it closer to the body with his toe, then calmly walked into the living room.
Canada A.M.
had given way to
Donahue
. He opened the cabinet next to the TV, found the slave recorder hooked up to the security camera, took out the little disk, and put it in his hip pocket. Then he headed back to the entryway, picked up the box full of bricks and, taking care not to slip on the hardwood floor now slick with an expanding pool of blood, headed out into the bright morning sunshine.

“What’s this?” said Peter, pointing to a monitor in Mirror Image’s computer lab showing what appeared to be a school of small blue fish swimming through an orange ocean.

Sarkar looked up from his keyboard. “Artificial life. I’m teaching a course about it at Ryerson this winter.”

“How’s it work?”

“Well, just as we’ve simulated your mind within a computer, so too is it possible to simulate other aspects of life, including reproduction and evolution. Indeed, when the simulations get sufficiently complex, some say it’s only a question of semantics as to whether the simulations are really alive. Those fish evolved from very simple mathematical simulations of living processes. And, like real fish, they exhibit a lot of emergent behaviors, such as schooling.”

“How do you get from simple math to things that behave like real fish?”

Sarkar saved his work and moved over to stand next to Peter. “Cumulative evolution is the key — it makes it possible to go from randomness to complexity very quickly.” He reached over and pushed some keys. “Here, let me give you a simple demonstration.”

The screen cleared.

“Now,” said Sarkar, “type a phrase. No punctuation, though — just letters.”

Peter considered for a moment, then pecked out, “And where hell is there must we ever be.” The computer forced it all to lowercase.

Sarkar glanced over his shoulder. “Marlowe.”

Peter was surprised. “You know it?”

Sarkar nodded. “Of course. Private school, remember? From
Doctor Faustus
: ‘Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place, for where we are is hell, and where hell is there must we ever be.’ ”

Peter said nothing.

“Look at that phrase you typed — it consists of 39 characters.” Sarkar hadn’t counted; the computer had reported the number as soon as Peter had finished typing, as well as several other statistics. “Well, think of each of those characters as a gene. There are 27 possible values each of those genes could have: A through Z, plus a space. Since you typed a 39-character string, that means there are 27 to the 39th power possible different strings of that length. Oodles, in other words.”

Sarkar reached over and pressed a few keys. “This workstation,” he said, “can generate a hundred thousand random 39-character strings each second.” He pointed to a number on the screen. “But even at that rate, it would take 2x1043 years — trillions of times longer than the whole lifetime of the universe — to hit that entire, precise string of Marlowe you typed by pure random chance.”

Peter nodded. “It’s like the monkeys.”

Sarkar sang: “Here we come…”

“Not the Monkees. The infinite number of monkeys banging away on keyboards. They’ll never produce an exact copy of Shakespeare, no matter how long they try.”

Sarkar smiled. “That’s because they’re working at random. But evolution is not random. It is cumulative. Each generation improves on the one that preceded it, based on selection criteria imposed by the environment. With cumulative evolution, you can go from gibberish to poetry — or from equations to fish, or even from slime mold to human beings — amazingly fast.” He touched a key and pointed at the screen. “Here’s a purely random thirty-seven-character string. Consider it an ancestral organism.” The screen showed:

000 wtshxowlveamfhiqhgdiigjmh rpeqwursudnfe

“Using cumulative evolution, the computer can get from that random starting point to the desired ending point in a matter of seconds.”

“How?” asked Peter.

“Say that every generation, one text string can produce thirty-nine offspring. But, just as in real life, the offspring are not exactly the same as the parent. Rather, in each offspring, one gene — one character — will be different, moving up or down the alphabet by one: a Y can become an X or a Z, for instance.”

“Okay.”

“For each of the thirty-nine offspring, the computer finds the one that is best suited to this environment — the one that is closest to Marlowe, our ideal of a perfectly adapted life form. That one — the fittest — is the only one that breeds in the next generation. See?”

Peter nodded.

“Okay. We’ll let evolution run its course for a generation.” Sarkar pushed another key. Thirty-nine virtually identical strings appeared on screen, and a moment later thirty-eight of them winked out. “Here’s the fittest offspring.” He pointed at the screen:

wtshxowlveamfhiqhgdiigjmh rpeqwursudnfe

wtshxowlvdamfhiqhgdiigjmh rpeqwursudnfe

“It is not obvious,” said Sarkar, “but the lower string is marginally closer to your target than the original.”

“I can’t see a difference,” said Peter.

Sarkar peered at the screen. “The tenth character has changed from E to D. In the target, the tenth character is a space — the space between ‘where’ and ‘hell.’ We’re using a circular alphabet, with space as the character between Z and A. D is closer to a space than E is, so this string is a slight improvement — slightly fitter.” He pushed another key. “Now, we’ll let it run through to the end — there, it’s done.”

Peter was impressed. “That was fast.”

“Cumulative evolution,” said Sarkar, triumphantly. “It took only 277 generations to get from gibberish to Marlowe — from randomness to a complex structure. Here, I’ll just display every thirtieth generation, with genes that have evolved to their target values in upper case.”

Keyclicks. The screen showed:

000 wtshxowlvdamfhiqhgdiigjmh rpeqwursudnfE

030 wttgWoxmvdakgiiphfdHghili STerwuotucneE

060 xrtgWoymwccigihpiddHfihll STesxuovvapdE

090 xqugWm nzccfhihomcdHfihkM STcuyunvvzpdE

120 ypudWl p bcEijhmnbbHfihkMzSTbWyvmvwyrcE

150 zpvdWj R aeEjlhlqbzHfigkMyST WyvkvwvsBE

180 AozcWibR fEklhkrbyHEjgiMxST W wjvwtuBE

210 ANzaWHERd HELLhISawHEjEiMwST WbwgvxsuBE

240 AND WHERE HELLfIS THEnEiMUST WdwEVzszBE

270 AND WHERE HELLcIS THEREbMUST WE EVER BE

He pressed a couple more keys. “And here are the last five generations.”

AND WHERE HELLcIS THEREaMUST WE EVER BE

AND WHERE HELLbIS THEREaMUST WE EVER BE

AND WHERE HELLalS THEREaMUST WE EVER BE

AND WHERE HELLalS THERE MUST WE EVER BE

AND WHERE HELL IS THERE MUST WE EVER BE

“That’s neat,” said Peter.

“It is more than just neat,” said Sarkar. “It is why you and I and the rest of the biological world are here.”

Peter looked up. “You surprise me. I mean, well, you’re a Muslim — I assumed that meant you were a creationist.”

“Please,” said Sarkar. “I am not fool enough to ignore the fossil record.” He paused. “You were raised a Christian, even if you don’t practice that faith in any meaningful way. Your religion says we were created in God’s image. Well, that’s ridiculous, of course — God would have no need for a belly button. What ‘created in His image’ means to me is simply that He provided the selection criteria — the target vision — and the form we evolved to take was one that was pleasing to Him.”