The Terminal Experiment - Plot

Plot

The novel takes place in Toronto, briefly in 1995 and chiefly in 2011. Dr. Peter Hobson, a biomedical engineer, has invented many devices in the field of home automation. He has always been haunted by memories of monitoring an EKG during the dissection of a "corpse" for organ donation when he was in graduate school; the donor's heart was still beating and the body exhibited signs of anesthesia awareness. Now, Peter devises a what he calls a superEEG in order to determine the exact moment when all electrical energy ceases in the brain; he wants to precisely "determine that someone is dead before they begin carving out his organs."

Peter is hurt and angry when his beloved wife, Cathy, admits that she had sex with Hans Larsen, whom neither of them respects. A psychotherapist helps her to understand that she has low self-esteem because of emotional neglect by her critical father, appropriately named Rod. Peter throws himself into his work. This is the emotional set-up that drives events in the following five months.

To his shock, when Peter places his superEEG on the head of a willing terminal patient, he afterwards finds in the readouts a small electrical field leaving the brain after death. He shares this discovery with his friend Sarkar Muhammed, who runs his own startup firm doing expert system design. Sarkar declares it a soul, which Peter, a skeptic, is reluctant to believe. To maintain precise scientific language, they call it a soulwave: "The soulwave had a distinctive electrical signature. The frequency was very high, well above that of normal electrochemical brain activity, so, even though the voltage was minuscule, it wasn't washed out in the mass of other signals within the brain."

Peter experiments with more terminal patients to verify his finding; he tests pregnant women to discover when the fetus gains a soulwave (at about ten weeks); and he finds that, among animals, at least chimpanzees also have souls.

When Peter holds a press conference to announce his breakthrough, human society around the world undergoes a revolution. He is repeatedly asked what life after death is like, though he has no idea.

"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."

In order to learn about immortality and life after death, Peter and Sarkar create three electronic simulations of Peter's own personality after a comprehensive scan of his mind and memories. From one, they seek "which neural nets are activated exclusively by biological concerns, and then zero those out" (p. 131), so that it is purely intellect; they call it Spirit. From the second, they edit all fears of aging and death, so that it "feels" itself to be immortal; they call this one Ambrotos. The third is a control, with Peter's knowledge up to the point of the brain scan. At first, the three "sims" enjoy exploring all that the Internet has to offer. One sim, however, hires a hit man to kill Hans and then, days later, Cathy's father.

Detective Sandra Philo takes the case and, questioning Cathy and her co-workers, realizes at once that Cathy is concealing her relationship with Hans. She also knows Peter is rich enough to afford hiring a professional hit. What she doesn't realize is that the guilty sim is prepared to have her killed, too. Peter and Sarkar race to find a way to "pull the plug" on the sims before Philo and perhaps others die.