The Terminal Experiment (v5) Read online

  “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:

  Wanted: person in very late stages of terminal illness or injury to participate in testing a new biomedical monitoring device. Location: southern Ontario. Will pay participant CDN$10,000. Terminal individuals, or persons with power of attorney for same, please apply in confidence to Hobson Monitoring (net: HOBMON).

  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 hundred and nineteen 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.

  CHAPTER 12

  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 bestselling 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 th
eir 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 taurus, 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.

  CHAPTER 13

  It had happened thirteen years ago, during their first year of marriage. Peter remembered it all vividly.

  October 31, 1998. Even back then, they didn’t eat at home often. But they’d always thought it rude to go out on Halloween—someone should be in to give treats to the kids.

  Cathy made fettuccine Alfredo while Peter put together a Caesar salad with real bacon bits crisped in the microwave, and they collaborated on making a cake for desert. They had fun cooking together, and the tight confines of the tiny kitchen they’d had back then made for plenty of enjoyable contact as they squeezed past each other, jockeying for access to the kitchen’s various cupboards and appliances. Cathy had ended up with flour stains in the shapes of Peter’s handprints on each of her breasts, while Peter had her handprints on his bum.

  But after they’d finished eating the salads and had made a good start on the pasta, Cathy had said, without preamble, “I’m pregnant.”

  Peter had put his fork down and looked at her. “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s—” He knew he should say “That’s wonderful,” but he was unable to get the second word out. Instead, he settled for “interesting.”

  She chilled visibly. “Interesting?”

  “Well, I mean, it’s unexpected, that’s all.” A pause. “Weren’t you—” Another pause. “Damn.”

  “I think it was that weekend at my parents’ cottage,” she said. “Remember? You’d forgotten to—”

  “I remember,” said Peter, a slight edge in his voice.

  “You said you’d have a vasectomy when you turned thirty,” Cathy said, a tad defensively. “You said if by then we still didn’t want to have kids, you’d do it.”

  “Well, I wasn’t bloody well going to do it on my birthday. I’m still thirty. And, besides, we were still discussing whether to have a child.”

  “Then why are you angry?” asked Cathy.

  “I—I’m not.” He smiled. “Really, darling, I’m not. It’s just a surprise, that’s all.” He paused. “So, if it was that weekend, you’re what? Six weeks along?”

  She nodded. “I missed my period, so I bought one of those kits.”

  “I see,” said Peter.

  “You don’t want the baby,” she said.

  “I didn’t say that. I don’t know what I want.”

  At that point, the doorbell rang. Peter got up to answer it.

  Trick or treat, he thought. Trick or treat.

  PETER AND CATHY had waited another three weeks, weighing their options, their lifestyle, their dreams. Finally, though, they made their decision.

  The abortion clinic on College Street had been in an old two-story brownstone. On its left had been a greasy spoon called Joes—no apostrophe—that advertised a breakfast special with two “egg’s” any way you like them. On its right had been an appliance store with a hand-lettered sign in the window that said, “We do repairs.”

  And in front of the clinic there had been protesters, marching up and down the sidewalk, carrying placards.

  Abortion is murder, said one.

  Sinner, repent, said another.

  Baby’s have rights too, said a third, perhaps produced by Joe’s sign-maker. A bored-looking police officer was leaning against the brownstone’s wall, making sure the protesters didn’t get out of hand.

  Peter and Cathy parked across the street and got out of their car. Cathy looked toward the clinic and shivered, even though it wasn’t particularly cold. “I didn’t think there would be that many protesters,” she said.

  Peter counted eight of them—three men and five women. “There’re always going to be some.”

  She nodded.

  Peter moved next to her and took her hand. She squeezed it, and managed a slight, brave smile. They waited for a break in the traffic, then crossed.

  As soon as they arrived at the other side, the protesters closed in on them. “Don’t go in there, lady!” shouted one. “It’s your baby!” shouted another. “Take some time,” shouted a third. “Think it over!”

  The cop moved close enough to see that the protesters weren’t actually touching Cathy or preventing her from gaining access.

  Cathy kept her eyes facing straight ahead.

  Eggs any way you like, thought Peter. Repairs done here.

  “Don’t do it, lady!” shouted one of the protesters again.

  “It’s your baby!”

  “Take some time! Think it over!”

  There were four stone steps leading up to the wooden doors of the clinic. She started up them, Peter right behind.

  “It’s … !”

  “Don’t … !”

  “Take … !”

  Peter stepped ahead to open the door for Cathy.

  They went inside.

  PETER HAD HAD his vasectomy the following week. He and Cathy never spoke again of that episode from their past, but sometimes when her sister’s daughters were visiting, or when they ran into a neighbor taking a baby for a stroll, or when they saw children on TV, Peter would find himself feeling wistful and sad and confused, and he would steal a look at his wife and see in her large blue eyes the same mix of emotions and uncertainty.

  And now, they had to
face that moral issue all over again.

  There was no way to put a scanning skull cap on a fetus, of course. But Peter didn’t need to scan all electrical activity in the unborn child’s brain—all he needed was equipment to detect the high-frequency soulwave. It took him days of work, but he eventually managed to cobble together a scanner that could be laid on a pregnant woman’s belly to detect the soulwave inside. The unit incorporated some of the scanning-at-a-distance technology from the Hobson Monitor, and employed a directional sensor to make sure the mother’s own soulwave wasn’t mistakenly picked up.

  The soulwave was exceedingly faint, and the fetus was deep within the woman’s body. So, just like a telescope taking prolonged exposures to build up an image, Peter suspected this sensor would probably have to be in place for about four hours before a determination could be made of whether the soulwave was present.

  Peter went down to his company’s finance department. One of the senior analysts there, Victoria Kalipedes, was just beginning her ninth month of pregnancy.

  “Victoria,” Peter said, “I need your help.”

  She looked up expectantly. Peter smiled at the thought. Everything she did these days was expectantly. “I’ve got a new prototype sensor I’d like you to help me test,” he said.

  Victoria looked surprised. “Does it have to do with my baby?”

  “That’s right. It’s just a sensor web that’s laid over your belly. It won’t hurt you, and it can’t harm the baby in any way. It’s, well, it’s like an EEG—it detects activity in the fetal brain.”

  “And there’s no way it can hurt the baby?”

  Peter shook his head. “None.”

  “I don’t know …”

  “Please.” Peter surprised himself with the forcefulness with which he said the word.