Factoring Humanity

by Неизвестный

  Heather was empty inside. A part of her was dead—and had been dead for as long as she could remember.

  And besides, just because Gurdjieff's technique had been leading, it didn't mean that no abuse had ever happened to Heather's daughters. She'd been thinking of Ron Goldman's anger again, and that brought back the Simpson case; just because the cops had tried to frame O.J. didn't mean he hadn't actually committed murder.

  As she brought some toast to her mouth, she realized with a start that her anger wasn't conditional.

  She was furious with Becky regardless of whether or not Kyle was guilty. Becky had turned their lives upside down.

  It was a terrible thing to think—but ignorance had indeed been bliss.

  Heather was rapidly losing her appetite. Damn it, why had this happened to them?

  To her?

  She put down her cutlery and picked up her plate. Then she walked into the kitchen and scraped her breakfast into the garbage bag beneath the sink.

  Heather got to the university an hour later. When she entered her office, she found the theatrical lights were off—unplugged actually, since they had no switches.

  The damned cleaning staff. Who'd have thought they worked after midnight?

  The construct sat in ruins, its panels having separated without benefit of the structural-integrity field.

  Whether it had fallen apart while the cleaners were still present or had collapsed later in the night, there was no way to tell. Heather's heart was racing.

  She dropped her purse on the carpet and hurried over to the heap of panels. One of the panels had lost a dozen tiles where it had hit the floor. Thank God Paul had had the foresight to number them; she managed to snap them back into place in short order. She then reassembled the construct. It collapsed once more; it was hard to keep the pieces together. But at last she managed it. She walked gingerly across the room, lest her footfalls send it tumbling again. She fumbled the plugs back into the sockets and heard the surge protector on her desktop computer shriek as she did so. And then she watched in relief and wonder as the construct visibly pulled itself together, all of its angles becoming square.

  Heather checked her watch. There was a departmental meeting at two—not that much of the faculty was around in the summer, but that would just make her absence all the more obvious.

  She was eager to continue exploring. She wrote two notes in Magic Marker telling the cleaning staff not to turn off the lamps. She stuck the first note on one of the lamp stands (low enough that there was no chance of the light igniting it) and the second directly beside the outlet into which both lamps were plugged.

  But, gee, even with the lamps on for a short time, it was warm in here; Heather was sweating in her clothes. She locked her door and feeling slightly self-conscious, removed her blouse and slacks, stripping down to bra and panties. She then lifted off the door cube and scrunched herself into the construct's body. Then she pulled on the suction-cup handle to reattach the door, waited for her eyes to adjust to the semidarkness, and reached forward and pressed the start button.

  Her heart was pounding rapidly; it was just as exhilarating, just as terrifying, as yesterday.

  But she was relieved to see that her guess had been right: she found herself floating just where she'd left off last time, next to the vast, curving surface of hexagons. Of course, whether that was their actual shape or simply a form given to them by Heather's own mind, she had no way to know.

  Despite the bizarreness, it all seemed far too real to be simply the result of piezoelectric discharges scrambling her brain. And yet, as a psychologist, Heather knew that hallucinations often seemed strikingly real—indeed, they could have a hyperreality, making the real world appear dull by comparison.

  She looked at the hexagons, each perhaps two meters across. The only natural thing she could think of that was made of packed hexagons was honeycomb.

  No, wait. Another image came to her. The Giant's Causeway, in Northern Ireland—a vast field made up of hexagonal basalt columns.

  Bees or lava? Either way, it was order out of chaos—and this regular arrangement of six-sided structures was the most orderly thing she'd yet encountered here.

  The hexagons didn't cover the entire inner surface of the sphere—there were vast tracts where none were visible. Still, even if they covered a portion of the surface, there must have been millions, if not billions, of them.

  The view shifted again. It had Neckered into another configuration: the one she'd seen yesterday with two spheres, one now very close to hand, the other hugely far away. Forming the backdrop was the maelstrom—which, she now realized, had the same mix of colors as did the hexagons. She defocused and tried again. The image of the vast wall of hexagons reappeared.

  If the hexagons and the maelstrom were really the same thing, just seen in different dimensional frameworks, then, seemingly, much energy was tied up in the hexagons. But what did each hexagon represent?

  As she watched, one of the hexagons in front of her darkened suddenly to a black deeper than any she'd seen before. No light at all seemed to reflect from it. Indeed, at first she thought it didn't exist anymore, but soon her eyes adjusted to its perfect ebony surface; it was still there.

  Heather looked around to see if she could find any other missing hexagons. It didn't take long to turn up another, and then another. But whether they had just turned black, or had been black for a long time, she couldn't say.

  Still, that the hexagons changed color made her think they might be pixels. And yet when she'd been flying over this landscape at a great height, no image had been apparent. Heather pursed her lips in frustration.

  She continued to hover along the field of hexagons, passing over pockets of emptiness where there were no colored or black hexagons at all, just a silvery nothingness.

  At the margins of one such area—a puddle of mercury, she thought—Heather saw a hexagon forming. It started as a point and then expanded rapidly outward to fill the available space, abutting on three sides against other hexagons, and against the silver abyss on its other sides.

  What could the hexagons be?

  She'd seen them born.

  And she'd seen them die.

  Just how many of the damn things were there?

  Born.

  Died.

  Born.

  Died.

  A crazy thought hit her—maybe the kind of thought that was more likely to occur to a Jungian psychologist than to the average Joe, but crazy nonetheless.

  It couldn't be.

  And yet. . .

  If she was right, she knew exactly how many active hexagons there were.

  Their number wasn't countless—of that she felt sure. This wasn't one of Kyle's noncomputational problems; these weren't infinite tiles, covering an infinite plane.

  No, their number was knowable.

  Her heart was thundering and fluttering simultaneously.

  It was a flash of insight, but she felt in her bones that it was right. There must be something like—she strained to remember the quantity. Seven billion, four hundred million.

  Plus or minus.

  Give or take.

  Seven billion, four hundred million.

  The entire human population of planet Earth.

  Jung made concrete; reality, not metaphor.

  The collective unconscious.

  The collective conscious.

  The overmind.

  She felt a surge of energy coursing through her system. It fit perfectly. Yes, what she was seeing was biological, but of a kind of biology she'd never encountered before, and on a scale more vast than she'd ever imagined.

  She'd always known, down deep, that the construct hadn't taken her anywhere. She was still in her office, on the second floor of Sid Smith.

  All she was doing was looking through a twisted lens, a Mobius microscope, a topological telescope.

  A hyperscope.

  And the hyperscope was allowing her to see the four-dimensional reality that surroun
ded her quotidian world, a reality she'd been no more aware of than A Square—the hero of Abbott's Flatland—had been aware of the three-dimensional world surrounding him.

  Jung's metaphor had suggested it long ago, although old Carl had never thought of it in physical terms. But if the collective unconscious was more than just a metaphor, it would have to look something like this: the apparently disparate parts of humanity actually connected at a higher level.

  Incredible.

  If she was right—

  If she was right, the Centaurs hadn't sent information about their alien world. Rather, they'd given humanity a mirror so that humans could finally see themselves.

  And Heather was now looking at a portion of that mirror, a close-up—a few thousand minds packed in front of her.

  Heather rotated around, scanning the vast surface of the bowl. She couldn't make out discrete hexagons in the distance—but she could see that colored spots made up only a tiny fraction of the total.

  Perhaps five or ten percent.

  Five or ten percent. . .

  She'd read years ago that the total number of human beings who had ever existed—whether habilis, erectus, neanderthalensis, or sapiens—was about one hundred billion.

  Five or ten percent.

  Seven billion human beings currently alive.

  And ninety-three billion, more or less, who had come and gone before.

  The overmind didn't reduce, reuse, and recycle. Rather, it maintained all the previous hexagons, dark and pristine, untouched and immutable.

  And then it hit her.

  Staggering. . .

  And yet it must be here.

  She felt flush, felt faint.

  She'd found what she'd wanted.

  Since sophisticated consciousness had first arisen, lo those millions of years ago, some hundred billion extensions of it—some hundred billion humans—had been born and died on planet Earth.

  And they were still represented here, each a hexagon.

  And what was a man or a woman but the sum of his or her memories? What else of value could the hexagons possibly store? Why keep the old ones around, unless—

  It made her giddy, the very idea.

  Who to access first? If she could touch only one mind, which would it be?

  Christ?

  Or Einstein?

  Socrates?

  Or Cleopatra?

  Stephen Hawking?

  Or Marie Curie?

  Or—she'd been suppressing it, of course—or her dead daughter Mary?

  Or even Heather's own dead father?

  Who? Where would one begin?

  As Heather watched, an arc of light connected one of the colored hexagons to one that was dark.

  There was a way to use this vast switchboard, to interface a living mind with the archive of one dead.

  Did such arcs happen spontaneously? Did they explain such things as people thinking they'd lived before? Heather had never believed in past-life regression, but a fistula in—in—in psychospace, bridging a dead mind and one still active, might very well be interpreted as a past life by the active mind, unaware of what was going on.

  As she watched, the arc disappeared; whatever contact there had been, for whatever purpose, had been fleeting, and now it was over.

  The passive hexagon had never lit up; it was dead throughout the access. Heather was seeing the best representation her mind could produce of the four-dimensional realm in which the overmind dwelt, but the fourth dimension, as the Web articles she'd read had said, wasn't time; it did not link the living and the dead interactively.

  Heather rotated again, turning back to the vast sunflower of active hexagons.

  One of them—one out of seven billion—was her, a cross section through her extension into threespace.

  But which one? Was she nearby or far away? Surely the connections were more complex than this representation suggested. Surely, like neurons in an individual human brain, the connections were multilayered. This was merely one way—one vastly simplified way—of looking at the gestalt of human consciousness.

  But if she was there—and she must be—then. . .

  No, not Christ.

  Not Einstein.

  Not poor, dead Mary.

  Not her own father.

  No, the first mind Heather wanted to touch was one still alive, one still active, one still feeling, one still experiencing.

  She had indeed found it.

  The off-site storage.

  The backup.

  The archive.

  One of those hexagons represented Kyle.

  If she could find it, if she could access it, then she would know.

  One way or the other, she would finally know.

  23

  The door chime in Kyle's lab sounded. He got up from the chair in front of Cheetah's console and moved toward the entrance. The door slid open as he approached.

  A tall, angular white man was standing in the curving corridor. “Professor Graves?” he said.

  “Yes?” said Kyle.

  “Simon Cash,” said the man. “Thank you for agreeing to see me.”

  “Oh, right. I'd forgotten you were coming. Come in, come in.” He moved aside to let Cash enter.

  Kyle took a chair in front of Cheetah's console, and motioned for Cash to take another seat.

  “I know you're a busy man,” said Cash, “so I won't waste your time on preliminaries. We would like you to come work for us.”

  “Us?”

  “The North American Banking Association.”

  “Yes, yes, you said that on the phone. Say—a banker named Cash. Bet you get a lot of jokes about that.”

  Cash's tone was even. “You're the first.”

  Kyle was slightly flustered. “But I'm not a banker,” he said. “Why on earth would you possibly be interested in me?”

  “We'd like you to work for our security division.”

  Kyle spread his hands. “I'm still at a loss.”

  “Do you recognize me?” asked Cash.

  “I don't, I'm sorry. Have we met before?”

  “Sort of. I attended your seminar on quantum computing at the IA-squared conference last year.”

  The 2016 meeting of the International Artificial Intelligence Association had been held in San Antonio.

  Kyle shook his head. “Sorry, no, I don't remember. Did you ask any questions?”

  “No—I never do. I get paid simply to listen. Listen and report back.”

  “Why should the Banking Association care about my work?” Cash reached into his pocket. For a horrible instant, Kyle had the crazy thought that he was going for a gun. But all Cash did was remove his wallet and pull out a SmartCash card.

  “Tell me how much money this card has on it,” said Cash.

  Kyle took the card from him and squeezed it hard between thumb and forefinger; the pressure powered up the little display on the surface of the card. “Five hundred and seven dollars and sixteen cents,” he said, reading the numbers.

  Cash nodded. “I transferred the amount just before coming here. There's a reason I chose that figure. That's the average amount each adult North American has programmed into a smartcard on his or her person. The entire cashless society is based on the security of these cards.”

  Kyle nodded; he was beginning to see what Cash was getting at.

  “Remember the Year-2000 problem?” Cash held up a hand. “I think we in the banks should take the full blame for that, by the way. We're the ones who produced billions of paper checks with '19' preprinted in front of where the year goes; we pioneered the concept of the two-digit year and trained everyone to use it in their day-to-day life. Anyway, as you know, it cost billions to avert disaster from hitting the world at one second past 23:59:59 on December 31, 1999.” He paused, waiting for Kyle to acknowledge this. Kyle simply nodded.

  “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.”