Laboratory Conditions

Well, he did not get up

and walk out of here, guy's at death's door.

Tell me you did not misplace my patient.

I went to check the urine output in 1052,

I was only gone a minute.

Palliative care? - Social work found a hospice.

If he lasts that long.

No family, no insurance.

Check the morgue.

You know, there is such a thing as harvesting organs

and trafficking in cadavers, or such

is the public perception. Let's not play into that.

Got him. Celestial discharge at 9:15.

Okay, my patient expires and nobody pages me.

Wait. Morgue says body never got there.

Give us a few minutes?

Track him down before your shift change so that I can

go home. - Okay, thanks.

We got trouble. Transportation

never picked him up.

Who is that?

Who is she?

Dan. Dan.

This nice lady seems to have made a wrong turn.

Sure, right. Ma'am if you could come

Get away from me.

Yeah. All right.

All right. Okay.

This area is off limits.

I'm sorry, but we're

at a critical phase in a very dangerous experiment.

You have my patient, show him to me

or I call campus police.

And then the department chair.

That would be me, Marjorie Kane

Chair of the Graduate School of Neuroscience.

You're in charge.

Yes, Dr. Emma Holloway.

So regarding your patient, perhaps we could delay your fears

by showing you our grand experiment.

So what we've done is we've, we've surrounded this chamber

every type of detection device we could think

of air pressure, motion, light sensors,

ultraviolet infrared, all spectra,

Temperature

Temperature, temperature to a hundredth

of a centigrade actually,

an electric grid to a fraction of a millivolt,

magnetic, electromagnetic.

On, on the quantum level

we have we've constructed an atomic net

exactly one particle thick, right?

So if anything passes through it, anything

be it strange or charmed or up or down or backwards.

It'll create a wave pattern, measurable disturbance.

The room is a vault, not of steel, but of detection.

I'm happy for you. Now, my patient.

Dr. Holloway, tonight in this very room

we intend to verify empirically in the human species.

The existence of a soul. Nature does not know extinction,

all it knows is transformation and everything that science

has taught me and continues to teach me

strengthens my belief in the continuity

of our spiritual existence after death.

Nothing disappears without trace.

Soul.

Yes, you clinicians don't have a monopoly

on the spiritual element.

As in Faustian bargain.

As in Jesus died to save it.

And for this, you steal a corpse?

Doctor, your patient is not deceased.

Not yet.

We got a live one, not by much.

We need to transport this patient back to ICU immediately.

George Lockwood, 73, history of portal hypertension,

cirrhosis secondary to chronic alcohol abuse

presented with acities and jaundice.

Status post massive hemorrhagic stroke

DNR, he's not expected to survive the night.

DNR does not imply consent for an experimental study.

He's obtunded, he could not have given consent.

Right now, our gentle Mr. Lockwood

would be lying in a hospital ward alone and waiting to die.

And so a lost man, in a small hospital,

in a city of no consequence passes on

as have millions before him and millions will after.

An underpaid, overworked nurse makes a notation

on his chart and his body is discarded

with the morning trash, but here his death can have meaning.

No, he did not give consent for the study.

Mr. Lockwood, can you hear me?

Doctor, it's not like we can ask for volunteers.

Don't take the moral high ground Holloway.

If he coded you wouldn't intubate.

Aren't you curious?

Let's see what happens.

I want a steroid drip to

decrease intracranial pressure, morphine for pain.

Entering!

All right guys, let's fire it up.

All closed.

Chamber sealed.

You're not troubled by this?

No, actually I think we ought spend more time

on things like this, death, life.

What came before?

What comes after? It's basic.

So die already.

There is no real moment of death.

It's a legal construct, something to put down

on a form.

Long after the heart has stopped,

we can still detect pulseless electrical activity.

Moment of death, its a fiction.

Til tonight.

True moment of death, when the soul leaves the body.

Spark of the divine on its journey home.

So where do you put your money doctor?

When cerebral blood flow is

in adequate to support synaptic function or when the

when the reticular formation shuts down?

I've I mean, will the soul exit the body

all at once or will it seep away?

Like, like sand?