The Terminal Experiment

She never tired of doing that.

Spirit, the life-after-death sim, probed the net, looking for new stimulation. Everything was so static, so unchanging. Oh, he could absorb a book or a newsgroup quickly, but the information itself was passive, and, ultimately, that made it boring.

Spirit also wandered through the computers at Mirror Image. Eventually he found Sarkar’s game bank and tried playing chess and Tetris and Go and Bollix and a thousand others, but they were no better than the interactive games on the net. Peter Hobson had never really liked games, anyway. He much preferred devoting his energies to things that actually made a difference, rather than to silly contests that in the end changed nothing. Spirit continued to search, going through file after file.

And, at last, he came upon a subdirectory called A-LIFE. Here, blue fish were evolving, the ones judged most fit getting to breed. Spirit watched several generations go by, fascinated by the process. Life, he thought.

Life.

Finally, Spirit had found something that intrigued him.

CHAPTER 30

Enough time had elapsed, Sarkar felt, for the sims to have adapted to their new circumstances. It was time to start posing the big questions. Sarkar and Peter were both tied up with other things for the next couple of days, but finally they got together at Mirror Image, and ensconced themselves in the computer lab. Sarkar brought Ambrotos into the foreground. He was about to begin asking it questions, but thought better of it. “It’s your mind,” Sarkar said. “You should ask the questions.”

Peter nodded and cleared his throat. “Hello, Ambrotos,” he said.

“Hello, Peter,” said that mechanical voice. “What is immortality really like?” Ambrotos took a long time before replying, as if contemplating all of eternity first. “It’s … relaxing, I suppose is the best word for it.” Another pause. Nothing was rushed. “I hadn’t realized how much pressure aging put on us. Oh, I know women sometimes say their biological clock is ticking. But there’s a bigger clock affecting all of us — at least people like you and me, driven people, people with a need to accomplish things. We know we’ve only got a limited amount of time, and there’s so much we want to get done. We curse every wasted minute.” Another pause. “Well, I don’t feel that anymore. I don’t feel the pressure to do things quickly. I still want to accomplish things, but there’ll always be tomorrow. There’ll always be more time.”

Peter considered. “I’m not sure I’d consider being less driven an improvement. I like getting things done.”

Ambrotos’s reply was infinitely calm. “And I like relaxing. I like knowing that if I want to spend three weeks or three years learning about something that strikes my fancy that I can, without it somehow reducing my productive time. If I feel like reading a novel today instead of working on some project, what’s wrong with that?”

“But,” said Peter, “you know, as I do now, that there’s some form of life after death. Don’t you wonder about that?”

The sim laughed. “You and I never believed in life after death. Even now, even knowing that, yes, something does survive the physical demise of the body, I’m not attracted to whatever afterlife there might be. Clearly, it would be beyond physical existence — it would involve the intellect but not the body. I never thought of myself as a sensualist, and we both know we’re not very athletic. But I like sex. I like feeling sun on my skin. I like eating a really good meal. I even like eating lousy meals. I’d miss my body if it wasn’t there. I’d miss physical stimulation. I’d miss — I’d miss everything. Gooseflesh and being tickled and cutting a really good fart and ru

Peter was guarded; Sarkar was listening intently. “What about — what about our relationship with Cathy? I guess you think the whole marriage is just a tiny blip in a vast life?”

“Oh, no,” said Ambrotos. “Fu

“But, despite all that, I still know only the tiniest fraction of her. Surely she’s every bit as complex as I am. What does she really think about my parents? About her sister? Does she ever silently pray? Does she really enjoy some of the things we do together, or just tolerate them? What thoughts does she have that, even after all this time, she still doesn’t yet feel comfortable enough to share with me? Sure, we exchange little bits of ourselves every time we interact, but as the decades and centuries go by, we’ll get to know each other better. And nothing pleases me more than that.”

Peter frowned. “But people change. You can’t take a thousand years to get to know an individual any more than you can take a thousand years to get to know a city. Once all that time has elapsed, the old information will be completely obsolete.”

“And that’s the most wonderful thing of all,” said the sim, not pausing at all this time. “I could spend forever with Cathy and never run out of new things to learn about her.”

Peter leaned back in his chair, thinking. Sarkai took the opportunity for a turn at the mike. “But isn’t immortality boring?”

The sim laughed. “Forgive me, my friend, but that’s one of the silliest ideas I’ve ever heard. Boring, when you’ve got the totality of creation to comprehend? I’ve never read a play by Aristophanes. I’ve never studied any Asian language. I don’t understand anything about ballet, or lacrosse, or meteorology. I can’t read music. I can’t play the drums.”

Laughter again. “I want to write a novel and a so

Peter and Sarkar were interrupted by a call from Sarkar’s receptionist. “Excuse me,” said the little Asian man from the screen of the video phone, “but there’s a long-distance video call for Dr. Hobson.”

Peter lifted his eyebrows. Sarkar motioned for him to have a seat in front of the phone. “I’m here, Chin.”

“Patching through,” he said.

The screen image changed to show a middle-aged red-haired woman: Brenda MacTavish, from the Glasgow Chimpanzee Retirement Home. “Ah, Peter,” she said, “I called your office and they said you’d be here.”

“Hi, Brenda,” Peter said. He peered at the screen. Had she been crying?

“Forgive the state I’m in,” she said. “We just lost Cornelius, one of our oldest residents. He had a heart attack; chimps normally don’t get those, but he’d been used for years in smoking research.” She shook her head in wonder at the cruelty. “When we first spoke, of course, I di