Terminal Experiment (9 page)

Hobson Monitoring had a standard database of medical journalists worldwide to whom electronic press kits were routinely sent. A few members of Peter’s senior staff argued that this particular release should also go to religion editors, but Peter vetoed that. He was still uncomfortable with the moral aspects of the discovery. Besides, everyone from the National Enquirer on down would be clamoring for interviews soon enough. An invitation to the press conference went out by E-mail and courier three days in advance of the actual event. Peter was uneasy about the wording of the invitation, but Joginder Singh, his PR person, was adamant that this was the correct approach:

Several reporters did call, trying to sniff out whether the story would really be worth pursuing, or if this was just going to be the release of a new piece of hospital gadgetry. But no advance information was given out. Everyone had to wait until Thursday morning. And then…

About forty reporters showed up for the press conference — Hobson Monitoring had only once before gotten more, back when it had announced its first public share offering. Peter knew half the reporters by name: Buck Piekarz, medical correspondent for the
Toronto Star
, Cory Tick, his counterpart from the
Globe and Mail
; Lianne Delaney from CBC Newsworld; a fat guy who covered Canadian stories for the
Buffalo News
; a stringer for
USA Today
; many more. The reporters helped themselves to fresh fruit and coffee while they chatted amongst themselves. They were surprised to not be receiving press kits up front, although Peter and Joginder assured them that full kits, including data disks and transcripts of Peter’s remarks, would be distributed as they exited. Several of the journalists present would videotape the conference, anyway.

Cathy had taken a vacation day to be there with Peter. At a quarter after ten, he made his way up to the front of the room. Cathy beamed at him, and, despite the butterflies in his stomach, he drew strength from her presence. “Hello, everyone,” he said, smiling at them all in turn, but holding a special, lingering smile on Cathy. “Thank you for coming out. Please forgive all the secrecy — I know it seems a tad melodramatic. But what we’re going to announce here today is something very special, and we wanted to be sure that responsible journalists heard about it first.” He smiled.

“Joginder, if you’ll dim the lights please? Thanks. Now, everyone, please watch the wall monitor. You’ll all be getting copies of the recording I’m about to play when you leave. All set? Run the demo, please, Joginder.”

The journalists watched intently as Peter narrated a slowed-down playback of the brain scans of Peggy Fennell’s death. Peter went into a fair bit of technical detail — these were, after all, medical correspondents. When the soulwave actually departed from Mrs. Fennell’s head a murmur moved through the audience.

“Play that last bit back again,” called out Piekarz from the
Star
. Peter signaled Joginder to do so.

“Exactly what is that?” asked another reporter.

Peter looked at Cathy, sitting in the front row. Her eyes were twinkling. He affected a shrug. “It’s a cohesive electrical field that leaves the body through the temple at the moment of death.”

“At the exact moment of death?” asked Delaney, the woman from Newsworld.

“Yes. It’s the final bit of electrical activity in the brain.”

“So — so it’s what?” said the woman. “Some kind of a soul?” She said the word offhandedly, as if a joke, giving her room to retreat in case she was making a fool of herself.

But in the weeks since Sarkar had first uttered that term, Peter had grown more comfortable with it. “Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly what we think it is.” He raised his voice, speaking generally to the room. “There it is, ladies and gentlemen: the first ever direct scientific recording of what may be a human soul leaving a body.”

A buzz erupted, everyone talking at once. Peter spent the next two hours answering questions, although some of the print reporters with early deadlines grabbed the press kits and exited almost at once. He made clear that his studies had yet to reveal exactly what happened to the soulwave after departure — it seemed to remain coherent, but there was still no proof that it didn’t dissipate shortly after leaving the body. He also stressed that very little data was available yet about the content or structure of the soulwave, and, in particular, about what, if any, meaningful information it contained.

But it made no difference. The idea of a soul was an archetype, universally grasped. People already were sure, in their hearts, of what the soulwave represented.

That night, Cathy and Peter saw that the CBC TV story was picked up by CNN in the States and the BBC World Service. The announcement was all over the net within hours and made front-page news in the evening editions of the
Toronto Star
and several American papers, and was plastered across page one of newspapers around the world the next day. Within twenty-four hours, the entire developed world knew about the discovery.

Suddenly Peter Hobson was a celebrity.

“Is the caller still there?” asked Donahue, back on daytime TV after his failed presidential bid.

“I’m here, Phil.”

Donahue made his tortured face; precious seconds were being wasted. “Go ahead — I have very little time.”

“What I’d like to know,” said the caller’s voice, “is what life after death is
really
like. I mean, we know now that it exists, but what’s it really like?”

Donahue turned to Peter. “That’s a very good question, caller. Dr. Hobson — what is the afterlife like?”

Peter shifted in his chair. “Well, that’s more a subject for philosophers, I’m afraid, and—”

Donahue turned toward the studio audience. “Audience, are we prepared for these questions? Do we really want to know the answers? And what will America do if the afterlife turns out to be unpleasant?” He spoke into the air. “Show ’em, Bryan — number 14.”

A chart appeared on the screen. “Sixty-seven percent of the people of this good country,” said Donahue, “believe that the soulwave proves the Judeo-Christian model of a heaven and a hell. Only eleven percent believe that your discovery, Dr. Hobson, disproves that model.”

The chart disappeared. Donahue spied a raised hand in the back of the studio. Still spry at seventy-five, he bolted for the back row and shoved a microphone under a woman’s chin.

“Yes, ma’am. You had a brief comment.”

“That’s right, Phil. I’m from Memphis — we love your show down there.”

First the little-boy face, patted on the head. “Thank you, ma’am.” Then the pained face, as if something was caught going down his gullet. “I have very little time.”

“My question is for the doctor. Do you think your discovery is going to get you into heaven, or are you going to hell for interfering in God’s mysteries?”

Close-up on Peter. “I — I have no idea.”

Donahue did his standard theatrical arm gesture that ended with his finger pointing directly into the camera. “And we’ll be back…”

The silver-haired Latin fox turned to face the audience. According to the tabloids, he’d recently undergone the Life Unlimited process, so viewers had centuries of his particular brand of television to look forward to.

“Life after life,” he said, portentously. “That’s our focus on this edition of
Geraldo
. Our guests today include Peter Hobson, the Ottawa scientist who claims to have captured the immortal soul on film, and Monsignor Carlos Latina of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.” Geraldo turned to the man wearing a black cassock. “Monsignor — where do you think the souls are today of those clergy members who molested boys in church-run orphanages?”

(Roll computer graphic of Capitol Building dome. Cue music.) Announcer: “From ABC News:
This Week with Peter Jennings
. Now from our Washington headquarters, here’s Peter Jennings.”

Jennings, gray haired, dour, facing into the camera: “The soulwave — fact or fantasy? Religious revelation or scientific truth? We’ll ask our guests: Peter Hobson, the engineer who first detected the soulwave; Carl Sagan, author of the best-selling
Eyes of Creation
; and Helen Johannes, presidential advisor on religion in America. Some background on all this from our man Kyle Adair. And joining me in our Washington studio will be—”

(Medium shot of Donaldson, his features sharp despite his wrinkles; his shoe-polish brown toupee looking obviously fake.)

“Sam Donaldson—”

(Medium shot of silver-haired Will, walleyed and bow-tied, looking like a retired plantation owner.)

“ — and George Will. Later, we’ll be joined by commentator Sally Fernandez of the Washington Post … all here on our Sunday program.”

(Run commercials: Archer Daniels Midland’s new all-vegetable automobile. General Dynamics — “our work may be classified, but we’re a good corporate citizen.” Merrill Lynch — “because someday the economy will turn around.")

(Roll prerecorded backgrounder.)

(Fade up in studio.)

Jennings: “Kyle, thank you.”

(Recap guests and panelists.)

(Insert Peter Hobson on wall monitor, with dateline display at top showing “Toronto.")

Sam Donaldson, leaning forward: “Professor Hobson, your discovery of the soulwave could be seen as a great liberator of oppressed people, final proof that all men and women are created equal. What effect do you think your discovery will have on totalitarian regimes?”

Hobson, politely: “Excuse me, but I’m not a professor.”

Donaldson: “I stand corrected. But don’t duck my question, sir! What effect will your discoveries have on the human-rights violations going on in the eastern Ukraine?”

Hobson, after a moment’s reflection: “Well, I’d love to think that I’ve struck a blow for human equality, of course. But it seems that our ability to be inhuman has survived every challenge to it in the past.”

George Will, over steepled fingers: “Dr. Hobson, the average American, struggling under the burden of an excessive government with a ravenous appetite for tax dollars, cares not one whit about the geopolitical ramifications of your research. The average church-going American wants to know, in precise and plain language, sir, exactly what characteristics the afterlife actually has.”

Hobson, blinking: “Is that a question?”

Will: “It is the question, Dr. Hobson.”

Hobson, shaking head slowly: “I have no idea.”

Peter was not about to let his newfound celebrity interfere with his Tuesday evening dinners with Sarkar at Sonny Gotlieb’s. But he did have something very specific that he wanted to explore with Sarkar, and he began without preamble. “How do you create an artificial intelligence? You work in that field — how do you do it?”

Sarkar looked surprised. “Well, there are many ways. The oldest is the interview method. If we wanted a system to do financial planning, we would ask questions of several financial planners. Then we reduce the answers as a series of rules that can be expressed in computer code — ‘if A and B are true, do C.’”

“But what about that scanner my company built for you? Aren’t you doing full brain dumps of specific people now?”

“We’re making good progress toward that. We’ve got a prototype called RICKGREEN, but we’re not ready to go public with it. You know that comedian, Rick Green?”

“Sure.”

“We did a full scan of him. The resulting system can now tell jokes that are just as funny as the ones the real Rick tells. And by giving it access to the Canadian Press and UPI news feeds, it can even generate new topical humor.”

“Okay, so you can essentially clone in silicon a specific human mind—”

“Get with the twenty-first century, Peter. We use gallium arsenide, not silicon.”

“Whatever.”

“But you have hit upon what makes the problem crisp: we are just at the point where we can clone one specific human mind — a shame that such a technique did not exist in time to scan Stephen Hawking. But there are very few applications in which you want the knowledge of just one person. For most expert systems, you really want the
combined
knowledge of many practitioners. So far, there is no way to combine, say, Rick Green and Jerry Seinfeld, or to build a combined Stephen Hawking/Mordecai Almi neural net. Although I had high hopes for this technology, I suspect most of the contracts we’ll get will be for duplicating the brains of autocratic company presidents who think their heirs are going to be interested in what they have to say after they’re dead.”

Peter nodded.

“Besides,” said Sarkar, “total brain dumps are turning out to be a tremendous waste of resources. When we created RICKGREEN, all we were really interested in was his sense of humor. But the system also gives us everything else Rick knows, including his approaches to raising his children, an endless amount of expertise about model trains, which are his hobby, and even his cooking technique, something no one in his right mind would want to emulate.”

“Can’t you pare it down to isolate just the sense of humor?”

“That’s difficult. We’re getting good at decoding what each neural net does, but there are many interconnections. When we tried deleting the part about child rearing, we found the system no longer made jokes about family life.”

“But you can make an accurate duplicate of a specific human mind on a computer?”

“It’s a brand-new technique, Peter. But, so far, yes, the duplication seems accurate.”

“And you can, at least to some extent, decode the functions of the various neural interconnections?”

“Yes,” said Sarkar. “Again, we’ve only tried it on the RICKGREEN prototype — and that was a limited model.”

“And, once you’ve identified a function, you can delete it from the overall brain simulacrum?”

“Bearing in mind that deleting one thing may change the way something that seems unrelated will respond, yes, I’d say we’re at the point at which we can do that.”

“All right,” said Peter. “Let me propose an experiment. Say we make two copies of a specific person’s mind. In one of them you excise everything related to the physical body: hormonal responses, sexual urges, things like that. And in the second one, you remove everything related to bodily degeneration, to fear of old age and dying, and so on.”

Sarkar ate a matzo ball. “And what would the point be?”

“The first one would be to answer that question everyone keeps asking me: what is life after death really like? What parts of the human psyche could persist separate from the body? And, while we’re at it, I figure we’d do the second one — a simulation of a being who knew he was physically immortal, like someone who has undergone that Life Unlimited process.”

Sarkar stopped chewing. His mouth hung open, giving an undignified view of a masticated dumpling. “That’s — that’s incredible,” he said at last, around his food. “
Subhanallah
, what an idea.”

“Could you do it?”

Sarkar swallowed. “Maybe,” he said. “Electronic eschatology. What a concept.”

“You’d need to make the two brain dumps.”

“We’d do the dump once, of course. Then we’d just copy it twice.”

“Copy it once, you mean.”

“No, twice,” said Sarkar. “You can’t do an experiment without a control; you know that.”

“Right,” said Peter, slightly embarrassed. “Anyway, we’d make one copy which we would modify to simulate life after death. Call it — call it the Spirit simulacrum. And another to simulate immortality.”

“And the third we would leave unmodified,” said Sarkar. “A baseline or control version that we can compare to the original living person to make sure that the simulacra retain their accuracy as time goes on.”

“Perfect,” said Peter.

“But you know, Peter, this wouldn’t necessarily simulate true life after death. It’s life outside the physical body — but who knows if the soulwave carries with it any of our memories? Of course, if it doesn’t, then it’s not really a meaningful continuation of existence. Without our memories, our pasts, what we were, it wouldn’t be anything we’d recognize as a continuation of the same person.”

“I know,” said Peter. “But if the soul is anything like what people believe it to be — just the mind, without the body — then this simulation, at least, would give us some idea of what that kind of soul would be like. Then I could have something intelligent to say the next time I get asked that ‘What’s life after death really like?’ question.”

Sarkar nodded. “But why the research into immortality?”

“I went to one of those Life Unlimited seminars a while ago.”

“Really? Peter, surely you don’t want that.”

“I — I don’t know. It’s fascinating, in a way.”

“It’s stupid.”

“Maybe — but it seems we could kill two birds with one stone with this research.”

“Perhaps,” said Sarkar. “But who would we simulate?”

“How about you?” asked Peter.

Sarkar raised a hand. “No, not me. The last thing I want to do is live forever. True joy is possible only after death; I look forward to the felicity to be given to my realized soul in the next world. No, they were your questions, Peter. Why not use you?”

Peter stroked his chin. “All right. If you’re willing to undertake the project, I’m willing both to fund it and to be the guinea pig.” He paused. “This could answer some really big questions, Sarkar. After all, we know now that both physical immortality is possible and that some form of life after death exists. It would be a shame to choose one if the other turned out to be better.”

“Hobson’s choice,” said Sarkar.

“Eh?”

“Surely you know the phrase. Your last name is Hobson, after all.”

“I’ve heard the expression once or twice.”

“It refers to Thomas Hobson, a liveryman in England in, oh, the seventeenth century, I think. He rented out horses, but required his customers to take either the horse nearest the stable door or none at all. A ‘Hobson’s choice’ is a choice that offers no real alternative.”

“So?”

“So you don’t get an alternative. Do you seriously think that if you were to bankrupt yourself buying nanotechnology immortality that Allah couldn’t take you anyway if He wanted to? You have a destiny, as do I. We have no choice. When it’s time for you to go to the stable, the horse nearest the door
will
be the one that is meant for you. Call it Hobson’s choice or
qadar Allah
or
kismet
— whatever term you use, it’s the foredestiny of God.”

Peter shook his head. He and Sarkar rarely talked about religion, and he was beginning to remember why. “Are you willing to undertake the project?”

“Sure. My part is easy. You’re the one who is going to have to face himself. You will see your own personality, the inner workings of your own mind, the interconnections that drive your thoughts. Do you really choose to do that?”

Peter reflected for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “I really do choose that.”

Sarkar smiled. “Hobson’s choice,” he said, and signaled the server to bring the check.