Dan Simmons - The Hollow Man

“No, no … it’s great !” Jeremy is almost shouting. “It’s wonderful, Gail. Goldmann’s research fills in all the missing parts. I was doing all the right work, but on the wrong problem.”

Gail shakes her head. She does not understand.

He leans forward, his face glowing. Iced tea spills onto the butcher-block table. He thrusts a stack of papers toward her. “No, look , kiddo, it’s all right here. Remember what my work is about?”

“Wavefront analysis of memory function,” says Gail automatically.

“ Yes . Only I was stupid to restrict it to memory. Goldmann and his team have been doing basic research on holistic wavefront parameters for general human consciousness analogs. It started with a line of analysis developed in the thirties by a Russian mathematician, tied into some stuff done on rehabilitation anomalies following stroke effects, and led right up to my Fourier analysis of memory function.…” Despite himself Jeremy abandons language and tries to communicate directly with Gail. His mindtouch interferes with words, images cascading like printouts from an overworked terminal. Endless Schrödinger curves, their plots speaking in language infinitely purer than speech. The collapse of probability curves in binomial progression.

“No, no,” gasps Gail, shaking her head. “Talk. Tell me in words.”

Jeremy tries, knowing all the while that the mathematics that are so much chalky static to her would tell the story more clearly. “Holograms,” he says. “Goldmann’s work is based on holographic research.”

“Like your memory analysis,” says Gail, frowning slightly as she always does when they discuss his work.

“Yeah … right … only Goldmann’s work has taken it beyond a synaptic memory-function analysis, taken it all the way to an analog of human thought … hell, the entire range of human consciousness.”

Gail takes in a breath and Jeremy can see the understanding begin to blossom in her mind. He would like to reach in and substitute pure math for the sullied language constructs she uses to bridge her way to understanding, but he resists the impulse and tries to find more words himself.

“Does this …” says Gail and pauses. “Does this work Goldmann’s doing explain our … ability?”

“Telepathy?” Jeremy grins. “Yes, Gail … yes . Hell, it explains almost everything that I was groping around like a blind man.” He takes a breath, gulps down the last of his iced tea, and continues. “Goldmann’s team is doing all sorts of complicated EEG studies and scans. He’s been getting a lot of raw data, but I took his stuff this morning and did a Fourier analysis of it, then plugged it into various modifications of Schrödinger’s wave equation to see whether it worked as a standing wave.”

“Jerry, I don’t quite see …” says Gail. He can feel her questing thoughts trying to sort out the mathematical jumble of his own thoughts.

“Damn it, kiddo, it did work. Goldmann’s MRI-type longitudinal study of human thought patterns can be described as a standing wavefront. Not just the memory function of it, like I was piddling around with it, but all of human consciousness. The part of us that’s us can be expressed almost perfectly as a hologram … or, maybe more precisely, sort of a superhologram containing a few million smaller holograms.”

Gail leans forward, her eyes beginning to shine. “I think I see … but where does that leave the mind, Jerry? The brain itself?”

Jeremy grins, tries to take another drink, but only ice cubes rattle against his lips. He sets the glass down with a bang. “I guess the best answer is that the Greeks and the religious nuts were right to separate the two. The brain could be viewed as a … well, a kind of electrochemical wavefront generator and interferometer all in one. But the mind … ah, the mind … that is something much more beautiful than that lump of gray matter we call a brain.” Despite himself Jeremy is again thinking in terms of equations: sine waves dancing to Schrödinger’s elegant tune. Eternal but mutable sine waves.

Gail frowns again. “So there is a soul … some part of us that can survive death?” Gail’s parents, especially her mother, had been fundamentalists, and now her voice takes on that slightly querulous tone that always enters in when she discusses religious ideas. The idea of a smarmy little cherub of a soul winging its way toward eternal stasis in heaven is appalling to her.

It is Jeremy’s turn to frown. “Survive death? Well, no …” He is irritated at having to think in words once again. “If Goldmann’s work and my analysis of it are right and the personality is a complex wavefront, sort of a series of low-energy holograms interpreting reality, then the personality certainly couldn’t survive brain death. The template would be destroyed as well as the holographic generator. That intricate wavefront that’s us … and by intricate, Gail, well, my analysis shows more wave-particle variations than there are atoms in the universe … that holographic wavefront needs energy to support it just like everything else does. With brain death, the wavefront would collapse like a hot-air balloon without the hot air. Collapse, fragment, shred, and disappear.”

Gail smiles grimly. “Pleasant image,” she says softly.

Jeremy is not listening. His eyes have taken that slightly stigmatic look he gets when a thought is working him over. “But it’s not what happens to the wavefront when the brain dies that’s important,” he says in a tone that suggests his wife is one of his students. “It’s how this breakthrough … and by God, it is a breakthrough … it’s how this breakthrough applies to what you call our ability. To telepathy.”

“And how does it apply, Jerry?” Gail’s voice is soft.

“It’s simple enough when you visualize human thought as a series of standing wavefronts creating interference patterns that can be stored and propagated in holographic analogs.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No, it is simple. Remember when we shared impressions of the ability just after we met? We both decided that it would be impossible to explain mindtouch to anyone who hadn’t experienced it. It would be like describing—”

“Like describing colors to a person blind since birth,” says Gail.

“Okay. Yeah. You know that the reality of mindtouch isn’t anything like how they portray it in those silly sci-fi stories you read.”

Gail smiles. Reading science fiction is her secret vice, a vacation from the “serious reading” she usually does, but she enjoys the genre enough that she usually chastises Jeremy for calling it “sci-fi.” “They usually say it’s like picking up radio or TV broadcasts,” she says. “Like the mind’s a receiver or something.”

Jeremy nods. “We know it’s not like that. That it’s more like …” Again, words fail him and he tries to share the mathematics with her: out-of-phase sine waves slowly converging as amplitudes shift across graphed probability space.

“Sort of like having déjà vu with someone else’s memories,” says Gail, refusing to leave the flimsy raft of language.

“Right,” says Jeremy, but frowns, considering, and then says “right” again. “The question that no one ever thought to ask … at least until Goldmann and his team … is how does anyone read his or her own mind? Neurological researchers are always trying to track down the answer to that by looking at neurotransmitters or other chemicals, or thinking in terms of dendrites and synapses … sort of like someone trying to understand how a radio works by tearing apart individual chips or peering into a transistor, without ever putting the thing together.”