The Terminal Experiment

by Robert J. Sawyer

  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, pre-empting 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.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Sarkar Muhammed’s artificial-intelligence company was called Mirror Image. Its offices were located in Concord, Ontario, just north of 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’chayim,” 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 you 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 audio tape. 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, sou
nd 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. Terabytes 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 backwards 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 …

  CHAPTER 19

  November 2011

  Sarkar had called Peter early Sunday morning to tell him the training and pruning of the simulacra were complete. Cathy was off looking at garage sales—a hobby whose appeal Peter had never understood—so Peter left a message for her with the household computer. He then hopped into his Mercedes and drove to Mirror Image’s offices in Concord.

  Once he and Sarkar were together in the computer lab, Sarkar said, “We’ll try activating the Control simulacrum first.” Peter nodded. Sarkar pushed a few keys then spoke into the microphone stalk rising from the console. “Hello.”

  A synthesized voice came from the speaker. “H—hello?”

  “Hello,” Sarkar said again. “It’s me, Sarkar.”

  “Sarkar!” The voice was full of relief. “What the hell is going on? I can’t see anything.”

  Peter felt his jaw drop. The simulation was much more real than he’d expected.

  “That’s right, Peter,” said Sarkar into the mike. “Don’t worry.”

  “Have I—have I been in an accident?” said the voice from the speaker.

  “No,” said Sarkar. “No, you’re fine.”

  “Is it a power failure, then? What time is it?”

  “About eleven forty.”

  “Morning or night?”

  “Morning.”

  “Why is it so dark, then? And what’s wrong with your voice?”

  Sarkar turned to Peter. “You tell him.”

  Peter cleared his throat. “Hello,” he said.

  “Who’s that? Is that still Sarkar?”

  “No, it’s me. Peter Hobson.”

  “I’m Peter Hobson.”

  “No, you’re not. I am.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You’re a simulation. A computer simulacrum. Of me.”

  There was a long silence, then: “Oh.”

  “You believe me?” asked Peter.

  “I guess,” said the voice from the speaker. “I mean, I remember discussing this experiment with Sarkar. I remember—I remember everything up to the brain scan.” Silence, then: “Shit, you really did it, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Sarkar.

  “Who was that?” asked the voice from the speaker.

  “Sarkar.”

  “I can’t tell the two of you apart,” said the sim. “You sound exactly the same.”

  Sarkar nodded.
“Good point. I’ll adjust the software to pass on a distinction between my accent and Peter’s. Sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay,” said the sim. “Thank you.” And then: “Christ, you did a good job. I feel—I feel just like myself. Except … except I’m not hungry. Or tired. And I don’t itch anywhere.” A beat. “Say, which simulacrum am I?”

  “You are Control,” said Sarkar, “the experimental baseline. You’re the first one we’ve activated. I do have routines set up to simulate a variety of neural inputs, including hunger and being tired. I am afraid I didn’t even think about simulating normal body itching and little aches and pains. Sorry about that.”

  “That’s okay,” said the simulacrum. “I didn’t realize just how much I used to itch all the time until now, with the sensation completely gone. So—so what happens now?”

  “Now,” said Sarkar, “you get to do whatever you want. There are many input programs available to you both here and out on the net.”

  “Thanks. Christ, this is strange.”

  “I’m going to put you in the background now so I can deal with the other simulations,” said Sarkar.

  “Okay, but, ah, Peter—?”

  Peter looked up, surprised. “Yes?”

  “You’re a lucky bastard, you know that? I wish I were you.”

  Peter grunted.

  Sarkar hit some keys.

  “So what will they be doing when running in the background?” asked Peter.

  “Well, I’ve given them limited net access. They can download any books or newsgroups they might want to read, of course, but the main thing I’ve given them access to is the net’s virtual-reality special-interestgroup libraries. They can plug into simulations of just about anything imaginable: scuba diving, mountain climbing, dancing—whatever. I’ve also given them access to the European equivalent of the VR sig; that one’s full of sex simulations. So, there’ll be plenty to keep them busy. The activities each of them chooses will tell us a lot about how their psychology has changed.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, the real you would never go skydiving, for instance—but an immortal version, who knew he couldn’t be killed, might indeed take that up as a hobby.” Sarkar typed some commands. “And speaking of the immortal, let’s introduce ourselves to Ambrotos.” A few more keyclicks, then he spoke into the microphone. “Hello,” he said, “it’s me, Sarkar.”