The Terminal Experiment

The Terminal Experiment is a science fiction novel by the Canadian writer Robert J. Sawyer, published in 1995.

Hobson is a biomedical engineer whose equipment has found something that looks like a soul, and the experiment is designed to settle the question of what happens to a personality when the body stops. The three copies begin in a simulation, and their differences are deliberate: one believes in an afterlife, one knows there is none, and one has no opinion because it was not told what it was made for. Once they are loose in the world's networks they are able to act, and somebody starts killing the men Hobson has reasons to resent, including the colleague who had an affair with his wife. Sawyer writes the book as a murder investigation with a philosophical problem attached, and the identity of the killer depends on an argument about what a copy of a person owes the original.

The novel appeared first as a magazine serial, and it won the Nebula Award for Best Novel.