The Lost Symbol

She nodded. “Six minutes or so, depending on their breathing rate.”

He turned to her. “I don’t get it.”

She smiled. “You will.”

Leaving the machine behind, Katherine led Peter into the Cube’s control room and sat him down in front of the plasma wall. She began typing and accessed a series of video files stored on the holographic drives. When the plasma wall flickered to life, the image before them looked like home-video footage.

The camera panned across a modest bedroom with an unmade bed, medication bottles, a respirator, and a heart monitor. Peter looked baffled as the camera kept panning and finally revealed, near the center of the bedroom, Katherine’s scale contraption.

Peter’s eyes widened. “What the.?”

The capsule’s transparent lid was open, and a very old man in an oxygen mask lay inside. His elderly wife and a hospice worker stood beside the pod. The man’s breathing was labored, and his eyes were closed.

“The man in the capsule was a science teacher of mine at Yale,” Katherine said. “He and I have kept in touch over the years. He’s been very ill. He always said he wanted to donate his body to science, so when I explained my idea for this experiment, he immediately wanted to be a part of it.”

Peter was apparently mute with shock as he stared at the scene unfolding before them.

The hospice worker now turned to the man’s wife. “It’s time. He’s ready.”

The old woman dabbed her tearful eyes and nodded with a resolute calm. “Okay.”

Very gently, the hospice worker reached into the pod and removed the man’s oxygen mask. The man stirred slightly, but his eyes remained closed. Now the worker wheeled the respirator and other equipment off to the side, leaving the old man in the capsule totally isolated in the center of the room.

The dying man’s wife now approached the pod, leaned down, and gently kissed her husband’s forehead. The old man did not open his eyes, but his lips moved, ever so slightly, into a faint, loving smile.

Without his oxygen mask, the man’s breathing was quickly becoming more labored. The end was obviously near. With an admirable strength and calm, the man’s wife slowly lowered the transparent lid of the capsule and sealed it shut, exactly as Katherine had taught her.

Peter recoiled in alarm. “Katherine, what in the name of God?!”

“It’s okay,” Katherine whispered. “There’s plenty of air in the capsule.” She had seen this video dozens of times now, but it still made her pulse race. She pointed to the scale beneath the dying man’s sealed pod. The digital numbers read:

51.4534644 kg

“That’s his body weight,” Katherine said.

The old man’s breathing became more shallow, and Peter inched forward, transfixed.

“This is what he wanted,” Katherine whispered. “Watch what happens.”

The man’s wife had stepped back and was now seated on the bed, silently looking on with the hospice worker.

Over the course of the next sixty seconds, the man’s shallow breathing grew faster, until all at once, as if the man himself had chosen the moment, he simply took his last breath. Everything stopped.

It was over.

The wife and hospice worker quietly comforted each other.

Nothing else happened.

After a few seconds, Peter glanced over at Katherine in apparent confusion.

Wait for it, she thought, redirecting Peter’s gaze to the capsule’s digital display, which still quietly glowed, showing the dead man’s weight.

Then it happened.

When Peter saw it, he jolted backward, almost falling out of his chair. “But. that’s. ” He covered his mouth in shock. “I can’t. ”

It was seldom that the great Peter Solomon was speechless. Katherine’s reaction had been similar the first few times she saw what had happened.

Moments after the man’s death, the numbers on the scale had decreased suddenly. The man had become lighter immediately after his death. The weight change was minuscule, but it was measurable. and the implications were utterly mind-boggling.

Katherine recalled writing in her lab notes with a trembling hand: “There seems to exist an invisible ‘material’ that exits the human body at the moment of death. It has quantifiable mass which is unimpeded by physical barriers. I must assume it moves in a dimension I cannot yet perceive.”

From the expression of shock on her brother’s face, Katherine knew he understood the implications. “Katherine. ” he stammered, blinking his gray eyes as if to make sure he was not dreaming. “I think you just weighed the human soul.”

There was a long silence between them.