The Terminal Experiment

CHAPTER 9

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.