Factoring Humanity

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Well, the problem we’re facing now is infinitely worse than the Year-2000 problem. There are trillions of dollars worldwide that exist nowhere except as stored data on smartcards. Our entire financial system is based on the integrity of those cards.” He took a deep breath. “You know, when those cards were first being developed, the Cold War was still going on. We—the banking industry, that is—worried about what would happen if an atomic bomb were dropped on the United States or Canada, or on Europe, where they went to smartcards even before we did. We were terrified that the electromagnetic pulse would wipe the card memories—and suddenly all that cash would simply disappear. So we engineered the cards to survive even that. But now a threat is facing them that’s even greater than a nuclear bomb and, Professor Graves, the threat is from you.”

  Kyle had been playing with Cash’s smartcard, tapping each of its edges in turn against the desktop. He stopped doing that and placed it in front of him. “You must use RSA-style encryption.”

  “We do, yes. We have since day one—and now it’s the de facto standard worldwide. Your quantum computer, if you really can build it, will render every one of the eleven billion smartcards in use on the planet susceptible to tampering. One user could take all of another user’s money during a simple card-to-card transfer, or you could simply program your own card with any amount you wanted, up to the maximum the card allows, making money appear out of thin air.”

  Kyle was silent for a long moment. “You don’t want me to work for you. You want to bury my research.”

  “Professor Graves, we’re prepared to make you a very generous offer. Whatever U of T is paying you, we will double the figure—and give it to you in American dollars. You’ll have a state-of-the-art lab, in whatever city in North America you’d like to live in. We’ll provide you with whatever staff you require, and you can do research to your heart’s content.”

  “I can just never publish any of it, is that it?”

  “We would require you to sign an NDA, yes. But most research these days is proprietary, isn’t it? You don’t see computer companies or drug manufacturers giving away their secrets. And we will start looking for a secure alternative to the encoding systems we’ve been employing, so that eventually you will be able to publish your work.”

  “I don’t know. I mean, the research I’m doing might even put me in line for a Nobel Prize.”

  Cash nodded, as if he had no intention of disputing this. “The current monetary award that accompanies a Nobel Prize is the equivalent of 3.7 million Canadian dollars; I’m empowered to offer you that as a signing bonus.”

  “This is crazy,” said Kyle.

  “No, Professor Graves. It’s just business.”

  “I’ll have to think about this.”

  “Of course, of course. Talk it over with your wife Heather.”

  Kyle felt his heart jump at the mention of Heather’s name.

  Cash smiled a cold smile and held it for several seconds.

  “You know my wife?” asked Kyle.

  “Not personally, no. But I’ve read full dossiers on both of you. I know she’s two years younger than you; I know you were married September twelfth, nineteen ninety-five; I know you’re currently separated; I know where she works. And, of course, I know all about Rebecca, too.” He smiled again. “Do get back to us quickly, Professor.”

  And with that, he was gone.

  Heather, floating in psychospace, fought for equilibrium, for sanity, for logic.

  It was all so overwhelming, all so incredible.

  But how to proceed?

  She took a calming breath and decided to try the obvious approach.

  “Show me Kyle.”

  Nothing happened.

  “Kyle Graves,” she said again.

  Still nothing.

  “Brian Kyle Graves.”

  No luck.

  Of course not. That would have been too easy

  She tried concentrating on his face, on mental pictures of him.

  Bupkes.

  She sighed.

  Seven billion choices. Even if she could figure out how to access someone, she could spend the rest of her life trying hexagons at random.

  The intuitively obvious next step would simply be to move closer to the mosaic, to touch one of the six-sided jewels. She swam with cupped palms, moving herself forward, toward the curving wall of glowing lights.

  She could perceive the individual hexagons, even though she was still a goodly distance away from them, even though there were so many that she shouldn’t be able to discern the separate components at all.

  A trick of perception.

  A way of dealing with the information.

  She drew closer, and yet it seemed she wasn’t getting closer at all. The hexagons in the center of her vision shrank proportionately as she came nearer; those outside the center of her vision were a spectral blur.

  She drifted, or flew, or was pulled through space, closing the distance.

  Closer and closer still.

  And, at last, she was at the wall.

  Each honeycomb cell was now perhaps a centimeter and a half across, no bigger than a keycap, as if the whole thing was a vast keyboard. As she watched, each of the hexagonal caps drew away slightly, forming a concave surface, inviting the touch of her fingers.

  Heather, bunched up in the Centauri construct, inhaled deeply.

  Heather, in psychospace, felt a tingling in her projected index finger, as if it were full of energy, waiting to discharge. She moved the finger closer, half-expecting a spark to bridge the gap between her invisible digit and the nearest hexagonal key. But the energy continued to build within her, without release.

  Five centimeters, now.

  And now four.

  Three.

  And two.

  One.

  And, finally . . .

  Contact.

  24

  Kyle and Stone were having lunch at The Water Hole; during the day, the Tiffany lamps were turned off and the windows were uncovered, making it into more of a restaurant than a bar—although the fare still tended toward pub grub.

  “President Pitcairn came to see me today,” said Kyle, working his way through a ploughman’s lunch of bread, cheese, and pickles. “He’s all hyped about the quantum-computing work I’m doing.”

  “Pitcairn,” said Stone dismissively. “Guy’s a Neanderthal.” He paused. “Well, not really, of course—but he looks like one, beetle brow and all.”

  “Maybe he has some Neanderthal blood in him,” said Kyle. “Isn’t that the theory? That Homo sapiens sapiens in Eastern Europe crossbred with Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, so that at least some modern humans carry Neanderthal genes?”

  “Where have you been, Kyle? In a cave?” Stone snorted at his own wit. “We’ve had snippets of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA for about twenty years, and we recovered a full set of Neanderthal nuclear DNA about eighteen months ago—The Nature of Things did a whole episode about it.”

  “Well, like you said, no one watches the same shows anymore.”

  Stone harrumphed. “Anyway, that debate’s been solved. There wasn’t ever any such thing as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis—that is, Neanderthal man wasn’t a subspecies of the same species we belong to. Rather, they really were something else: Homo neanderthalensis, a completely different species. Oh, maybe—just maybe—a human and a Neanderthal could have produced a child, but that child would have almost certainly been sterile, like a mule.

  “No,” continued Stone, “it was always pretty facile reasoning—this idea that if someone had brow ridges, he must have Neanderthal blood. Brow ridges are just a normal part of the variation among Homo sapiens—like eye color, or prominent webbing between the thumb and index finger. When you look at the more subtle details of Neanderthal anatomy—such as the nasal cavity, which contains two triangular projections jutting in from either side, or the muscle-attachment scars on the limbs, or even the complete lack of a chin—you can see that they are clearly
unlike modern humans.” He took a swig of beer. “Neanderthals are wholly and completely extinct. They were lords of creation for maybe a hundred thousand years, but we supplanted them.”

  “That’s too bad, in a way,” said Kyle. “I’d always liked the idea that we incorporated them into us.”

  “It just doesn’t work like that. Oh, maybe within the same species, it sometimes happens; by the end of this century, there’ll doubtless be more mixed-race people on this planet than there are pure-race people. But most of the time, there’s no peaceful handing over of the baton, no incorporating of the past into the present. You wipe out those who were there before.”

  Kyle thought about the beggars he’d seen on Queen Street. “Do you have any Native Canadian students?”

  Stone shook his head. “Not a one. Not anymore.”

  “Me neither. I don’t think there are even any Natives on faculty, are there?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Not even in Native Studies?”

  Stone shook his head.

  Kyle took a sip of his drink. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I am right,” said Stone. “ ’Course, Natives still exist, but they’re extremely marginalized. For decades, they’ve had the highest suicide rate, the highest alcoholism rate, the highest poverty rate, the highest infant-mortality rate, and the highest unemployment rate of any demographic group in the country.”

  “But I remember when I was going to school here twenty years ago,” said Kyle. “There were a few Natives in the classes.”

  “Sure. But it was government money that was doing it—and neither Ottawa nor the provinces spends money like that anymore, unless there are a lot of votes to be had—and, sadly, there aren’t. Hell, there are far more Ukrainians in Canada than Natives, you know.” He paused. “Anyway, government programs like the one that put those students in your class never succeed; I did some work years ago for the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, before they killed it. The Natives didn’t want our culture. And when we decided that their culture was irrelevant to our way of life, we stopped settling their land claims and now we’re letting them die as a people. We Europeans took North America over from the Natives lock, stock, and barrel.”

  Kyle was quiet for a moment, then: “Well, no one’s going to take over from us.”

  Stone took a sip of beer. “Not unless your wife’s aliens come down to Earth,” he said, dead serious.

  What a rush! Spectacular and vibrant, like the acid she’d tried along with so many other things when she’d first arrived in the big city.

  Another human mind!

  It was disorienting, intoxicating, frightening, exhilarating.

  She fought the excitement and surprise, fought to bring rationality to the fore.

  But the other was so alien.

  He was male—that was part of it. A man’s mind.

  But there was more that was incongruous.

  The images were colored incorrectly. All browns and yellows and grays, and—

  Ah, of course. Heather’s cousin Bob had the same problem. This man—whoever he was—was color-blind.

  But there was more that was amiss. She could—well, hear was as good a metaphor as any—she could hear his thoughts, a silent babble, a voice without breath, a sound without vibration, words cascading left and right like dominoes falling.

  But they were gibberish, incomprehensible—

  Because they weren’t in English.

  Heather strained harder, trying to make them out. They were indeed words, but without aspiration or accent, it was hard to determine which language they were in.

  Vowels. Consonants.

  No—no. Consonants, then vowels, always in alteration. No consonants abutting.

  Most of Japanese worked that way.

  Yes. A Japanese speaker. A Japanese thinker.

  Why not? Perhaps three-quarters of a billion people spoke-thought—in English most of the time. Americans, Canadians, Brits, Aussies, a smattering of smaller populations. Oh, perhaps half the world’s inhabitants spoke some English, but it was the native tongue for only a tenth of the total.

  Should she try again? Disconnect? Select another key on the wall of humanity?

  Yes. But not yet. Not yet.

  It was fascinating.

  She was in contact with another mind.

  Was he aware of it? If so, there was no sign that Heather could detect.

  Images flickered, forming for a second, then disappearing. They came and went so quickly, Heather couldn’t resolve them all. Many were distorted. She saw a man’s face—an Asian man—but the proportions were all wrong; the lips, nose, and eyes loomed large, but the rest of the face curved away to obscurity. Trying to remember someone, perhaps? In places, the detail was stunning: pores on the man’s nose, short black hairs—not a mustache, but not enough to warrant shaving, either—above the upper lip; eyes bloodshot. But other details were only sketched roughly: two projections from the head, like lumps of clay—ears, recalled without detail.

  Other images. A crowded street at night, neon everywhere. A black-and-white cat. A woman, Asian, young, pretty—and suddenly naked, apparently undressed by the man’s imagination. Again the disconcerting distortion as details shifted in and out of importance: alabaster breasts inflating like balloons, strange yellow-gray nipples the product of his color-blindness; labia expanding to fill the screen as if ready to devour him.

  And, incredibly, his feelings, too: sexual desire, for another woman—something Heather had perhaps, if she were honest, felt once or twice before, but never quite like that.

  And then the woman was gone, and a crowded Tokyo subway appeared, signage all in kanji.

  A torrent of words—yes, words: spoken language. The man was hearing something.

  No, he was overhearing, straining to eavesdrop on a conversation.

  Straining, too, to maintain a poker face, giving away nothing.

  The subway lurched into motion.

  The hum of its motors.

  And then that hum fading away, shunted out of consciousness, a distraction.

  Actual visual images—except for the color-blindness, relatively free of distortion.

  And conjured-up mental images, a Daliesque gallery of imagined, or half-remembered, or mythic thought-paintings.

  So much of it made no sense to Heather. It was a staggering realization for a Jungian: to know that cultural relativity really did exist, that the mind of a Japanese man might be as alien to a Canadian woman, at least in part, as the mind of one of the Centaurs.

  And yet—

  And yet, this man was a fellow member of Homo sapiens. Was the strangeness of his mind more a product of his being Japanese or of his being male? Or was it just of his own-ness, the unique qualities that made this—this Ideko, that was his name; it came to her like a feather falling to earth, unbidden—the qualities that made Ideko an individual human being, different from every one of the seven billion other souls on the planet?

  She’d always thought she understood Kyle and other men, but she’d never been to Japan and couldn’t speak a word of the language.

  Or maybe it was simply that she lacked a mental Rosetta stone. Maybe this Ideko’s thoughts and fears and needs were similar to Heather’s own but were just coded differently. The archetypes had to be there. Just as Champollion recognized Cleopatra’s name in Greek and demotic and hieroglyphics, allowing the ancient Egyptian text on the real Rosetta stone to finally begin to make sense, so too must there be the archetype of the Earth Mother and of the fallen angel and of the uncompleted whole, forming the underpinnings of what Ideko was. If only she could key into it—

  But no matter how she tried, most of what he was thinking remained a mystery. Still, given enough time, she was sure she could make sense of it all . . .

  The subway was coming into another station. She’d heard stories about burly men whose job it was to push people into Japanese subway cars, packing each one as full as possibl
e—but there was no sign of any such thing. Perhaps the stories were a myth; perhaps that, too, was an archetype: misconceptions about the other.

  A thought did rise up in the Japanese man’s mind—another blatantly sexual thought. Heather was startled by it, but almost at once it was repressed. More cultural specificity? She had whiled away many a long commute with idle fantasies—more romantic than pornographic, true. But this fellow spurned the stray thought and bent his mind back to its rigid control.

  Cultural specificity. The Old Testament said that fathers should sleep with their daughters.

  She shuddered, and—

  No, it was the subway car, shuddering back into motion. Ideko hated to commute—perhaps that, too, was an archetype, a pillar of the modern collective unconscious, a Cleopatra chiseled in granite.

  It was intoxicating, this access to another. There was a sexual connotation to it, even without the sexual thoughts—a voyeurism that permeated it.

  It was thrilling and fascinating.

  But she knew she had to disengage.

  She felt an immediate pang of sadness. She now knew Ideko better than she knew almost anyone; she’d seen through his eyes, felt his thoughts.

  And now, after this brief, deep, joining, she would likely never encounter him again.

  But she did have to press on.

  The truth was out there.

  The undeniable truth.

  The truth about the past.

  The truth about Kyle and their daughters.

  A truth Heather had to find.

  25

  After his lunch with Stone, Kyle had three hours free until he had to teach a class. He decided to leave the university altogether, riding the subway down the University Avenue line, around by Union Station, and up to the penultimate stop on the Yonge line, North York Centre. He exited the station, walking through the concrete blight of Mel Lastman Square, and headed over to Beecroft Avenue, one block west of Yonge.