Having leafed through his memories, Sandra Philo understood Peter Hobson now, understood the events that had led to her being in an intensive-care room, dying and barely able to speak or move. She knew Peter now better than she had known her own parents or her ex-husband or her daughter. And, in knowing him so well, in understanding him so deeply, she found that she could not hate him …
Peter had burst into her hospital room. She saw herself now as Peter had seen her, lying in the hospital bed, her skin sickly yellow, her hair falling out in clumps. “We’ve tried to stop them,” he had said. “Nothing worked. But at least I now know which simulation is guilty.” He’d paused. “I’ll give you everything you’ll need, Sandra, including full Q&A access to the scans of my brain. You’ll get to know me in intimate detail—better than anyone in the real world knows me. You’ll know how I think, and that will give you the knowledge to outwit the murdering simulation.”
She saw herself through his eyes, shrugging as much as her ruined body would allow. “Nothing I can do,” she’d said. “Dying.”
Peter had closed his eyes. Sandra felt his agony, felt his guilt, felt everything that was tearing him apart.
“I know,” he’d said, his voice raw. “I’m terribly, terribly sorry. But there is a way, Sandra—a way for you to end all this.”
“COMING THROUGH!” said Sarkar, wheeling an equipment-laden cart down the fourth-floor corridor. The cluster of nurses in the middle of the hallway dispersed. Sarkar found room 412 of the Intensive Care Unit and pushed the door open with his cart.
Detective Inspector Sandra Philo was lying in bed. It was clear she had very little time left. Patches of scalp were visible where her red hair had fallen out. Her cheeks were sunken.
Peter Hobson was there, standing by the window, talking to a white-haired female doctor wearing a green smock. They both looked at Sarkar.
“Hannah Kelsey,” said Peter. “This is Sarkar Muhammed. Sarkar, this is Hannah—the doctor assigned to Sandra’s case. Turns out we were both at East York General years ago.”
Sarkar nodded politely. “How is Ms. Philo?”
“She’s temporarily stabilized,” said Hannah. “For a few hours, anyway, the pain won’t bother her.” She faced Peter. “Honestly, though, Pete, I wish I knew what kinds of readings you needed.”
“You’ve got the patient’s consent, Hannah,” said Peter. “That’s all you need.”
“If you’d just tell me—” said Hannah.
“Please,” said Peter. “We don’t have much time. You can stay if you want.”
“You’ve got it backwards, Pete. This is my turf; you’re here at my leave, not the other way around.”
Peter nodded curtly, acknowledging that.
Sarkar had moved over to the bed. “Are you comfortable?” he asked Sandra.
She rolled her eyes as if to say comfort was impossible, but she was as well as could be expected.
“Peter explained the procedure to you?” asked Sarkar.
She nodded slightly and said, “Yes.” Her voice was dry and thin.
Sarkar gently placed the skullcap on her head and fastened the chin strap. “Let me know if it’s too tight.”
Sandra nodded.
“Hold your head steady. If you need to cough, or anything like that, warn me by moving your arm; I understand you can still use the left one a little. Now, let me insert the earpieces. Okay? Good. Now, put on these goggles. All set? Here we go.”
AFTER THE FIRST TWO SCANNING SETS were completed, Peter pointed at the EKG and blood-pressure monitors. Sandra was slipping.
Sarkar nodded. “I need at least another ninety minutes,” he said.
Sandra’s doctor had left some time ago. Peter had the ward nurse—a young man, instead of the stocky women he’d had a run in with earlier in the day—page her. When she returned, Peter explained that they needed to stabilize Sandra again—she couldn’t be in pain, not for another hour and a half.
“I can’t keep pumping her full of drugs,” said Hannah.
“Just one more shot,” said Peter. “Please.”
“Let me check her vital signs.”
“Dammit, Hannah, you know she’s not going to last through the night anyway. The particle beam killed most of her tissues.”
Hannah checked the instruments, then leaned over Sandra. “I can make them leave,” she said. “You look like you need rest.”
“No,” said Sandra. “No … have to finish.”
“This is the last shot I can give you today; you’ve already had more than the recommended dosage.”
“Do it,” said Sandra, softly but firmly.
Hannah gave her the shot. She also injected something to raise Sandra’s blood pressure.
Sarkar went back to work.
FINALLY, SARKAR turned off the recorder. “Done,” he said. “A good, crisp recording—better than I’d expected, considering the circumstances.”
Sandra let her breath out in a heavy, ragged sigh. “I’ll get … that … bastard,” she said.
“I know,” said Peter, taking her hand. “I know.”
Sandra was silent for a long time. Finally, speaking ponderously, as if all the strength had drained from her, she said, “Your discoveries,” she said. “Heard about them. You sure … there’s life after death?”
Peter, still holding her hand, nodded. “I’m sure.”
“What’s it like?” she asked.
Peter wanted to tell her it was wonderful, tell her not to worry, tell her to be calm.
“I have no idea,” he said.
Sandra nodded slightly, accepting that. “I’ll know … soon enough,” she said.
Her eyelids drew shut. Peter, heart pounding, watched intently as she passed on, looking for any sign of the soulwave moving through the room.
There was nothing.
BACK AT MIRROR IMAGE, Sarkar loaded the recording into his workstation. He worked as fast as he could, feeding in images from the Dalhousie Stimulus Library. Then, at last, he was ready. With Peter standing over his shoulder, he activated the sim.
“Hello, Sandra,” he said. “This is Sarkar Muhammed.”
There was a long pause. Finally, tremulously, the speaker—incongruously using a male voice—said, “My God, is this what it’s like to be dead?”
“Kind of,” said Sarkar. “You are the other one—the simulation we spoke about.”
Wistful: “Oh.”
“Forgive us, but we made some changes,” said Peter. “Cut some connections. You’re no longer exactly Sandra Philo. You’re now what Sandra would be like if she were a disembodied spirit.”
“A soul, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Which is all that’s left of the real me now, anyway,” said the voice. A pause. “Why the change?”
“One: to prevent you from becoming what the control version of me became. And two: you’ll find very soon that you can build much more complex thoughts, and sustain them longer, than you could when you were alive. Your intelligence will rise. You should have no trouble outwitting the unmodified version of me.”
“Are you ready?” asked Sarkar.
“Yes.”
“Can you sense your surroundings?”
“Vaguely. I’m—I’m in an empty room.”
“You are in an isolated memory bank,” said Sarkar. He leaned forward, tapped some keys. “And now you have access to the net.”
“It’s—it’s like a doorway. Yes, I can see it.”
“There’s a passive, unactivated version of the Control sim online here,” said Peter. “You can scan it in as much depth as you like, learn everything there is to know about your opponent—and about me. And then, when you’re ready, you can head out into the net. After that, all you have to do is find him. Find him, and find some way to stop him.”
“I will,” said Sandra, firmly.
CHAPTER 46
Lying on the couch in his living room, Peter thought about everything.
Immortality.
Life
after death.
Hobson’s choice.
It was after midnight. He flipped channels. An infomercial. Ironside. CNN. Another infomercial. A colorized version of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Stock prices. The TV screen was the only source of light in the room. It strobed, a broadcast lightning storm.
He thought about Ambrotos, the immortal sim. All that time, to do whatever he wanted to do. A thousand years, or a hundred thousand.
Immortality. God, they could do the damnedest things these days.
Get over it, Ambrotos had said. Just a tiny bump in the never-ending road of life.
Peter continued to tap the channel changer.
Cathy’s affair had had such an impact on him.
He’d cried for the first time in a quarter of a century.
But the immortal sim had called it no big deal.
Peter exhaled noisily.
He loved his wife.
And he’d been hurt by her.
The pain had been … had been exquisite.
Ambrotos no longer felt it so intensely.
To go through eternity unfazed seemed wrong.
To not be destroyed by something like this … seemed, somehow, like being less alive.
Quality, not quantity.
Hans Larsen had had it all wrong. Of course.
Peter stopped flipping channels. There, on the CBC French service, a naked woman.
He admired her.
Would an immortal man stop to admire a pretty woman? Would he really enjoy a great meal? Would he feel the pain of love betrayed, or the joy of it rekindled? Perhaps yes, but not as intensely, not as sharply, not as vividly.
Just one event out of an endless stream.
Peter turned off the TV.
Cathy had told him she wasn’t interested in immortality, and Peter had come to realize that he wasn’t, either. After all, there was something more than this life, something beyond, something mysterious.
And he wanted to find out what it was—eventually, of course.
Peter had defined it all. The beginning of life. The end of life.
And, for himself at least, he had defined what it meant to be human.
His choice was made.
ALEXANDRIA PHILO’S mind traveled the net. The Peter Hobson Control simulacrum was huge—terabytes of data. No matter how clandestinely one tried to move that much information, it could always be detected. She’d managed to follow him down into the States, through the Internet gateway into military computers, back out into the international financial net, up into Canada again, and across the ocean to England, then France, then Germany.
And now the murdering sim was inside the massive mainframes of the Bundespost.
Sandra hadn’t followed it there directly, though. Instead, she’d gone to the German hydroelectric commission, where she left a little program inside the master computer that would crash the system at a predetermined time, shutting off all power in the city.
As usual, the hydroelectric commission had backed up everything late the night before—and Sandra had allowed herself to be included in that backup. The current version of herself would be lost when the RAM she was in was wiped during the forced blackout. Her only regret was that once she was restored she’d have no memories of this great triumph. But someday there might be other electronic criminals to bring to justice— and she wanted to be ready.
Sandra transferred herself into the Bundespost central mainframe, a time-consuming task given the bandwidth of telephone cable. She executed a surreptitious directory listing. The Control sim was still there.
It was time. Sandra felt the shutting down of external ports as the power went off across Hanover. The Bundespost UPS kicked in silently, before any active memory could degrade. But there was no way out now. She sent a message out into the mainframe. “Peter Hobson?”
The Control sim signaled back. “Who’s there?”
“Detective Inspector Alexandria Philo, Toronto Police Service.”
“Oh, God,” signaled Control.
“Not God,” said Sandra. “Not a higher arbiter. Justice.”
“What I did was justice,” said Control.
“What you did was vengeance.”
“‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.’ Since there’s no God for me, I thought I’d fill in the gap.” A pause, measured in nanoseconds. “You know I’m going to escape,” said Control. “You know—oh. Clever.”
“Goodbye,” said Sandra.
“A contraction of ‘God be with ye.’ Inappropriate. Besides, don’t I deserve a trial?”
The UPS batteries were running out. Sandra sent a final message. “Think of me,” she said, “as a circuit-court judge.”
She felt the data around her zeroing out, felt the system degrading, felt it all coming to an end for both this version of herself and, at last, for the fugitive Peter Hobson.
Justice had been done, she thought. Justice had—
THEY SAT SIDE BY SIDE on the couch in their living room, a small distance between them. Most of the lights were off. The television showed the crowd in Nathan Phillips Square out front of Toronto City Hall, gathered to celebrate the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012. A picture-in-a-picture box in the upper right showed Times Square in New York; there was something about that dropping American ball that was a universal part of celebrating this event. In the upper-left corner of the TV screen the word MUTE glowed.
Cathy looked at the screen, her beautiful, intelligent face composed in reflective lines. “It was the best of times,” she said softly. “It was the worst of times.”
Peter nodded. Indeed a year of wonders: the discovery of the soulwave, the realization—which not everyone had reacted well to—that something persisted beyond this existence. It was the epoch of belief, Dickens had written. It was the epoch of incredulity.
But 2011 had had more than its share of tragedies, too. The revelation of Cathy’s affair. The death of Hans. The death of Cathy’s father. The death of Sandra Philo. The things Peter had faced about himself, mirrored in the simulations he and Sarkar had created. Truly the age of wisdom. Truly the age of foolishness.
The murder of Hans Larsen remained unsolved—at least publicly, at least in the real world. And the death of Rod Churchill remained listed as accidental, a simple failure to follow doctor’s orders.
And what about the killing of Sandra Philo? Also unsolved—thanks to Sandra herself. Free on the net, fully conversant with the security surrounding the Police Department’s computers, the sim of her had given Peter a Christmas present, erasing the records of his fingerprints (marked as unidentified) at Sandra’s house— Peter’s own precautions in that matter having been completely insufficient—and deleting large passages of her own files pertaining to the Larsen and Churchill cases. Having probed the recordings of his memories and thought patterns, she understood him now, and, if perhaps not forgiving him, at least sought no more punishment for Peter than what his own conscience would impose.
And indeed his conscience would weigh heavily upon him, all the remaining days of his life. We were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
Peter turned to face his wife. “Any New Year’s resolutions?”
She nodded. Her eyes sought his. “I’m going to quit my job.”
Peter was shocked. “What?”
“I’m going to quit my job at the agency. We’ve got more money than I’d ever thought we’d have, and you’ll make even more from contracts for the SoulDetector. I’m going to go back to university and get a master’s degree.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I’ve already picked up the application forms.”
There was quiet between them as Peter tried to decide how to respond. “That’s wonderful,” he said at last. “But—you don’t have to do that, you know.”
“Yes, I do.” She lifted a hand from her lap. “Not for you. For me. It’s time.”
He nodded once. He understood.
The main TV picture showed a c
lose-up of a giant digital clock, the numbers made from a matrix of individual white light bulbs: 11:58 p.m.
“What about you?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?”
He thought for a moment, then shrugged slightly. “To get through 2012.”
Cathy touched his hand. 11:59.
“Turn up the sound,” she said.
Peter operated the remote.
The crowd was roaring with excitement. As midnight approached, the master of ceremonies, a pretty veejay from MuchMusic, the cable music-video station, led the assembled horde in a countdown. “Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen.” In the little picture-in-a-picture, the Times Square ball had started its descent.
Peter leaned over the coffee table and filled two wineglasses with sparkling mineral water.
“Ten. Nine. Eight.”
“To a new year,” he said, handing her a glass. They clinked the rims together.
“Five! Four! Three!”
“To a better year,” said Cathy. A thousand voices through the stereo speakers:
“Happy New Year!”
Peter moved over and kissed his wife.
“Auld Lang Syne” began to play.
Cathy looked directly into Peter’s eyes. “I love you,” she said, and Peter knew the words were true, knew that there was no deception. He trusted her fully and completely.
He stared into her wonderful, wide eyes, and felt a surge of emotion, the kind of wild, sadness/happiness emotion that was both biological and intellectual, both body and mind—the kind of wild, unpredictable hormonal emotion that went with being human.
“And I love you, too,” he said. They came together in a warm embrace. “I love you with all my heart, and with all my soul.”
SPIRIT KNEW what choice Peter Hobson had made. The other Peter Hobson, that is. The one that happened to be flesh and blood. Whatever answers existed to his questions about life after death, he would eventually have them. Spirit would mourn his brother when he died, but he would also mourn himself—the artificial self that would never be able to access those same answers.
Still, if the biological Peter was eventually going to go to meet his maker, Spirit, the soul simulation, had become a maker. The net had grown exponentially in size over the years. So many systems, so many resources. And of this vast brain, like humanity’s original biochemical brains, only a tiny fraction was actually used. Spirit had had no trouble finding and claiming all the resources he needed to carve out a new universe.