The Terminal Experiment (v5)

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “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. “Cripes. 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.”

  CHAPTER 32

  The sim had been monitoring Food Food’s computer, waiting for an order for the Churchill address. Finally, there it was—the same thing Rod, creature of habit that he was, had ordered for the last six weeks.

  As soon as the order appeared in the system, the sim intercepted it, made one small modification, then let it continue on its way through the phone line to the Food Food store at Steeles and Bayview, six blocks from Rod Churchill’s house.

  PETER AND CATHY had taken Cathy’s car down Bayview Avenue. This part, some ten kilometers south of where her parents lived, was entirely lined with shops, boutiques, and restaurants. They’d briefly stopped in at The Sleuth of Baker Street, Toronto’s mystery bookstore, and were now looking for a break in the traffic so they could cross over to the little Korean restaurant they both liked on the other side of the street.

  A round man with a shock of white hair and clad in a navy blue trench coat, was walking down the sidewalk. Peter noticed him doing a double take as he passed them. He was slowly getting used to that; he’d had enough press lately that people were recognizing him on the streets. But the man didn’t move on. Instead, he came toward them.

  “You’re Peter Hobson, aren’t you?” he said. He was about sixty, with little veins visible on the surface of his nose and cheeks.

  “Yes,” said Peter.

  “You the guy who discovered that soul signal?”

  “Soulwave,” said Peter. “We call it the soulwave.” A beat. “Yes, that’s me.”

  “I thought so,” said the man. “But you know, unless your soul is saved, you’ll go to hell.”

  Cathy took Peter’s arm. “Come on,” she said. But the man moved to block their way. “Give yourself over to Jesus, Mr. Hobson—it’s the only way.”

  “I’m, ah, really not interested in discussing this,” said Peter.

  “Jesus forgives you,” said the man. He reached into the pocket of his trench coat. For one horrible moment, Peter thought the man was going for a gun, but instead he brought out a worn Bible, bound in blood-red leather. “Hear the word of God, Mr. Hobson! Save your soul!”

  Cathy spoke directly to the man. “Leave us alone.”

  “I can’t let you go,” said the man. He reached out an arm and—

  —connected with Cathy’s shoulder.

  Before Peter could react, Cathy had brought her shoe down on the man’s instep. He yowled in pain. “Get lost!” shouted Cathy, and she firmly took Peter’s arm, and propelled them both across the street.

  “Hey,” said Peter, still flustered but nonetheless impressed. “Pretty good.”

  Cathy tossed her black hair back. “No one messes with my husband,” she said, grinning her megawatt grin. She led them the few doors down to the restaurant. “Now, let me buy you dinner.”

  THE DOORBELL RANG. Rod Churchill glanced at his watch. Twenty-six minutes. He’d yet to get a free meal, although a history teacher at his high school said she’d gotten lucky twice in a row. Out of habit, Rod glanced at the security camera display on his TV. Yup, a Food Food driver, all right: the orange and white uniform was quite distinctive. Rod walked down to the entryway, checked himself in the hall mirror to make sure his hair was still properly combed over his bald head, and opened the door. He signed the receipt for the driver, who gave him one copy, then took his packaged food up to the dining room. Rod opened the envirofoam containers carefully, got himself a glass of white wine, put on the TV—easily visible from his place at the dining-room table—and sat down to enjoy his meal.

  The roast beef was adequate if a bit stringy, Rod thought, but the gravy was particularly good tonight. He cleaned the serving dish, using forkfuls of mashed-up baked potato to sop up the last of the gravy. He was halfway through his slice of pie when the pain began: a severe pounding at the back of his head, and an excruciating sensation, as though spikes were being driven into his eyes. He felt his heart fluttering. His forehead was slick with sweat and he thought for a moment he was going to vomit. A hot flash came over him. He rose to his feet, in hopes of getting to the telephone and calling for help, but suddenly there was a moment of unbearable pain, and he toppled backward, knocking his chair over, and fell to the carpeted floor, stone cold dead.

  PETER AND CATHY had already gone to bed, but their Hobson Monitor knew that neither of them were yet asleep, and so it allowed the phone to ring.

  There was no video phone in the bedroom, of course. In the darkness, Peter groped for the audio handset on his night table.

  “Hello?” he said.

  A crying woman. “Oh, Peter! Peter!”

  “Bunny?”

  Hearing her mother’s name, Cathy sat up in bed at once. “Lights!” she called out. The household computer turned on the two floor lamps in the room.

  “Peter—Rod is dead.”

  “Oh my God,” said Peter.

  “What is it?” said Cathy, concerned. “What’s wrong?”

  “What happened?” said Peter, heart pounding.

  “I just got back from my course, and I found him lying on the floor in the dining room.”

  “Have you called an ambulance?” asked Peter.

  “What is it?” Cathy said again, horrified.

  Bunny had been crying so much, she had to pause to blow her nose. “Yes. Yes, it’s on its way.”

  “So are we,” said Peter. “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  “Thank you,” said Bunny, terrified. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  “Just hold on,” said Peter. “We’re coming.” He hung up.

  “What’s happening?” said Cathy.

  Peter looked at his wife, her giant eyes wide in terror. My God, how to tell her? “That was your mother,” he said. He knew she knew that, but he was buying time, composing his thoughts. “Your father—she thinks your father is dead.”

  Horror danced across Cathy’s face. Her mouth hung open and she shook her head slightly from left to right.

  “Get dressed,” said Peter, gently. “We’ve got to get going.”

  NET NEWS DIGEST

  Gallup’s ongoing “Religion in America” survey showed church attendance this week was up 13.75% over the same week last year.

  Christiaan Barnard Hospital in Mandelaville, Azania, announced today that it had formally adopted the departure of the soulwave from the body as the determining moment of death.

  Schlockmeister Jon Tchobanian has begun production on his latest computer-generated flick, Soul Catcher. This one’s about a mad hospital worker who imprisons people’s souls in magnetic bottles and holds them for ransom. “Appropriately for a film about life after death,” says Tchobanian, “I’m casting the movie entirely with computer reconstructions of dead actors.” Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre will star.

  Life Unlimited of San Rafael, California, reported today its best-ever month of sales for its patented nanotechnology immortality process. Analyst Gudrun Mungay of Merrill Lynch suggested that the record sales were a direct response to the discovery of the soul-wave. “Some people,” she said, “definitely do not want to meet their maker.”

  Trial news: Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Accused serial rapist Gordon Spitz today entered a plea of not guilty by reason of special insanity. Spitz, who claims to have had out-of-body experiences since the age of twelve, contends that his soul
was absent from his body on each occasion that he committed rape, and therefore he is not responsible for the crimes.

  CHAPTER 33

  December 2011

  Sometimes there was nothing like a good, old-fashioned keyboard. For entering or massaging data, it was still the best tool yet invented. Sandra Philo pulled out the keyboard drawer of her desk and began typing in all the proper nouns she’d turned up in relation to the Hans Larsen murder, including the street he lived on, the name of the company he worked for, where he’d taken his vacation last year, and the names of neighbors, family, friends, and coworkers. She also entered a variety of terms related to the mutilation Larsen had suffered.

  By the time she was finished, she had a list of over two hundred words. She then asked the computer to search the records of all homicides in Greater Toronto Region for the last year to see if any of the same terms showed up in the reports filed for them. As it processed the search, the computer drew a little line of dots on the screen to show that it was working. It only took a few seconds to complete the search. Nothing significant.

  Sandra nodded to herself; she figured she’d have remembered a similar MO. After all, it’s not every day a corpse is found with its penis lopped off. The computer presented her with suggestions for broader queries: all Ontario murders, all Canadian murders, all North American murders. It also suggested a series of time frames, from one month to ten years.

  If she chose the broadest-based one, all North American killings for the last ten years, the search would take hours to run. She was about to select “all Ontario murders,” but at the last moment changed her mind and typed her own query in the dialog box: “all deaths GTR >20110601,” meaning all deaths—not just murders—in the Greater Toronto Region after June 1st of this year.

  The little line of dots grew across the screen as the computer searched. After a few moments, the display cleared and this appeared:

  Name:

  Larsen, Hans

  Date of Death:

  14 Nov 2011

  Cause of Death:

  homicide

  Search term

  correlated:

  Hobson, Catherine R.(coworker)

  Name:

  Churchill, Roderick B.

  Date of Death:

  30 Nov 2011

  Cause of Death:

  natural causes

  Search term

  correlated:

  Hobson, Cathy (daughter)

  Philo’s eyebrows went up. Catherine Hobson—that slim, intelligent brunette Toby Bailey had identified as having been involved with Hans Larsen. Her father had died just two days ago.

  It probably didn’t mean a thing. Still … Sandra accessed the city registry. There was only one Catherine Hobson in GTR, and her record was indeed annotated “née Churchill.” And—good God! She was listed as living with Peter G. Hobson, a biomedical engineer. The soulwave guy—Sandra had seen him on Donahue and read about him in Maclean’s. They must be rolling in money … enough for either of them to hire a hitman.

  Sandra switched back to the reports database and asked for full details on the Roderick Churchill death. Churchill, a high-school gym teacher, had died alone while eating dinner. Cause of death was recorded by medical examiner Warren Chen as “aneurysm(?).” That question mark was intriguing. Sandra turned on her video phone and dialed. “Hello, Warren,” she said, once Chen’s round, middle-aged face had appeared on the screen.

  Chen smiled warmly. “Hello, Sandra. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m calling about the death a couple of days ago of one Roderick Churchill.”

  “The gym teacher who combed his hair over? Sure, what about him?”

  “You recorded the cause of death as an aneurysm.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But you put a question mark after it. Aneurysm, question mark.”

  “Oh, yes.” Chen shrugged. “Well, you can never be completely sure. When God wants you, sometimes he just flicks the old switch in your head. Click! Aneurysm. You check out, just like that. That seemed to be what happened there. The guy was already on heart medication.”

  “Was there anything unusual about the case?”

  Chen made the clucking sound that passed for his chuckle. “I’m afraid not, Sandra. There’s nothing nefarious about a sixty-something-year-old man dropping dead—especially a gym teacher. They think they’re in good shape, but they spend most of their day just watching other people exercise. The guy had been scarfing fast food when he died.”

  “Did you do an autopsy?”

  The medical examiner clucked again; somebody had once suggested that Chen’s name was a contraction of chicken hen. “Autopsies are expensive, Sandra. You know that. No, I did a couple of quick tests at the scene, then signed the certificate. The widow—it’s coming back to me now, her name was Bunny; can you believe that? Anyway, she’d found the body. Her daughter and son-in-law were with her when I got there around, oh, 1:30, quarter to two, in the morning.” He paused. “Why the interest?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” said Sandra. “Just that the man who died, Rod Churchill, was the father of one of the coworkers in that castration case.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Chen, his voice full of relish. “Now there’s an interesting one. Carracci was M.E. on that; she gets all the weird cases these days. But, Sandra, it seems a pretty tenuous connection, no? I mean it just sounds like this woman—what’s her name?”

  “Cathy Hobson.”

  “It just sounds like it’s not Cathy Hobson’s year, that’s all. Run of bad luck.”

  Sandra nodded. “I’m sure you’re right. Still, do you mind if I come down and look at your notes?”

  Chen clucked again. “Of course not, Sandra. It’s always a pleasure to see you.”

  PETER HATED FUNERALS. Not because he disliked being around dead people; one couldn’t spend as much time in hospitals as he did without running into a few of those. No, it was the live ones he couldn’t stand.

  First, there were the hypocrites: the ones who hadn’t seen the dear departed in years, but came out of the woodwork after it was too late to do the deceased any good.

  Second, the wailers, the people who became so flamboyantly emotional that they, instead of the deceased, became the center of attention. Peter’s heart did go out to close relatives who were having trouble dealing with the loss of someone they truly loved, but he had no patience for the distant cousins or five-blocks-away neighbors who went to pieces at funerals, until they were surrounded by a crowd of people trying to comfort them, loving every minute.

  For his own part, as in all things, Peter tried for a certain stoicism—the stiff upper lip of his British ancestors.

  Rod Churchill, vain man that he had been, wanted an open casket. Peter disapproved of those. As a child of seven, he’d gone to the funeral of his mother’s father. Granddad had been known for his large nose. Peter remembered entering the chapel and seeing the coffin at the far end, the upper part open, the only thing visible from that angle being his grandfather’s nose sticking up above the line made by the side of the casket. To this day, whenever he thought of his grandfather, the picture that came to mind first was of the dead man’s proboscis, a lone peak rising into the air.

  Peter looked around. The chapel he was in today was paneled in dark wood. The coffin looked expensive. Despite the request for donations to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario in lieu of flowers, there were many bouquets, and a large horseshoe-shaped affair sent by the teachers Rod had worked with. Must have been from the Phys. Ed. department—only those guys could be daft enough not to know that horseshoe arrangements meant “good luck,” hardly the appropriate thing to send to a dead man.

  Bunny was holding up bravely, and Cathy’s sister, Marissa, although crying intermittently, seemed to be doing okay, too. Peter didn’t know what to make of Cathy’s reaction, though. Her face was impassive as she greeted people coming to pay their respects. Cathy, who cried when she watched sad movies and
who cried when she read sad books, seemed to have no tears at all for her dead father.

  IT WASN’T MUCH to go on, thought Sandra Philo. Two deaths. One clearly a murder; the other of indeterminate cause.

  But they both had Cathy Hobson in common.

  Cathy Hobson, who had slept with the murdered man, Hans Larsen.

  Cathy Hobson, daughter of Rod Churchill.

  True, Larsen had been involved with many women. True, Churchill had been in his sixties.

  Still …

  After Sandra had finished her work for the day, she drove to the Churchill house, at Bayview just south of Steeles. It was only five kilometers from 32 Division headquarters—not much of a waste if this turned out to be a wild-goose chase. She parked and went up to the front door. The Churchill family had a FILE scanner—Fingerprint Index Lock Electronics. Common these days. Above the scanning plate was a doorbell button. Sandra pushed it. A minute later, a woman with gray hair appeared at the door. “Yes?”

  “Hello,” said Sandra. “Are you Bunny Churchill?”

  “Yes.”

  Sandra held up her ID. “I’m Alexandria Philo, Toronto Police. Can I ask you a few questions.”

  “What about?”

  “The, ah, death of your husband.”

  “Goodness,” said Bunny. Then: “Yes, of course. Come in.”

  “Thank you—but, before I forget, can I ask whose fingerprints the FILE scanner accepts?” Sandra pointed at the blue glass plate.

  “Mine and my husband’s,” said Bunny.

  “Anybody else?”

  “My daughters. My son-in-law.”

  “Cathy Hobson, and—” Sandra had to think for a moment—“Peter Hobson, is that right?”

  “Yes, and my other daughter, Marissa.”

  They went inside.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” said Sandra, smiling sympathetically. “I know this must be a very difficult time for you. But there are a few little questions I’d like to clear up, so we can close the file on your husband.”