The Terminal Experiment

CHAPTER 26

In theory, nine o’clock was official starting time at Doowap Advertising. In practice, that meant that a little after nine people began thinking about actually getting down to work.

As usual, Cathy Hobson arrived around 8:50. But instead of the standard joking around as people sipped their coffee, today everything seemed somber. She moved through the open-plan office to her cubicle and saw that Shannon, the woman who worked next to her, had been crying. “What’s wrong?” said Cathy.

Shannon looked up, her eyes red. She sniffled. “Did you hear about Hans?”

Cathy shook her head.

“He’s dead,” said Shannon, and began crying again.

Jonas, the one Cathy’s husband called the pseu-dointellectual, was passing by. “What happened?” asked Cathy.

Jonas ran a hand through his greasy hair. “Hans was murdered.”

“Murdered!”

“Uh-huh. An intruder, it seems.”

Toby Bailey moved closer, apparently sensing that this cluster of workers was the interesting one to be with — someone hadn’t yet heard the story. “That’s right,” he said. “You know he didn’t show up for work yesterday? Well, Nancy Caulfield got a call late last night from his — I was going to say wife, but I guess the word is ‘widow,’ now. Anyway, it was in this morning’s Sun, as well. Service is on Thursday; everybody gets time off to go, if they want.”

“Was it robbery?” asked Cathy.

Jonas shook his head. “The newspaper said the cops had ruled out robbery as a motive. Nothing taken, apparently. And” — Jonas’s face showed an uncharacteristic degree of animation — “according to unnamed sources, the body was mutilated.”

“Oh, God,” said Cathy, stunned. “How?”

“Well, the police are refusing to comment on the mutilation.” Jonas adopted that knowing air that irritated Peter so. “Even if they were willing to speak about it, I suspect they’d keep the details secret so that they could weed out any false confessions.”

Cathy shook her head. “Mutilated,” she said again, the word sounding foreign to her.

Ambrotos, the immortal simulacrum, dreamed.

Peter walked. There was something unusual about his footfalls, though. They were softened, somehow. Not like walking on grass or mud. More like the rubberized surface of a tennis court. Just a hint of give as each foot came down in turn; an ever-so-slight springiness added to his step.

He glanced down. The surface was light blue. He looked around. The material he was on was gently curved, falling away in all directions. There was no sky. Just a void, a nothingness, a colorless emptiness, an absence of anything. He continued to walk slowly across the slightly resilient, curving surface.

Suddenly he caught sight of Cathy in the distance, waving at him.

She was wearing her old navy blue University of Toronto jacket. Spelled out on one sleeve was “9T5,” her graduating year; on the other, “CHEM.” Peter saw now that this wasn’t the Cathy of today, but rather Cathy as he’d first known her: younger, her heart-shaped face free of lines, her ebony hair halfway down her back. Peter looked down again. He had on stone-washed blue jeans — the kind of clothes he hadn’t worn for twenty years.

He began to walk toward her, and she toward him. With each step, her clothes and hairstyle changed, and after every dozen paces or so it was clear that she had aged a little more. Peter felt a beard erupting from his face, and then disappearing, a bad experiment abandoned, and, as he walked further, he felt a coolness on the top of his head as he began to lose his hair. But after a few more paces, Peter realized that all changes in him, at least, had stopped. His hair thinned no farther, his body did not hunch over, his joints continued to work with ease and smoothness.

They walked and walked, but soon Peter realized that they were not getting closer to each other. Indeed, they were growing farther and farther apart.

The ground between them was expanding. The rubbery blueness was growing bigger and bigger. Peter began to run, and so did Cathy. But it did no good. They were on the surface of a great balloon that was inflating. With each passing moment its surface area increased and the distance between them grew.

An expanding universe. A universe of vast time. Even though she was far away now, Peter could still perceive the details of Cathy’s face, the lines around her eyes. Soon she gave up running, gave up even walking. She just stood there on the ever-growing surface. She continued to wave, but Peter understood that it had become a wave of good-bye — no immortality for her. The surface continued to expand, and soon she had slipped over the horizon, out of sight…

When Cathy got home that evening, she told Peter. Together, they watched the CityPulse News at six, but the report added very little to what she’d learned at work. Still, Peter was surprised to see how small a house Hans had had — a pleasing reminder that, at least in economic matters, Peter had been his better by an order of magnitude.

Cathy seemed to still be in shock — dazed by the news. Peter shocked himself by how … how satisfactory all this seemed. But it irritated him to see her mourning the death. Granted, she and Hans had worked together for years. Still, there was something deep in Peter that was affronted by her sadness.

Even though he had to get up early for a meeting — some Japanese journalists were flying in to interview him about the soulwave — he didn’t even make a pretense of trying to go to bed at the same time as Cathy. Instead he stayed up, watched white-haired Jay Leno for a bit, then ambled off to his office and dialed into Mirror Image. He received the same menu as before:

[Fl] Spirit (Life After Death)

[F2] Ambrotos (Immortality)

[F3] Control (unmodified)

Once again, he selected the Control sim.

“Hello,” said Peter. “It’s me, Peter.”

“Hello,” replied the sim. “It’s after midnight. Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

Peter nodded. “I suppose. I’m just — I don’t know, I guess I’m jealous, in a funny sort of way.”

“Jealous?”

“Of Hans. He was killed yesterday morning.”

“Was he? My God…”

“You sound like Cath. All fucking choked up.”

“Well, it does come as a surprise.”

“I suppose,” said Peter. “Still…”

“Still what?”

“Still it bothers me that she’s so upset by this. Sometimes…” He paused for a long time, then: “Sometimes I wonder if I married the right woman.”

The sim’s voice was neutral. “You didn’t have much choice.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Peter. “There was Becky. Becky and I would have been wonderful together.”

The speaker made a very strange sound; perhaps the electronic equivalent of blowing a raspberry. “People think the choice of who they marry is a big decision, and a very personal reflection of who they are. It’s not — not really.”

“Of course it is,” said Peter.

“No, it’s not. Look, I’ve got nothing much to do these days except read stuff coming in off the net. One thing I’ve been looking into is twin studies — I guess kind of being your silicon twin has got me interested.”

“Gallium arsenide,” said Peter.

The raspberry sound again. “The studies show that twins separated at birth are enormously alike in thousands of ways. They have the same favorite chocolate bar. They like the same music. If male, they both choose to grow, or not to grow, a beard. They end up with similar careers. On and on — similarity after similarity. Except in one thing: spouses. One twin may have an athletic spouse, the other a delicate intellectual. One a blonde, the other a brunette. One an extrovert, the other a wallflower.”

“Really?” asked Peter.

“Absolutely,” said Control. “Twin studies are devastating to the ego. All those similarities in tastes show that nature, not nurture, is the overwhelming component of personality. In fact, I read a great study today about two twins separated at birth. Both were slobs. One had adoptive parents who were obsessive about neatness; the other was adopted by a family with a messy household. A researcher asked the twins why they were sloppy, and both said it was a reaction to their adoptive parents. One said, ‘My mother was such a neat-freak, I can’t bear to be so meticulous.’ But the other said, ‘Well, gee, my mother was a slob, so I guess I picked it up from her.’ In fact, neither answer is true. Being messy was in their genes. Almost everything we are is in our genes.”

Peter digested this. “But doesn’t the choice of radically different spouses refute that? Doesn’t that prove we are individuals, shaped by our individual upbringings?”

“At first glance, it might seem that way,” said Control, “but in fact it proves exactly the opposite. Think about when we got engaged to Cathy. We were twenty-eight, just about to finish our doctorate. We were ready to get on with life; we wanted to get married. Granted, we were already very much in love with Cathy, but even if we weren’t, we’d probably have wanted to get married about then. If she hadn’t been there, we would have looked around at our circle of acquaintances to find a mate. But think about it: we really had very few possibilities. First eliminate all those who were already married or engaged — Becky was engaged to somebody else at that point, for instance. Then eliminate all those who weren’t approximately our same age. Then, to be really honest with ourselves, eliminate those of other races or profoundly different religions. Who would have been left? One person? Maybe two. Maybe, if we’d been extraordinarily lucky, three or four. But that’s it. You’re fantasizing about all the people we could have married, but if you look at it — really look at it — you’ll find we had almost no choice at all.”

Peter shook his head. “It seems so cold and impersonal when put like that.”

“In a lot of ways, it is,” said the sim. “But it’s given me a new appreciation for Sarkar and Raheema’s arranged marriage. I’d always thought that was wrong, but when you get right down to it, the difference is trivial. They didn’t have much choice in who they married, and neither did we.”

“I suppose,” said Peter.

“It’s true,” said the sim. “So go to bed, already. Go upstairs and lie down next to your wife.” He paused. “I should be so lucky myself.”