The Terminal Experiment - Robert J. Sawyer Page 0,43

sounds on audio tape. 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. Terabytes 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 backwards 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