brain.
Astonishing.
Peter touched some keys, overlaying an extrapolated outline of Mrs. Fennell’s head over the silhouette of her brain. He mentally kicked himself for not having done this sooner. It was obvious where the knot of light was heading.
Straight for the temple.
Straight for the thinnest part of her skull.
It continued along, through the bone, through the thin veneer of muscle that overlaid the skull.
Surely, thought Peter, it was going to break up. Yes, there are nerves at the temple; that’s why it hurts to be struck there. Yes, there are nerves in muscle tissue, too, including the jaw muscles that overlay the temple. And, yes, there are nerves shot through the lower layers of the skin. Even if the pattern had some form of cohesion, Peter expected to see a change here. The nerves outside the actual brain are much less densely packed. The pattern might balloon in size, drawn between the points of more diffuse neural tissue.
But it did not. It continued, exactly the same size, tumbling slowly end over end, through the muscle, through the skin, and—
Out. Past the sensor field.
It didn’t break up. It simply left. And yet it had held its cohesion. The pattern had remained intact right up to the moment the sensor web lost it.
Incredible, thought Peter. Incredible.
He scanned the wall, looking for signs of other active neural nets.
But there were none.
Peggy Fennell’s brain showed as an unblemished silhouette, devoid of electrical activity.
She was dead.
Dead.
And something had left her body.
Something had left her brain.
Peter felt his own head wheeling.
It couldn’t be.
It could not be.
He reversed the recording, played it back from a different angle.
Why had the knot of light moved from the left hemisphere to the right? The other temple had been closer.
Ah, but Peggy had been lying down, her head on her pillow. Her left temple had been facing into the pillow; it was her right one that had been exposed to air. Even though it had been farther away, it represented the easier escape route.
Peter played the recording back again and again. Different angles. Different plotting methods. Different color-encoding schemes. It didn’t matter; the result was the same. He compared the time-coded recordings to Peggy’s other vital signs — pulse, respiration, blood pressure. The knot of light left just after her heart stopped, just after she’d breathed her last.
Peter had found exactly what he was looking for: an unequivocal marker that life was now over, an indisputable sign that the patient was just meat, ready for organ harvesting.
Marker.
That wasn’t the right word, and he knew it. He was deliberately avoiding even thinking it. And yet, there it was, recorded by his own ultrasensitive instruments: the departure from her body of Peggy Fennell’s very own soul.
Peter knew that when he asked Sarkar to come at once to his house, Sarkar would do so. Peter couldn’t contain his excitement when Sarkar arrived. He was trying, and probably failing, to suppress a grin. He took Sarkar into his den, then played back the recording of Peggy Fennell’s death once more.
“You faked that,” said Sarkar.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Oh, come on, Peter.”
“Really. I haven’t even done any cleanup of the data. What you just saw is exactly what happened.”
“Play that last bit again,” said Sarkar. “One one-hundredth speed.”
Peter touched buttons.
“
“Isn’t it, though?”
“You know what that is, don’t you?” said Sarkar. “Right there, in crisp images. That’s her
To his surprise, Peter found himself reacting negatively when he heard that idea said aloud. “I knew you were going to say that.”
“Well, what else could it be?” asked Sarkar.
“I don’t know.”
“Nothing,” said Sarkar. “That’s the only thing it could be. Have you told anyone about this yet?”
“No.”
“How do you announce something like this, I wonder? In a medical journal? Or do you just call the newspapers?”
“I don’t know. I’ve only just begun to think about that. I suspect I’ll call a press conference.”
“Remember Fleischmann and Pons,” cautioned Sarkar.
“The cold-fusion guys? Yeah, I know they jumped the gun, and ended up with egg on their faces. I’ll have to get some more recordings of the thing. I’ve got to be sure this happens to everyone, after all. But I can’t wait forever. Someone else will stumble on this soon enough.”
“What about patents?”
Peter nodded. “I’ve thought about that. I’ve already got patents on most of the technology in the superEEG — it’s an incremental improvement on the brain scanner we built for your AI work, after all. I’m certainly not going to go public until I’ve got the whole thing protected.”
“When you do announce it,” said Sarkar, “there will be a ton of publicity. This is as big as it gets. You’ve proven the existence of life after death.”
Peter shook his head. “You’re going beyond the data. A small, weak electrical field leaves the body at the moment of death. That’s all; there’s nothing to prove that the field is conscious or living.”
“The Koran says—”
“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.”
“You’re being deliberately obtuse. It’s a soul, Peter. You know that.”
“I don’t like using that word. It — it prejudices the discussion.”
“All right, call it something else if you like. Casper the Friendly Ghost, even — although I’d call the physical manifestation the soulwave. But it exists — and you know as well as I do that people are going to embrace it as an honest-to-goodness soul, as proof of life after death.” Sarkar looked his friend in the eye. “This will change the world.”
Peter nodded. There wasn’t anything else to say.
CHAPTER 11
Peter hadn’t seen Colin Godoyo in months — not since the seminar on nanotechnology immortality. They’d never really been friends — at least Peter hadn’t thought so — but when Colin called Peter at the office asking him to come to lunch, something in Colin’s voice had sounded urgent, so Peter had agreed. Lunch couldn’t go on
