Factoring Humanity

by Robert J. Sawyer

  The construct was piezoelectric.

  Could it be malfunctioning? Could she be experiencing the phenomenon Persinger at Laurentian University had discovered all those years ago? Could piezoelectric discharges from the Centauri paint be causing her to hallucinate? Would she soon see angels or demons or big-headed aliens, come to take her away?

  She closed her eyes, reintegrating the construct, then pushed the stop button. Maybe something had gone a little wonky with that particular insertion into psychospace. She took a deep breath, then reached out for the start button again.

  She reentered, near the wall of black hexagons.

  And the sensation that something else was there was stronger than before.

  Something was moving through the realm, a coruscating wave undulating through all of human thought, all of human experience. It packed a wallop, this wave; it disturbed everything in its path. Heather tried to clear her mind, to act merely as a receiver rather than an interpreter, to open herself to whatever was passing through psychospace . . .

  Kyle was walking up St. George, heading back from his class at New College to Mullin Hall. His favorite hot-dog vendor was positioned at his usual spot in front of the Robarts Library, a black-and-yellow Shopsy’s umbrella protecting him from the summer sun. Kyle stopped.

  “ ’Afternoon, Professor,” said the Italian-accented voice. “The usual?”

  Kyle considered for a moment. “I think I need a new usual, Tony. What have you got that’s healthy?”

  “We got a veggie-dog. Fat-free, cholesterol-free.”

  “How’s it taste?”

  The little man shrugged. “It could be worse.”

  Kyle smiled. “I’ll just have an apple,” he said, picking one from a basket. He handed Tony his SmartCash card.

  Tony transferred the cost and returned the card.

  Kyle continued on his way, polishing the apple on his blue shirt, unaware of the chubby figure that was following him.

  Heather tried to suppress all the thoughts rushing through her brain.

  She fought down thoughts about Kyle. She fought down thoughts about her daughters. She fought down thoughts about Lydia Gurdjieff, the therapist who had torn her family apart. She fought down thoughts about her work, her neighbors, TV shows she’d seen, music she’d heard, social encounters that had left her miffed. She fought it all down, trying to return her mind to its original tabula rasa form, trying to simply hear, simply detect, simply understand what it was that was rippling through psychospace.

  And at last she made it out.

  During her life, Heather had encountered people who were experiencing joy—and she’d seen how she herself could become joyous, the emotion transferring from the other person to her. The same thing could happen with anger; it was contagious.

  But this emotion—well, she’d felt it often enough on her own, but had never experienced the transferring of it from the outside into herself.

  Until now.

  The sensation moving through psychospace was astonishment.

  Absolute surprise; complete amazement—the very jaw of God dropping.

  Something completely new was happening—something the overmind had never experienced even once before in all the countless millennia it had existed.

  Heather struggled to keep her mind clear, trying to detect the reason for such profound amazement.

  And at last she felt it, a strange sensation, as though she’d been touched by a ghostly hand, as if suddenly something was there.

  That was it.

  Something was there.

  For the first time in its existence, the overmind was aware of something else, of someone else.

  It was incredible—absolutely incredible.

  The word “loneliness” didn’t even have a definition at the overmind level. It was only meaningful in three dimensions, referring to the apparent isolation of individual nodes. But in fourspace, it was meaningless—as meaningless as asking where the edge of the universe was.

  Or so the overmind had apparently thought.

  But now, incredibly, there was another presence in fourspace.

  Another overmind.

  The human overmind was struggling to comprehend. The sensation was as foreign to it as it would be for Heather to see a new color, to detect magnetism directly, to hear the music of the spheres.

  Another overmind.

  What could it be?

  Heather thought of apes—gorillas, chimpanzees, and the handful of remaining orangutans. Perhaps one of those species had finally broken through, stepping beyond its animal limitations and achieving consciousness, a sentience if not comparable to humanity’s today, perhaps on a par with that of our Homo habilis ancestors.

  But that wasn’t it. Heather knew in the very core of her being that that wasn’t the answer.

  Heather then thought of APEs—the approximation of psychological experiences her husband and others had been building for years. They had never quite worked, never quite been human. But perhaps that had changed; they were constantly being tweaked, endless updates on the road to sentience. Perhaps Saperstein, or someone else, had solved the problems with quantum computing; she and Kyle hadn’t yet made the Huneker message public—Saperstein wouldn’t have known any better.

  But, no, that was not it either.

  The Other wasn’t here—however broadly one defined “here” in the fourspace of the overmind.

  No—no, it was there. Elsewhere. Reaching out, making contact, touching the human collective unconscious for the very first time.

  And then Heather knew.

  It was another overmind—but not a terrestrial overmind.

  It was the Centaurs. Their thoughts, their archetypes, their symbols.

  They’d sent their radio messages as harbingers, heralding their arrival. But the human overmind, locked into its own ways, unable to comprehend, had missed the point. Individual humans had long proclaimed that we must not be alone in the universe, but the human overmind had known—known down to its very essence—that nothing but isolation was possible.

  But it had been wrong.

  The Centaurs had broken through.

  Contact had been made.

  Were the individual threespace Centaurs en route to Earth? Had they stretched the confines of their overmind, extending a lobe from Alpha Centauri toward the yellow star in whatever name they gave to the constellation humans called Cassiopeia, and in that stretching, had they sufficiently closed the gap so that the overmind of Earth and the overmind of the Centaurs now touched, now interfaced, now—in the most tenuous, tentative way—mingled?

  If the Centaurs were coming closer, who knew how long it would be before they arrived in the flesh? The radio messages had begun a decade ago; even an overmind might be constrained by Einstein. The Centaurs would have had to have managed half the speed of light to arrive here by now, assuming they’d left at the same time they sent their first message; at a quarter of light-speed, they would still be over two light-years from Earth.

  Heather realized that her mind was racing, despite her efforts to keep it clear, and—

  No. No, it wasn’t her mind. It was every mind. The human overmind was trying to make sense of it all, puzzling it through, looking for answers.

  Heather decided not to fight it. She let herself go, giving herself up to the waves of astonishment and curiosity and wonder washing over her . . .

  40

  The chubby man continued to follow Kyle Graves, who was now heading back to Mullin Hall, munching on an apple. The man’s name was Fogarty, and he was under contract to the North American Banking Association. Not that NABA was a big customer of his, but every few years Cash phoned him with a job.

  Fogarty was pleased that Graves hadn’t gone straight from his classroom to the subway. If he had, Fogarty wouldn’t have had an opportunity to earn his fee today. But there should be no trouble getting Graves alone in his office or lab. The university was largely deserted in the summer, and by early evening, Mulli
n Hall would be almost completely vacant. Fogarty stopped at a street-side news terminal and downloaded the day’s Globe and Mail into a stolen datapad. He’d cased Mullin Hall earlier in the day; he would sit and read in the third-floor student lounge for a while, until the crowds in the building thinned. Then he’d take care of the problem of Kyle Graves once and for all.

  Suddenly Heather felt something grab hold of her. Her invisible body, until that moment floating freely in psychospace, was seized as if by a giant hand. She found herself being lifted up and away from the wall of hexagons, higher and higher and higher. Without any mental effort on her part, the whole view transformed from the interior of the sphere to the exterior view of two hemispheres, with the maelstrom of gold and silver and red and green off in the distance.

  Two of the long iridescent snakes flew by in front of her almost simultaneously, one going up, the other down. She was moving forward now at breakneck speed—or at least she thought she was; there was no discernible breeze except for an almost subliminal sense of the air-circulation system inside the construct.

  The two giant globes were soon receding behind her. For a moment, a third sort of Necker transformation occurred, swapping a different trio of dimensions into her perception. She saw the malestrom change to a series of flat disks, bronze and gold, silver and copper, like metal checkers or hockey pucks seen from the side, stacked in rickety columns. The space around her turned into long, silky white streamers.

  But then, almost at once, it transformed again, back into the interior view, inside the joined sphere. She was rushing horizontally toward a vast mercury ocean. Vampire-like, she made no reflection in its glistening surface, but still, instinctively, she brought her hands up to protect her face as—

  —as she collided with the surface, it shattering just as liquid mercury did, into a thousand rounded blobs—

  The Necker transformation again: she was now seeing the exterior view, the two globes fully behind her, the maelstrom ahead.

  And still she rushed onward. The impact, although visually splendid, had left her utterly unscathed. But she was now free of the sphere.

  The maelstrom was no longer an infinitely distant backdrop. It was now looming closer and closer, its surface roiling and—

  —and there, directly ahead, was an opening in it. A perfectly regular pentagonal hole.

  Yes, a pentagon rather than a hexagon. The only polygonal shape she’d seen to date in this entire realm had been six-sided, but this opening had only five.

  And as she hurtled closer still, she saw that it wasn’t just a hole. Rather, it was a tunnel, pentagonal in cross section, receding away, its inner walls slick and wet and blue—a color that until now she hadn’t realized she’d never yet seen when looking at psychospace.

  Heather knew, somehow, that the pentagon was part of the other overmind, the extension of it that was tentatively reaching out, tentatively contacting the human collective.

  And she suddenly realized what her role was—and why the Centaurs had gone to so much trouble to teach humans to build a device to access fourspace.

  The human overmind could no more see inside itself than Heather could see inside her own body. But now that one of its threespace extensions was sailing within it, it could use Heather’s perceptions to ascertain exactly what was going on. She was a laparoscope within the collective unconscious, eyes and ears now for all of humanity as it worked to make sense of what it was experiencing.

  The Centaurs had overrated human intelligence. No doubt they’d expected millions of humans to already be exploring psychospace by the time their overmind actually first touched ours, instead of just one fragile individual.

  But the purpose was plain; they needed the human overmind to accept the newcomer as a friend rather than a threat, for humanity to welcome it rather than to challenge it. Perhaps Earth’s overmind wasn’t the first one the Centaurs had had contact with; perhaps a previous first contact had gone bad, with the startling external touch panicking some other alien overmind, or driving it mad.

  Heather was doing more than just seeing for the overmind. She was mediating its thoughts—the tail, for one brief moment, wagging the dog. She looked at the alien presence with wonder and awe and excitement, and she could feel, in a strange way, like the psychic equivalent of peripheral vision, those same emotions propagating back into the human overmind.

  This was a good thing, was to be welcomed, was exciting, stimulating, fascinating, and—

  —and something else, too.

  The psychic tide turned, thoughts from the human overmind washing back now over Heather, flooding her, submerging her. It was a whole new feeling for the overmind, something it had never experienced before. And yet Heather had had some small personal experience, as most threespace extensions had, with this phenomenon. She found herself mediating the overmind’s thoughts again, helping shape them, helping it interpret.

  And then—

  And then waves of the new sensation, giant, crashing, wonderful waves—

  Overwhelming waves—

  The whole human overmind resonating on one note, crystal-clear, a transformation, a transcendence—

  Heather closed her eyes, scrunching them tight, the construct reforming around her just in time, before the tsunami of this glorious new feeling could wash her utterly away.

  Fogarty turned off the datapad and slipped it into the pocket of his nondescript jacket. It made a plasticky clang against the military stunner he had in there.

  It had been thirty minutes since the last person had passed by in the corridor; the building was as dead now as it was likely to get. When Graves had entered the building, Fogarty had followed him; he’d noted that Graves had gone into his office, not the lab.

  Fogarty got up and slipped the stunner into his chubby palm. All he had to do was touch it to Graves’s body and enough voltage would course through the man to stop his heart. With Graves’s medical history, no one would likely suspect foul play. And even if they did, well, so what? No one could ever connect it to Fogarty (or to Cash, for that matter); a stunner discharge couldn’t be traced. And of course Fogarty had plastiskin sprayed over his hands, molded with Graves’s own fingerprints; not only would that let him trick Graves’s lock, it would also ensure that none of Fogarty’s fingerprints would be left at the scene.

  Fogarty took one final look around the corridor to make sure no one was around, then headed toward Kyle’s office door.

  He didn’t give a shit about the threat to the banking industry, of course—that wasn’t his concern. Cash had mentioned that they’d already bought off an Israeli researcher, but if this Graves fellow was too stupid to take the easy way, well, Fogarty didn’t mind.

  He took a step, and—

  —and felt woozy for a moment, slightly disoriented, dizzy.

  It passed, but—

  Kyle Graves, he thought. Forty-five, according to the dossier Cash had e-mailed him.

  A father, a husband—Cash had said that Graves had recently reconciled with his wife.

  Brian Kyle Graves—another human being.

  Fogarty fingered the stunner.

  You know, according to the dossier, the guy did seem a decent-enough sort, and—

  And, well, certainly Fogarty wouldn’t want somebody to do something like this to him.

  Another step; he could hear the muffled sound of Graves dictating into his word processor.

  Fogarty stopped dead in his tracks. Christ, he’d eliminated more than two dozen problems in the last year alone, but—

  But—

  But—

  I can’t do this, he thought. I can’t.

  He turned around and headed back up the curving hallway.

  Kyle finished dictating his report and headed over to The Water Hole; he’d arranged to meet Stone Bentley there, with Stone coming directly from a meeting he’d had at the Royal Ontario Museum.

  “You look in a good mood,” said Stone as Kyle sat down opposite him.

  Kyle
grinned. “I feel better than I have for ages. My daughter has realized she was wrong.”

  Stone lifted his eyebrows. “That’s wonderful!”

  “Isn’t it, though? It’ll be my birthday in a few weeks—I couldn’t ask for a better present.”

  A server arrived.

  “A glass of red wine,” said Kyle. Stone already had a mug of beer in front of him.

  The server scurried away.

  “I want to thank you, Stone,” said Kyle. “I don’t know if I could have gotten through this without you.” Stone said nothing, so Kyle went on. “Sometimes it’s not easy being a man—people tend to assume we’re guilty, I guess. Anyway, your support meant a lot to me. Knowing that you’d gone through something a bit similar, and survived it, gave me—I don’t know, I guess ‘hope’ is the right word.”

  The server reappeared, depositing Kyle’s wineglass. Kyle nodded thanks at the young woman, then lifted his drink. “To us—a pair of survivors.”

  After a moment, Stone lifted his beer and allowed Kyle to clink his glass against the mug. But Stone did not take a sip. He lowered his mug back to the tabletop and looked off in the distance.

  “I did it,” he said softly.

  Kyle wasn’t following. “Sorry?”

  Stone looked at Kyle. “I did it . . . that girl, five years ago. I did harass her.” He held Kyle’s gaze for a few seconds, apparently searching for a reaction, then looked back down at the tablecloth.

  “But the student recanted,” said Kyle.

  Stone made an almost imperceptible nod. “She knew she’d lost the fight and she was getting the cold shoulder from a lot of other male faculty members. She thought it would help.” He did take a gulp of his beer now. “She transferred to York.” He shrugged a little. “Fresh start.”

  Kyle didn’t know what to say. He looked around the bar for a time.

  “I didn’t—” said Stone. “I know this doesn’t excuse it, but I was going through a bad time. Denise and I were getting a divorce. I—” He stopped. “It was a stupid thing to do.”