The Terminal Experiment

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Danita let out a slow, whispery sigh. “We’ve got our work cut out for us.”

  LATER THAT EVENING, Peter and Cathy were sitting in their living room, Peter on the couch and Cathy alone in the love seat across the room.

  Peter didn’t know what was going to happen, what the future held. He was still trying to deal with it all. He’d always tried to be a good husband, always tried to show a genuine interest in her job. There was no reason to change that, he figured, and so, as he had often done in the past, he asked, “How was work today?”

  Cathy put down her reader. “Fine.” She paused. “Toby brought in fresh strawberries.”

  Peter nodded.

  “But,” she said, “I left early.”

  “Oh?”

  “I, ah, went to see a counselor.”

  Peter was surprised. “You mean like a therapist?”

  “Sort of. She works for the Family Service Association—I found them using directory assistance.”

  “Counselor …” said Peter, chewing over the word. Fascinating. He met her eyes. “I would have gone with you, if you’d asked.”

  She smiled briefly but warmly. “I know you would have. But, ah, I wanted to sort some things out for myself.”

  “How did it go?”

  She looked at her lap. “Okay, I guess.”

  “Oh?” Peter leaned forward, concerned.

  “It was a little upsetting.” She lifted her gaze. Her voice was small. “Do you think I have low self-esteem?”

  Peter was quiet for a moment. “I, ah, have always thought that perhaps you underestimated yourself.” He knew that was as far as he should go.

  Cathy nodded. “Danita—that’s the counselor— she thinks it’s related to my relationship with my father.”

  The first thought in Peter’s mind was a snide comment about Freudians. But then the full measure of what Cathy said hit him. “She’s right,” Peter said, eyebrows lifting. “I hadn’t seen it before, but of course she’s right. He treats you and your sister like crap. Like you had been boarders, not his children.”

  “Marissa is in therapy, too, you know.”

  Peter hadn’t known, but he nodded. “It makes sense. Christ, how could you have a positive self-image, growing up in an environment like that? And your mother—” Peter saw Cathy’s face harden and he stopped himself. “Sorry, but as much as I like her, Bunny is not, well, let’s say she’s not the ideal role model for the twenty-first-century woman. She’s never worked outside the home, and, after all, your father doesn’t seem to treat her much better than he treated

  you or your sister.”

  Cathy said nothing.

  It was obvious now, all of this. “God damn him,” said Peter, getting to his feet, pacing back and forth. He stopped and stared at the Alex Colville painting behind the couch. “God damn him to hell.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Tuesday was the standard night for Peter and Sarkar to have dinner together. Sarkar’s wife Raheema took a course on Tuesdays, and Peter and Cathy had always given each other time to pursue separate interests. Peter was more relaxed this evening, now that he’d decided not to discuss Cathy’s infidelity with Sarkar. They hashed through more prosaic family news, international politics, the Blue Jays’ stunning performance and the Leafs’ lousy one. Finally, Peter looked across the table and cleared his throat. “What do you know about near-death experiences?”

  Sarkar was having lentil soup this evening. “They’re a crock.”

  “I thought you believed in that kind of stuff.”

  Sarkar made a pained face. “Just because I’m religious doesn’t mean I am an idiot.”

  “Sorry. But I was talking to a woman recently who had had a near-death experience. She certainly believed it was real.”

  “She have the classic symptoms? Out-of-body perspective? Tunnel? Bright light? Life review? Sense of peace? Encounters with dead loved ones?”

  “Yes.”

  Sarkar nodded. “It is only when taken as one big thing that NDEs are inexplicable. The individual components are easy to understand. For instance, do this: close your eyes and picture yourself at dinner last night.”

  Peter closed his eyes. “Okay.”

  “What do you see?”

  “I see me and Cathy at Kelsey’s on Keele Street.”

  “Don’t you ever eat at home?”

  “Well, not often,” said Peter.

  “DINKs,” said Sarkar, shaking his head—double income, no kids. “Anyway, realize what you just said: you picture yourself and Cathy.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You are seeing yourself. The image you conjure up isn’t from the point of view of your eyes, a meter and half off the floor or however high up they are when you’re sitting down. It’s a picture of yourself as seen from outside your own body.”

  “Well, I guess it is, at that.”

  “Most human memory and dream imagery is ‘out of body.’ That’s the way our minds work both when recalling things that really happened and in fantasizing. There’s nothing mystical about it.”

  Peter was having another heart-attack kit. He rearranged the slices of smoked meat on the rye bread. “But people claim to be able to see things they couldn’t possibly have seen, like the manufacturer’s name on the light unit mounted above their hospital bed.”

  Sarkar nodded. “Yeah, there are reports like that, but they aren’t crisp—they don’t stand up to scrutiny. One case involved a man who worked for a company that manufactured hospital lighting: he had recognized a competitor’s unit. Others involve patients who had been ambulatory before or after the NDE and had had plenty of time to check out the details for themselves. Also, many times the reports are either unverifiable, such as ‘I saw a fly sitting on top of the x-ray machine,’ or just flat-out wrong, such as ‘there was a vent on the top of the respirator,’ when in fact there was no vent at all.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” said Sarkar. He smiled. “I know what to get you for Christmas this year: a subscription to The Skeptical Inquirer.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A journal published by The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. They blow holes in this sort of thing all the time.”

  “Hmm. What about the tunnel?”

  “Have you ever had a migraine?”

  “No. My father used to get them, though.”

  “Ask him. Tunnel vision is common in severe headaches, in anoxia, and lots of other conditions.”

  “I guess. But I’d heard that the tunnel was maybe a recollection of the birth canal.”

  Sarkar waved his soup spoon in Peter’s direction. “Ask any woman who’s had a baby if the birth canal is even remotely like a tunnel with a wide opening and a bright light at the end. The baby is surrounded by contracting walls of muscle; there’s no tunnel. Plus, people who were delivered by Caesarean section have recounted the NDE tunnel as well, so it can’t be some sort of actual memory.”

  “Hmm. What about the bright light at the end of the tunnel?”

  “Lack of oxygen causes overstimulation of the visual cortex. Normally, most of the neurons in that cortex are prevented from firing. When oxygen levels drop, the first thing to cease functioning is the disinhibitory chemicals. The result is a perception of bright light.”

  “And the life review?”

  “Didn’t you take a seminar once at the Montreal Neurological Institute?”

  “Umm—yes.”

  “And who was the most famous doctor associated with that institute?”

  “Wilder Penfield, I guess.”

  “You guess,” said Sarkar. “He’s on a bloody stamp, after all. Yes, Penfield, who did work on directly stimulating the brain. He found it easy to elicit vivid memories of long-forgotten things. Again, in an anoxia situation, the brain is more active than normal because of the loss of disinhibitors. Neural nets are firing left and right. So the flooding of the brain with images from the past makes perfect sen
se.”

  “And the sense of peace?”

  “Natural endorphins, of course.”

  “Hmm. But what about the visions of long-dead friends? The woman I spoke to saw her dead twin sister, Mary, who had died shortly after birth.”

  “Did she see an infant?”

  “No, she described the vision as looking like herself.”

  “The brain isn’t stupid,” said Sarkar. “It knows when it may be about to die. That naturally gets one thinking about people who are already dead. Here is the crisp point, though: there are cases of little children having near-death experiences. Do you know who they see visions of?”

  Peter shook his head.

  “Their parents or their playmates. People who are still alive. Children don’t know anyone who has already died. If the NDE really was a window into some afterlife, they wouldn’t see people who are alive.”

  “Hmm,” said Peter. “You know, the woman who had seen her sister Mary had her NDE while on the phone talking to another woman named Mary.”

  Sarkar looked triumphant. “The power of suggestion. It’s all just a normal, explicable brain reaction.” The server came with the bill. Sarkar glanced at it. “My religion teaches that we do continue on after this existence, but the near-death experience has nothing to do with real life after death. If you want to know what that’s like, I’ll give you a copy of the Koran.”

  Peter reached for his wallet to pay his half of the tab. “I think I’ll pass.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Peter Hobson was quite fond of his sister-in-law Marissa. In 2004, her first child had died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: she had simply stopped breathing, without any fuss, sometime during her third evening of life. Marissa and her ex-husband had used a standard baby monitor, a microphone that broadcast to a receiver they carried about the house.

  But little Amanda had died quietly.

  When Marissa had had another baby a year later, she refused to leave the child’s side. Day or night, for months on end, she would always have the baby in her sight. Intellectually she knew that infant deaths just sometimes happened, but emotionally she blamed herself—if she had been with Amanda when her breathing had stopped, maybe she could have saved her.

  Back then, Peter had been working on designs for touchless medical instrumentation. With AIDS continuing to plague the world, there was a big demand for units that didn’t have to come into contact with a patient’s body. At-a-distance heart-rate monitors were easy enough to develop, using declassified sensing equipment originally created for espionage. And detecting brain activity was usually done at a distance anyway—with electrodes separated from the brain by the thickness of the scalp and skull. Eventually, Peter found a way to read the rudiments of brain activity over a great distance, with nothing touching the patient’s skin except a low-wattage infrared laser.

  And so the Hobson Baby Monitor was born—a device that could report the vital signs of an infant in another room. He gave the prototype to Marissa and her husband. The monitor’s built-in alarms would warn them immediately if their baby was in distress. They were delighted with the unit, and at Cathy’s urging, Peter quit his job at East York General Hospital and started a little company to sell his baby monitors.

  And then, one morning, Peter was lying next to his wife in bed. He needed to pee. Looking at the clock radio, he saw it was 6:45 a.m. The alarm would go off at seven. If Cathy was sleeping lightly, Peter knew that his getting up now would wake her, depriving her of her last quarter-hour of sleep, something he’d hate to do.

  Peter lay there, enduring the pressure in his bladder. He wished he knew whether she was sleeping soundly. Maybe she was even already awake, but just had her eyes closed.

  And then it hit him—a completely different use for his monitoring technology. The product appeared full-blown in his mind. A panel on the wall opposite the bed, with two clusters of readouts, one for each person in the bed. In each cluster, there’d be a big LED and a small one. The big one would indicate the person’s current sleep state, and the small one would indicate the state he or she was moving into. There’d also be a digital counter indicating how long until the transition between one state and the next would take place—after just a few nights’ training, the unit would have the individual users’ sleep cycles down pat.

  The LEDs would change color: white would mean the person was awake; red would mean the person was in a light sleep and would definitely be disturbed by any noise or movement. Yellow would mean the person was in a medium sleep, and so long as care was taken, one could get up and go to the bathroom, or cough, or whatever, without disturbing one’s partner. Green would mean the person was in deep sleep, and you could probably do limbo dancing in the bed without disturbing him or her.

  It would be pig-simple to read: a big yellow light with a small green one, and 07 showing on the counter would mean if you got up now, you might disturb your partner, but if you could hold off for seven minutes, she would be fast asleep and you could slip out without waking her.

  As the urinary pressure gave Peter a typical early-morning erection, he realized something else. He’d often awoken horny at two or three a.m. and wondered if his wife was awake, too. If she had been, they’d probably have made love, but Peter would never dream of waking her up for that. But if the monitor happened to show white lights for both of them, well, then, what had started out as the Hobson Baby Monitor might end up being responsible for lots of new babies …

  As time went by, Peter refined his system. All the telephones in the Hobson house were now hooked up to a Hobson Monitor, and from there to the household computer. Whether the phones rang at all, or just signaled incoming calls with flashing lights, depended on Peter and Cathy’s sleep states.

  At 3:17 a.m., a call was indeed detected. Moments before, Peter had been asleep, but he was now heading to the en suite bathroom, which had a small voice-only telephone. As he entered, its indicator started to flash. Peter closed the door, sat down on the toilet, and picked up the handset.

  “Hello,” he said, his voice thick and dry.

  “Dr. Hobson?” said a man’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Sepp van der Linde at Carlson’s Chronic Care. I’m the head night nurse.”

  “Yes?” Peter fumbled for a drinking glass and filled it from the tap.

  “I think Mrs. Fennell is going to pass on tonight. She’s had another stroke.”

  Peter felt a small twang of sadness. “Thank you for letting me know. Is my equipment all set up still?”

  “Yes, sir, it is, but—”

  He fought to stifle a yawn. “Then I’ll come by in the morning to pick up the data disk.”

  “But Dr. Hobson, she’s asking for you to come.”

  “Me?” said Peter.

  “She said you’re her only friend.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  PETER ARRIVED at the chronic-care facility about 4:00 a.m. He showed his pass to the security guard and took the elevator to the third floor. The door to Mrs. Fennell’s room was open and the incandescent light directly above her head was on, although the main overhead fluorescents were out. A row of four green LEDs pierced the gloom beside the bed, showing that Peter’s equipment was working properly. A nurse sat on a chair next to the bed, a bored look on her face.

  “I’m Peter Hobson,” Peter said. “How is she?”

  Mrs. Fennell stirred slightly. “Pe-ter,” she said, but the effort of even those two syllables seemed to visibly weaken her.

  The nurse got up and moved over to stand next to Peter. “She had a stroke about an hour ago, and Dr. Chong expects she’ll have another one shortly; there are several clots in the arteries feeding her brain. We offered her something for the pain, but she said no.”

  Peter stepped over to his recording unit and turned on the screen, which immediately came to life. A series of jagged lines traced from left to right. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll stay with her. You can go now, if you like.”
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br />   The nurse nodded and left. Peter sat in the chair, the vinyl back warm from the nurse. He reached out and took Mrs. Fennell’s left hand. There was a catheter inserted into the back of it, a tube leading to a drip bag mounted just beside the chair. Her hand was thin, small bones covered by translucent skin. Peter encircled Mrs. Fennell’s fingers with his own. She squeezed his hand very softly.

  “I’ll stay with you, Mrs. Fennell,” said Peter.

  “P—P—”

  Peter smiled. “That’s right, Mrs. Fennell; it’s me, Peter.”

  She shook her head ever so slightly. “P—P—” she said again, and then, with great effort, “Peg—”

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Peter. “I’ll stay with you, Peggy.”

  The old woman smiled ever so slightly, her mouth just another line across her face. And then, without any fuss, her fingers went limp in Peter’s hand and her eyelids slid very slowly shut. On the monitor, the green tracings had turned into a series of perfectly straight horizontal lines. After several moments, Peter retrieved his hand, blinked slowly a few times, and went to find the nurse.

  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.