The Mind/Body Experiment

I’m not a monster, I’m no Victor Frankenstein; I’m a doctor, a healer, nurturing life, improving what’s there.   

 

How can I best describe what I do? I'm an experimental biologist with an interest in the interaction between mind and body. My ground-breaking experiment attempted to establish whether the relationship between mind and body could be replicated after a person is dead by reproducing the electrical activity in the deceased’s brain necessary to stimulate the body.

 

In other words I re-animate corpses.

 

I repeat, I am not a monster. My experiments are all entirely ethical, my participants are all volunteers, and the experiments are carried out in an ethics-committee monitored university laboratory, not a darkened basement, and none of the lab assistants are 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.

 

I recruited volunteers with a fatal medical condition, mostly cancer victims. 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 expected to die within a year, so that I could carry out the next stage of the experiment in my own lifetime.    

 

I monitored the brain activity of my recruits over a period of time and stored every single detail on my mega computer, Cecilia. I identified the exact parts of the brain my subjects used when lifting an arm, scratching a knee, or carrying out complex activities like eating sardines. The equipment I used was so precise I could pinpoint the individual cell or cells used for every activity.

 

By getting the patients to play specially designed video games, I could break down finite details of 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. I could distinguish the smell of a rose petal from the smell of a primrose by the cell combinations they evoked.

 

The first experiment with an actual corpse took place six months into the project. Eric his name was. He was just 42. By the time he died he had two different types of cancer competing to kill him. I'd been doing tests on Eric for about three months, 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 meant thousands of cells would decay. It meant cranking up the lab in the middle of the night. It was quite spooky, working alone in an otherwise empty university late at night, it was all very Hammer Horror, especially as there was a storm outside. I joked to my assistant that if it didn't work first time we should just hook Eric up to a lightening rod. Actually, that assistant's name was Igor too.

 

Igor helped me to immerse the body into an electric bath.  The experiment worked by sending an electric current to the brain, which would in turn send a message to the body. My theory was that the electricity in the water would provide the energy to carry the brain’s message and to enable the body to carry out the brain’s instruction. 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 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 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. Igor sneezed, 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, 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 three minutes before it eventually flopped down. Three 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 different muscle combinations to sustain the lift.

 

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 cloned 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 minute and a half. I've tried to do that in my aerobics class, it's 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 that had come before me.

 

By the end of that first night I'd achieved far more than I could ever have hoped to achieve in a lifetime. I had solved the problems of mind and body that great philosophers like Plato, Locke and Descartes had spent centuries wresting with. 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. With the need for a god. I hadn't created life, but I had shown that life wasn't the impossible miracle it had once seemed. It was just bits of stuff being powered by energy. Nothing you couldn't replicate with a really good bath.

 

My 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. 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 into an upright position, even get Eric to 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 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 thing he said he’d miss most after he died.

 

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 companies saw the opportunity to sell people life after death and insurance firms saw a handy escape clause. This was a gross distortion of my ground-breaking work, 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. Within no time at all I had become the biggest department in the university: 170 staff. Most of the new recruits were computer specialists, under whose expert development Cecilia grew into the largest, most complex computer in the world, a computer capable of mapping the activities of a human mind.

 

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 that sounded a bit like it, but no more. I couldn't even get Lucy to say 'Hello' back.

 

My problem was that most bodily activities are the result of hundreds of internal functions, but the bath-water was outside the body, so I had no means of pumping sufficient energy to all the internal organs involved. 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 was perfect; if ever a corpse was desperate to talk it was Kevin. Within a week I'd got him telephoning for a pizza.

 

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, the last thing a scientist pulling an all-nighter needs is for your experiment to eat your pizza. I tried ordering another one but all the pizza companies in the area had put me on a blacklist. I went hungry for months after that, until I managed to programme one of my corpses to become a pizza chef. That was a genius move, even if I say so myself.

 

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. The case should never have come to court.

 

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. The bodies I was using continued to decay, then I could wait weeks or months before the next volunteer 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.

 

By this time Cecilia had advanced to such an extent that I no longer needed to monitor my volunteer’s brains before they died. Cecilia could predict the brain mechanics of a person she’d never met, adjusting her programme slightly to meet the needs of the particular brain and body. This freed me up to do other work and enabled me to develop the micro-computer that could be installed within the brain; the Mindwithinamind I called it. 

 

The Mindwithinamind meant that there was no limit to the number of corpses that Cecilia could control at the same time, no limit to what I could achieve. Which is why I was so frustrated by the lack of corpses. If I could generate my own, or if my volunteers would do it for me, then I would never run out.

 

Getting acquitted from the murder trial 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 in the world. The French, in particular, infuriated me by being too French. Really, really French, unnecessarily so. With my new army of animated corpses I was able to invade France and within a few weeks my volunteer army had killed the entire nation. I brought them back to life, of course, that was always my intention, but I brought them back just a little bit less French. A vast improvement.

 

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, with all errors and irrational thoughts eradicated.

 

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 isn’t blood, 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, Mindwithinamind mark 3.

 

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.