Factoring Humanity

by Неизвестный

  If such a mechanism existed, that is.

  And if it did, it meant that the universe did care, after all. Something beyond evolution had shaped life, had given it, if not meaning, at least freedom from torture.

  Except for the torture that happened when the memories came back.

  Kyle walked slowly back to the subway station. It was mid afternoon on a Friday; the trains arriving from downtown were packed with commuters escaping their corporate prisons. Kyle was teaching two summer courses, one of them, cruelly, met at 4:00 P.M. on Friday afternoon; he headed back to the university to give his final class of the week.

  27

  Heather continued to stare at the vast wall of hexagons, thinking, trying to keep her rationality from being overpowered by giddiness.

  She decided to simply try again. She touched another hexagon.

  And recoiled in horror.

  The mind she entered was twisted, dark, every perception askew, every thought frayed and disjointed.

  It was a man—again! White: that was important to him, his whiteness, his pureness. He was in a park, near an artificial lake. It was pitch dark. Heather assumed the connections she was making were in real time, meaning that this had to be somewhere other than North America; it was still afternoon here. Yet the man was thinking in French.

  It was likely France or Belgium, then, rather than Quebec.

  The man was hiding—lurking—behind a tree, waiting.

  There was something wrong, though. Something straining, as if trying to burst out.

  My God, thought Heather. An erection, bulging against his pants. So that's what it feels like.

  Good grief!

  Freud was wrong—envying that was impossible. The penis felt as though it was going to split along its length, a sausage bursting from its skin.

  A woman was approaching, visible intermittently under the lamplight.

  Young, pretty, white, wearing pink leather boots, walking alone.

  He let her pass by and then—

  And then he emerged from behind the trees and brought a knife to her throat, and she heard his voice. He spoke in French—and his accent was Parisian, not Québecois. Heather knew enough French to understand that he was saying she should not struggle, that she better make it good for him. . .

  Heather couldn't take it; she slammed her eyes closed, letting the construct reform around her. She felt helpless; frustrated. It was said that a woman was raped somewhere on Earth every eleven seconds—a meaningless statistic before. But this was going on right now.

  She had to do something.

  She took a deep breath, then opened her eyes again.

  “Stop!”

  Heather shouted it inside the cube.

  Stop!

  Heather screamed it with her mind.

  And then, “Arrêt!”

  Arrêt!

  But the monster continued, hands now pawing the woman's breasts through her bra.

  Heather pulled her own arms back, trying to drag his with them.

  But it was no good. Nothing she did had any effect on him. Heather was shaking with outrage and anger and fear, but the man continued, as oblivious to Heather's cries as he was to those of his victim.

  No—no, he wasn't oblivious to the victim's cries. Her whimpering was making him harder still—

  Heather couldn't stomach it.

  The man tore at the woman's panties, and—

  —and Heather managed to visualize the precipitation, solute out of solvent, releasing herself from his malfunctioning, poisoned mind, returning to the wall of hexagons.

  She closed her eyes, the construct rematerializing in her own mind, and leaned back against the rear substrate wall, waiting for her heart to stop pounding, waiting for her fury to subside, doing calming breathing exercises.

  Whether Kyle was innocent or guilty, there was one truth that no one could doubt, no one could question. Men sometimes did horrible things, unspeakable things.

  Her body continued to shake.

  Damn it all, that monster in France should have his penis sliced clean off.

  She felt as though she herself had been assaulted. It took time for her equilibrium to reappear, time to distance herself from the horror.

  But at last she was ready to try again. She reached forward, tentatively, frightened of what she might be thrust into, and touched another button.

  A woman—at last! But much, much older than Heather. Italian, maybe; the moon visible through a window. Stuccoed walls; labored breathing. An old Italian woman, in an ancient house—thinking hardly at all, just watching, breathing, waiting, waiting year after year after—

  Heather precipitated out, reintegrated, then touched another hexagon.

  At first she thought she'd entered a retarded person, but then she realized the truth, and smiled.

  A newborn—a baby lying in a crib, looking up. The slightly unfocused faces beaming down at it, grinning with pride and joy, were of a black man in his early twenties, with dreadlocks and a short beard, and a black woman, the same age, with beautiful, clear skin. The image was mostly meaningless to the child except for a feeling of contentment, of happiness, of simplicity, of belonging. Heather lingered for quite some time, letting the innocence and purity of the moment wash the remaining horror from France out of her.

  But then she pulled out, and tried once more.

  Darkness. Silence. Images flowing, fading at the periphery, distorted proportions.

  A sleeping person; a dream of. . . of what? Ironic for a Jungian: to see someone else's dream instead of hearing it described, and being utterly unable to interpret even the overt content, let alone any deeper meaning.

  She left the dreamer and tried once more.

  A doctor—a dermatologist, perhaps. Somewhere in China, looking at a scaly growth on a middle—aged man's leg.

  She disengaged; tried again.

  Somebody watching TV; this, too, in Chinese.

  There had to be a better way than just trial and error. But she'd tried calling out Kyle's name, tried conjuring his face. And before she touched a key, she concentrated hard on Kyle. Still, the vast array of hexagons seemed utterly indifferent to her wishes.

  She continued to hop from mind to mind, person to person—crossing genders and gender orientations and races and nationalities and religions. Hours passed, and although it was fascinating, she was no closer to her goal, no closer to finding Kyle.

  She continued her search.

  And at last, after a dozen more random insertions, the breakthrough came.

  She finally found another Canadian: a middle-aged woman, apparently living in Saskatchewan.

  And she was watching television.

  And on the television was a face Heather recognized.

  Greg McGregor, the man who sometimes anchored CBC Newsworld's newscasts out of the Calgary studio.

  And a thought occurred to Heather.

  They say there are no more than six degrees of separation between any two people—John Guare even wrote a play and a movie on that theme.

  It's often a peak—three steps up and three steps down. A man knows his local minister, the minister knows the Pope, the Pope knows every major world leader, the appropriate leader is known by lesser politicians, and even lesser politicians know their constituents. A bridge is built from Toronto to Tokyo—or Vladivostok to Venice, or Miami to Melbourne.

  The picture changed, McGregor's face disappearing as a news story came on. It was a report on the Hosek inquiry—which was indeed deliberating today; the connections were indeed in real time.

  Heather stuck through it, waiting for McGregor to return. And he did.

  Now, if there were only some way to get from this woman in Saskatchewan into McGregor, hundreds of kilometers away.

  This was live. McGregor was doing this right now.

  Meaning that he had to be perceiving the exact same words; what he was saying was precisely what the woman was hearing.

  Heather thought about her earli
er perspective shifts.

  Could she try something similar here?

  The Saskatchewan woman was listening to McGregor, but she was also idly thinking about how handsome he was, how trustworthy he sounded.

  Heather concentrated solely on the words McGregor was saying, defocused her eyes, and tried the Necker trick, reorienting her point of view, and—

  —and suddenly she was inside McGregor's mind!

  She'd found a way to take a step from one person to another; if an experience was directly shared, even at a great distance, the jump could be made.

  McGregor was in his anchor's chair, wearing a blue Newsworld blazer, reading the script off the TelePrompTer. He needed another touch of laser keratotomy; the text was a little blurry.

  While he was reading the news, he was concentrating exclusively on it. But as soon as he'd introduced the next story, he relaxed.

  The floor director said a few words to him. McGregor laughed. All sorts of thoughts were running through his head now.

  If the previous encounters had felt somewhat voyeuristic, this one was particularly so. Heather had never met McGregor, but she knew him as a presence in the media, as a face on her living-room wall.

  McGregor was thinking about a fight he'd had last night with his wife; he was also warring with himself over what to do about the discovery that his teenage son was smoking pot, trying to decide how indignant he could be about it when he himself had used marijuana during college. He also thought briefly about his contract negotiations—Heather was surprised to learn he made far less than she'd always assumed he did.

  Fascinating.

  But what was the next step?

  So far, she'd connected with other minds in the present. She could access what they were experiencing at this very instant.

  But surely there must be some way to access their memories, too—not just what they happened to be thinking of at any given moment, but a way, somehow, to ply their memories, search their pasts.

  She had tried talking to the individuals she was visiting, but that had not worked.

  And she'd tried controlling their actions. But that had failed, too.

  So there was no reason to think this would work, no reason to expect that she could leaf through memories.

  But she had to try. She had to know.

  What would Greg McGregor have a memory of?

  He was a newscaster; he'd remember famous events.

  And he'd know famous people!

  Six degrees of separation.

  Six degrees, tops.

  What would be the logical connection, a step closer to Kyle? Who would McGregor know that would be a way station on the path to her husband?

  The prime minister! Kyle didn't know her, but the chain leading down from her to him was obvious.

  Heather knew precisely what Susan Cowles looked like, of course. She'd seen her on TV a million times.

  She concentrated on her. Hard.

  The Right Honourable Susan M. Cowles.

  Canada's second woman prime minister.

  The Dominionatrix, as Time had dubbed her.

  Susan Cowles—in profile.

  Susan Cowles—head-on.

  Susan Cowles—from a distance.

  Susan Cowles—close up.

  Surely Greg McGregor must have met her, or at least have a mental image of her.

  But no—it apparently needed to be more than that. The jump from the woman in Saskatchewan to Greg McGregor had required a precise match, his perspective and hers coinciding exactly.

  Well, there was no way to know what Susan Cowles was doing at this very moment, unless, of course, she happened to be on the Parliamentary channel. But even if she was, McGregor wasn't watching that.

  But perhaps the match didn't have to be in real time. Perhaps if two people simply shared the same memory, a jump could be made. There were some things everyone had seen. The Hindenburg crash. The Zapruder film. The Challenger and Atlantis explosions. The Eiffel Tower toppling over.

  And surely everyone in Canada had to share certain memories of Susan Cowles. She was the first prime minister since Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act; she did it for four days, to quell the Longueil riots—the very thing the Hosek inquiry was now investigating. There wasn't a person in Canada who didn't have a precise memory of Susan Cowles uttering these words as she began one hundred hours of martial law: “The true north may be strong, but it won't be free again until I say so.” Surely McGregor must have that same image in his mind, surely—

  Yes! Yes, yes, yes! She'd accessed it: McGregor's own memory of that same speech.

  Heather concentrated on the speech, concentrated on the prime minister, defocused her mind, tried to force a Necker swap, and then—

  —and then, there she was, inside the mind of The Right Honourable Susan M. Cowles!

  She had found it—found the way to step from mind to mind. Access a memory depicting the desired person, force the person in the memory from the background into the foreground, and then—

  Violà!

  She was on the trail now, on her way to Kyle.

  Still, what an experience! A brush with history. Heather had been to the Federal Parliament chambers once, thirty years ago, on a high-school trip. They hadn't changed much—ornate, classy, dark wood, ineffably British.

  And Cowles was fascinating! And, Heather had to admit, she was also a bit of a personal hero. It was amazing to see through her eyes, and—

  Oh, my goodness!

  Heather suddenly realized it wasn't just personal privacy that was compromised by access to psychospace—it was national security as well. Without even thinking about it, she suddenly knew—knew—that despite prevailing public opinion to the contrary, Canada was going to oppose the United States in the upcoming UN vote on Colombian war-crimes trials.

  Heather cleared her mind, pushing the state secrets aside. This isn't where she needed to be right now, anyway. It was just a step on the road.

  She concentrated now on the premier of Ontario, Karl Lewandowski. It took a while, but she managed to come up with one of Cowles's memories of him—and was shocked to find out just how much the Conservative Cowles hated the Liberal Lewandowski.

  She concentrated hard, forcing another Necker translation.

  And now she was inside Lewandowski's mind.

  And from there she Neckered into the mind of the Minister of Education.

  And from there, to Donald Pitcairn, the slope-browed president of the University of Toronto.

  And from there—

  From there, at last, into the mind of Brian Kyle Graves.

  28

  Yes, it was Kyle.

  Heather knew it at once.

  First, there was the view Kyle's eyes were currently seeing: his office at U of T. Not the lab, but his actual wedge-shaped office, down the hall from the lab. Heather had been there a million times; there was no mistaking it. On one wall was a framed poster from the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors. Another poster showed an Allosaurus from the Royal Ontario Museum. His desk was piled high with paperite, but peeking out above one stack was a gold-framed holo of Heather herself. Kyle saw colors with a bit more of a blue tinge than Heather did. She smiled at the thought—no one had ever accused her husband of looking at the world through rose-colored glasses.

  Heather had thought she knew Kyle, but clearly what she knew was only the tiniest fraction, the tip of the iceberg, the shadow on the wall. He was so much more than she'd ever imagined—so complex, so introspective, so incredibly, intricately alive.

  Images kept flickering in and out at the periphery of Kyle's attention. Heather knew that the problem with Becky had been disturbing Kyle greatly, but she had no idea that it literally was constantly on his mind.

  Kyle's gaze dropped to his wristwatch. It was a beautiful Swiss digital; Heather had given it to him on their tenth wedding anniversary. Engraved on the backside, she knew, were the words:

  To Kyle—wonderful husband, wonderful fa
ther.

  Love, Heather

  But no echo of those words passed through Kyle's consciousness; he was simply consulting the time. It was 3:45 P.M.

  My God! thought Heather. Was it really that late? She'd been inside the construct for a total of five hours. She'd completely missed her own two-o'clock meeting.

  Kyle got up, evidently deciding it was time to leave for his class. The visual input bounced wildly as he stood, but it didn't seem the least disconcerting to Kyle, although Heather, with access only to his consciousness and not to whatever unconscious balance signals his inner ear was relaying, felt rather tossed about.

  It had been a sunny morning when Heather had entered the construct, and the forecast had called for sun to prevail for the rest of the day. But here, outside, on St. George Street, Kyle didn't see the day as bright or beautiful. It seemed dingy to him; Heather had heard the expression “living under a cloud” before, but she had never appreciated how true it could be.

  He continued along, past the carts and snack trucks pulled up to the curb selling hot dogs and knockwurst, or Chinese food—with, as if the cuisine could be uplifted thus, the bristol-board menus written exclusively in Chinese.

  Kyle paused. He pulled out his wallet, removed his SmartCash card, and to Heather's astonishment, walked up to a hotdog vendor.

  Kyle had been eating heart-smart ever since his coronary four years ago; he'd given up red meat, he ate—even though he really didn't like—lots of fish, he took aspirin every other day, and he'd replaced most of his beer with red wine.

  “The usual?” asked a voice with an Italian accent.

  The usual, thought Heather, chilled. The usual.

  Kyle nodded.

  Heather watched through Kyle's eyes as a little man plucked from the grill a dark-red dog, thick enough around to be a section out of the handle of a baseball bat, and put it in a poppy-seed bun. He then used the same tongs he'd employed to move the dog to scoop up a mound of fried onions and pile them on top.

  Kyle handed his card to the man, waited for the money to be transferred, pumped mustard and relish onto the dog, and then continued down the street, eating as he walked.

  The thing was, though, it didn't really give him any pleasure. He was disobeying his doctor's orders—and, yes, Heather could detect the pang of guilt about what she herself would think, if she only knew—but it wasn't making him any happier.