The Mind/Body Experiment

When I was young, I remember asking my mum; "How does a dead person know he's dead? What if he forgets and starts moving around?"

Mum gave me an uncertain answer about dead people not being able to move. I don' think she was ever confident answering my awkward-kid questions.

I suppose my question was fuelled by growing up watching '70s TV, a period before actors had come to terms with that fact that if you were playing a dead character and opened your eyes or tapped your foot, the audience could see. Most of these actors had started out on the stage, where there was distance from the audience and a suspension of reality, so they'd never practised the art of keeping still.

I remember one particular BBC play where the actress playing a corpse was actually munching her lunch in the background, neither realising nor caring that she was still in shot. As I had never experienced death at first hand, I was left thinking that dead people were somehow only pretending, that they could open their eyes, move about, even eat their lunch.

So ultimately it's the ham actors from 70s TV drama that are responsible for my work. How can I best describe what I do? I wouldn't say that I bring people back to life, that's far too dramatic. Makes me sound like god. It's more accurate to say that I re-animate corpses. Essentially I'm an experimental biologist with an interest in the human brain and in particular in the interaction between mind and body.

My groundbreaking experiment attempted to establish whether the relationship between mind and body could be replicated after a person is dead. Whether it was a purely physical relationship, requiring electric stimulation, whether or not the human mind required an all-controlling soul. Not at all unambitious for a Phd student.

My experiments were all entirely ethical, the participants agreed in advance, whilst they were alive, and it all took place within an ethics-committee monitored university laboratory; I didn't use a lab in my basement and none of the lab assistants were called Igor. Well, actually that is a lie, there was one postgrad called Igor who worked with me one summer, but he just helped with filing and answering the phones, he was never involved with the dead bodies.

The subjects had to be alive when I recruited them, so that I could monitor how their brains worked, though I needed people who were going to die within six months or so, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to begin my experiments for decades. My recruits were usually people with a fatal condition, mostly cancer victims. I was contacted by one death row prisoner in America, but it didn't prove possible to use him, the Justice Department insisted in going ahead with the electric chair, which didn't leave a lot of brain for me to experiment with. I also had to turn down people with neurological conditions like MS or Parkinson's, I was after dying bodies and healthy brains, not brains fried by the US government or dopamine deprivation.

I monitored the brain activity of my recruits over a period of time and stored every single detail on my mega computer, Cecilia, named after a girl I nearly went out with in Cambridge. I monitored the exact parts of the brain my subjects used for a particular function, say lifting an arm or scratching a knee, even complex activities like talking and eating sardines. The equipment I used was so precise I could pinpoint the very cell or cells used for every activity, in exact detail.

By getting the patients to play specially designed video games I could break down finite details of exactly how the brain functioned in a range of spatial, verbal and aural tests. Where clusters of brain cells were used I was able to identify the exact combination used in an exact situation. I could distinguish the smell of a rose petal from the smell of a rose petal near a geranium leaf just from the cell combinations they evoked.

When the volunteers died, they left their bodies to my project: The Mind/Body Experiment. My aim was to replicate the electrical activity in the brain on their corpses to see if I could get the bodies to move, more than move in fact, to replicate the precise same activity.

I formed an odd bond with the volunteers. These were people who not only knew they were going to die, but that after they'd died I'd be zapping electricity into their dead bodies and trying to get them to move about. Why did they agree to do it? Who knows, maybe they wanted to feel that something useful came of their death. They all died young, without leaving a legacy, maybe they just wanted to play their role in the development of science.

The first experiment was about six months into the project. Eric his name was, a smoker, just 42. By the time he died he had two different types of cancer competing to kill him first. I'd been doing tests on Eric for about three months before he died. He was really enthusiastic about the project, even asked me to give a talk at his funeral, to explain why he wasn't there in person.

His body arrived around midnight, fresh from his death-bed. I had to start work immediately, every second lost means thousands of his cells would decay. It meant cranking up the lab in the middle of the night, it set a very Frankenstein-like mood, especially as there was a storm outside. I joked to my assistant that if it didn't work first time we should just hook him up to a lightening rod. Actually, that assistant's name was Igor too, I'd forgotten that.

Igor helped me to immerse the body into an electric bath. My theory was that when the brain required the body to move, the corpse would be able to obtain the necessary energy from the surrounding water. I had no idea if this would work, I'd never even tested it on rats. I could be doing nothing more than giving a corpse a jacuzzi.

Igor switched on the electric bath and we watched the water bubble with energy. Eric's brain was hooked up to a machine that would deliver a precise electric charge to stimulate the cells used by the brain in the original activity. The first experiment was simply to try to get him to lift his left arm two feet in the air.

I fed the instructions into Cecilia. In life, Eric had raised his arm a million times, mostly to smoke the fags that killed him, so Cecilia was loaded with the information about the brain-cells used in the process. All I had to do was press the green button. Outside, the sky rumbled and sparked with lightning, electricity causing atmospheric chaos. In the comparative quiet and safety of the lab Igor and I watched the bath-bound corpse of our first volunteer. A little ripple appeared in the water, the first evidence of action. Igor gave a sneeze, a nervous reaction to the anticipation, or maybe just hay fever.

More ripples appeared and slowly, unrealistically slowly, the arm started to move upwards. Far too slowly, it would take me months to get his movements working at a natural speed, rather than the slow motion effort I'd just witnessed. In the end it needed a complex adjustment to the electric pulse I sent to the brain, as different areas of the brain functioned more efficiently than others post-death. That was a real technology within a technology, even now I'm still tinkering with Cecilia's programming, trying to get it as close to perfection as possible.

Eric's hand stayed in a raised position for a full six minutes before it started to tire and eventually flopped down. Six minutes is a very long time. Anyone actually keeping their arm in the air that long would use a different brainwave pattern after the first minute or so, as they used more muscle power or different muscle combinations to keep it upright.

I had these data, of course, I'd measured everything Eric did, I just wanted to see what I could achieve with the simple stuff. As time went on I did eventually learn to keep the arm up longer by changing the brainwave message and consequently using a more efficient combination of muscles, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The all-day Hitler salute was months away.

Igor gave a little dance of joy and we allowed ourselves a few minutes of celebratory glee. That simple hand gesture was a scientific landmark, not just a personal landmark for me, Igor and the late Eric, but a Nobel-worthy breakthrough. Not that I ever got my Nobel prize, it went to a Swiss scientist who'd started to clone slugs. I've never understood that decision, I can only assume he threatened to let the slugs loose on the judges' vegetable patches if he didn't win.

I digress. Igor and I eventually calmed down and continued our work. The next test was to repeat the experiment on Eric's leg. I programmed the request into Cecilia and pressed the green button. There was a great splash of water as Eric's right leg slowly rose out of the bath, staying in the air for a full five minutes. I've tried to do that in my aerobics class, it's really hard when you're alive, I clearly had a supper fit corpse on my hands.

I tried various combinations of leg and arm movements, getting Eric to clutch and unclutch his hand, then simple gestures, waving, saluting. I tried clapping, but that was beyond us at that stage. I stayed up all night, like a child with a new toy, like a scientist with a new science. I WAS a scientist with a new science. This was the ultimate leap forward, I was metaphorically dropping apples on Newton's head, I was a giant stomping on the shoulders of the scientists and philosophers that had come before me.

Even by the end of that first night I'd achieved far more than I could ever have hoped to achieve in a lifetime. The problems of mind and body that great philosophers like Plato, Locke and Descartes had spent centuries wresting with were solved during the course of that one night. I had demonstrated that the behaviour of the human mind and body was replicable by the precise application of electrical charges. I had dispensed with the need for a soul. Even with the need for a god. I hadn't created life, but I had shown that life wasn't the impossible miracle it once seemed. It was just bits of stuff being powered by electrical energy (and other energies). Nothing you couldn't replicate with a really good bath.

The work took years of development to get beyond the simple movements achieved in that first night. Just to get the body to sit up took months, mainly because of the amount energy required. Eventually I had to entirely re-design the bath to make movement more natural. With the new bath in place, including the vertical tank, I could move the body in an upright position, even walk a few steps.

But even after that, developments were slow. I wasn't helped by the gradual decay of Eric's body. It became unusable after eight months, even with regular freezing between experiments and those corpse-sustaining jacuzzi baths. Despite my best efforts I never achieved my goal of getting him to smoke a cigarette, the one thing he most wanted to do.

I got lucky though, Eric's decomposition wasn't the disaster it could have been. Katy died the next day, and Lucy the day after that. I had two new bodies to experiment with, the female mind this time. Okay, I might never get these corpses to reverse park a car, but they were fresh and I was able to fine tune my work. They must have been impressed, within a month they were applauding me.

Yes, I finally achieved clapping, which soon led even complex manoeuvres like throwing and catching, and with two corpses to work with I was able to get them to throw and catch with each other.

By this time I had three new assistants to help me; Igor, Tiffany and another Igor (the one who did the filing). The funding poured in, private health and insurance companies saw the opportunity to sell people life after death. This was a gross distortion of the groundbreaking work I was doing, I never claimed for an instant that my corpses would experience anything akin to life, but nevertheless their money proved useful in funding the expansion of my project.

My ultimate goal was to get the corpses to talk, to replicate language. After all, it is language that distinguishes human from animal life. I wanted to demonstrate that there were no limits to my new science. I achieved verbal grunts fairly early on, I got Katy to say 'Hello', or something like it, but no more. I couldn't even get Lucy to say 'Hello' back.

The problem was that most bodily activities were the result of hundreds of internal functions, but the bath-water was outside the body, so most of the internal parts were simply not functioning fully. This was okay for simple movements for very short periods of time, but not for anything vaguely complicated or gruelling. To get the bodies to talk I needed a fully functioning voice-box, the ability to draw in and exhale air and the ability to cross-reference the spoken word with the brain's dictionary.

The answer took me years to perfect, but was actually quite simple; a sort of waterfall system of electric fluid, passing (and this is the simple bit) through the veins that already existed. Oh yes, a bit messy clearing out the blood, but worth it.

Kevin was my first serious attempt at language. Kevin was known to rabbit on when alive, so he perfect for the task; if ever a corpse was desperate to talk it was Kevin. Within a week I'd got him ordering a pizza over the phone.

By then I'd developed the port-a-bath as well, so he was able to answer the door, pay the money and even eat the pizza. I hadn't realised this would work so well, I thought getting the corpses to eat would prove impossible in my lifetime.

It did give me a problem, as it took another year to get the excretion system working. Plus of course, I'd had nothing to eat, as is the nature of scientists on an all-nighter, the last thing you need is for your experiment to eat your pizza. Especially as the firm refused to deliver ever again.

I'm often asked if I ever went too far. In particular, I got a lot of bad press over the murder trial, even though I was found not guilty. It wasn't even me that did the killing, it was Kevin, and, in English law at least, a dead person can't be charged for an offence.

You have to understand the circumstances behind the so-called murder. I was getting frustrated. I was on the verge of a massive breakthrough, but my
fantastic science was being delayed by the absence of sufficient subjects to develop my work on. The bodies I was using continued to decay, then I could wait weeks or months before the next one became available.

There was also an interesting moral issue I was experimenting with, whether I could order Kevin's body to commit an act that he would never have done whilst alive. Whether I could go beyond the simple mechanics of repeating his lifetime behaviours and create a new Kevin, one in my control, one in my power, one who would murder without qualm.

My main reason for needing new subjects was that I now had so much data on the link between brain chemistry and bodily activity that I no longer needed months of experiments before a person died, I could predict the brain mechanics of a person I'd never met. I was able to develop a programme that would enable Cecilia to issue the commands automatically, without my looking over her shoulder. This freed me up to do other work and enabled me to develop the micro-computer that could be installed within the brain; the mind within the mind I called it.

The mind within a mind meant that there was no limit to the number of corpses that Cecilia could control, no limit to what I could achieve. That led to my finest hour. Getting Blair and Bush to confess on national TV to their war crimes in Iraq. My techniques were so refined by this stage that nobody even noticed they were dead. There were just a few stitches that we easily covered with makeup. I watched the subsequent executions live on TV, two corpses being fried in matching electric chairs. The world cheered!

I went a bit crazy after that, I admit. I'd become such a perfectionist that I was annoyed that any imperfection existed. The French, in particular, infuriated me by being too French. Really, really French, unnecessarily so. With my new army I was able to invade France and within a few weeks had killed the entire nation, bringing them back to life just a little bit less French.

Maybe I should have stopped there, on a cultural high. Maybe I was wrong to kill every single person on the planet. It's just that my corpses are so perfect. So much better than living people, all errors and irrational thoughts could be eradicated. Perfect in every way.

Well, you are, you're perfect. Wonderful. Sitting there reading this story, completely oblivious to your own death, unaware that the red fluid throbbing through your veins is just a dyed version of my hydro-electric power.

Believing that it is your mind enabling you to decipher the words on the page, when in fact it is just a computer programme, the computer in your brain, mindwithinamind mark 3.

I'm sorry you had to find out this way. I felt it important that you should know, after all, science has to remain honest and open if it's to remain ethical. I'm not here to deceive you, to trick you, I'm simply endeavouring to advance mankind's knowledge. It's all ultimately for the greater good of the human race.

I hope this news doesn't spoil your day. I've programmed mindwithinamind 3 to ensure that something really wonderful happens to you within ten minutes of reading this. It involves chocolate, sex and ready money.

Ultimately everything I've done has been to ensure that you have a pleasant post-life experience. I really hope you enjoy the rest of your death.