The Terminal Experiment

CHAPTER 10

Peter took the superEEG recording with him when he left the chronic-care facility. By the time he got home, Cathy was getting ready for work, nibbling at a piece of dry whole-wheat toast and sipping a cup of tea. He’d left her a message with the household computer, so she’d know where he was.

“How did it go?” asked Cathy.

“I got the recording,” said Peter.

“You don’t seem very happy.”

“Well, a very nice lady died tonight.”

Cathy looked compassionate. She nodded.

“I’m exhausted,” said Peter. “I’m going back to bed.” He gave her a quick kiss, and did just that.

Four hours later Peter woke up with a headache. He stumbled to the bathroom, where he shaved and showered. He then filled a large tumbler with Diet Coke, got the disk, and went to his study.

His home system was more powerful than the mainframe he’d had to share access to as a student at university. He turned it on, inserted the disk into the drive, and activated the wall monitor on the other side of the room. Peter wanted to see the moment at which the last neuron had fired, the moment at which the last synapse had been made. The moment of death.

He selected a graphic display mode and played a few seconds of the data, having the computer plot every location at which a neuron had fired. Not surprisingly, the image on the screen looked exactly like a silhouette of a human brain. Peter used an edge-tracing tool to draw the outline of Mrs. Fennell’s brain. There was enough data to generate the picture three dimensionally; Peter rotated the image until the brain silhouette was facing him directly, as if he was looking the late Mrs. Fennell straight in the optic nerves.

He let the data play in real time. The computer looked for patterns in the firing neurons. Any connected series that fired once was color-coded red; twice, orange; three times, yellow; and so on through the seven colors of the spectrum. The picture of the brain looked mostly white: the combined effect of all the different colors of tiny dots. Peter occasionally zoomed in to see a close-up of one section of the brain, lit up with strings of infinitesimal Christmas lights.

As he watched, he could clearly see the stroke that had proved the final straw for Peggy Fennell. The color-coding scheme was refreshed every tenth of a second, but soon an area of blackness began to grow in her left temporal lobe, just below the Sylvian fissure. It was followed by an increase in activity, with the whole brain growing brighter and brighter as disinhibition caused neurons to fire again immediately after they’d last fired. After several moments, a complex network of purple lights was visible throughout her brain, a whole series of neural nets being triggered in identical patterns over and over as her brain spasmed. Then the nets began to fade, and no new ones replaced them. After ninety years of service, Peggy Fennell’s brain was giving up the ghost.

Peter had hoped to be able to watch it all dispassionately. It was just data, after all. But it was also Peggy, that brave and cheerful woman who had faced and beaten death once before, that woman who had held his hand as she passed from life into lifelessness.

The data continued to be plotted, and soon there were only a few patterns of light, like constellations on a foggy night, flickering on the screen. When the activity did stop, it did so without any apparent flourish. Not a bang. Not a whimper. Just nothingness.

Except…

What was that?

A tiny flash on the screen.

Peter reversed the recording, then played it back again at a much slower speed.

There was a minuscule pattern of purple lights — a persistent pattern, a pattern that kept firing over and over again.

And it was moving.

Neurons couldn’t really move, of course. They were physical entities. But the recorder was picking up the same pattern over and over again, just slightly displaced to the right each time. The recorder allowed for such displacements: neurons didn’t always fire in exactly the same way, and the brain was gelatinous enough that movements of the head and the pulsing of blood could slightly change the physical coordinates of a neuron. The pattern moving across the screen must have been propagating from neuron to adjacent neuron in steps small enough that the recorder mistook the individual increments for activity within the same neurons. Peter glanced at the scale bar at the bottom of the wall screen. The violet pattern, a complex knot like intestines made of neon tubes, had already shifted five millimeters, far more than any neuron could move within the brain except in the case of a major blow to the head, something Peggy Fennell had most assuredly not suffered.

Peter adjusted a control. The playback speeded up.

No doubt about it: the knot of violet pinpricks was moving to the right, pretty much in a straight line. It rotated a bit as it moved, like a tumbleweed blown by a desert wind. Peter stared in openmouthed wonder. It continued to move, passing over the corpus callosum into the other hemisphere, past the hypothalamus, and into the right temporal lobe.

Each part of the brain was normally reasonably isolated from the others, and the kinds of electrical waves typical of, say, the cerebral cortex were foreign to the cerebellum, and vice versa. But this tight knot of purple light was moving without changing its form through structure after structure.

An equipment malfunction, thought Peter. Oh, well. Nothing ever worked right the first time.

Except…

Except Peter couldn’t think of anything that would cause this kind of malfunction.

And still the pattern moved across the screen.

Peter tried to conjure up another explanation. Could a static discharge, perhaps from Peggy’s hair rubbing against the pillow, have caused this effect? Of course, hospital pillows are designed to be antistatic, precisely so they won’t mess up delicate recording equipment, and Peggy, after all, had had thinning, white hair. Besides, she’d been wearing his scanning skullcap.

No, it must be caused by something else.

The pattern was getting close to the outer edge of the brain. Peter wondered if it would dissipate on the convoluted surface of the cortex or maybe bounce back, spinning the other way, like a video game inside the head.

It did neither.

It reached the edge of the brain … and kept right on going, through the membrane that encased the brain.

Astonishing.

Peter touched some keys, overlaying an extrapolated outline of Mrs. Fennell’s head over the silhouette of her brain. He mentally kicked himself for not having done this sooner. It was obvious where the knot of light was heading.

Straight for the temple.

Straight for the thinnest part of her skull.

It continued along, through the bone, through the thin veneer of muscle that overlaid the skull.

Surely, thought Peter, it was going to break up. Yes, there are nerves at the temple; that’s why it hurts to be struck there. Yes, there are nerves in muscle tissue, too, including the jaw muscles that overlay the temple. And, yes, there are nerves shot through the lower layers of the skin. Even if the pattern had some form of cohesion, Peter expected to see a change here. The nerves outside the actual brain are much less densely packed. The pattern might balloon in size, drawn between the points of more diffuse neural tissue.

But it did not. It continued, exactly the same size, tumbling slowly end over end, through the muscle, through the skin, and—

Out. Past the sensor field.

It didn’t break up. It simply left. And yet it had held its cohesion. The pattern had remained intact right up to the moment the sensor web lost it.

Incredible, thought Peter. Incredible.

He scanned the wall, looking for signs of other active neural nets.

But there were none.

Peggy Fennell’s brain showed as an unblemished silhouette, devoid of electrical activity.

She was dead.

Dead.

And something had left her body.

Something had left her brain.

Peter felt his own head wheeling.

It couldn’t be.

It could not be.

He reversed the recording, played it back from a different angle.

Why had the knot of light moved from the left hemisphere to the right? The other temple had been closer.

Ah, but Peggy had been lying down, her head on her pillow. Her left temple had been facing into the pillow; it was her right one that had been exposed to air. Even though it had been farther away, it represented the easier escape route.

Peter played the recording back again and again. Different angles. Different plotting methods. Different color-encoding schemes. It didn’t matter; the result was the same. He compared the time-coded recordings to Peggy’s other vital signs — pulse, respiration, blood pressure. The knot of light left just after her heart stopped, just after she’d breathed her last.

Peter had found exactly what he was looking for: an unequivocal marker that life was now over, an indisputable sign that the patient was just meat, ready for organ harvesting.

Marker.

That wasn’t the right word, and he knew it. He was deliberately avoiding even thinking it. And yet, there it was, recorded by his own ultrasensitive instruments: the departure from her body of Peggy Fennell’s very own soul.

Peter knew that when he asked Sarkar to come at once to his house, Sarkar would do so. Peter couldn’t contain his excitement when Sarkar arrived. He was trying, and probably failing, to suppress a grin. He took Sarkar into his den, then played back the recording of Peggy Fennell’s death once more.

“You faked that,” said Sarkar.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Oh, come on, Peter.”

“Really. I haven’t even done any cleanup of the data. What you just saw is exactly what happened.”

“Play that last bit again,” said Sarkar. “One one-hundredth speed.”

Peter touched buttons.

“Subhanallah,” said Sarkar. “That’s incredible.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

“You know what that is, don’t you?” said Sarkar. “Right there, in crisp images. That’s her nafs — her soul — leaving her body.”

To his surprise, Peter found himself reacting negatively when he heard that idea said aloud. “I knew you were going to say that.”

“Well, what else could it be?” asked Sarkar.

“I don’t know.”

“Nothing,” said Sarkar. “That’s the only thing it could be. Have you told anyone about this yet?”

“No.”

“How do you announce something like this, I wonder? In a medical journal? Or do you just call the newspapers?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only just begun to think about that. I suspect I’ll call a press conference.”

“Remember Fleischmann and Pons,” cautioned Sarkar.

“The cold-fusion guys? Yeah, I know they jumped the gun, and ended up with egg on their faces. I’ll have to get some more recordings of the thing. I’ve got to be sure this happens to everyone, after all. But I can’t wait forever. Someone else will stumble on this soon enough.”

“What about patents?”

Peter nodded. “I’ve thought about that. I’ve already got patents on most of the technology in the superEEG — it’s an incremental improvement on the brain scanner we built for your AI work, after all. I’m certainly not going to go public until I’ve got the whole thing protected.”

“When you do announce it,” said Sarkar, “there will be a ton of publicity. This is as big as it gets. You’ve proven the existence of life after death.”

Peter shook his head. “You’re going beyond the data. A small, weak electrical field leaves the body at the moment of death. That’s all; there’s nothing to prove that the field is conscious or living.”

“The Koran says—”

“I can’t rely on the Koran, or the Bible, or anything else. All we know is that a cohesive energy field survives the death of the body. Whether that field lasts for any appreciable time after departure, or whether it carries any real information, is completely unknown — and any other interpretation at this point is just wishful thinking.”

“You’re being deliberately obtuse. It’s a soul, Peter. You know that.”

“I don’t like using that word. It — it prejudices the discussion.”

“All right, call it something else if you like. Casper the Friendly Ghost, even — although I’d call the physical manifestation the soulwave. But it exists — and you know as well as I do that people are going to embrace it as an honest-to-goodness soul, as proof of life after death.” Sarkar looked his friend in the eye. “This will change the world.”

Peter nodded. There wasn’t anything else to say.