The Terminal Experiment

CHAPTER 30

Enough time had elapsed, Sarkar felt, for the sims to have adapted to their new circumstances. It was time to start posing the big questions. Sarkar and Peter were both tied up with other things for the next couple of days, but finally they got together at Mirror Image, and ensconced themselves in the computer lab. Sarkar brought Ambrotos into the foreground. He was about to begin asking it questions, but thought better of it. “It’s your mind,” Sarkar said. “You should ask the questions.”

Peter nodded and cleared his throat. “Hello, Ambrotos,” he said.

“Hello, Peter,” said that mechanical voice. “What is immortality really like?” Ambrotos took a long time before replying, as if contemplating all of eternity first. “It’s … relaxing, I suppose is the best word for it.” Another pause. Nothing was rushed. “I hadn’t realized how much pressure aging put on us. Oh, I know women sometimes say their biological clock is ticking. But there’s a bigger clock affecting all of us — at least people like you and me, driven people, people with a need to accomplish things. We know we’ve only got a limited amount of time, and there’s so much we want to get done. We curse every wasted minute.” Another pause. “Well, I don’t feel that anymore. I don’t feel the pressure to do things quickly. I still want to accomplish things, but there’ll always be tomorrow. There’ll always be more time.”

Peter considered. “I’m not sure I’d consider being less driven an improvement. I like getting things done.”

Ambrotos’s reply was infinitely calm. “And I like relaxing. I like knowing that if I want to spend three weeks or three years learning about something that strikes my fancy that I can, without it somehow reducing my productive time. If I feel like reading a novel today instead of working on some project, what’s wrong with that?”

“But,” said Peter, “you know, as I do now, that there’s some form of life after death. Don’t you wonder about that?”

The sim laughed. “You and I never believed in life after death. Even now, even knowing that, yes, something does survive the physical demise of the body, I’m not attracted to whatever afterlife there might be. Clearly, it would be beyond physical existence — it would involve the intellect but not the body. I never thought of myself as a sensualist, and we both know we’re not very athletic. But I like sex. I like feeling sun on my skin. I like eating a really good meal. I even like eating lousy meals. I’d miss my body if it wasn’t there. I’d miss physical stimulation. I’d miss — I’d miss everything. Gooseflesh and being tickled and cutting a really good fart and running my hand over my five-o’clock shadow. All of it. Sure, life after death might be forever, but so is physical immortality — and I like the physical part.”

Peter was guarded; Sarkar was listening intently. “What about — what about our relationship with Cathy? I guess you think the whole marriage is just a tiny blip in a vast life?”

“Oh, no,” said Ambrotos. “Funny — despite that crack Colin Godoyo made, I’d thought that an immortal would rue the day he’d sworn to do anything until death do us part. But I don’t feel that way at all. In fact, this has added a whole new dimension to marriage. If Cathy becomes immortal, too, there’s a chance — a real chance — that I may finally, actually, completely get to know her. In the fifteen years we’ve been living together, I’ve already gotten to know her better than any other human being. I know what sort of risque jokes will make her giggle, and what kinds will turn her right off. I know how important her ceramics are to her. I know that she’s not really serious when she says she doesn’t like horror films, but that she is absolutely serious when she says she doesn’t like 1950s rock music. And I know how bright she is — brighter than me, in a lot of ways; after all, I’ve never been able to do the New York Times crossword.

“But, despite all that, I still know only the tiniest fraction of her. Surely she’s every bit as complex as I am. What does she really think about my parents? About her sister? Does she ever silently pray? Does she really enjoy some of the things we do together, or just tolerate them? What thoughts does she have that, even after all this time, she still doesn’t yet feel comfortable enough to share with me? Sure, we exchange little bits of ourselves every time we interact, but as the decades and centuries go by, we’ll get to know each other better. And nothing pleases me more than that.”

Peter frowned. “But people change. You can’t take a thousand years to get to know an individual any more than you can take a thousand years to get to know a city. Once all that time has elapsed, the old information will be completely obsolete.”

“And that’s the most wonderful thing of all,” said the sim, not pausing at all this time. “I could spend forever with Cathy and never run out of new things to learn about her.”

Peter leaned back in his chair, thinking. Sarkai took the opportunity for a turn at the mike. “But isn’t immortality boring?”

The sim laughed. “Forgive me, my friend, but that’s one of the silliest ideas I’ve ever heard. Boring, when you’ve got the totality of creation to comprehend? I’ve never read a play by Aristophanes. I’ve never studied any Asian language. I don’t understand anything about ballet, or lacrosse, or meteorology. I can’t read music. I can’t play the drums.”

Laughter again. “I want to write a novel and a sonnet and a song. Yes, they’ll all stink, but eventually I’ll learn to do them well. I want to learn to paint and to appreciate opera and to really understand quantum physics. I want to read all the great books, and all the trashy ones, too. I want to learn about Buddhism and Judaism and Seventh Day Adventists. I want to visit Australia and Japan and the Galapagos. I want to go into space. I want to go to the bottom of the ocean. I want to learn it all, do it all, live it all. Immortality boring? Impossible. Even the lifetime of the universe may not be enough to do all the things I want to do.”

Peter and Sarkar were interrupted by a call from Sarkar’s receptionist. “Excuse me,” said the little Asian man from the screen of the video phone, “but there’s a long-distance video call for Dr. Hobson.”

Peter lifted his eyebrows. Sarkar motioned for him to have a seat in front of the phone. “I’m here, Chin.”

“Patching through,” he said.

The screen image changed to show a middle-aged red-haired woman: Brenda MacTavish, from the Glasgow Chimpanzee Retirement Home. “Ah, Peter,” she said, “I called your office and they said you’d be here.”

“Hi, Brenda,” Peter said. He peered at the screen. Had she been crying?

“Forgive the state I’m in,” she said. “We just lost Cornelius, one of our oldest residents. He had a heart attack; chimps normally don’t get those, but he’d been used for years in smoking research.” She shook her head in wonder at the cruelty. “When we first spoke, of course, I dinna know what you were up to. Now I’ve seen you all over the telly, and read all about it in The Economist. Anyway, we got the recordings you wanted. I’m sending the data over the net tonight.”

“Did you look at it?” said Peter.

“Aye,” she said. “Chimps have souls.” Her voice was bitter, as she thought about her lost friend. “As if anyone could have ever doubted that.”

The sim’s first thought was to tamper with the prescription database at Shoppers Drug Mart, the pharmacy chain used by Rod Churchill. But despite repeated attempts, he couldn’t get in. It was frustrating, but not surprising: of course a drugstore would have very high security. But there was more than one way to skin a gym teacher. And there were lots of low-security computer systems around…

Since the 1970s, immigration officials at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport had used a simple test whenever someone arrived claiming to be a Torontonian but whose papers weren’t entirely in order. They asked the person what the phone number was of a famous local pizza delivery chain. No one could live in Toronto and not know that number: it appeared on billboards, countless newspaper and TV ads, and was sung incessantly as a jingle in radio commercials.

As the decades passed, the chain widened its array of deliverable meals, first adding other Italian dishes, then submarine sandwiches, then barbecued chicken and ribs, then burgers, and, eventually, a whole range of cuisine from the pedestrian to the exotic. Although they’d kept their trademark phone number, they eventually changed their name to Food Food. But even back in its humble pizza days, the company prided itself on its state-of-the-art computerized ordering system. All orders were placed through the one central phone number and then transferred to the whichever of the over three hundred stores throughout Metro Toronto was closest to the caller’s home, allowing the food to be delivered within thirty minutes — or the customer got it for free.

Well, Rod Churchill had said that every Wednesday night, when his wife was out at her conversational French course, he ordered dinner from Food Food. The chain’s computer records would have a complete history of every meal he’d ever ordered from there — Food Food was famous for being able to not just give you the same order you had last time, but also, if you wanted it, a repeat of what you’d had on any occasion in the past.

It took a couple of days of trying, but the sim eventually unraveled the security of Food Food’s computers — as he expected, the safety precautions were much less rigid than those of a drugstore. He called up Rod’s ordering history.

Perfect.

Like all restaurants, Food Food was obligated to provide full ingredient and nutritional information, which could be read by videophone at the customer’s leisure. The sim waded carefully through it, until he found exactly what he was looking for.