The Terminal Experiment (v5) Read online

  Praise for The Terminal Experiment

  Winner of the Science Fiction

  and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award

  for Best Novel of the Year

  Finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year

  Winner of the Canadian Science Fiction

  and Fantasy Award (“the Aurora”)

  for Best Novel of the Year

  “A terrific mix of science, technological derring-do, and murder. A great story; a crackerjack novel.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “A very intriguing philosophical journey; a taut, believable exciting mystery story.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Audacious. Sawyer is to be commended for raising important philosophical issues in the form of a highly entertaining scientific mystery. His characters are convincing; their motivations and relationships are always at the heart of the action.”

  —The Montreal Gazette

  “A page-turner; a quality read. Murder is the name, and chases through cyberspace the game—a cautionary tale straight from the murky depths of the brave new world of our data future. Entirely realistic.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “Sawyer has succeeded in blending the high-tech mystery novel with the cutting-edge-future SF story, and has enriched both with fascinating philosophical speculation about life after death. This book matters.”

  —Hugo and Nebula winner Nancy Kress

  “Sawyer’s impressive storytelling skills make The Terminal Experiment a compelling thriller.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Robert J. Sawyer won the Nebula Award with this novel, and I would have voted for it. There is so much of interest in this book—artificial intelligence, a good murder mystery, a nicely realized near-future, and, as I’ve come to expect from Sawyer’s novels, thought-provoking philosophy.”

  —SF Site

  Praise for Robert J. Sawyer

  “By any reckoning Sawyer is among the most successful Canadian authors ever.”

  —Maclean’s

  “Sawyer is Canada’s answer to Michael Crichton.”

  —Toronto Star

  “A writer of boundless confidence and bold scientific extrapolation.”

  —The New York Times

  “Robert J. Sawyer’s novels—intelligent, literate, and immensely readable explorations of the biggest ideas there are—prove that science fiction is now literature.”

  —The Halifax Chronicle-Herald

  “Can Sawyer write? Yes—with near-Asimovian clarity, with energy and drive, with such grace that his writing becomes invisible as the story comes to life in your mind.”

  —Hugo and Nebula winner Orson Scott Card

  “No reader seeking well-written stories that respect, emphasize and depend on modern science should be disappointed by the works of Rob Sawyer.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Sawyer is the dean of Canadian science fiction.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “Sawyer is on a par with giants like Asimov and Heinlein— and, perhaps more than any other science-fiction writer working today, he understands that it’s a genre about ideas.”

  —Mystery News

  “Sawyer is one of the most successful Canadian writers ever. He has won himself an international readership by reinvigorating the traditions of hard science fiction, following the path of such writers as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein in his bold speculations from pure science. Almost alone among Canadian writers, he tackles the most fundamental questions of who we are and where we might be going— while illuminating where we are now.”

  —National Post

  “If Robert J. Sawyer were a corporation, I would buy stock in him. He’s on my (extremely short) Buy-On-Sight list, and belongs on yours.”

  —Spider Robinson

  “Robert J. Sawyer is just about the best science fiction writer out there these days.”

  —The Denver Rocky Mountain News

  “It is clear that the Canadians regard Robert J. Sawyer as a national treasure, as well they should.”

  —Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show

  PENGUIN CANADA

  THE TERMINAL EXPERIMENT

  ROBERT J. SAWYER is one of only seven writers in history—and the only Canadian—to win all three of the science-fiction field’s top awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award; he’s also won an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada. The ABC TV series FlashForward is based on his novel of the same name. He lives in Mississauga, Ontario. Visit his website at sfwriter.com.

  ALSO BY ROBERT J. SAWYER

  Novels

  Golden Fleece

  End of an Era

  Starplex

  Frameshift

  Illegal Alien

  Factoring Humanity

  FlashForward

  Calculating God

  Mindscan

  Rollback

  The Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy

  Far-Seer

  Fossil Hunter

  Foreigner

  The Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy

  Hominids

  Humans

  Hybrids

  The WWW Trilogy

  Wake

  Watch (coming in 2010)

  Wonder (coming in 2011)

  Collections

  Iterations (introduction by James Alan Gardner)

  Relativity (introduction by Mike Resnick)

  Identity Theft (introduction by Robert Charles Wilson)

  For book-club discussion guides, visit sfwriter.com.

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson

  Canada Inc., 2009

  Originally published in the United States by HarperPrism, an imprint of HarperCollins

  Publishers, 1995

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (OPM)

  Copyright © Robert J. Sawyer, 1995

  This novel was originally serialized in four parts under the title Hobson’s Choice in Analog

  Science Fiction and Fact magazine’s mid-December 1994 through March 1995 issues.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

  no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval

  system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission

  of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places and incidents either

  are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any

  resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Sawyer, Robert J.

  The terminal experiment / Robert Sawyer.

  Originally publ.: New York : HarperPrism, 1995.

  ISBN 978-0-14-317511-7

  I. Title.

  PS8587.A389835T4 2009 C813’.54 C2009-905533-3

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that

  it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise

  circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover

  other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  For Ted Bleaney

  with thanks for twenty years of friendship

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel came to life with the help of many fine souls, including Christopher Schelling, John Douglas, and John Silbersack at HarperCollins, Stanley Schmidt at Analog, and Richard Curtis. The advice of David Gotlib, M.D., was enormously helpful. I received wonderful feedback from writing colleagues Barbara Delaplace, Terence M. Green, Edo van Belkom, and Andrew Weiner. As well, friends Shaheen Hussain Azmi, Asbed Bedrossian, Ted Bleaney, David Livingstone Clink, Richard Gotlib, Howard Miller, and Alan B. Sawyer gave me valuable insights. Special thanks to the Ontario Arts Council for providing me with a Writers’ Reserve grant to aid in creating this novel, and to Adrienne Kerr and Ralph Vicinanza for arranging for this new edition. Finally, my deepest thanks to my wife, Carolyn Clink.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Future Is Now

  These days, I’m best known for FlashForward, my novel that is the basis for the ABC TV series of the same name. But that book didn’t change my life the most; this one did. The Terminal Experiment made my career when it won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award—the “Academy Award” of the SF field—for Best Novel of the Year.

  I received that award on April 27, 1996, at a gala banquet aboard the Queen Mary off Long Beach, California. Right after my win, John Douglas, an editor with the company that had produced the original edition of this book, said to me, “You’ve gone overnight from being a promising newcomer to an established, bankable name.” And John was right; my days as a struggling writer ended then and there.

  I wrote The Terminal Experiment in 1993, setting it in the then far-distant year of 2011. Although the story is told against a backdrop of the online universe, when I was writing it the Internet was new to most people and the World Wide Web hadn’t yet been invented.

  Even though I was an early adopter of online technologies—I’ve been on the Internet since 1983, have had a Web site (indeed, was the very first science-fiction writer to have one, at sfwriter.com) since 1995, and have been blogging since before the word even existed—neither I nor anyone else foresaw the current world of Google and Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, Wikipedia and YouTube (although my latest novels, Wake, Watch, and Wonder, which deal with the World Wide Web gaining consciousness in the present day, do embrace our modern reality).

  For this new edition of The Terminal Experiment, I thought about changing the dates mentioned in the book, about removing the dates altogether, and about updating or revising the many references to computing and online life. But I ultimately decided not to alter the text. Yes, that means this book is now an odd snapshot of the way one writer thought the future of computing might unfold, but that’s the smallest part of what The Terminal Experiment is really about. Mostly the novel is an exploration of timeless conundrums: Do we have souls? Is there an afterlife? Does God exist? And—to me, the most intriguing of all—can science ever help us find the answers to these questions?

  ROBERT J. SAWYER

  MISSISSAUGA, ONTARIO

  SEPTEMBER 2009

  In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions life puts to us.

  DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD (1905–1961)

  UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY GENERAL

  PROLOGUE

  December 2011

  “What room is Detective Philo in?” asked Peter Hobson, a tall, thin man of forty-two, with hair an equal mixture of black and gray.

  The squat nurse behind the desk had been absorbed in whatever she’d been reading. She looked up. “Pardon?”

  “Detective Sandra Philo,” said Peter. “What room is she in?”

  “Four-twelve,” said the nurse. “But her doctor has ordered that only immediate family members should visit.”

  Peter began down the corridor. The nurse came around from behind the desk and gave chase. “You can’t go in there,” she said firmly.

  Peter turned briefly to look at her. “I have to see her.”

  The nurse maneuvered in front of him. “She’s in critical condition.”

  “I’m Peter Hobson. I’m a doctor.”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Hobson. I also know you’re not a medical doctor.”

  “I’m on the Board of Directors of North York General.”

  “Fine. Go over there and bully someone, then. You’re not raising havoc on my ward.”

  Peter exhaled noisily. “Look, it’s a matter of life and death that I see Ms. Philo.”

  “Everything in the ICU is a matter of life and death, Mr. Hobson. Ms. Philo is sleeping, and I’ll not have her disturbed.”

  Peter pushed ahead.

  “I’ll call security,” said the nurse, trying to keep her voice low so as not to alarm the patients.

  Peter didn’t look back. “Fine,” he snapped, his long legs carrying him quickly down the corridor. The nurse waddled toward her desk and picked up the phone.

  Peter found 412 and entered without knocking. Sandra was hooked up to an EKG; it wasn’t a Hobson unit, but Peter had no trouble reading its display. A drip bag of saline was on a pole beside her bed.

  Sandra opened her eyes. It seemed to take a moment for them to focus. “You!” she exclaimed at last, her voice raw and thin—the effects of the beamer.

  Peter closed the door. “I’ve only got a few moments. They’ve already called security to come and take me away.”

  Every word was a struggle for Sandra. “You tried … to have me … killed,” she said.

  “No,” said Peter. “I swear to you that wasn’t my doing.”

  Sandra managed a weak shout, too faint to be heard through the closed door. “Nurse!”

  Peter looked at the woman. When he’d first met her, only a few weeks ago, she’d been a healthy thirty-six-yearold, with flaming red hair. Now her hair was falling out in clumps, her complexion was sallow, and she could barely move. “I don’t want to be rude, Sandra,” Peter said, “but please shut up and listen.”

  “Nurse!”

  “Listen, damn it! I had nothing to do with the murders. But I know who did. And I can give you a chance at getting him.”

  At that moment the door burst open. The squat nurse entered, flanked on either side by a burly security guard.

  “Remove him,” said the nurse.

  The guards moved forward.

  “Dammit, Sandra,” said Peter. “This is your only chance. Give me five minutes.” One guard grabbed Peter’s upper arm. “Five minutes, for God’s sake! That’s all I ask.”

  “Let’s go,” said the guard.

  Peter’s tone was imploring. “Sandra, tell them you want me to stay!” He hated himself for what he sai
d next, but he couldn’t think of anything more effective: “If you don’t, you’ll die never having solved the crimes.”

  “Come along now, buddy,” said the other guard gruffly.

  “No—wait! Sandra, please!”

  “Come along …”

  “Sandra!”

  Finally, a voice weak and wan: “Let … him … stay.”

  “We can’t do that, ma’am,” said one of the guards.

  Sandra rallied a little strength. “Police business … let him stay.”

  Peter twisted free of the guard’s grip. “Thank you,” he said to Sandra. “Thank you.”

  The nurse scowled at him. “I won’t stay long,” Peter said to her. “I promise.”

  Sandra managed to roll her head slightly in the nurse’s direction. “It’s … okay,” she said, faintly.

  The nurse was seething. The tableau held for several seconds, then the woman nodded. “All right,” she said, perhaps the talk of police business and unsolved crimes convincing her she was out of her depth.

  “Thank you,” Peter said to the nurse, relieved. “Thank you very much.”

  The nurse scowled, turned on her heel, and left, followed immediately by one of the guards. The other guard backed out, his face an angry mask, all the time pointing a warning finger at Peter.

  When they were alone again, Sandra said, “Tell … me.”

  Peter found a chair and sat down beside her bed.

  “First, let me say I’m terribly, terribly sorry about what’s happened. Believe me, I never wanted you or anyone else to come to harm. This—this is all out of control.”

  Sandra said nothing.

  “Do you have any family? Any children?”

  “Daughter,” said Sandra, surprised.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “With my ex now,” she said.

  “I want you to know, I’m going to take care of her financially. Everything she needs—clothes, cars, university, vacations in Europe, whatever. I will pay for it all. I’ll set up a trust fund.”

  Sandra’s eyes were wide.

  “I never intended any of this, and I swear to you that I’ve tried repeatedly to stop it all.”