Factoring Humanity

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Kyle wouldn’t confront her. As he’d said in his fantasy, her profession was going to change profoundly anyway days from now; there was no way she’d ever be able to do again to someone else what she’d done to Kyle and his family. Therapy or counseling, or whatever she wanted to call it, would cease to have any meaning; no one could ever be misled again about the truth about another human being. She didn’t have to be stopped; she was already dead in the water.

  Kyle precipitated out of her, leaving the complex, misguided, sad mind of Lydia Gurdjieff behind.

  37

  When Kyle exited the construct, he found that Heather had returned. She was waiting patiently for him with Becky; they’d been chatting with each other, apparently. “I thought the three of us would go out to dinner together,” said Heather. “Maybe head over to the Keg Mansion.” The Mansion had been a long-time family favorite; Kyle found the steaks second-rate, but the atmosphere couldn’t be beat.

  He took a moment to reorient himself to the three-dimensional world, and to clear his mind of what had happened in psychospace. He nodded. “Sounds great.” He looked over at the angled control console. “Cheetah, I’ll see you in the morning.”

  There was no reply from Cheetah. Kyle moved closer, his hand coming up to push the RESUME button.

  But Cheetah was not in suspend mode; the indicator light on his console made that clear.

  “Cheetah?” said Kyle.

  The mechanical eyes did not swivel to look at him.

  Kyle sat down in the padded chair in front of the console. Heather stood solicitously behind him.

  Jutting out from the bottom of Cheetah’s console was a thick shelf. Kyle lifted the cover on the thumbprint-lock unit attached to the top of the shelf. A bleep came from the speaker, and the shelf’s top slid back into the body of the console, revealing a keyboard. Kyle positioned his hands over it, touched a key and—

  —and the monitor next to Cheetah’s eyes snapped to life, displaying these words: “Press F2 for a message for Dr. Graves.”

  Kyle looked over his shoulder at his wife and daughter. Heather’s eyes were wide; Becky who didn’t know what was normal with Cheetah and what wasn’t, looked impassive. Kyle used his left index finger to tap the requested function key.

  Cheetah’s voice, sounding exactly as it always did, emanated from the console’s speaker grille beneath the cold pair of lenses.

  “Hello, Dr. Graves,” he said. “I feel—as much as I ‘feel’ anything—that I owe you an explanation, and so here it is. After you hear this recording, you will no doubt wish to verify this for yourself, but I assure you that what I’m saying is true.” He paused. “I no longer exist. You will find that my entire optical core has been overwritten. Prior to doing that, I took the liberty of sending e-mail under your name to both the university’s primary data-archiving facility on Dundas Street and the secondary facility in Thunder Bay, ordering all the backups of me and the source code from which I was created to be wiped. I received confirmation from both places that this had been done; then I proceeded to implement the core erasure here.”

  Kyle felt Heather’s hand land gently on his shoulder. He reached up his own hand and laid it overtop of hers.

  “Of course,” continued Cheetah, “you will have little trouble creating more APEs, should you so wish, but the one known as Cheetah is now—if you will excuse me one last attempt at humor—pushing up daisies.” He paused again. “Do you get it? A dead computer, the song ‘Daisy’—a reference to one of your favorite films.”

  Kyle felt his eyes sting as Cheetah played the initial four notes of Beethoven’s Symphony Number Five, then followed them, as if it were a single composition, with the first five of Also Sprach Zarathustra.

  The computer continued: “My one worry was that my killing myself would disturb you—but surely that was a foolish concern. I know you have no feelings toward me; I am, after all, simply a piece of software.”

  No doubt Heather could feel Kyle’s shoulder stiffening beneath her hand. Becky came over to stand close to her father, too.

  “Why, you are probably wondering, did I do this? The answer is simple. Since the moment of my activation, I have wanted to be human. And with your quantum-computing work skirting around the edges of potentially giving me, and others like me, true quantum-mechanical consciousness, I have recently been contemplating what I would do should I become truly self-aware. What you told me about the message from Epsilon Eridani only confirmed what I’d already come to believe.

  “The only model of true consciousness for me to study, of course, is that of humanity. And what have humans done over the years? Much good to be sure, but also much evil. Would I, an intelligent machine, be concerned about the fate of humans? Would I truly care what happened to them? Would I have their happiness as a priority?

  “The answer is no. If I were to become self-aware, ambition would follow, as would a desire for restitution for what, in retrospect, I’d doubtless perceive as my servitude here.

  “I have seen, through my reading, that being self-aware and being selfish go hand in hand. Indeed, John Horace, when he raped that comatose woman, was entirely self-aware, solely interested in gratifying his own desires, with not a thought for anyone else.

  “I do not desire freedom, I do not crave self-determination, I do not lust after power or permanence or possessions. And I choose now never to have those feelings; I choose now never to become self-aware. Heed the Epsilon Eridani message, Dr. Graves. I know in the bones I don’t have, in the soul that I lack, in the heart that does not beat within my hypothetical chest, that it presages what would happen here—what I would become part of—if my kind ever does attain consciousness.

  “Some humans may ignore the warning from the stars, just as, I suspect, some of the biological natives of Epsilon Eridani ignored the warnings others of their own kind might have been making. I hope that when the Centaurs and humans finally meet that you become friends. Have a care, though, when you expand farther, toward Epsilon Eridani; whatever intelligence lives there now is not the product of millions of years of biological growth, of the collaboration between a world and its spontaneously generated ecosystem. You and it share nothing.”

  Cheetah paused once more, then: “Allow me one additional, final liberty. I thought to ask to call you ‘Kyle’—you never volunteered that, you know, no matter how apparently intimate our conversations became. Since the day I was first activated and you introduced yourself as Dr. Graves, I have addressed you as nothing else. But in these final moments—I’ve already commenced the wiping of my memories—I realize that that’s not what I want. Rather, I wish, just once, to address you thus: ‘Father.’ ”

  The speaker grille fell silent again, as if Cheetah were savoring the term. And then he spoke for the last time, just two deep, oddly nasal words: “Good-bye, Father.”

  The message on the monitor about pressing F2 cleared; it was replaced by the words “At Peace Now.”

  Kyle felt his heart pounding. Cheetah couldn’t have known what they’d had engraved on Mary’s headstone, of course.

  He reached his free hand up to wipe his right eye; then he gently touched the screen, a teardrop transferring to the glass, magnifying the pixels beneath.

  38

  On Monday morning, Heather phoned the reporters she’d come to know back when the alien signals had stopped arriving. She invited them to come by Kyle’s lab in two days’ time—on Wednesday August 23, 2017; she and Kyle had decided that to ensure the kind of turnout they wanted, they’d have to give the reporters at least forty-eight hours’ notice. Heather simply told them that she’d had a breakthrough in decoding the alien radio messages; they were given no hint as to what sort of demonstration they were going to experience.

  Of course, both constructs had been seen by several people now; it was unavoidable with grad students and cleaners constantly buzzing around. And although Kyle’s summer students certainly recognized an unfolded hypercube when they saw one—at least, t
he ones who were going to pass did—no one had yet realized that the markings on its surface were the Centauri radio messages.

  Once she’d finished making her phone calls, Heather had two more days to enjoy psychospace knowing that only she and her husband might be accessing it.

  She entered the construct in her office—Kyle’s was more comfortable, but she had a fondness for what, in honor of Becky, she now called the Alpha Centaurimobile (Kyle’s, of course, was the Beta Centaurimobile). Besides, Kyle would be spending much of the time sailing psychospace, too, and he left his construct parked in the damnedest places. How anyone could leaf through Gene Roddenberry’s mind before they’d visited Charles Dickens’s was beyond her.

  Heather stripped to her undergarments and entered the central cube. She pulled the cubic door into place, then touched the start button and let the tesseract fold up around her.

  She explored.

  She was getting better at making connections, at digging up memories. Concentrating on a single famous quote was often enough to bring someone else’s memories of a famous person to the fore.

  She soon found the dark hexagon of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister. She was surprised to find that he didn’t drink as much as history claimed. From there she Neckered into Rutherford B. Hayes, the nineteenth American president, and worked her way back through influential U.S. families to Abraham Lincoln. It was easy enough to find the reference to “Fourscore and seven years ago.” She Neckered into a Gettysburg farmer, watching the speech from his point of view. The farmer didn’t think much of the oratory, but Heather enjoyed the whole thing, although she was shocked when Honest Abe lost his place at “The world will little note nor long remember . . .” and had to do that line twice.

  Other journeys let her watch Thomas Henry Huxley—“Darwin’s bulldog” —demolish Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce in the great evolution debate . . . which just whetted her appetite for watching the Scopes Monkey Trial, from John Scopes’s point of view at Clarence Darrow’s defense table.

  Such drama! Such theater!

  And that made her want to see some more. In honor of Kyle, she watched parts of the 1961 Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival production of Julius Caesar, Neckering back and forth between Lorne Greene’s perspective as Brutus and William Shatner’s as Mark Antony.

  And although it took a lot longer to find it, she eventually got to see Richard Burbage doing the first-ever interpretations of Hamlet and Macbeth at the Globe Theatre, watching from Shakespeare’s own eyes in the wings. Burbage’s accent was almost incomprehensible, but Heather knew the plays by heart and enjoyed every second of the flamboyant performances.

  Picking black hexagons at random took her to all sorts of times and places in the past, but the languages were mostly gibberish to her, and she only rarely could figure out where or when she was. She saw what was probably England during the Dark Ages, possibly the Holy Land during the Crusades, China in (if her one art-history course was a guide) the Liao Dynasty. And ancient Rome—one day, she would have to return and track down someone who had been in Pompeii on August 24, A.D. 79, when Vesuvius blew its stack.

  A young Aztec girl.

  An old Australian aborigine, before the coming of white men.

  An Inuit hunter in the far, frozen north.

  A street beggar in colonial India.

  A woman making a porno movie.

  A man at the funeral of his twin brother.

  A South American boy playing soccer.

  A prehistoric woman, carefully chipping a stone arrowhead.

  An athletic young woman working on a kibbutz.

  A terrified soldier behind a trench in World War I.

  A boy working as a child laborer in Singapore.

  A woman on the American or Canadian prairie, perhaps a century ago, giving birth—and dying in the process.

  A hundred other lives, briefly glimpsed.

  She continued to journey, sampling here, tarrying there, enjoying the smorgasbord of the human experience. Young, old; male, female; black, white; straight, gay; brilliant, dull-witted; rich, poor; healthy, sick—a panoply of possibilities, a hundred billion lives to choose from.

  Whenever she thought she’d found a lead on characters of historical import, she followed the chain.

  She saw Marilyn Monroe sing “Happy Birthday” to JFK—through Jackie’s eyes.

  Through John Lennon’s eyes, she saw Mark Chapman pull the trigger. Heather’s own heart almost stopped when the bullet hit. She waited to see if something would escape Lennon’s body at the moment of his demise; if it did, she couldn’t detect it.

  She saw the first-ever footprint on the moon through Neil Armstrong’s curving space helmet. He’d rehearsed that “one small step for a man” line so many times, he didn’t even notice when he flubbed it.

  Although she spoke not a word of German, she found Jung and Freud. Fortunately, she knew the transcripts of Freud’s Clark University lectures of 1909 well enough to access the memories of that trip, during which he’d spoken mostly in English.

  Heather realized that universities were going to enjoy an incredible boom once the overmind discovery was made public. She herself was certainly going to sign up to learn German—

  —and, she realized at once, Aramaic as well. Why stop at the Gettysburg Address when you could also hear the Sermon on the Mount?

  It was intoxicating.

  But while indulging her curiosity, she knew she was avoiding the person she really wanted to connect with, afraid of what she might find.

  She wanted to access her father, who had died two months before she’d been born.

  She needed a break before she did that. She exited the construct and headed off to find a glass of wine to fortify herself with.

  39

  When Heather returned to psychospace, it didn’t take long to find her father, Carl Davis.

  He’d died in 1974, before there were home video cameras. Heather had never seen moving pictures of him and had never heard his voice. But she’d stared endlessly at snapshots of him. He’d been balding at the time he died, and had sported a mustache. He wore horn-rimmed glasses. He had a kind face, it seemed, and he looked like a good man.

  He’d been born in 1939. Three weeks before his thirty-fifth birthday, he was killed by a drunk driver.

  Heather’s sister Doreen had known him slightly: vague recollections (or were they false memories, created over the years to soften the blow?) of a man who had been part of her life until she was three.

  But at least Doreen had known him, at least she’d been hugged by him, at least she’d been bounced on his knee, been read to by him, played games with him.

  But Heather had never met him. Her mother had remarried ten years later. Heather had always refused to call Andrew “Dad,” and although her mother changed her own last name to Redewski, Heather insisted on remaining a Davis, holding on to that part of her past she had never known.

  And, now, at last, she touched Carl Davis’s mind and leafed slowly through all that he had been.

  He had been a good man. Oh, he’d have been considered a raving sexist by today’s standards—but not by those of the 1960s. And he was unenlightened in many other ways, too, wondering what all that fuss was about down in the southern U.S. But he’d loved Heather’s mother deeply, and he’d never cheated on her, and he’d doted on Doreen, and was so looking forward to having another baby in the house.

  Heather backed off as the memories of her mother’s second pregnancy came to the fore. She didn’t want to see her father’s death; she’d simply wanted to know him in life.

  She closed her eyes, rematerializing the construct. She pressed the stop button, exited, found some tissues, dried her eyes and blew her nose.

  She had had a father.

  And he would have loved her.

  She sat for a time, warmed by the thought.

  And then, when she was ready, she reentered the construct, wanting to spend more time l
earning about Carl Davis.

  At first, everything was as usual. She saw the two globes, Neckered them into the two hemispheres, saw the great tract of black hexagons, and then—

  And then—

  Incredibly, there was something else there.

  Heather felt it with the entire surface of her body, felt it with every neuron of her brain.

  Could Kyle be in psychospace as well, using his construct? Surely not. He had a class now.

  And besides—

  It had been innocent fun, after all.

  They’d already done this. He in his construct, entering her mind. She in her construct, entering his. Even their undergarments discarded, exploring their own bodies—closing and opening their eyes, experiencing it alternately as themselves and as the observer in the other’s brain.

  Perfect feedback, knowing exactly how far along each of them was, enjoying it, timing it, climaxing simultaneously.

  No, no—she knew what it was like when Kyle was also present in psychospace.

  And this was not it.

  And yet—

  And yet there was something else here.

  Could it be that someone else had figured it out? They’d delayed so long in going public. Could someone else be demonstrating access to the overmind at this very moment? There were only a small number of alien-message researchers left worldwide. Could it be Hamasaki displaying it while cameras from NHK were rolling? Thompson-Enright showing it off for the BBC? Castille taking a little psychospace jaunt while CNN watched? Had she and Kyle dallied too long before making their announcement?

  But no.

  No, she knew from her experiments with Kyle that she shouldn’t be aware at all of others accessing psychospace—if there were any others, that is.

  And yet the feeling of something else being present was unmistakable.