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your pain is here, exactly where your sister's brain used to meet the section you once shared. At one level it's quite straightforward, and I'm sure other specialists you've seen have told you about it. You have classic phantom pain. It isn't unusual. There's a young man, Paul, in the ward down the corridor who's been suffering pain in his severed arm for the last four years. We've managed to stop it now, using the NeuroTranslator, but it was very real to him. When a part of the body is lost during a traumatic accident the victim may continue to experience acute pain in the missing body part. Often the pain reflects the way the limb was damaged, as if the last distress signal sent to the brain is the one it remembers.'
    Amber nodded. 'But I didn't lose a limb.'
    'No, that's what makes your case so unusual. You lost a person.' He paused, as he tried to put into words what he was thinking. 'What makes you unique, Amber, is that you possess part of the living brain of a dead person.'
    She frowned, transfixed by the image of her twin on the screen. 'I realize that. But what does it mean?' Then she paled. Are you saying I'm feeling Ariel's pain? Could she still somehow-
    She looked so horrified that Fleming reached across and touched her shoulder. 'No. I can assure you that this is your pain. As with Paul's arm, your brain is simply making a link to missing tissue that for some reason it thinks is still there. Ariel is no longer in pain. She's gone.' He tried to make light of it. 'Come on, Amber, you're a scientist.
    'I'm a particle physicist, Miles,' she countered, 'and what the quantum world's taught me is that you can't be sure of anything.' Her eyes narrowed, and he knew that she was tired of being patronized by so-called 'experts'. All my life I've tried to make sense of what happened to my sister. I've studied philosophy, physics and even theology, and so far all I've learnt is that we don't know much.' She gave a tight smile and leant back in her chair. 'The point I'm making, Miles, is that I'm not in the business of allowing anybody to assure me of anything.'
    Fleming raised both hands in surrender. He didn't understand how life worked either. But one thing he knew was that when it was over it was over. There was no point wasting any mental energy worrying about the afterlife because there wasn't one. Thank God. Amber, I'm not foolish enough to debate the vagaries of quantum physics with you but I do know about the human brain. It can do many strange things and make you believe anything's real, whether it's a pain in a missing part of your body, or the existence of a divine being. Having spent my entire career studying it, I'm convinced that everything we experience in this world can be explained by the electrical and chemical activity in that walnut-shaped organ in our skull. Love, religious belief, our sense of self, all come from our physical brain. Our consciousness, our mind, isn't some abstract thing, it's born of the totality of the physical brain, and once the physical is gone the mind's gone too. You're still here, Amber, but Ariel's gone into oblivion. You might be in pain because your brain can still deliver signals to your physical being, but your twin's no longer suffering. She can't because she no longer exists. That's not quantum theory. It's physical fact.'
    Amber smiled and her tone softened, more teasing than confrontational. 'Since you're talking about the oblivion of death I've got to tell you I'm a Catholic'
    Fleming laughed. 'There aren't many of you left. I thought most Catholics had defected to the Church of the Soul Truth.'
    Her smile broadened. 'I'm not real devout, but you know how it is? When your godfather's a Jesuit priest who saved your life and you're adopted by a couple of Catholics, it instils certain loyalties in you.'
    'I suppose so,' Fleming said. 'Anyway, you now know that I'm an atheist with outdated Newtonian certainties, and I know you're a Catholic with quantum tendencies. What we