“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 endlessly, anyway — Peter had a meeting with a major U.S. client at 2:00 P.M.
They went to a little restaurant Peter liked on Sheppard East, out toward Vic Park — a place that made a club sandwich by hacking the turkey breast with a knife, instead of slicing it thin on a machine, and toasting the bread on a grill so that it had brown lines across it. Peter never thought of himself as particularly memorable, but it seemed half the restaurants in North York thought him a regular, even though, excepting Sonny Gotlieb’s, he only came in to any one of them once or twice a month. The server took Colin’s drink order (scotch and soda), but protested he knew what Peter wanted ("Diet Coke with lime, right?"). Once the server was gone, Peter looked at Colin expectantly. “What’s new?”
Colin was grayer than Peter had remembered, but he still wore his wealth ostentatiously, and was sporting a total of six gold rings. His eyes moved back and forth incessantly. “I guess you heard about me and Naomi.”
Peter shook his head. “Heard what?”
“We’ve separated.”
“Oh,” said Peter. “I’m sorry.”
“I hadn’t realized how many of our friends were really just her friends,” said Colin. The server arrived, set down little napkins, deposited the drinks on them, then scurried away. “I’m glad you agreed to come to lunch.”
“No problem,” said Peter. He had never been good at this kind of social situation. Was he supposed to ask Colin what had gone wrong? Peter rarely spoke of private matters, and on the whole didn’t like either asking or answering personal questions. “I’m sorry to hear about you two.” His cliche-dispenser suggested adding, “You always seemed so happy,” but he stopped himself before the thought was given voice — Peter’s own recent experience had taught him to put no stock in appearances.
“We’d been having problems for quite some time,” said Colin.
Peter squeezed his lime into his Diet Coke.
“We weren’t really on the same wavelength anymore.” Apparently Colin had a cliche-dispenser of his own. “We weren’t talking.”
“You just drifted apart,” said Peter, not quite making it a question, not wanting to pry.
“Yeah,” said Colin. He took a liberal swig of his drink, then winced as if it were a masochistic pleasure. “Yeah.”
“You’d been together a long time,” said Peter, again careful to keep his tone flat, to keep the statement from becoming a question.
“Eleven years, if you count the time we lived together before we got married,” said Colin. He cupped his glass in both hands.
Peter wondered idly who had broken up with whom. None of my business, he thought. “A good long time,” he said.
“I — I was seeing someone else,” said Colin. “A woman in Montreal. I had to go there every three weeks on business, took the maglev out.”
Peter was dumbfounded. Was everyone screwing outside of marriage these days? “Oh,” he said.
“It didn’t really mean anything,” said Colin, making a dismissive gesture with his hand. “It was just, you know, just a way of getting a message to Naomi.” He looked up. “A cry for help, maybe. You know?”
No, thought Peter. No, I don’t.
“Just a cry for help. But she went crazy when I told her. Said that was the last straw. The straw that broke the camel’s back.” Clearly, thought Peter, everyone had a cliche-dispenser. “I didn’t want to hurt her, but I had needs, you know. I don’t think she should have left me over something like that.” The server came in again, depositing Peter’s club sandwich and Colin’s pasta primavera. “What do you think?” asked Colin.
I think you’re an asshole, Peter thought. I think you’re the biggest fucking asshole on the planet. “Hard luck,” he said, pulling the toothpick out of one of his sandwich wedges and spreading mayonnaise on the turkey. “Hard luck indeed.”
“Anyway,” said Colin, perhaps sensing that it was time to change the subject, “I didn’t ask you to lunch to talk about me. I really wanted to get some advice from you.”
Peter looked at him. “Oh?”
“Well, you and Cathy were at that Life Unlimited seminar. What did you think?”
“Impressive sales pitch,” said Peter.
“I mean, what did you think of the process? You’re a biomedical engineer. Do you think it would really work?”
Peter shrugged. “Jay Leno says Queen Elizabeth has undergone the process — only way to save the monarchy was to make sure that none of her children ever got to sit on the throne.”
Colin chuckled politely, but looked at Peter as if he expected a more serious response. Peter chewed on a bit of his sandwich, then: “I don’t know. The basic premise seems sound. I mean, there are — what? — five basic models for senescence and eventual death.” Peter ticked them off on his fingers. “First, there’s the stochastic theory. It says our bodies are complex machines, and, like all complex machines, something’s bound to break down eventually.