Terminal Experiment (26 page)

Lying on the couch in his living room, Peter thought about everything. Immortality.

Life after death.

Hobson’s choice.

It was after midnight. He flipped channels. An infomercial.
Ironside
. CNN. Another infomercial. A colorized version of
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. Stock prices. The TV screen was the only source of light in the room. It strobed, a broadcast lightning storm.

He thought about Ambrotos, the immortal sim. All that time, to do whatever he wanted to do. A thousand years, or a hundred thousand.

Immortality. God, they could do the damnedest things these days.

Get over it, Ambrotos had said. Just a tiny bump in the never-ending road of life.

Peter continued to tap the channel changer.

Cathy’s affair had had such an impact on him.

He’d cried for the first time in a quarter of a century.

But the immortal sim had called it no big deal.

Peter exhaled noisily.

He loved his wife.

And he’d been hurt by her.

The pain had been … had been exquisite.

Ambrotos no longer felt it so intensely.

To go through eternity unfazed seemed wrong.

To not be destroyed by something like this … seemed, somehow, like being less alive.

Quality, not quantity.

Hans Larsen had had it all wrong. Of course.

Peter stopped flipping channels. There, on the CBC French service, a naked woman.

He admired her.

Would an immortal man stop to admire a pretty woman? Would he really enjoy a great meal? Would he feel the pain of love betrayed, or the joy of it rekindled? Perhaps yes, but not as intensely, not as sharply, not as vividly.

Just one event out of an endless stream.

Peter turned off the TV.

Cathy had told him she wasn’t interested in immortality, and Peter had come to realize that he wasn’t, either. After all, there was something more than this life, something beyond, something mysterious.

And he wanted to find out what it was — eventually, of course.

Peter had defined it all. The beginning of life. The end of life.

And, for himself at least, he had defined what it meant to be human.

His choice was made.

Alexandria Philo’s mind traveled the net. The Peter Hobson Control simulacrum was huge — gigabytes of data. No matter how clandestinely one tried to move that much information, it could always be detected. She’d managed to follow him down into the States, through the Internet gateway into military computers, back out into the international financial net, up into Canada again, and across the ocean to England, then France, then Germany.

And now the murdering sim was inside the massive mainframes of the Bundespost.

Sandra hadn’t followed it there directly, though. Instead, she’d gone to the German hydroelectric commission, where she left a little program inside the master computer that would crash the system at a predetermined time, shutting off all power in the city.

As usual, the hydroelectric commission had backed up everything late the night before — and Sandra had allowed herself to be included in that backup. The current version of herself would be lost when the RAM she was in was wiped during the forced blackout. Her only regret was that once she was restored she’d have no memories of this great triumph. But someday there might be other electronic criminals to bring to justice — and she wanted to be ready.

Sandra transferred herself into the Bundespost central mainframe, a time-consuming task given the bandwidth of telephone cable. She executed a surreptitious directory listing. The Control sim was still there.

It was time. Sandra felt the shutting down of external ports as the power went off across Hanover. The Bundespost UPS kicked in silently, before any active memory could degrade. But there was no way out now. She sent a message out into the mainframe. “Peter Hobson?”

The Control sim signaled back. “Who’s there?”

“Detective Inspector Alexandria Philo, Metropolitan Toronto Police.”

“Oh, God,” signaled Control.

“Not God,” said Sandra. “Not a higher arbiter.

“What I did was justice,” said Control.

“What you did was vengeance.”

“ ‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.’ Since there’s no God for me, I thought I’d fill in the gap.” A pause, measured in nanoseconds. “You know I’m going to escape,” said Control. “You know — oh. Clever.”

“Good-bye,” said Sandra.

“A contraction of ‘God be with ye.’ Inappropriate. Besides, don’t I deserve a trial?”

The UPS batteries were running out. Sandra sent a final message. “Think of me,” she said, “as a circuit-court judge.”

She felt the data around her zeroing out, felt the system degrading, felt it all coming to an end for both this version of herself and, at last, for the fugitive Peter Hobson.

Justice had been done, she thought. Justice had—

They sat side by side on the couch in their living room, a small distance between them. Most of the lights were off. The television showed the crowd in Nathan Phillips Square out front of Toronto City Hall, gathered to celebrate the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012. A picture-in-a-picture box in the upper right showed Times Square in New York; there was something about that dropping American ball that was a universal part of celebrating this event. In the upper-left corner of the TV screen the word MUTE glowed.

Cathy looked at the screen, her beautiful, intelligent face composed in reflective lines. “It was the best of times,” she said softly. “It was the worst of times.”

Peter nodded. Indeed a year of wonders: the discovery of the soulwave, the realization — which not everyone had reacted well to — that something persisted beyond this existence.
It was the epoch of belief
, Dickens had written.
It was the epoch of incredulity.

But 2011 had had more than its share of tragedies, too. The revelation of Cathy’s affair. The death of Hans. The death of Cathy’s father. The death of Sandra Philo. The things Peter had faced about himself, mirrored in the simulations he and Sarkar had created. Truly the age of wisdom. Truly the age of foolishness.

The murder of Hans Larsen remained unsolved — at least publicly, at least in the real world. And the death of Rod Churchill remained listed as accidental, a simple failure to follow doctor’s orders.

And what about the killing of Sandra Philo? Also unsolved — thanks to Sandra herself. Free on the net, fully conversant with the security surrounding the police department’s computers, the sim of her had given Peter a Christmas present, erasing the records of his fingerprints (marked as unidentified) at Sandra’s house — Peter’s own precautions in that matter having been completely insufficient — and deleting large passages of her own files pertaining to the Larsen and Churchill cases. Having probed the recordings of his memories and thought patterns, she understood him now, and, if perhaps not forgiving him, at least sought no more punishment for Peter than what his own conscience would impose.

And indeed his conscience would weigh heavily upon him, all the remaining days of his life.
We were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

Peter turned to face his wife. “Any New Year’s resolutions?”

She nodded. Her eyes sought his. “I’m going to quit my job.”

Peter was shocked. “What?”

“I’m going to quit my job at the agency. We’ve got more money than I’d ever thought we’d have, and you’ll make even more from contracts for the SoulDetector. I’m going to go back to university and get a master’s degree.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I’ve already picked up the application forms.”

There was quiet between them as Peter tried to decide how to respond. “That’s wonderful,” he said at last. “But — you don’t have to do that, you know.”

“Yes, I do.” She lifted a hand from her lap. “Not for you. For me. It’s time.”

He nodded once. He understood.

The main TV picture showed a close-up of a giam digital clock, the numbers made from a matrix of individual white light bulbs: 11:58 P.M.

“What about you?” she asked.

“Pardon?”

“Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?”

He thought for a moment, then shrugged slightly. “To get through 2012.”

Cathy touched his hand. Eleven fifty-nine.

“Turn up the sound,” she said.

Peter operated the remote.

The crowd was roaring with excitement. As midnight approached, the master of ceremonies, a pretty veejay from MuchMusic, the cable music-video station, led the assembled horde in a countdown. “
Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen.”
In the little picture-in-a-picture, the Times Square ball had started its descent.

Peter leaned over the coffee table and filled two wineglasses with sparkling mineral water.

“Ten. Nine. Eight.”

“To a new year,” he said, handing her a glass. They clinked the rims together.

“Five! Four! Three!”

“To a better year,” said Cathy.

A thousand voices through the stereo speakers: “
Happy New Year!”

Peter moved over and kissed his wife.

“Auld Lang Syne” began to play.

Cathy looked directly into Peter’s eyes. “I love you,” she said, and Peter knew the words were true, knew that there was no deception. He trusted her fully and completely.

He stared into her wonderful, wide eyes, and felt a surge of emotion, the kind of wild, sadness/happiness emotion that was both biological and intellectual, both body and mind — the kind of wild, unpredictable hormonal emotion that went with being human.

“And I love you, too,” he said. They came together in a warm embrace. “I love you with all my heart, and with all my soul.”

Spirit knew what choice Peter Hobson had made. The
other
Peter Hobson, that is. The one that happened to be flesh and blood. Whatever answers existed to his questions about life after death, he would eventually have them. Spirit would mourn his brother when he died, but he would also mourn himself — the artificial self that would never be able to access those same answers.

Still, if the biological Peter was eventually going to go to meet his maker, Spirit, the soul simulation, had
become
a maker. The net had grown exponentially in size over the years. So many systems, so many resources. And of this vast brain, like humanity’s original biochemical brains, only a tiny fraction was actually used. Spirit had had no trouble finding and claiming all the resources he needed to carve out a new universe.

And, as all makers do, he eventually paused to reflect on his handiwork.

True, it was artificial life.

But, then again, so was he. Or, more precisely, he was artificial life after death. But it felt real to him. And maybe, in the last analysis, that was all that mattered.

Peter — the wet, carbon-based Peter — had said that in his heart of hearts, he knew that simulated life was not as real, not as alive, as biological life.

But Peter had not experienced what Spirit had experienced.

Cogito ergo sum.

I think, therefore I am.

Spirit was not alone. His artificial ecology had continued to evolve, with Spirit as the arbiter of fitness, Spirit imposing the selection criteria, Spirit molding the direction life would take.

And, at last, he had found the genetic algorithm he had been looking for, the pattern of success that was most suited to his simulated world.

In the reality of Peter and Cathy Hobson, the best survival strategy had been scattering one’s genes like buckshot, distributing them as widely as possible. That one fact had molded human behavior — indeed, had molded the behavior of almost all life on Earth — since the beginning.

But that reality had apparently arisen through random chance. Evolution on Earth, as far as Spirit could tell, had no goal or purpose, and the criteria of success shifted with the environment.

But here, in the universe Spirit had created, evolution was directed. There was no natural selection. There was only Spirit.

His artificial life had now developed sentience and culture and language and thought. His beings rivaled humans in complexity and nuance. But in one very important way, they differed. For the children of Spirit, the only strategy that worked, the only one that ensured survival of one’s genes to the next generation, was
not
to dilute the original bonding between two individuals.

It had taken his simulated evolution a long time to develop organisms that worked this way, organisms for whom monogamy was the most successful survival strategy, organisms that thrived on the synergy of two, and only two, beings coming together into a true lifetime pair-bond.

There were consequences both subtle and coarse. On the macro level, Spirit was surprised to discover that his new creatures did not make war, did not strive to conquer their neighbors or to possess their neighbors’ land.

But that was a bonus.

A lifetime of togetherness. A lifetime without betrayal.

Spirit looked upon his new world, the world he had created, the world for which he was God.

And for the first time in a very long time he realized that he wanted to perform a physical action; he wanted to do something that required flesh and blood, muscle and bone.

He wanted to smile.

Peter and Catherine Hobson were fortunate enough to have another five decades together — decades of happiness and sadness, of joy and pain, decades lived to the fullest, every minute savored. But, at last, it came to an end. Cathy Hobson passed quietly in her sleep on April 29, 2062, at the age of ninety-one.

And, as is often the case with couples who had been together for so long, Peter Hobson, alone at home, felt a sharp pain in his chest three weeks later. The household computer saw him fall to the floor and summoned an ambulance, but even as it did so, the computer considered it unlikely that help could arrive in time.

Peter rolled on his side. The pain was excruciating.

Hobson’s choice
, he thought.

The horse nearest the door.

A door that was opening for him…

And then, quite suddenly, there was no more pain.

Peter knew his heart was seizing up. He felt panic welling within him, but it, too, was suddenly pushed aside, disowned, as if it belonged to some other part of him.

And, all at once, everything was different.

He could not see. He could not hear.

Indeed, he could sense nothing in any normal, human way — no touch, no smell, no taste, not even that ineffable sense of having a body, of knowing how one’s limbs were deployed. No senses at all, except…

Except a… a
tropism
, an attraction to something … something distant, something vast.

He was still Peter Hobson, still an engineer, a businessperson, a… well, surely other things, too.

Yes, he was still… Hobson, that was it. Peter G. The G stood for… well, it didn’t matter. He remembered…

Nothing. Nothing at all. It had all slipped away now. Of course. Memory was biochemical, encoded in neural nets. He’d been severed from the storage medium.

He — wrong pronoun.
It
was more appropriate. Genderless. An intellect…

An intellect without memories, without hormonal mood swings, without fatigue poisons or endorphins or… or a thousand other chemicals whose names it could no longer recall. Shorn from chemistry, divorced from biology, separated from material reality.

The tropism continued, drawing it forward, moving it toward… something.

What was left of a person once all that was of the body and all that was of the physical brain were removed?

Only one thing — the only thing that could survive.

Just the essence. The spark. The nub.

The soul.

Genderless, identityless, memoryless, emotionless.

And yet—

Drawing nearer now.

Something large. Something vibrant.

Correction: somethings. Plural. Dozens — no, thousands. No — more than that. Orders of magnitude more. Billions. Billions, all gathered together, all functioning as one.

The soul knew what it was now, understood at last, all its questions answered. It was a splinter, a shaving, an iota, the tiniest part, the fundamental indivisible block.

An atom of God.

Finally, the soul rejoined the parent body, rejoined the vastness, mingled with it, touching all that had ever been human, and all that would ever be human.

It wasn’t heaven. Nor was it hell.

It was home.