The Terminal Experiment (v5)

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Cathy shook her head.

  “He’s dead,” said Shannon, and began crying again.

  Jonas, the one Cathy’s husband called the pseudointellectual, was passing by. “What happened?” asked Cathy.

  Jonas ran a hand through his greasy hair. “Hans was murdered.”

  “Murdered!”

  “Uh-huh. An intruder, it seems.”

  Toby Bailey moved closer, apparently sensing that this cluster of workers was the interesting one to be with—someone hadn’t yet heard the story. “That’s right,” he said. “You know he didn’t show up for work yesterday? Well, Nancy Caulfield got a call late last night from his—I was going to say wife, but I guess the word is ‘widow,’ now. Anyway, it was in this morning’s Sun, as well. Service is on Thursday; everybody gets time off to go, if they want.”

  “Was it robbery?” asked Cathy.

  Jonas shook his head. “The newspaper said the cops had ruled out robbery as a motive. Nothing taken, apparently. And”—Jonas’s face showed an uncharacteristic degree of animation—“according to unnamed sources, the body was mutilated.”

  “Oh, God,” said Cathy, stunned. “How?”

  “Well, the police are refusing to comment on the mutilation.” Jonas adopted that knowing air that irritated Peter so. “Even if they were willing to speak about it, I suspect they’d keep the details secret so that they could weed out any false confessions.”

  Cathy shook her head. “Mutilated,” she said again, the word sounding foreign to her.

  AMBROTOS, THE IMMORTAL SIMULACRUM, dreamed.

  Peter walked. There was something unusual about his footfalls, though. They were softened, somehow. Not like walking on grass or mud. More like the rubberized surface of a tennis court. Just a hint of give as each foot came down in turn; an ever-so-slight springiness added to his step.

  He glanced down. The surface was light blue. He looked around. The material he was on was gently curved, falling away in all directions. There was no sky. Just a void, a nothingness, a colorless emptiness, an absence of anything. He continued to walk slowly across the slightly resilient, curving surface.

  Suddenly he caught sight of Cathy in the distance, waving at him.

  She was wearing her old navy blue University of Toronto jacket. Spelled out on one sleeve was “9T5,” her graduating year; on the other, “CHEM.” Peter saw now that this wasn’t the Cathy of today, but rather Cathy as he’d first known her: younger, her heart-shaped face free of lines, her ebony hair halfway down her back. Peter looked down again. He had on stone-washed blue jeans—the kind of clothes he hadn’t worn for twenty years.

  He began to walk toward her, and she toward him. With each step, her clothes and hairstyle changed, and after every dozen paces or so it was clear that she had aged a little more. Peter felt a beard erupting from his face, and then disappearing, a bad experiment abandoned, and, as he walked further, he felt a coolness on the top of his head as he began to lose his hair. But after a few more paces, Peter realized that all changes in him, at least, had stopped. His hair thinned no further, his body did not hunch over, his joints continued to work with ease and smoothness.

  They walked and walked, but soon Peter realized that they were not getting closer to each other. Indeed, they were growing farther and farther apart.

  The ground between them was expanding. The rubbery blueness was growing bigger and bigger. Peter began to run, and so did Cathy. But it did no good. They were on the surface of a great balloon that was inflating. With each passing moment its surface area increased and the distance between them grew.

  An expanding universe. A universe of vast time. Even though she was far away now, Peter could still perceive the details of Cathy’s face, the lines around her eyes. Soon she gave up running, gave up even walking. She just stood there on the ever-growing surface. She continued to wave, but Peter understood that it had become a wave of goodbye—no immortality for her. The surface continued to expand, and soon she had slipped over the horizon, out of sight …

  WHEN CATHY GOT HOME that evening, she told Peter. Together, they watched the CityPulse News at 6:00, but the report added very little to what she’d learned at work. Still, Peter was surprised to see how small a house Hans had had—a pleasing reminder that, at least in economic matters, Peter had been his better by an order of magnitude.

  Cathy seemed to still be in shock—dazed by the news. Peter shocked himself by how … how satisfactory all this seemed. But it irritated him to see her mourning the death. Granted, she and Hans had worked together for years. Still, there was something deep in Peter that was affronted by her sadness.

  Even though he had to get up early for a meeting— some Japanese journalists were flying in to interview him about the soulwave—he didn’t even make a pretense of trying to go to bed at the same time as Cathy. Instead he stayed up, watched white-haired Jay Leno for a bit, then ambled off to his office and dialed into Mirror Image. He received the same menu as before:

  [F1]

  Spirit (Life After Death)

  [F2]

  Ambrotos (Immortality)

  [F3]

  Control (unmodified)

  Once again, he selected the Control sim.

  “Hello,” said Peter. “It’s me, Peter.”

  “Hello,” replied the sim. “It’s after midnight. Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  Peter nodded. “I suppose. I’m just—I don’t know, I guess I’m jealous, in a funny sort of way.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Of Hans. He was killed yesterday morning.”

  “Was he? My God…”

  “You sound like Cath. All fucking choked up.”

  “Well, it does come as a surprise.”

  “I suppose,” said Peter. “Still …”

  “Still what?”

  “Still it bothers me that she’s so upset by this. Sometimes …” He paused for a long time, then: “Sometimes I wonder if I married the right woman.”

  The sim’s voice was neutral. “You didn’t have much choice.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Peter. “There was Becky. Becky and I would have been wonderful together.”

  The speaker made a very strange sound; perhaps the electronic equivalent of blowing a raspberry. “People think the choice of who they marry is a big decision, and a very personal reflection of who they are. It’s not—not really.”

  “Of course it is,” said Peter.

  “No, it’s not. Look, I’ve got nothing much to do these days except read stuff coming in off the net. One thing I’ve been looking into is twin studies—I guess kind of being your silicon twin has got me interested.”

  “Gallium arsenide,” said Peter.

  The raspberry sound again. “The studies show that twins separated at birth are enormously alike in thousands of ways. They have the same favorite chocolate bar. They like the same music. If male, they both choose to grow, or not to grow, a beard. They end up with similar careers. On and on—similarity after similarity. Except in one thing: spouses. One twin may have an athletic spouse, the other a delicate intellectual. One a blonde, the other a brunette. One an extrovert, the other a wallflower.”

  “Really?” asked Peter.

  “Absolutely,” said Control. “Twin studies are devastating to the ego. All those similarities in tastes show that nature, not nurture, is the overwhelming component of personality. In fact, I read a great study today about two twins separated at birth. Both were slobs. One had adoptive parents who were obsessive about neatness; the other was adopted by a family with a messy household. A researcher asked the twins why they were sloppy, and both said it was a reaction to their adoptive parents. One said, ‘My mother was such a neat-freak, I can’t bear to be so meticulous.’ But the other said, ‘Well, gee, my mother was a slob, so I guess I picked it up from her.’ In fact, neither answer is true. Being messy was in their genes. Almost everything we are is in our genes.”

  Peter digested this. “But doesn’t the choice of radically
different spouses refute that? Doesn’t that prove we are individuals, shaped by our individual upbringings?”

  “At first glance, it might seem that way,” said Control, “but in fact it proves exactly the opposite. Think about when we got engaged to Cathy. We were 28, just about to finish our doctorate. We were ready to get on with life; we wanted to get married. Granted, we were already very much in love with Cathy, but even if we weren’t, we’d probably have wanted to get married about then. If she hadn’t been there, we would have looked around at our circle of acquaintances to find a mate. But think about it: we really had very few possibilities. First eliminate all those who were already married or engaged—Becky was engaged to somebody else at that point, for instance. Then eliminate all those who weren’t approximately our same age. Then, to be really honest with ourselves, eliminate those of other races or profoundly different religions. Who would have been left? One person? Maybe two. Maybe, if we’d been extraordinarily lucky, three of four. But that’s it. You’re fantasizing about all the people we could have married, but if you look at it—really look at it—you’ll find we had almost no choice at all.”

  Peter shook his head. “It seems so cold and impersonal when put like that.”

  “In a lot of ways, it is,” said the sim. “But it’s given me a new appreciation for Sarkar’s and Raheema’s arranged marriage. I’d always thought that was wrong, but when you get right down to it, the difference is trivial. They didn’t have much choice in who they married, and neither did we.”

  “I suppose,” said Peter.

  “It’s true,” said the sim. “So go to bed, already. Go upstairs and lie down next to your wife.” He paused. “I should be so lucky myself.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Detective Inspector Alexandria Philo had a love-hate relationship with this part of her job. On the one hand, questioning those who had known the deceased often provided valuable clues. But, on the other, having to pump distraught people for information was an unpleasant experience all around.

  Even worse was the cynicism that went with the process: not everyone would be telling the truth; some of the tears would be crocodile. Sandra’s natural instinct was to offer sympathy for those who were in pain, but the cop in her said that nothing should be taken at face value.

  No, she thought. It wasn’t the cop in her that made her say that. It was the civilian. Once her marriage to Walter was over, all the people who had earlier congratulated her on their engagement and wedding started saying things like, “Oh, I knew it would never last,” and “gee, he really wasn’t right for you,” and “he was an ape”—or a Neanderthal, or a jerk, or whatever the individual’s favorite metaphor for stupid people was. Sandra had learned then that people—even good people, even your friends—will lie to you. At any given moment, they will tell you what they think you want to hear.

  The elevator doors slid open on the sixteenth floor of the North American Centre tower. Sandra stepped out. Doowap Advertising had its own lobby, all in chrome and pink leather, directly off the elevators. Sandra walked over to stand in front of the receptionist’s large desk. These days, most companies had gotten rid of the fluffy bimbos at the front desk, and replaced them with more mature adults of either sex, projecting a more businesslike image. But advertising was still advertising, and sex still sold. Sandra tried to keep her conversation to words of one syllable for the benefit of the pretty young thing behind the desk.

  After flashing her badge at a few executives, Sandra arranged to interview each of the employees. Doowap used the kind of open-office floor plan that had become popular in the Eighties. Everyone had a cubicle in the center of the room, delineated by movable room dividers covered in gray fabric. Around the outside of the room were offices, but they belonged to no particular person, and no one was allowed to homestead in one. Instead, they were used as needed for client consultations, private meetings, and so on.

  And now it was only a matter of listening. Sandra knew that Joe Friday had been an idiot. “Just the facts, Ma’am,” got you nowhere at all. People were uncomfortable about giving facts, especially to the police. But opinions … everybody loved to have their opinion solicited. Sandra had found a sympathetic ear was much more effective than a world-weary get-to-the-point approach. Besides, being a good listener was the best way of finding the office gossip: that one person who knew everything—and had no compunctions about sharing it.

  At Doowap Advertising, that person turned out to be Toby Bailey.

  “You see ’em come and go in this business,” said Toby, spreading his arms to demonstrate how the advertising trade encompassed all of reality. “The creative types are the worst, of course. They’re all neurotic. But they’re only a tiny part of the process. Me, I’m a media buyer—I acquire space for ads. That’s where the real power is.”

  Sandra nodded encouragingly. “It sounds like a fascinating business.”

  “Oh, it’s like everything else,” said Toby. Having now established the wonders of advertising, he was prepared to be magnanimous. “It takes all kinds. Take poor old Hans, for instance. Now, he was a real character. Loved the ladies—not that his wife was hard to look at. But Hans, well, he was interested in quantity, not quality.” Toby smiled, inviting Sandra to react to his joke.

  Sandra did just that, chuckling politely. “So he just wanted to put more notches on his belt? That was the only thing that mattered to him?”

  Toby raised a hand, as if fearing that his words might be construed as speaking ill of the dead. “Oh, no—he only liked pretty women. You never saw him with anything below an eight.”

  “An eight?”

  “You know—on a scale of one to ten. Looks-wise.”

  Pig, thought Sandra. “I imagine in an advertising firm, you must have a lot of pretty women.”

  “Oh, yes—packaging sells, if you’ll forgive me for saying so.” He seemed to be mentally thumbing through the company’s personnel files. “Oh, yes,” he said again.

  “I noticed your receptionist when I came in.”

  “Megan?” said Toby. “Case in point. Hans set his sights on her the moment she was hired. It didn’t take long for her to fall for his charms.”

  Sandra glanced at the personnel roster she’d been given. Megan Mulvaney. “Still,” said Sandra, “did Hans have any particular likes or dislikes when it came to women? I mean, ‘pretty’ is a broad category.”

  Toby opened his mouth, as if to say something stupid like, “so to speak.” Sandra gave him points for stopping himself before he did so. But he did seem quite animated, as if talking about beautiful women to a woman was in itself a turn-on. “Well, he liked them to be, ah, well-endowed, if you catch my meaning, and, I don’t know, I suppose his taste was a little more toward the sultry than my own. Still, almost anyone was fair game—I mean, one would hardly call Cathy or Toni sultry, although they’re both quite attractive.”

  Sandra stole another glance at the roster. Cathy Hobson. Toni D’Ambrosio. More starting points. She smiled. “Still,” she said, “a lot of men are all talk and no action. A number of people have mentioned Hans’s prowess, but tell me truthfully, Toby, was he all he was cracked up to be?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Toby, feeling the need now to defend his dead friend. “If he went after somebody, he got her. I never saw him fail.”

  “I see,” said Sandra. “What about Hans’s boss?”

  “Nancy Caulfield? Now, there’s a character! Let me tell you how Hans finally got her …”

  FOR SPIRIT, the life-after-death sim, there was no such thing anymore as biological sleep, no distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness.

  For a flesh-and-blood person, dreams provided a different perspective, a second opinion about the day’s events. But Spirit had only one mode, only one way of looking at the universe. Still, he sought connections.

  Cathy.

  His wife—once upon a time.

  He remembered that she had been beautiful ...to him, at least. But now, freed fr
om biological urges, the memory of her face, her figure, excited no aesthetic response.

  Cathy.

  In lieu of dreaming, Spirit cogitated idly. Cathy. Is that an anagram for anything? No, of course not. Oh, wait a moment. “Yacht.” Fancy that; he’d never thought of that before.

  Yachts had pleasing lines—a certain mathematical perfection dictated by the laws of fluid dynamics. Their beauty, at least, was something he could still appreciate.

  Cathy had done something. Something wrong. Something that had hurt him.

  He remembered what it was, of course. Remembered the hurt the same way, if he cared to, that he could summon the memories of other pains. Breaking his leg skiing. A skinned knee in childhood. Bumping his head for the dozenth time on that low ceiling beam at Cathy’s parents’ cottage.

  Memories.

  But finally, at last, no more pain.

  No pain sensor.

  Sensor. An anagram of snores.

  Something I don’t do anymore.

  Dreams had been great for making connections.

  Spirit was going to miss dreaming.

  CHAPTER 28

  Even though Toby Bailey had given her some good leads, Sandra continued to work her way alphabetically down the roster of Doowap employees. Finally, it was Cathy Hobson’s turn—one of those whom Bailey had mentioned Hans had been involved with.

  Sandra sized up Cathy as she seated herself. Pretty woman, thin, with lots of black hair. Good dresser. Sandra smiled. “Ms. Hobson, thank you for your time. I won’t keep you long. I just want to ask a few questions about Hans Larsen.”

  Cathy nodded.

  “How well did you know him?” Sandra asked.

  Cathy looked past Sandra at the wall behind her. “Not very.”

  No point in confronting her just yet. Sandra glanced at a printout. “He’d worked here longer than you had. I’d be interested in anything you could tell me. What sort of a man was he?”