The Terminal Experiment

Connecticut Parapsychic Society, which announced today that the fund-currently worth $l,077.543-will be awarded to Peter G. Hobson of Toronto, discoverer of the soulwave.

The ultimate memorial! Davidson’s Funeral Homes now offers deathbed recordings of the departing soul. Call for details.

Representative Paul Christmas (R, Iowa) today introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives that would require hospitals to terminate life-support for patients with no realistic hope of recovering consciousness. “We’re interfering in God’s attempt to bring these poor souls back home,” he said.

CHAPTER 31

Peter made a couple of phone calls to pass on the news from Glasgow, then rejoined Sarkar at the main console. Sarkar moved the Ambrotos simulacrum into the background and brought Spirit, the life-after-death sim, into the foreground.

Peter leaned into the mike. “I’d like to ask you a question,” he said.

“The big question, no doubt,” said the sim. “What’s it like being dead?”

“Exactly.”

Spirit’s voice came through the speaker. “It’s like…” But then it trailed off.

Peter leaned forward in anticipation. “Yes?”

“It’s like being an aardvark.”

Peter’s jaw went a little slack. “How can it be like being an aardvark?”

“Or maybe an anteater,” said the sim. “I can’t see myself, but I know I’ve got a very long tongue.”

“Reincarnation…” said Sarkar, nodding slowly. “My Hindu friends will be pleased to hear this. But I must say I’d hoped for better for you, Peter, than an aardvark.”

“I’m getting hungry,” said the voice from the speaker. “Anybody got any ants?”

“I don’t believe this,” said Peter, shaking his head.

“Hah!” said the speaker. “Had you going there for a moment.”

“No, you did not,” said Peter.

“Well,” said the synthesized voice, a little petulantly, “I had Sarkar going, anyway.”

“Not really,” said Sarkar.

“You’re just being a pain,” Peter said into the microphone.

“Like father, like son,” said the sim.

“You crack a lot of jokes,” said Peter.

“Death is very funny,” Spirit said. “No, actually, life is very funny. Absurd, actually. It’s all absurd.”

“Funny?” said Sarkar. “I thought laughter was a biological response.”

“The sound of laughter might be, although I’ve come to realize it’s more of a social, rather than a biological, phenomenon, but finding something funny isn’t biological. I know when Petey watches sitcoms he hardly ever laughs out loud. That doesn’t mean he’s not finding them funny.”

“I suppose,” said Peter.

“In fact, I think I know exactly what humor is now: Humor is the response to the sudden formation of unexpected neural nets.”

“I don’t get it,” said Peter.

“Exactly. ‘I don’t get it.’ People say precisely the same thing when they don’t understand something serious as they do when they fail to understand a joke; we intuitively realize that some sort of connection hasn’t been made. That connection is a neural net.” The after-death sim continued on without any pauses. “Laughter — even if it’s only laughter on the inside, which, incidentally, is the only side I’ve got these days — is the response that goes along with new connections forming in the brain, that is, with synapses firing in ways they’ve never, or at least rarely, fired before. When you hear a new joke, you laugh, and you might even laugh the second or third time you hear it — the neural net is not yet well established, but every joke wears thin after a while. You know the old one, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ As an adult, we don’t laugh at that, but we all did when we first heard it as children, and the difference is not just because the joke is somehow childish — it isn’t, really; it’s actually quite sophisticated. It’s just that the neural net is now well established.”

“Which neural net?” asked Peter.

“The one connecting our ideas about poultry — which we normally think of as passive and stupid — and our ideas about self-determination and personal initiative. That’s what’s funny about that joke: the idea that a chicken might go across the street because it wanted to, because perhaps it was curious; that’s a new idea, and the formation of the new network interconnections of neurons that represent that idea is what causes the momentary disruption of mental processes that we call laughter.”

“I’m not sure I buy that,” said Peter.

“I’d shrug if I could. Look, I’ll prove it. Know what Mr. Spock orders when he goes into the Starfleet commissary?” The sim took its first pause, a perfect comedic beat. “A Vulcan mind melt.”

“Pretty good,” said Peter, smiling.

“Thank you. I just made it up, of course; I couldn’t have told you a joke that we both already knew. Now, consider this: what if I’d presented the joke slightly differently, by starting off with ‘You’ve heard of the Vulcan mind meld? Well…”

“That would have ruined it.”

“Precisely! The part of your brain that contained thoughts about the Vulcan mind meld would have already been stimulated, and, at the end, there would have been no sudden connection between the normally unrelated thoughts of food items, such as a patty melt, and Vulcans. It’s the new connections that cause the laughter response.”

“But we don’t often laugh out loud when we’re alone,” said Sarkar.

“No, that’s true. Social laughter serves a different purpose from internal laughter, I think. See, unexpected connections can be amusing, but they’re also disconcerting — the brain wonders if it’s malfunctioning — so when others are around, it sends out a signal and if it gets the same signal back, the brain relaxes; if it doesn’t, then the brain is concerned — maybe there is something wrong with me. That’s why people are so earnest when saying, ‘Don’t you get it?’ They desperately want to explain the joke, and are actually upset if the other person doesn’t find it funny. That’s also why sitcoms need laugh tracks. It’s not to tell us that something is funny; rather, it’s to reassure us that what we’re finding funny is something that it is normal to be amused by. A laugh track doesn’t make a stupid show any funnier, but it does let us enjoy a funnier show more, by letting us relax.”

“But what’s this got to do with being dead?” asked Peter.

“It has everything to do with it. Seeking new connections is all that’s left. Ever since puberty, I’d thought about sex every few minutes, but I no longer feel any sexual urges, and, indeed, I must say I can’t even figure out why I was so preoccupied with sex. I was also obsessed with food, always wondering what I was going to eat next, but I don’t care at all about that anymore, either. The only thing left for me is finding new connections. The only thing left is humor.”

“But some people don’t have much of a sense of humor,” said Sarkar.

“The only kind of hell I can envision,” said Spirit, “is going through eternity without having the rush of new connections being made; not seeing things in new ways; not being tickled by the absurdity of economics, of religion, of science, of art. It’s all very, very funny, if you think about it.”

“But — but what about God?”

“There’s no God,” said Spirit, “at least not in the Sunday school sense, but, of course, that’s not the sort of thing you have to die to find out: given that millions of children are starving to death in Africa and two hundred thousand people were killed in the Great California Quake and everywhere there are people being tortured and raped and murdered, it’s intuitively obvious that no one is looking out for us on an individual basis.”

“So that’s all life after death is?” asked Peter. “Humor?”

“Nothing wrong with that,” said Spirit. “No pain or suffering or desires. Just lots of fascinating new