The Terminal Experiment

CHAPTER 18

Sarkar Muhammed’s artificial-intelligence company was called Mirror Image. Its offices were located in Concord, Ontario, north of Metro Toronto. Peter met Sarkar there on Saturday morning, and Sarkar took him upstairs to the newly created scanning room. It had originally been just a regular office. There were crushed indentations in the rug where filing cabinets had once been. There had also been a large window, but it had been completely covered with plywood panels to prevent light from coming in from outside, and the walls had been lined with gray foam rubber, molded in egg-carton shapes to deaden sound. In the center of the room was an old dentist’s chair on a swivel base and along one wall was a bench covered with a PC, various oscilloscopes, and several other pieces of equipment, including some circuitry breadboards lying out in the open.

Sarkar motioned for Peter to sit in the dentist’s chair.

“Just a little off the top,” said Peter.

Sarkar smiled. “We are going to take everything off the top — get a complete record of everything in your brain.” He positioned the scanner’s skullcap on Peter’s head.

“L’chaim,” said Peter.

Sarkar loosely fastened the cap’s chin strap and motioned for Peter to pull it tight. “Second down,” said Peter. “Four yards to go.”

Sarkar handed Peter two small earpieces. Peter inserted them. Finally, Sarkar handed him the test goggles: a pair of special glasses that projected separate video signals into each eye.

“Breathe through your nose,” said Sarkar. “And try to keep swallowing to a minimum. Also, try not to cough.”

Peter nodded.

“And don’t do that,” said Sarkar. “Don’t nod. I’ll assume you understand my instructions without your acknowledging them.” He moved to his workbench and pressed some keys on the PC. “In many ways, this is going to be more complex than what you did in recording the soulwave’s departure. There, you were simply looking for any electrical activity in the brain. But here, we must stimulate your brain in myriad ways, to activate every neural net contained within — most nets are inactive most of the time, of course.”

He pushed some more keys. “Okay, we’re recording now. Don’t worry if you have to shift to get comfortable in the next few minutes; it’ll take that long to calibrate, anyway.” He spent what seemed a very long time making minute adjustments to his controls. “Now, as we discussed,” said Sarkar, “you are going to receive a series of inputs. Some will be oral — spoken words or sounds on audiotape. Some will be visual: you will see images or words projected into your eyes. I know you speak French and a little Spanish; some of the inputs will be in those languages. Concentrate on the inputs, but don’t worry if your mind wanders. If I show you a tree and that makes you think of wood, and wood makes you think of paper, and paper makes you think of paper airplanes, and airplanes make you think of lousy food, that’s fine. Don’t force the connections, though: this is not an exercise in free association. We just want to map which neural nets exist in your brain, and what excites them. Ready? No — you nodded again. Okay, here we go.”

At first, Peter thought he was seeing a standard barrage of test images, but it soon became apparent that Sarkar had supplemented that with images specifically related to Peter. There were pictures of Peter’s parents, of the house he and Cathy lived in now and the one they’d lived in before it, shots of Sarkar’s cottage, Peter’s own high-school graduation photo, sound clips of Peter’s voice, and Cathy’s voice, and on and on, a This Is Your Life retrospective mingled with generic pictures of lakes and woods and football fields and simple mathematical equations and snatches of poetry and Star Trek trivia questions and popular music from when Peter had been a teenager and art and pornography and out-of-focus pictures that might have been Abe Lincoln or might have been a hound dog or might have been nothing at all.

Periodically, Peter got bored, and his mind wandered to the night before — the disastrous night out with Cathy’s coworkers. Damn, that had been a mistake.

Fucking Hans.

He couldn’t even shake his head to fling off the thoughts. But by an effort of will, he tried to concentrate on the images. And yet, from time to time, they, too, would provoke the unpleasant memories: A picture of hands that made him think of Hans. Peter and Cathy’s wedding photo. A pub. A parked car.

Nets fired.

They did four two-hour sets of this, with half-hour breaks for Peter to stretch and work his jaw and drink water and go to the bathroom. Sometimes the audio clips would reinforce the visual images — he saw a picture of Mick Jagger and heard “Satisfaction.” And sometimes they were jarringly opposite — the sight of a starving Ethiopian child coupled with the sounds of wind chimes. And sometimes the images shown to his left eye were different than those shown to his right, and sometimes the sound played into one earpiece was completely unrelated to that pumped into the other.

Finally, it was over. Tens of thousands of images had been seen. Gigabytes of data had been recorded. And the sensors in the skullcap had mapped every nook and cranny, every thoroughfare and side street, every neuron and every net in Peter Hobson’s brain.

Sarkar took the disk holding the brain scan down to his computer lab. He loaded it onto an AI workstation and copied everything into three different RAM partitions — producing three identical copies of Peter’s brain, each isolated in its own memory bank.

“What now?” said Peter, sitting backward on a stacking chair and leaning his chin on his arms folded over the chair’s back.

“First, we label them.” Sarkar, sitting on the barstool he preferred to a chair, spoke into the microphone on the console in front of him. “Login,” he said.

“Login name?” said the computer’s voice, female, emotionless.

“Sarkar.”

“Hello, Sarkar. Command?”

“Rename Hobson 1 to Spirit.”

“Please spell destination name.”

Sarkar sighed. The word “Spirit” was doubtless in the computer’s vocabulary, but Sarkar’s accent occasionally gave it trouble. “S-P-I-R-I-T.”

“Done. Command?”

“Rename Hobson 2 to Ambrotos.”

“Done. Command?”

Peter piped up. “Why ‘Ambrotos’?”

“It’s the Greek word for immortal,” said Sarkar. “You see it in words such as ‘ambrosia’ — the foodstuff that confers immortality.”

“That darned private school education,” said Peter.

Sarkar grinned. “Exactly.” He turned back to the mike. “Rename Hobson 3 to Control.”

“Done. Command?”

“Load Spirit.”

“Loaded. Command?”

“Okay,” said Sarkar, turning to face Peter. “Spirit is supposed to simulate life after death. To do that, we begin by paring out all exclusively biological functions. That will not actually involve removing parts of the conscious brain, of course, but rather just disconnecting various networks. To find out which connections we can sever, we’ll use the Dalhousie Stimulus Library. That’s a Canadianized version of a collection of standard images and sound recordings originally created by the University of Melbourne; it’s commonly used in psychological testing. As Spirit is exposed to each image or sound, we record which neurons fire in response.”

Peter nodded.

“The stimuli are all cataloged by the type of emotion they’re supposed to elicit — fear, revulsion, sexual arousal, hunger, et cetera. We look to see which neural nets are activated exclusively by biological concerns, and then zero those out. Of course, we have to go through the images several times in random sequences. That’s because of action potentials: nets might not get activated if a substantially similar combination of neurons was recently triggered by something else. Once we’ve finished doing that, we should have a version of your mind that approximates the way you would be if you were freed of all concerns about meeting physical needs — what you would be like if you were dead, in other words. After that, we’ll do the same thing with Ambrotos, the immortal version, but for it we’ll excise the fear of growing old and concerns about aging and death.”

“What about the experimental control?”

“I’ll feed it the same sorts of images and sound clips, just so that it will have been exposed to the same things as the other two versions, but I won’t zero out any of its nets.”

“Very good.”

“Okay,” said Sarkar. He turned to face the console. “Run Dalhousie Version 4.”

“Executing,” said the computer.

“Estimate time to completion.”

“Eleven hours, nineteen minutes.”

“Advise when complete.” Sarkar turned to Peter. “I’m sure you won’t want to watch the whole thing, but you can see what is being fed to Spirit on that monitor.”

Peter looked at the screen. A monarch butterfly emerging from a cocoon. Banff, Alberta. A pretty woman blowing a kiss at the camera. Some 1980s movie star that Peter sort of recognized. Two men boxing. A house on fire…