“Did you look at it?” said Peter.

“Aye,” she said. “Chimps have souls.” Her voice was bitter, as she thought about her lost friend. “As if anyone could have ever doubted that.”

The sim’s first thought was to tamper with the prescription database at Shoppers Drug Mart, the pharmacy chain used by Rod Churchill. But despite repeated attempts, he couldn’t get in. It was frustrating, but not surprising: of course a drugstore would have very high security. But there was more than one way to skin a gym teacher. And there were lots of low-security computer systems around…

Since the 1970s, immigration officials at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport had used a simple test whenever someone arrived claiming to be a Torontonian but whose papers weren’t entirely in order. They asked the person what the phone number was of a famous local pizza delivery chain. No one could live in Toronto and not know that number: it appeared on billboards, countless newspaper and TV ads, and was sung incessantly as a jingle in radio commercials.

As the decades passed, the chain widened its array of deliverable meals, first adding other Italian dishes, then submarine sandwiches, then barbecued chicken and ribs, then burgers, and, eventually, a whole range of cuisine from the pedestrian to the exotic. Although they’d kept their trademark phone number, they eventually changed their name to Food Food. But even back in its humble pizza days, the company prided itself on its state-of-the-art computerized ordering system. All orders were placed through the one central phone number and then transferred to the whichever of the over three hundred stores throughout Metro Toronto was closest to the caller’s home, allowing the food to be delivered within thirty minutes — or the customer got it for free.

Well, Rod Churchill had said that every Wednesday night, when his wife was out at her conversational French course, he ordered dinner from Food Food. The chain’s computer records would have a complete history of every meal he’d ever ordered from there — Food Food was famous for being able to not just give you the same order you had last time, but also, if you wanted it, a repeat of what you’d had on any occasion in the past.

It took a couple of days of trying, but the sim eventually unraveled the security of Food Food’s computers — as he expected, the safety precautions were much less rigid than those of a drugstore. He called up Rod’s ordering history.

Perfect.

Like all restaurants, Food Food was obligated to provide full ingredient and nutritional information, which could be read by videophone at the customer’s leisure. The sim waded carefully through it, until he found exactly what he was looking for.

Peter made a couple of phone calls to pass on the news from Glasgow, then rejoined Sarkar at the main console. Sarkar moved the Ambrotos simulacrum into the background and brought Spirit, the life-after-death sim, into the foreground.

Peter leaned into the mike. “I’d like to ask you a question,” he said.

“The big question, no doubt,” said the sim. “What’s it like being dead?”

“Exactly.”

Spirit’s voice came through the speaker. “It’s like…” But then it trailed off.

Peter leaned forward in anticipation. “Yes?”

“It’s like being an aardvark.”

Peter’s jaw went a little slack. “How can it be like being an aardvark?”

“Or maybe an anteater,” said the sim. “I can’t see myself, but I know I’ve got a very long tongue.”

“Reincarnation…” said Sarkar, nodding slowly. “My Hindu friends will be pleased to hear this. But I must say I’d hoped for better for you, Peter, than an aardvark.”

“I’m getting hungry,” said the voice from the speaker. “Anybody got any ants?”

“I don’t believe this,” said Peter, shaking his head.

“Hah!” said the speaker. “Had you going there for a moment.”

“No, you did not,” said Peter.

“Well,” said the synthesized voice, a little petulantly, “I had Sarkar going, anyway.”

“Not really,” said Sarkar.

“You’re just being a pain,” Peter said into the microphone.

“Like father, like son,” said the sim.

“You crack a lot of jokes,” said Peter.

“Death is very funny,” Spirit said. “No, actually, life is very funny. Absurd, actually. It’s all absurd.”

“Funny?” said Sarkar. “I thought laughter was a biological response.”

“The sound of laughter might be, although I’ve come to realize it’s more of a social, rather than a biological, phenomenon, but finding something funny isn’t biological. I know when Petey watches sitcoms he hardly ever laughs out loud. That doesn’t mean he’s not finding them funny.”

“I suppose,” said Peter.

“In fact, I think I know exactly what humor is now: Humor is the response to the sudden formation of unexpected neural nets.”

“I don’t get it,” said Peter.

“Exactly. ‘I don’t get it.’ People say precisely the same thing when they don’t understand something serious as they do when they fail to understand a joke; we intuitively realize that some sort of connection hasn’t been made. That connection is a neural net.” The after-death sim continued on without any pauses. “Laughter — even if it’s only laughter on the inside, which, incidentally, is the only side I’ve got these days — is the response that goes along with new connections forming in the brain, that is, with synapses firing in ways they’ve never, or at least rarely, fired before. When you hear a new joke, you laugh, and you might even laugh the second or third time you hear it — the neural net is not yet well established, but every joke wears thin after a while. You know the old one, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ As an adult, we don’t laugh at that, but we all did when we first heard it as children, and the difference is not just because the joke is somehow childish — it isn’t, really; it’s actually quite sophisticated. It’s just that the neural net is now well established.”