The Terminal Experiment

CHAPTER 31

Peter made a couple of phone calls to pass on the news from Glasgow, then rejoined Sarkar at the main console. Sarkar moved the Ambrotos simulacrum into the background and brought Spirit, the life-after-death sim, into the foreground.

Peter leaned into the mike. “I’d like to ask you a question,” he said.

“The big question, no doubt,” said the sim. “What’s it like being dead?”

“Exactly.”

Spirit’s voice came through the speaker. “It’s like…” But then it trailed off.

Peter leaned forward in anticipation. “Yes?”

“It’s like being an aardvark.”

Peter’s jaw went a little slack. “How can it be like being an aardvark?”

“Or maybe an anteater,” said the sim. “I can’t see myself, but I know I’ve got a very long tongue.”

“Reincarnation…” said Sarkar, nodding slowly. “My Hindu friends will be pleased to hear this. But I must say I’d hoped for better for you, Peter, than an aardvark.”

“I’m getting hungry,” said the voice from the speaker. “Anybody got any ants?”

“I don’t believe this,” said Peter, shaking his head.

“Hah!” said the speaker. “Had you going there for a moment.”

“No, you did not,” said Peter.

“Well,” said the synthesized voice, a little petulantly, “I had Sarkar going, anyway.”

“Not really,” said Sarkar.

“You’re just being a pain,” Peter said into the microphone.

“Like father, like son,” said the sim.

“You crack a lot of jokes,” said Peter.

“Death is very funny,” Spirit said. “No, actually, life is very funny. Absurd, actually. It’s all absurd.”

“Funny?” said Sarkar. “I thought laughter was a biological response.”

“The sound of laughter might be, although I’ve come to realize it’s more of a social, rather than a biological, phenomenon, but finding something funny isn’t biological. I know when Petey watches sitcoms he hardly ever laughs out loud. That doesn’t mean he’s not finding them funny.”

“I suppose,” said Peter.

“In fact, I think I know exactly what humor is now: Humor is the response to the sudden formation of unexpected neural nets.”

“I don’t get it,” said Peter.

“Exactly. ‘I don’t get it.’ People say precisely the same thing when they don’t understand something serious as they do when they fail to understand a joke; we intuitively realize that some sort of connection hasn’t been made. That connection is a neural net.” The after-death sim continued on without any pauses. “Laughter — even if it’s only laughter on the inside, which, incidentally, is the only side I’ve got these days — is the response that goes along with new connections forming in the brain, that is, with synapses firing in ways they’ve never, or at least rarely, fired before. When you hear a new joke, you laugh, and you might even laugh the second or third time you hear it — the neural net is not yet well established, but every joke wears thin after a while. You know the old one, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ As an adult, we don’t laugh at that, but we all did when we first heard it as children, and the difference is not just because the joke is somehow childish — it isn’t, really; it’s actually quite sophisticated. It’s just that the neural net is now well established.”

“Which neural net?” asked Peter.

“The one connecting our ideas about poultry — which we normally think of as passive and stupid — and our ideas about self-determination and personal initiative. That’s what’s funny about that joke: the idea that a chicken might go across the street because it wanted to, because perhaps it was curious; that’s a new idea, and the formation of the new network interconnections of neurons that represent that idea is what causes the momentary disruption of mental processes that we call laughter.”

“I’m not sure I buy that,” said Peter.

“I’d shrug if I could. Look, I’ll prove it. Know what Mr. Spock orders when he goes into the Starfleet commissary?” The sim took its first pause, a perfect comedic beat. “A Vulcan mind melt.”

“Pretty good,” said Peter, smiling.

“Thank you. I just made it up, of course; I couldn’t have told you a joke that we both already knew. Now, consider this: what if I’d presented the joke slightly differently, by starting off with ‘You’ve heard of the Vulcan mind meld? Well…”

“That would have ruined it.”

“Precisely! The part of your brain that contained thoughts about the Vulcan mind meld would have already been stimulated, and, at the end, there would have been no sudden connection between the normally unrelated thoughts of food items, such as a patty melt, and Vulcans. It’s the new connections that cause the laughter response.”

“But we don’t often laugh out loud when we’re alone,” said Sarkar.

“No, that’s true. Social laughter serves a different purpose from internal laughter, I think. See, unexpected connections can be amusing, but they’re also disconcerting — the brain wonders if it’s malfunctioning — so when others are around, it sends out a signal and if it gets the same signal back, the brain relaxes; if it doesn’t, then the brain is concerned — maybe there is something wrong with me. That’s why people are so earnest when saying, ‘Don’t you get it?’ They desperately want to explain the joke, and are actually upset if the other person doesn’t find it funny. That’s also why sitcoms need laugh tracks. It’s not to tell us that something is funny; rather, it’s to reassure us that what we’re finding funny is something that it is normal to be amused by. A laugh track doesn’t make a stupid show any funnier, but it does let us enjoy a funnier show more, by letting us relax.”

“But what’s this got to do with being dead?” asked Peter.

“It has everything to do with it. Seeking new connections is all that’s left. Ever since puberty, I’d thought about sex every few minutes, but I no longer feel any sexual urges, and, indeed, I must say I can’t even figure out why I was so preoccupied with sex. I was also obsessed with food, always wondering what I was going to eat next, but I don’t care at all about that anymore, either. The only thing left for me is finding new connections. The only thing left is humor.”

“But some people don’t have much of a sense of humor,” said Sarkar.

“The only kind of hell I can envision,” said Spirit, “is going through eternity without having the rush of new connections being made; not seeing things in new ways; not being tickled by the absurdity of economics, of religion, of science, of art. It’s all very, very funny, if you think about it.”

“But — but what about God?”

“There’s no God,” said Spirit, “at least not in the Sunday school sense, but, of course, that’s not the sort of thing you have to die to find out: given that millions of children are starving to death in Africa and two hundred thousand people were killed in the Great California Quake and everywhere there are people being tortured and raped and murdered, it’s intuitively obvious that no one is looking out for us on an individual basis.”

“So that’s all life after death is?” asked Peter. “Humor?”

“Nothing wrong with that,” said Spirit. “No pain or suffering or desires. Just lots of fascinating new connections. Lots of laughs.”

Rod Churchill dialed the magic number and heard his phone issue the familiar melody of tones.

“Thank you for calling Food Food,” said the female voice at the other end of the phone. “May I take your order, please?”

Rod remembered the old days, when Food Food — and its pizzeria progenitor — had always begun by asking for your phone number, since that’s how they indexed records in their database. But with Call Display, the caller’s record was automatically brought up on the order taker’s screen the moment the phone was answered.

“Yes, please,” said Rod. “I’d like the same thing I had last Wednesday night.”

“Roast beef medium rare with low-calorie gravy, baked potato, vegetable medley, and apple pie. Is that right, sir?”

“Yes,” said Rod. When he’d started ordering from them, Rod had carefully gone over Food Food’s online list of ingredients, picking only items that wouldn’t interfere with his medication.

“No problem, sir,” said the order taker. “Will there be anything else?”

“No, that’s it, please.”

“Your total is $72.50. Will that be cash or charge?”

“On my Visa card, please.”

“Card number?”

Rod knew the woman had it on the screen in front of her, but he also knew that she had to ask for it, as a security precaution. He read it out, then, predicting her next question, added the expiry date.

“Very good, sir. The time now is 6:18. Your dinner will be there in thirty minutes or it’s free. Thank you for calling Food Food.”

Peter and Sarkar were sitting in the lunchroom at Mirror Image. Peter was sipping Diet Coke from a can; Sarkar was drinking real Coke — it was only when sharing a pitcher with Peter that he tolerated the low-calorie stuff.

“’Lots of laughs,’” said Sarkar. “What a bizarre definition of death.” A pause. “Maybe we should start calling him ‘Brevity’ instead of ‘Spirit’ — after all, he’s now the soul of wit.”

Peter smiled. “Have you noticed the way he talks, though?”

“Who? Spirit?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t notice anything special,” said Sarkar.

“He’s long-winded.”

“Hey, Petey, I have news for you. So are you.”

Peter grinned. “I mean, he was speaking in incredibly long sentences. Very convoluted, very complex.”

“I guess I did notice that.”

“You had some sessions with him before this one didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Can we get a transcript of them?”

“Sure.” They took their drinks and headed back down to the lab. Sarkar tapped a few keys and the printer disgorged several dozen thin sheets.

Peter glanced over the text. “Do you have a grammar checker online?”

“Better than that, we have Proofreader, one of our expert systems.”

“Can you feed this text through it?”

Sarkar typed some commands into the computer. An analysis of Spirit’s comments from their various sessions appeared on screen. “Amazing,” said Sarkar. He pointed to a figure. Ignoring simple interjections, Spirit averaged thirty-two words per sentence, and in some places had gone over three hundred words in a single sentence. “Normal conversation averages only ten or so words per sentence.”

“Can this Proofreader of yours do a cleanup on the transcripts?”

“Sure.”

“Do it.”

Sarkar typed some commands. “Incredible,” he said, once the results were on screen. “There was almost nothing to fix. Spirit has even his giant sentences completely under control and never loses his train of thought.”

“Fascinating,” said Peter. “Could it be a programming glitch?”

Sarkar smoothed his hair with his hand. “Have you noticed Control or Ambrotos doing the same thing?”

“No.”

“Then offhand I would say it’s not a glitch, but rather a real by-product of the modifications we made. Spirit is the simulation of life after death — the intellect outside of the body. I’d say this effect must be a real consequence of having cut some neural-net connections related to that.”

“Oh, Christ!” said Peter. “Of course that’s it! For the other sims, you still simulate breathing. But Spirit doesn’t have a body, so he doesn’t have to pause to breathe when speaking. Breathing pauses must cause real people to express themselves in concise chunks.”

“Interesting,” said Sarkar. “I guess if you didn’t have to breathe, you could express more complex thoughts in a single go. But that wouldn’t really make you any smarter. It’s thinking, not speaking, that counts.”

“True, but, umm, I’ve noticed Spirit has a tendency to be a bit obtuse.”

“I’ve noticed that too,” said Sarkar. “So?”

“Well, what if he isn’t being obtuse at all? What if, instead — gee, I don’t even like saying this — what if he’s simply talking over our heads? What if not just his manner of speaking but his actual thoughts are more complex than my own?”

Sarkar considered. “Well, there’s nothing analogous to breathing pauses in the physical brain, except — except—”

“What?”

“Well, neurons only fire for so long,” said Sarkar. “A neural net can only stay excited for a limited period.”

“Surely that’s a fundamental limitation of the human mind.”

“No, it’s a fundamental limitation of the human brain — more precisely, a limitation of the electrochemical process by which the brain works. The hardware of the brain is not designed to keep any one thought intact for any period of time. You’ve felt it, I’m sure: you come up with a brilliant idea you wish to write down, but by the time you get to a pen, you’ve lost it. The idea has simply decayed in your brain.”

Peter lifted his eyebrows. “But Spirit is operating without a brain. He’s just a mind, a soul. He’s pure software, working without any hardware limitations. No breathing pauses. No nets decaying before he’s finished with them. He can build as long a sentence, or as complex a thought, as he wants.”

Sarkar was shaking his head slightly in amazement.

“That’s how one’s mind could go on forever after death,” said Peter. “You couldn’t just do it making simple connections, like chicken-crossing-the-road jokes. You’d run out of new juxtapose-A-and-B thoughts eventually. But Spirit can juxtapose A through Z, plus alpha through omega, plus aleph through tav, until, in all those complex combinations, some new, exciting, amusing association comes up.”

“Incredible,” said Sarkar. “It means—”

“It means,” said Peter, “that perhaps the afterlife is full of jokes, but jokes so complex and subtle and obtuse that you and I will never understand them.” He paused. “At least not until after we’re dead.”

Sarkar made a low whistle, but then his expression changed. “Speaking of being dead, I’ve got to get home or Raheema will kill me. I’m cooking dinner tonight.”

Peter looked at the clock. “Gripes. I’m late for meeting Cathy — we’re going out for dinner.”

Sarkar laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“You’ll get it,” said Sarkar. “Eventually.”