Terminal Experiment (7 page)

Peter hadn’t seen Colin Godoyo in months — not since the seminar on nanotechnology immortality. They’d never really been friends — at least Peter hadn’t thought so — but when Colin called Peter at the office asking him to come to lunch, something in Colin’s voice had sounded urgent, so Peter had agreed. Lunch couldn’t go on endlessly, anyway — Peter had a meeting with a major U.S. client at 2:00 P.M.

They went to a little restaurant Peter liked on Sheppard East, out toward Vic Park — a place that made a club sandwich by hacking the turkey breast with a knife, instead of slicing it thin on a machine, and toasting the bread on a grill so that it had brown lines across it. Peter never thought of himself as particularly memorable, but it seemed half the restaurants in North York thought him a regular, even though, excepting Sonny Gotlieb’s, he only came in to any one of them once or twice a month. The server took Colin’s drink order (scotch and soda), but protested he knew what Peter wanted ("Diet Coke with lime, right?"). Once the server was gone, Peter looked at Colin expectantly. “What’s new?”

Colin was grayer than Peter had remembered, but he still wore his wealth ostentatiously, and was sporting a total of six gold rings. His eyes moved back and forth incessantly. “I guess you heard about me and Naomi.”

Peter shook his head. “Heard what?”

“We’ve separated.”

“Oh,” said Peter. “I’m sorry.”

“I hadn’t realized how many of our friends were really just her friends,” said Colin. The server arrived, set down little napkins, deposited the drinks on them, then scurried away. “I’m glad you agreed to come to lunch.”

“No problem,” said Peter. He had never been good at this kind of social situation. Was he supposed to ask Colin what had gone wrong? Peter rarely spoke of private matters, and on the whole didn’t like either asking or answering personal questions. “I’m sorry to hear about you two.” His cliche-dispenser suggested adding, “You always seemed so happy,” but he stopped himself before the thought was given voice — Peter’s own recent experience had taught him to put no stock in appearances.

“We’d been having problems for quite some time,” said Colin.

Peter squeezed his lime into his Diet Coke.

“We weren’t really on the same wavelength anymore.” Apparently Colin had a cliche-dispenser of his own. “We weren’t talking.”

“You just drifted apart,” said Peter, not quite making it a question, not wanting to pry.

“Yeah,” said Colin. He took a liberal swig of his drink, then winced as if it were a masochistic pleasure. “Yeah.”

“You’d been together a long time,” said Peter, again careful to keep his tone flat, to keep the statement from becoming a question.

“Eleven years, if you count the time we lived together before we got married,” said Colin. He cupped his glass in both hands.

Peter wondered idly who had broken up with whom.
None of my business
, he thought. “A good long time,” he said.

“I — I was seeing someone else,” said Colin. “A woman in Montreal. I had to go there every three weeks on business, took the maglev out.”

Peter was dumbfounded. Was everyone screwing outside of marriage these days? “Oh,” he said.

“It didn’t really mean anything,” said Colin, making a dismissive gesture with his hand. “It was just, you know, just a way of getting a message to Naomi.” He looked up. “A cry for help, maybe. You know?”

No
, thought Peter.
No, I don’t.

“Just a cry for help. But she went crazy when I told her. Said that was the last straw. The straw that broke the camel’s back.” Clearly, thought Peter, everyone had a cliche-dispenser. “I didn’t want to hurt her, but I had needs, you know. I don’t think she should have left me over something like that.” The server came in again, depositing Peter’s club sandwich and Colin’s pasta primavera. “What do you think?” asked Colin.

I think you’re an asshole
, Peter thought.
I think you’re the biggest fucking asshole on the planet
. “Hard luck,” he said, pulling the toothpick out of one of his sandwich wedges and spreading mayonnaise on the turkey. “Hard luck indeed.”

“Anyway,” said Colin, perhaps sensing that it was time to change the subject, “I didn’t ask you to lunch to talk about me. I really wanted to get some advice from you.”

Peter looked at him. “Oh?”

“Well, you and Cathy were at that Life Unlimited seminar. What did you think?”

“Impressive sales pitch,” said Peter.

“I mean, what did you think of the process? You’re a biomedical engineer. Do you think it would really work?”

Peter shrugged. “Jay Leno says Queen Elizabeth has undergone the process — only way to save the monarchy was to make sure that none of her children ever got to sit on the throne.”

Colin chuckled politely, but looked at Peter as if he expected a more serious response. Peter chewed on a bit of his sandwich, then: “I don’t know. The basic premise seems sound. I mean, there are — what? — five basic models for senescence and eventual death.” Peter ticked them off on his fingers. “First, there’s the stochastic theory. It says our bodies are complex machines, and, like all complex machines, something’s bound to break down eventually.

“Second, the Hayflick phenomenon: human cells seem to only be able to divide about fifty times total.

“Third, the smudged-Xerox hypothesis. Small errors are introduced every time DNA is copied, and at some point the copy gets so bad that it doesn’t make sense anymore. Boom! — you’re pushing up daisies.

“Number four is the toxic-waste theory. Something — possibly free radicals — gives your body trouble from the inside.

“And finally, the autoimmune hypothesis, in which your body’s natural defenses become confused and turn upon your own healthy cells.”

Colin nodded. “And no one knows which one is right?”

“Oh, I suspect they’re all right to one degree or another,” said Peter. “But the key thing is that Life Unlimited’s — what did they call them? nannies? — their nannies seem to address all five probable causes. So, yes, I’d say it’s got a good chance of working. There’s no way to know for sure, though, until someone who has undergone the process actually does live for a few centuries.”

“So — so you think it’d be worth the money?” said Colin.

Peter shrugged again. “On the surface, yeah, I guess so. I mean, who wouldn’t want to live forever? But, then again, it’d be a shame to do that if it meant missing out on a wonderful heaven.”

Colin cocked his head. “You’re sounding downright religious, Peter.”

Peter concentrated on finishing his food. “Sorry. Idle thoughts, that’s all.”

“What did Cathy think of Life Unlimited?”

“She didn’t seem very interested,” said Peter.

“Really?” said Colin. “I think it sounds great. I think it’s something I’d very much like to do.”

“It costs a fortune,” said Peter. “You been embezzling from the bank?”

“Hardly,” said Colin. “But I think it would be worth every penny.”

It took three weeks to get two additional recordings of the soulwave departing from human bodies. Peter made one of the recordings at Carlson’s Chronic Care, the same place he’d met Peggy Fennell. This time, the subject was Gustav Reichhold, a man just a few years older than Peter who was dying of complications from AIDS, and had chosen to end his life through doctor-assisted suicide.

The other recording, though, had to be made somewhere else, lest critics charge that the soulwave, far from being a universal component of human existence, was simply some mundane electrical phenomenon related to the wiring in that particular building, or to its proximity to power lines, or to some particular course of treatment used at Carlson’s. So, to get his third recording, Peter had put an ad out on the net:

Peter felt funny about placing the ad — it seemed so cold. Indeed, his embarrassment probably had a lot to do with why he offered such a large fee. But within two days of the ad going out on the net, Peter had fourteen applicants. He chose a boy — just twelve years of age — who was dying of leukemia. He made the choice as much for compassionate reasons as for varying the sample base: the boy’s family had bankrupted themselves coming to Canada from Uganda in hopes of finding a cure for their son. The money would be some small help in paying their hospital bills.

And, feeling upon reflection that the others who had already participated in the study deserved the same compensation, Peter also made a $10,000 payment to the estate of Gustav Reichhold. Since Peggy Fennell had no heirs, he made a donation in her name to the Canadian Diabetes Association. He reasoned that soon researchers around the globe would be scrambling to reproduce his results. It seemed appropriate to establish up front a generous payment for test subjects.

All three recordings looked remarkably similar: a tiny cohesive electrical field departing the body at the precise moment of death. To be on the safe side, Peter had used a different superEEG unit to record the Ugandan boy’s death. The principles were the same, but he used all-new components, some employing different engineering solutions, to make sure that the previous results weren’t due to some glitch in his recording equipment.

Meanwhile, over the course of several weeks, Peter had also used a superEEG on all 119 employees of Hobson Monitoring, without telling any except his most-senior staff what it was actually for. None of his employees were dying, of course, but Peter wanted to be sure that the soulwave did indeed exist in healthy people, and wasn’t just some sort of electrical last gasp produced by an expiring brain.

The soulwave had a distinctive electrical signature. The frequency was very high, well above that of normal electrochemical brain activity, so, even though the voltage was minuscule, it wasn’t washed out in the mass of other signals within the brain. After making some refinements to his equipment, Peter had little trouble isolating it in scans of all his employees’ brains, although he did find it amusing that it took several tries to locate it in the brain of Caleb Martin, his staff lawyer.

Meanwhile, that selfsame Martin had been working his tail off, securing patent protection on all the superEEG components in Canada, the United States, the European Community, Japan, the CIS, and elsewhere. And the Korean manufacturing firm Hobson Monitoring used to actually build its equipment was gearing up a new production line for superEEGs.

Soon it would be time to go public with the existence of the soulwave.

Peter felt like a student again, pulling off a silly fraternity prank involving putting clothing on animals. He made his way over to one of the cows and stroked it gently at the base of the neck. It had been years since Peter had been this close to a cow; he’d grown up in Regina, but still had relatives who owned dairy farms elsewhere in Saskatchewan, and he’d spent parts of his boyhood summers there.

Like all cows, this one had enormous brown eyes and wet nostrils. It seemed unperturbed by Peter touching it, and so, without further ado, he gently strapped the modified scanning helmet onto its loaf-shaped head. The beast mooed at him, but more in apparent surprise than protest. Its breath stank.

“That it, Doc?” asked the foreperson.

Peter looked at the animal again. He felt a little sorry for it. “Yes.”

At this slaughterhouse, cattle were normally stunned with an electrical charge before being killed. But that method would overload Peter’s scanner. So instead this particular cow would be rendered unconscious with carbon dioxide gas, hung, and then have its throat slit for drainage. Peter had seen a lot of surgery over the years, but that cutting had always been to cure. He was surprised at how upsetting he found the killing of the animal. The foreperson invited him to stay for a full tour, including the butchering of a cow, but Peter didn’t have the stomach for it. He simply retrieved the special bovine headgear and his recording equipment, thanked the various people he’d inconvenienced, and headed back to his office.

Peter spent the rest of the day going over the recording, trying various computer-enhancement techniques on the data. The results were always the same. No matter what method he used or how hard he looked, he could find no evidence that cows had souls — nothing of any kind seemed to exit the brain at death. Not too surprising a revelation, he supposed, although he was quickly coming to realize that for every person who would hail him as a genius for his discoveries, there’d be another who’d damn him for them. In this case, the radical animal-rights lobby would surely be upset.

Peter and Cathy had been planning to go to Barberian’s, their favorite steakhouse, for dinner that night. At the last minute, though, Peter canceled their reservation and they went to a vegetarian restaurant instead.

When Peter Hobson had taken a university elective in taxonomy, the two species of chimpanzees had been
Pan troglodytes
(common chimps) and
Pan paniscus
(pygmy chimps).

But the split between chimps and humans had occurred just 500,000 generations ago, and they still have 98.4% of their DNA in common. In 1993, a group including evolutionist Richard Dawkins and best-selling science fiction writer Douglas Adams published the Declaration on Great Apes, which urged the adoption of a bill of rights for our simian cousins.

In took thirteen years, but eventually their declaration came to be argued at the UN. An unprecedented resolution was adopted formally reclassifying chimpanzees as members of genus
Homo
, meaning there were now three extant species of humanity:
Homo sapiens
,
Homo troglodytes
, and
Homo paniscus
. Human rights were divided into two broad categories: those, such as the entitlement to life, liberty, and freedom from torture, that applied to all members of genus
Homo
, and other rights, such as pursuit of happiness, religious freedom, and ownership of land, that were reserved exclusively to
H. sapiens
.

Of course, under Homo rights, no one could ever kill a chimp again for experimental purposes — indeed, no one could imprison a chimp in a lab. And many nations had modified their legal definitions of homicide to include the killing of chimps.

Adriaan Kortlandt, the first animal behaviorist to observe wild chimpanzees, once referred to them as “eerie souls in animals’ furs.” But now Peter Hobson was in a position to see how literally Kortlandt’s observation should be taken. The soulwave existed in
Homo sapiens
. It did not exist in
Bos taunts
, the common cow. Peter supported the simian-rights movement, but all the good that had been done in the last few years might be undone if it were shown that humans had souls but chimps did not. Still, Peter knew that if he himself did not do the test, someone else eventually would.

Even though chimps were no longer captured for labs, zoos, or circuses, some were still living in human-operated facilities. The United Kingdom, Canada, the U.S., Tanzania, and Burundi jointly funded a chimpanzee retirement home in Glasgow — of all places — for chimps that couldn’t be returned to the wild. Peter phoned the sanctuary, to find out if any of the chimps there were near death. According to the director, Brenda MacTavish, several were in their fifties, which was old age for a chimp, but none were terminal. Still, Peter arranged to have some scanning equipment shipped to her.

“And so,” Peter said to Sarkar during their weekly dinner at Sonny Gotlieb’s, “I think I’m ready to go public now. Oh, and my marketing people have come up with a name for the superEEG: they’re calling it a SoulDetector.”

“Oh, please!” said Sarkar.

Peter grinned. “Hey, I always leave those decisions up to Joginder and his people. Anyway, the SoulDetector patents are in place, we’ve got a backlog of almost two hundred units ready for shipment, I’ve got three good recordings of the soulwave leaving human beings, I know that at least some animals don’t have souls, and I’ll hopefully soon have the data on chimps, as well.”

Sarkar spread lox on a bagel half. “You’re still missing one important piece of information.”

“Oh?”

“I’m surprised you haven’t thought of the question yourself, Peter.”

“What question?”

“The flip side of your original inquiry: you know now when the soul leaves the body. But when does the soul arrive?”

Peter’s jaw went slack. “You mean — you mean in a fetus?”

“Precisely.”

“Holy shit,” said Peter. “I — I could get in a lot of trouble asking that question.”

“Perhaps,” said Sarkar. “But as soon as you go public, someone will ask it.”

“The controversy will be incredible.”

Sarkar nodded. “Indeed. But I’m surprised it hadn’t occurred to you.”

Peter looked away. He’d been suppressing it, no doubt. An old wound, long since healed. Or so he’d thought.

Damn, thought Peter. God damn.