Terminal Experiment (6 page)

Peter Hobson was quite fond of his sister-in-law Marissa. In 2004, her first child had died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: she had simply stopped breathing, without any fuss, sometime during her third evening of life. Marissa and her ex-husband had used a standard baby monitor, a microphone that broadcast to a receiver they carried about the house. But little Amanda had died quietly. When Marissa had had another baby a year later, she refused to leave the child’s side. Day or night, for months on end, she would always have the baby in her sight. Intellectually she knew that infant deaths just sometimes happened, but emotionally she blamed herself — if she had been with Amanda when her breathing had stopped, maybe she could have saved her.

Back then, Peter had been working on designs for touchless medical instrumentation. With AIDS continuing to plague the world, there was a big demand for units that didn’t have to come into contact with a patient’s body. At-a-distance heart-rate monitors were easy enough to develop, using declassified sensing equipment originally created for espionage. And detecting brain activity was usually done at a distance anyway — with electrodes separated from the brain by the thickness of the scalp and skull. Eventually, Peter found a way to read the rudiments of brain activity over a great distance, with nothing touching the patient’s skin except a low-wattage infrared laser.

And so the Hobson Baby Monitor was born — a device that could report the vital signs of an infant in another room. He gave the prototype to Marissa and her husband. The monitor’s built-in alarms would warn them immediately if their baby was in distress. They were delighted with the unit, and at Cathy’s urging, Peter quit his job at East York General Hospital and started a little company to sell his baby monitors.

And then, one morning, Peter was lying next to his wife in bed. He needed to pee. Looking at the clock radio, he saw it was 6:45 A.M. The alarm would go off at seven. If Cathy was sleeping lightly, Peter knew that his getting up now would wake her, depriving her of her last quarter hour of sleep, something he’d hate to do.

Peter lay there, enduring the pressure in his bladder. He wished he knew whether she was sleeping soundly. Maybe she was even already awake, but just had her eyes closed.

And then it hit him — a completely different use for his monitoring technology. The product appeared fullblown in his mind. A panel on the wall opposite the bed, with two clusters of readouts, one for each person in the bed. In each cluster, there’d be a big LED and a small one. The big one would indicate the person’s current sleep state, and the small one would indicate the state he or she was moving into. There’d also be a digital counter indicating how long until the transition between one state and the next would take place — after just a few nights’ training, the unit would have the individual users’ sleep cycles down pat.

The LEDs would change color: white would mean the person was awake; red would mean the person was in a light sleep and would definitely be disturbed by any noise or movement. Yellow would mean the person was in a medium sleep, and so long as care was taken, one could get up and go to the bathroom, or cough, or whatever, without disturbing one’s partner. Green would mean the person was in deep sleep, and you could probably do limbo dancing in the bed without disturbing him or her.

It would be pig-simple to read: a big yellow light with a small green one, and 07 showing on the counter would mean if you got up now, you might disturb your partner, but if you could hold off for seven minutes, she would be fast asleep and you could slip out without waking her.

As the urinary pressure gave Peter a typical early-morning erection, he realized something else. He’d often awoken horny at 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. and wondered if his wife was awake, too. If she had been, they’d probably have made love, but Peter would never dream of waking her up for that. But if the monitor happened to show white lights for both of them, well, then, what had started out as the Hobson Baby Monitor might end up being responsible for lots of new babies…

As time went by, Peter refined his system. All the telephones in the Hobson house were now hooked up to a Hobson Monitor, and from there to the household computer. Whether the phones rang at all, or just signaled incoming calls with flashing lights, depended on Peter and Cathy’s sleep states.

At 3:17 A.M., a call was indeed detected. Moments before, Peter had been asleep, but he was now heading to the en suite bathroom, which had a small voice-only telephone. As he entered, its indicator started to flash. Peter closed the door, sat down on the toilet, and picked up the handset.

“Hello,” he said, his voice thick and dry.

“Dr. Hobson?” said a man’s voice.

“Yes.’

“This is Sepp van der Linde at Carlson’s Chronic Care. I’m the head night nurse.”

“Yes?” Peter fumbled for a drinking glass and filled it from the tap.

“I think Mrs. Fennell is going to pass on tonight. She’s had another stroke.”

Peter felt a small twang of sadness. “Thank you for letting me know. Is my equipment all set up still?”

“Yes, sir, it is, but—”

He fought to stifle a yawn. “Then I’ll come by in the morning to pick up the data disk.”

“But Dr. Hobson, she’s asking for you to come.”

“Me?” said Peter.

“She said you’re her only friend.”

“I’m on my way.”

Peter arrived at the chronic-care facility about 4:00 a.m. He showed his pass to the security guard and took the elevator to the third floor. The door to Mrs. Fennell’s room was open and the incandescent light directly above her head was on, although the main overhead fluorescents were out. A row of four green LEDs pierced the gloom beside the bed, showing that Peter’s equipment was working properly. A nurse sat on a chair next to the bed, a bored look on her face.

“I’m Peter Hobson,” Peter said. “How is she?”

Mrs. Fennell stirred slightly. “Pe-ter,” she said, but the effort of even those two syllables seemed to visibly weaken her.

The nurse got up and moved over to stand next to Peter. “She had a stroke about an hour ago, and Dr. Chong expects she’ll have another one shortly; there are several clots in the arteries feeding her brain. We offered her something for the pain, but she said no.”

Peter stepped over to his recording unit and turned on the screen, which immediately came to life. A series of jagged lines traced from left to right. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll stay with her. You can go now, if you like.”

The nurse nodded and left. Peter sat in the chair, the vinyl back warm from the nurse. He reached out and took Mrs. Fennell’s left hand. There was a catheter inserted into the back of it, a tube leading to a drip bag mounted just beside the chair. Her hand was thin, small bones covered by translucent skin. Peter encircled Mrs. Fennell’s fingers with his own. She squeezed his hand very softly.

“I’ll stay with you, Mrs. Fennell,” said Peter.

“P— P—”

Peter smiled. “That’s right, Mrs. Fennell; it’s me, Peter.”

She shook her head ever so slightly. “P— P—,” she said again, and then, with great effort, “Peg—”

“Oh, that’s right,” said Peter. “I’ll stay with you,
Peggy
.”

The old woman smiled ever so slightly, her mouth just another line across her face. And then, without any fuss, her fingers went limp in Peter’s hand and her eyelids slid very slowly shut. On the monitor, the green tracings had turned into a series of perfectly straight horizontal lines. After several moments, Peter retrieved his hand, blinked slowly a few times, and went to find the nurse.

Peter took the superEEG recording with him when he left the chronic-care facility. By the time he got home, Cathy was getting ready for work, nibbling at a piece of dry whole-wheat toast and sipping a cup of tea. He’d left her a message with the household computer, so she’d know where he was.

“How did it go?” asked Cathy.

“I got the recording,” said Peter.

“You don’t seem very happy.”

“Well, a very nice lady died tonight.”

Cathy looked compassionate. She nodded.

“I’m exhausted,” said Peter. “I’m going back to bed.” He gave her a quick kiss, and did just that.

Four hours later Peter woke up with a headache. He stumbled to the bathroom, where he shaved and showered. He then filled a large tumbler with Diet Coke, got the disk, and went to his study.

His home system was more powerful than the mainframe he’d had to share access to as a student at university. He turned it on, inserted the disk into the drive, and activated the wall monitor on the other side of the room. Peter wanted to see the moment at which the last neuron had fired, the moment at which the last synapse had been made. The moment of death.

He selected a graphic display mode and played a few seconds of the data, having the computer plot every location at which a neuron had fired. Not surprisingly, the image on the screen looked exactly like a silhouette of a human brain. Peter used an edge-tracing tool to draw the outline of Mrs. Fennell’s brain. There was enough data to generate the picture three dimensionally; Peter rotated the image until the brain silhouette was facing him directly, as if he was looking the late Mrs. Fennell straight in the optic nerves.

He let the data play in real time. The computer looked for patterns in the firing neurons. Any connected series that fired once was color-coded red; twice, orange; three times, yellow; and so on through the seven colors of the spectrum. The picture of the brain looked mostly white: the combined effect of all the different colors of tiny dots. Peter occasionally zoomed in to see a close-up of one section of the brain, lit up with strings of infinitesimal Christmas lights.

As he watched, he could clearly see the stroke that had proved the final straw for Peggy Fennell. The color-coding scheme was refreshed every tenth of a second, but soon an area of blackness began to grow in her left temporal lobe, just below the Sylvian fissure. It was followed by an increase in activity, with the whole brain growing brighter and brighter as disinhibition caused neurons to fire again immediately after they’d last fired. After several moments, a complex network of purple lights was visible throughout her brain, a whole series of neural nets being triggered in identical patterns over and over as her brain spasmed. Then the nets began to fade, and no new ones replaced them. After ninety years of service, Peggy Fennell’s brain was giving up the ghost.

Peter had hoped to be able to watch it all dispassionately. It was just data, after all. But it was also Peggy, that brave and cheerful woman who had faced and beaten death once before, that woman who had held his hand as she passed from life into lifelessness.

The data continued to be plotted, and soon there were only a few patterns of light, like constellations on a foggy night, flickering on the screen. When the activity did stop, it did so without any apparent flourish. Not a bang. Not a whimper. Just nothingness.

Except…

What was that?

A tiny flash on the screen.

Peter reversed the recording, then played it back again at a much slower speed.

There was a minuscule pattern of purple lights — a persistent pattern, a pattern that kept firing over and over again.

And it was moving.

Neurons couldn’t really move, of course. They were physical entities. But the recorder was picking up the same pattern over and over again, just slightly displaced to the right each time. The recorder allowed for such displacements: neurons didn’t always fire in exactly the same way, and the brain was gelatinous enough that movements of the head and the pulsing of blood could slightly change the physical coordinates of a neuron. The pattern moving across the screen must have been propagating from neuron to adjacent neuron in steps small enough that the recorder mistook the individual increments for activity within the same neurons. Peter glanced at the scale bar at the bottom of the wall screen. The violet pattern, a complex knot like intestines made of neon tubes, had already shifted five millimeters, far more than any neuron could move within the brain except in the case of a major blow to the head, something Peggy Fennell had most assuredly not suffered.

Peter adjusted a control. The playback speeded up.

No doubt about it: the knot of violet pinpricks was moving to the right, pretty much in a straight line. It rotated a bit as it moved, like a tumbleweed blown by a desert wind. Peter stared in openmouthed wonder. It continued to move, passing over the corpus callosum into the other hemisphere, past the hypothalamus, and into the right temporal lobe.

Each part of the brain was normally reasonably isolated from the others, and the kinds of electrical waves typical of, say, the cerebral cortex were foreign to the cerebellum, and vice versa. But this tight knot of purple light was moving without changing its form through structure after structure.

An equipment malfunction, thought Peter. Oh, well. Nothing ever worked right the first time.

Except…

Except Peter couldn’t think of anything that would cause this kind of malfunction.

And still the pattern moved across the screen.

Peter tried to conjure up another explanation. Could a static discharge, perhaps from Peggy’s hair rubbing against the pillow, have caused this effect? Of course, hospital pillows are designed to be antistatic, precisely so they won’t mess up delicate recording equipment, and Peggy, after all, had had thinning, white hair. Besides, she’d been wearing his scanning skullcap.

No, it must be caused by something else.

The pattern was getting close to the outer edge of the brain. Peter wondered if it would dissipate on the convoluted surface of the cortex or maybe bounce back, spinning the other way, like a video game inside the head.

It did neither.

It reached the edge of the brain … and kept right on going, through the membrane that encased the brain.

Astonishing.

Peter touched some keys, overlaying an extrapolated outline of Mrs. Fennell’s head over the silhouette of her brain. He mentally kicked himself for not having done this sooner. It was obvious where the knot of light was heading.

Straight for the temple.

Straight for the thinnest part of her skull.

It continued along, through the bone, through the thin veneer of muscle that overlaid the skull.

Surely, thought Peter, it was going to break up. Yes, there are nerves at the temple; that’s why it hurts to be struck there. Yes, there are nerves in muscle tissue, too, including the jaw muscles that overlay the temple. And, yes, there are nerves shot through the lower layers of the skin. Even if the pattern had some form of cohesion, Peter expected to see a change here. The nerves outside the actual brain are much less densely packed. The pattern might balloon in size, drawn between the points of more diffuse neural tissue.

But it did not. It continued, exactly the same size, tumbling slowly end over end, through the muscle, through the skin, and—

Out. Past the sensor field.

It didn’t break up. It simply left. And yet it had held its cohesion. The pattern had remained intact right up to the moment the sensor web lost it.

Incredible, thought Peter. Incredible.

He scanned the wall, looking for signs of other active neural nets.

But there were none.

Peggy Fennell’s brain showed as an unblemished silhouette, devoid of electrical activity.

She was dead.

Dead.

And something had left her body.

Something had left her brain.

Peter felt his own head wheeling.

It couldn’t be.

It could not be.

He reversed the recording, played it back from a different angle.

Why had the knot of light moved from the left hemisphere to the right? The other temple had been closer.

Ah, but Peggy had been lying down, her head on her pillow. Her left temple had been facing into the pillow; it was her right one that had been exposed to air. Even though it had been farther away, it represented the easier escape route.

Peter played the recording back again and again. Different angles. Different plotting methods. Different color-encoding schemes. It didn’t matter; the result was the same. He compared the time-coded recordings to Peggy’s other vital signs — pulse, respiration, blood pressure. The knot of light left just after her heart stopped, just after she’d breathed her last.

Peter had found exactly what he was looking for: an unequivocal marker that life was now over, an indisputable sign that the patient was just meat, ready for organ harvesting.

Marker.

That wasn’t the right word, and he knew it. He was deliberately avoiding even thinking it. And yet, there it was, recorded by his own ultrasensitive instruments: the departure from her body of Peggy Fennell’s very own soul.

Peter knew that when he asked Sarkar to come at once to his house, Sarkar would do so. Peter couldn’t contain his excitement when Sarkar arrived. He was trying, and probably failing, to suppress a grin. He took Sarkar into his den, then played back the recording of Peggy Fennell’s death once more.

“You faked that,” said Sarkar.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Oh, come on, Peter.”

“Really. I haven’t even done any cleanup of the data. What you just saw is exactly what happened.”

“Play that last bit again,” said Sarkar. “One one-hundredth speed.”

Peter touched buttons.

“
Subhanallah
,” said Sarkar. “That’s incredible.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

“You know what that is, don’t you?” said Sarkar. “Right there, in crisp images. That’s her
nafs
— her soul — leaving her body.”

To his surprise, Peter found himself reacting negatively when he heard that idea said aloud. “I knew you were going to say that.”

“Well, what else could it be?” asked Sarkar.

“I don’t know.”

“Nothing,” said Sarkar. “That’s the only thing it could be. Have you told anyone about this yet?”

“No.”

“How do you announce something like this, I wonder? In a medical journal? Or do you just call the newspapers?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only just begun to think about that. I suspect I’ll call a press conference.”

“Remember Fleischmann and Pons,” cautioned Sarkar.

“The cold-fusion guys? Yeah, I know they jumped the gun, and ended up with egg on their faces. I’ll have to get some more recordings of the thing. I’ve got to be sure this happens to everyone, after all. But I can’t wait forever. Someone else will stumble on this soon enough.”

“What about patents?”

Peter nodded. “I’ve thought about that. I’ve already got patents on most of the technology in the superEEG — it’s an incremental improvement on the brain scanner we built for your AI work, after all. I’m certainly not going to go public until I’ve got the whole thing protected.”

“When you do announce it,” said Sarkar, “there will be a ton of publicity. This is as big as it gets. You’ve proven the existence of life after death.”

Peter shook his head. “You’re going beyond the data. A small, weak electrical field leaves the body at the moment of death. That’s all; there’s nothing to prove that the field is conscious or living.”

“The Koran says—”

“I can’t rely on the Koran, or the Bible, or anything else. All we know is that a cohesive energy field survives the death of the body. Whether that field lasts for any appreciable time after departure, or whether it carries any real information, is completely unknown — and any other interpretation at this point is just wishful thinking.”

“You’re being deliberately obtuse. It’s a soul, Peter. You know that.”

“I don’t like using that word. It — it prejudices the discussion.”

“All right, call it something else if you like. Casper the Friendly Ghost, even — although I’d call the physical manifestation the soulwave. But it exists — and you know as well as I do that people are going to embrace it as an honest-to-goodness soul, as proof of life after death.” Sarkar looked his friend in the eye. “This will change the world.”

Peter nodded. There wasn’t anything else to say.