Robert Sawyer: The Terminal Experiment

And, at last, he had found the genetic algorithm he had been looking for, the pattern of success that was most suited to his simulated world.

In the reality of Peter and Cathy Hobson, the best survival strategy had been scattering one’s genes like buckshot, distributing them as widely as possible. That one fact had molded human behavior — indeed, had molded the behavior of almost all life on Earth — since the beginning.

But that reality had apparently arisen through random chance. Evolution on Earth, as far as Spirit could tell, had no goal or purpose, and the criteria of success shifted with the environment.

But here, in the universe Spirit had created, evolution was directed. There was no natural selection. There was only Spirit.

His artificial life had now developed sentience and culture and language and thought. His beings rivaled humans in complexity and nuance. But in one very important way, they differed. For the children of Spirit, the only strategy that worked, the only one that ensured survival of one’s genes to the next generation, was not to dilute the original bonding between two individuals.

It had taken his simulated evolution a long time to develop organisms that worked this way, organisms for whom monogamy was the most successful survival strategy, organisms that thrived on the synergy of two, and only two, beings coming together into a true lifetime pair-bond.

There were consequences both subtle and coarse. On the macro level, Spirit was surprised to discover that his new creatures did not make war, did not strive to conquer their neighbors or to possess their neighbors’ land.

But that was a bonus.

A lifetime of togetherness. A lifetime without betrayal.

Spirit looked upon his new world, the world he had created, the world for which he was God.

And for the first time in a very long time he realized that he wanted to perform a physical action; he wanted to do something that required flesh and blood, muscle and bone.

He wanted to smile.

Peter and Catherine Hobson were fortunate enough to have another five decades together — decades of happiness and sadness, of joy and pain, decades lived to the fullest, every minute savored. But, at last, it came to an end. Cathy Hobson passed quietly in her sleep on April 29, 2062, at the age of ninety-one.

And, as is often the case with couples who had been together for so long, Peter Hobson, alone at home, felt a sharp pain in his chest three weeks later. The household computer saw him fall to the floor and summoned an ambulance, but even as it did so, the computer considered it unlikely that help could arrive in time.

Peter rolled on his side. The pain was excruciating.

Hobson’s choice , he thought.

The horse nearest the door.

A door that was opening for him…

And then, quite suddenly, there was no more pain.

Peter knew his heart was seizing up. He felt panic welling within him, but it, too, was suddenly pushed aside, disowned, as if it belonged to some other part of him.

And, all at once, everything was different.

He could not see. He could not hear.

Indeed, he could sense nothing in any normal, human way — no touch, no smell, no taste, not even that ineffable sense of having a body, of knowing how one’s limbs were deployed. No senses at all, except…

Except a… a tropism , an attraction to something … something distant, something vast.

He was still Peter Hobson, still an engineer, a businessperson, a… well, surely other things, too.

Yes, he was still… Hobson, that was it. Peter G. The G stood for… well, it didn’t matter. He remembered…

Nothing. Nothing at all. It had all slipped away now. Of course. Memory was biochemical, encoded in neural nets. He’d been severed from the storage medium.

He — wrong pronoun. It was more appropriate. Genderless. An intellect…

An intellect without memories, without hormonal mood swings, without fatigue poisons or endorphins or… or a thousand other chemicals whose names it could no longer recall. Shorn from chemistry, divorced from biology, separated from material reality.

The tropism continued, drawing it forward, moving it toward… something.

What was left of a person once all that was of the body and all that was of the physical brain were removed?

Only one thing — the only thing that could survive.

Just the essence. The spark. The nub.

The soul.

Genderless, identityless, memoryless, emotionless.

And yet—

Drawing nearer now.

Something large. Something vibrant.

Correction: somethings. Plural. Dozens — no, thousands. No — more than that. Orders of magnitude more. Billions. Billions, all gathered together, all functioning as one.

The soul knew what it was now, understood at last, all its questions answered. It was a splinter, a shaving, an iota, the tiniest part, the fundamental indivisible block.

An atom of God.

Finally, the soul rejoined the parent body, rejoined the vastness, mingled with it, touching all that had ever been human, and all that would ever be human.

It wasn’t heaven. Nor was it hell.

It was home.