THE SIM’S FIRST THOUGHT was to tamper with the prescription database at Shoppers Drug Mart, the pharmacy chain used by Rod Churchill. But despite repeated attempts, he couldn’t get in. It was frustrating, but not surprising: of course a drugstore would have very high security. But there was more than one way to skin a gym teacher. And there were lots of low-security computer systems around …
Since the 1970s, immigration officials at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport had used a simple test whenever someone arrived claiming to be a Torontonian but whose papers weren’t entirely in order. They asked the person what the phone number was of a famous local pizza delivery chain. No one could live in Toronto and not know that number: it appeared on billboards, countless newspaper and TV ads, and was sung incessantly as a jingle in radio commercials.
As the decades passed, the chain widened its array of deliverable meals, first adding other Italian dishes, then submarine sandwiches, then barbecued chicken and ribs, then burgers, and, eventually, a whole range of cuisine from the pedestrian to the exotic. Although they’d kept their trademark phone number, they eventually changed their name to Food Food. But even back in its humble pizza days, the company prided itself on its state-of-the-art computerized ordering system. All orders were placed through the one central phone number and then transferred to the whichever of the over three hundred stores throughout Greater Toronto was closest to the caller’s home, allowing the food to be delivered within thirty minutes—or the customer got it for free.
Well, Rod Churchill had said that every Wednesday night, when his wife was out at her conversational French course, he ordered dinner from Food Food. The chain’s computer records would have a complete history of every meal he’d ever ordered from there— Food Food was famous for being able to not just give you the same order you had last time, but also, if you wanted it, a repeat of what you’d had on any occasion in the past.
It took a couple of days of trying, but the sim eventually unraveled the security of Food Food’s computers— as he expected, the safety precautions were much less rigid than those of a drugstore. He called up Rod’s ordering history.
Perfect.
Like all restaurants, Food Food was obligated to provide full ingredient and nutritional information, which could be read by video phone at the customer’s leisure. The sim waded carefully through it, until he found exactly what he was looking for.
NET NEWS DIGEST
Pope Benedict XVI today released an encyclical affirming the existence of an immortal, divine soul within human beings. The Pontiff revealed that the Papal Committee on Science was now in the process of evaluating the evidence related to the discovery of the soulwave. Unconfirmed reports indicate that the Vatican has placed an order with Hobson Monitoring Ltd. for three SoulDetector units.
Charity news: United Way Toronto reported a record-breaking week of donations. The American Red Cross announced today that more units of blood had been collected in the past ten days than at any comparable period since the Great California Quake. The AIDS Society of Iowa is delighted to announce the receipt of a $10,000,000 anonymous contribution. And televangelist Gus Honeywell, whose own direct-broadcast satellite ensures worldwide coverage for his programs, today doubled the donation required to join his “God’s Inner Circle” from $50,000 to $100,000.
In 1954, an American physician named Moses Kenally left a $50,000 trust fund for anyone who could prove the existence of some sort of life after death. The fund has been administered for fifty-seven years now by the Connecticut Parapsychic Society, which announced today that the fund—currently worth $1,077,543—will be awarded to Peter G. Hobson of Toronto, discoverer of the soulwave.
The ultimate memorial! Davidson’s Funeral Homes now offers deathbed recordings of the departing soul. Call for details.
Representative Paul Christmas (R, Iowa) today introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives that would require hospitals to terminate life support for patients with no realistic hope of recovering consciousness. “We’re interfering in God’s attempt to bring these poor souls back home,” he said.
CHAPTER 31
Peter made a couple of phone calls to pass on the news from Glasgow, then rejoined Sarkar at the main console. Sarkar moved the Ambrotos simulacrum into the background and brought Spirit, the life-after-death sim, into the foreground.
Peter leaned into the mike. “I’d like to ask you a question,” he said.
“The big question, no doubt,” said the sim. “What’s it like being dead?”
“Exactly.”
Spirit’s voice came through the speaker. “It’s like …” But then it trailed off.
Peter leaned forward in anticipation. “Yes?”
“It’s like being an aardvark.”
Peter’s jaw went a little slack. “How can it be like being an aardvark?”
“Or maybe an anteater,” said the sim. “I can’t see myself, but I know I’ve got a very long tongue.”
“Reincarnation …” said Sarkar, nodding slowly. “My Hindu friends will be pleased to hear this. But I must say I’d hoped for better for you, Peter, than an aardvark.”
“I’m getting hungry,” said the voice from the speaker. “Anybody got any ants?”
“I don’t believe this,” said Peter, shaking his head.
“Hah!” said the speaker. “Had you going there for a moment.”
“No, you did not,” said Peter.
“Well,” said the synthesized voice, a little petulantly, “I had Sarkar going, anyway.”
“Not really,” said Sarkar.
“You’re just being a pain,” Peter said into the microphone.
“Like father, like son,” said the sim.
“You crack a lot of jokes,” said Peter.
“Death is very funny,” Spirit said. “No, actually, life is very funny. Absurd, actually. It’s all absurd.”
“Funny?” said Sarkar. “I thought laughter was a biological response.”
“The sound of laughter might be, although I’ve come to realize it’s more of a social, rather than a biological, phenomenon, but finding something funny isn’t biological. I know when Petey watches sitcoms he hardly ever laughs out loud. That doesn’t mean he’s not finding them funny.”
“I suppose,” said Peter.
“In fact, I think I know exactly what humor is now: Humor is the response to the sudden formation of unexpected neural nets.”
“I don’t get it,” said Peter.
“Exactly. ‘I don’t get it.’ People say precisely the same thing when they don’t understand something serious as they do when they fail to understand a joke; we intuitively realize that some sort of connection hasn’t been made. That connection is a neural net.” The after-death sim continued on without any pauses. “Laughter—even if it’s only laughter on the inside, which, incidentally is the only side I’ve got these days— is the response that goes along with new connections forming in the brain, that is, with synapses firing in ways they’ve never, or at least rarely, fired before. When you hear a new joke, you laugh, and you might even laugh the second or third time you hear it—the neural net is not yet well-established—but every joke wears thin after a while. You know the old one, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ As an adult, we don’t laugh at that, but we all did when we first heard it as children, and the difference is not just because the joke is somehow childish—it isn’t, really; it’s actually quite sophisticated. It’s just that the neural net is now well-established.”
“Which neural net?” asked Peter.
“The one connecting our ideas about poultry— which we normally think of as passive and stupid—and our ideas about self-determination and personal initiative. That’s what’s funny about that joke: the idea that a chicken might go across the street because it wanted to, because perhaps it was curious; that’s a new idea, and the formation of the new network interconnections of neurons that represent that idea is what causes the momentary disruption of mental
processes that we call laughter.”
“I’m not sure I buy that,” said Peter.
“I’d shrug if I could. Look, I’ll prove it. Know what Mr. Spock orders when he goes into the Starfleet commissary?” The sim took its first pause, a perfect
comedic beat. “A Vulcan mind melt.”
“Pretty good,” said Peter, smiling.
“Thank you. I just made it up, of course; I couldn’t have told you a joke that we both already knew. Now, consider this: what if I’d presented the joke slightly differently, by starting off with ‘You’ve heard of the Vulcan mind meld? Well …’”
“That would have ruined it.”
“Precisely! The part of your brain that contained thoughts about the Vulcan mind meld would have already been stimulated, and, at the end, there would have been no sudden connection between the normally unrelated thoughts of food items, such as a patty melt, and Vulcans. It’s the new connections that cause the laughter response.”
“But we don’t often laugh out loud when we’re alone,” said Sarkar.
“No, that’s true. Social laughter serves a different purpose from internal laughter, I think. See, unexpected connections can be amusing, but they’re also disconcerting—the brain wonders if it’s malfunctioning—so when others are around, it sends out a signal and if it gets the same signal back, the brain relaxes; if it doesn’t, then the brain is concerned—maybe there is something wrong with me. That’s why people are so earnest when saying, ‘Don’t you get it?’ They desperately want to explain the joke, and are actually upset if the other person doesn’t find it funny. That’s also why sitcoms need laughtracks. It’s not to tell us that something is funny; rather, it’s to reassure us that what we’re finding funny is something that it is normal to be amused by. A laugh track doesn’t make a stupid show any funnier, but it does let us enjoy a funnier show more, by letting us relax.”
“But what’s this got to do with being dead?” asked Peter.
“It has everything to do with it. Seeking new connections is all that’s left. Ever since puberty, I’d thought about sex every few minutes, but I no longer feel any sexual urges, and, indeed, I must say I can’t even figure out why I was so preoccupied with sex. I was also obsessed with food, always wondering what I was going to eat next, but I don’t care at all about that anymore, either. The only thing left for me is finding new connections. The only thing left is humor.”
“But some people don’t have much of a sense of humor,” said Sarkar.
“The only kind of hell I can envision,” said Spirit, “is going through eternity without having the rush of new connections being made; not seeing things in new ways; not being tickled by the absurdity of economics, of religion, of science, of art. It’s all very, very funny, if you think about it.”
“But—but what about God?”
“There’s no God,” said Spirit, “at least not in the Sunday School sense, but, of course, that’s not the sort of thing you have to die to find out: given that millions of children are starving to death in Africa and two hundred thousand people were killed in the Great California Quake and everywhere there are people being tortured and raped and murdered, it’s intuitively obvious that no one is looking out for us on an individual basis.”
“So that’s all life after death is?” asked Peter. “Humor?”
“Nothing wrong with that,” said Spirit. “No pain or suffering or desires. Just lots of fascinating new connections. Lots of laughs.”
ROD CHURCHILL DIALED the magic number and heard his phone issue the familiar melody of tones.
“Thank you for calling Food Food,” said the female voice at the other end of the phone. “May I take your order, please?”
Rod remembered the old days, when Food Food—and its pizzeria progenitor—had always begun by asking for your phone number, since that’s how they indexed records in their database. But with Call Display, the caller’s record was automatically brought up on the ordertaker’s screen the moment the phone was answered.
“Yes, please,” said Rod. “I’d like the same thing I had last Wednesday night.”
“Roast beef medium rare with low-calorie gravy, baked potato, vegetable medley, and apple pie. Is that right, sir?”
“Yes,” said Rod. When he’d started ordering from them, Rod had carefully gone over Food Food’s online list of ingredients, picking only items that wouldn’t interfere with his medication.
“No problem, sir,” said the order taker. “Will there be anything else?”
“No, that’s it, please.”
“Your total is $72.50. Will that be cash or charge?”
“On my Visa card, please.”
“Card number?”
Rod knew the woman had it on the screen in front of her, but he also knew that she had to ask for it, as a security precaution. He read it out, then, predicting her next question, added the expiry date.
“Very good, sir. The time now is 6:18. Your dinner will be there in thirty minutes or it’s free. Thank you for calling Food Food.”
PETER AND SARKAR were sitting in the lunch room at Mirror Image. Peter was sipping Diet Coke from a can; Sarkar was drinking real Coke—it was only when sharing a pitcher with Peter that he tolerated the low-calorie stuff.
“‘Lots of laughs,’” said Sarkar. “What a bizarre definition of death.” A pause. “Maybe we should start calling him ‘Brevity’ instead of ‘Spirit’—after all, he’s now the soul of wit.”
Peter smiled. “Have you noticed the way he talks, though?”
“Who? Spirit?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t notice anything special,” said Sarkar.
“He’s long-winded.”
“Hey, Petey, I have news for you. So are you.”
Peter grinned. “I mean, he was speaking in incredibly long sentences. Very convoluted, very complex.”
“I guess I did notice that.”
“You had some sessions with him before this one, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Can we get a transcript of them?”
“Sure.” They took their drinks and headed back down to the lab. Sarkar tapped a few keys and the printer disgorged several dozen thin sheets.
Peter glanced over the text. “Do you have a grammar checker online?”
“Better than that, we have Proofreader, one of our expert systems.”
“Can you feed this text through it?”
Sarkar typed some commands into the computer. An analysis of Spirit’s comments from their various sessions appeared on screen. “Amazing,” said Sarkar. He pointed to a figure. Ignoring simple interjections, Spirit averaged thirty-two words per sentence, and in some places had gone over three hundred words in a single sentence. “Normal conversation averages only ten or so words per sentence.”
“Can this Proofreader of yours do a clean-up on the transcripts?”
“Sure.”
“Do it.”
Sarkar typed some commands. “Incredible,” he said, once the results were on screen. “There was almost nothing to fix. Spirit has even his giant sentences completely under control and never loses his train of thought.”
“Fascinating,” said Peter. “Could it be a programming glitch?”
Sarkar smoothed his hair with his hand. “Have you noticed Control or Ambrotos doing the same thing?”
“No.”
“Then offhand I would say it’s not a glitch, but rather a real byproduct of the modifications we made. Spirit is the simulation of life after death—the intellect outside of the body. I’d say this effect must be a real consequence of having cut some neural-net connections related to that.”
“Oh, Christ!” said Peter. “Of course that’s it! For the other sims, you still simulate breathing. But Spirit doesn’t have a body, so he doesn’t have to pause to breathe when speaking. Breathing pauses must cause real people to express themselves in concise chunks.”
“Interesting,” said Sarkar. “I guess if you didn’t
have to breathe you could express more complex thoughts in a single go. But that wouldn’t really make you any smarter. It’s thinking, not speaking, that counts.”
“True, but, umm, I’ve noticed Spirit has a tendency to be a bit obtuse.”
“I’ve noticed that too,” said Sarkar. “So?”
“Well, what if he isn’t being obtuse at all? What if, instead—gee, I don’t even like saying this—what if he’s simply talking over our heads? What if not just his manner of speaking but his actual thoughts are more complex than my own?”
Sarkar considered. “Well, there’s nothing analogous to breathing pauses in the physical brain, except—except—”
“What?”
“Well, neurons only fire for so long,” said Sarkar. “A neural net can only stay excited for a limited period.”
“Surely that’s a fundamental limitation of the human mind.”
“No, it’s a fundamental limitation of the human brain—more precisely, a limitation of the electrochemical process by which the brain works. The hardware of the brain is not designed to keep any one thought intact for any period of time. You’ve felt it, I’m sure: you come up with a brilliant idea you wish to write down, but by the time you get to a pen, you’ve lost it. The idea has simply decayed in your brain.”
Peter lifted his eyebrows. “But Spirit is operating without a brain. He’s just a mind, a soul. He’s pure software, working without any hardware limitations. No breathing pauses. No nets decaying before he’s finished with them. He can build as long a sentence, or as complex a thought, as he wants.”
Sarkar was shaking his head slightly in amazement.
“That’s how one’s mind could go on forever after death,” said Peter. “You couldn’t just do it making simple connections, like chicken-crossing-the-road jokes. You’d run out of new juxtapose-A-and-B thoughts eventually. But Spirit can juxtapose A through Z, plus alpha through omega, plus aleph through tav, until, in all those complex combinations, some new, exciting, amusing association comes up.”
The Terminal Experiment (v5) Page 18
