Factoring Humanity

by Неизвестный

  He used to eat that way, of course. Before the heart attack. Never thought it could happen to him.

  But now. . . now he should care. He should be trying to look after himself.

  The usual.

  The thought was there, just below the surface.

  He didn't care anymore.

  Didn't care whether he lived or died.

  The hot juice from the dog burned the roof of his mouth.

  But the pain was lost against the constant background agony of Kyle Graves's life.

  Heather felt monumentally guilty about the way she was invading her husband's privacy. She'd never dreamed of spying on him, but now she was doing more than that. In a very real sense, she had become him, experiencing everything he did.

  Kyle continued down St. George until he came to Willcocks, then he walked the short block west to New College. Three students said “Hi” to him as he made his way inside; Kyle acknowledged them without recognizing them. His lecture hall was large and oddly shaped, more rhomboid than rectangular.

  Kyle moved to the front. A student came down, obviously hoping to get a word with him before class began.

  Kyle looked up at the her and—

  What a babe.

  Heather was angered by the thought.

  And then she herself looked at the girl.

  “Babe” was right. She had to be nineteen or twenty, but she looked no more than sixteen. Still, she was attractive—streaked blond hair in an elaborate do, big blue eyes, bright-red lips.

  “Professor Graves, about that assignment you gave us?”

  “Yes, Cassie?”

  He hadn't known the names of any of the students who greeted him in the corridor, but this one he knew.

  “I'm wondering if we have to use Durkan's model of AI sentience, or if we can base it on Muhammed's model instead?”

  Heather knew from recent Swiss Chalet conversations with Kyle that Muhammed's approach was very cutting-edge. Kyle should be impressed by that question.

  Babe, he thought again.

  “You can use Muhammed's, but you'll have to take into account Segal's critique.”

  “Thank you, Professor.” She smiled a megawatt smile and turned to go. Kyle's gaze watched her tight little rump as she walked up the steps to one of the middle rows of seats.

  Heather was bewildered. She'd never heard Kyle make an inappropriate remark about any student.

  And this one, this one of all of them, was so youthful, so much like a child pretending to be an adult.

  Kyle began presenting his lesson. He did it on automatic; he'd never been an inspired teacher, and he knew that. His strength was research. While he trudged through the material he'd prepared, Heather, now oriented in his mind, decided to press on. She'd come to the precipice, but, she realized now, she'd been hesitating before jumping over.

  But it was time.

  She'd come this far—finding the right mind out of seven billion possibilities. She couldn't give up now.

  She steeled herself.

  Rebecca.

  She concentrated on the name, while calling up an image.

  Rebecca.

  Harder and harder, shouting it with her mind, building up a good, concrete rendition of her face.

  Rebecca!

  She tried once more, rivaling Stanley Kowalski's shout of “Stella!”

  Rebecca!

  Nothing. Simply demanding the memories didn't bring them forth. She'd had earlier success concentrating on people, but for some reason, Kyle's past memories of Rebecca were blocked.

  Or repressed?

  There had to be a way. True, her brain wasn't hardwired for accessing external memories—but it was an adaptable, flexible instrument. It was simply a question of finding the right technique, the right metaphor.

  Metaphor. She had interfaced her own mind with Kyle's. Still, she had no control over his body—she'd failed to get that French rapist to stop, and now she attempted something more subtle, trying to get Kyle to glance at the floor for a moment. But it didn't work. His eyes simply roamed over the students, without really connecting with any of them. The metaphor her mind had adopted for her current circumstances was that of a passenger, riding behind Kyle's eyes. It had seemed a natural way of organizing the experience. But surely it wasn't the only way. Surely there was another, more active method.

  She kept trying to access what she'd come for, but except for the fleeting, harsh images of an accusing Becky that forever danced at the edges of his consciousness, Heather could find none of Kyle's memories of his younger daughter.

  29

  Frustrated, Heather left the construct. She visited the bathroom, then called Kyle's office, leaving voice mail asking him to meet her for dinner tonight—Friday—instead of their usual Monday-evening get—together at the Swiss Chalet. She was desperate to know if her intrusion into his mind had been detectable by him in any way.

  They arranged to meet at nine. With that much time, Heather decided she could prepare a meal for both of them, so she suggested, tentatively, that Kyle come by the house. He sounded surprised, but said that would be fine. She also asked him if she could borrow back their video camera. He made a silly joke—why did guys always think video cameras were going to be used for raunchy purposes?—but agreed to bring it with him.

  And now Heather and Kyle sat at opposite ends of the giant dining-room table. There were empty seats at either side; the one by the window had always been Becky's; the one opposite—the chair never removed, even after all this time—had been Mary's. Heather had made a pasta-salad casserole. It wasn't one of Kyle's favorite dishes—that would have been too much, would have sent the wrong signal. But it was a meal, she knew, that he didn't mind. She served it with a French bread she'd picked up on her way home.

  “How was work?” she asked.

  Kyle took a forkful of the casserole before he replied. “Okay,” he said.

  Heather tried to sound nonchalant. “Anything unusual happen?”

  Kyle put down his fork and looked at her. He was used to the perfunctory question about how work had gone—Heather had asked it countless times over the years. But the follow-up clearly left him puzzled.

  “No,” he said at last. “Nothing unusual.” He paused for a bit, then, as if such a strange question required more of an answer, added, “My class went fine, I guess. I don't really remember—I had a headache.”

  A headache, thought Heather.

  Perhaps her intrusion had had an effect?

  “Sorry to hear that,” she said. She was quiet for a moment, wondering if more probing would draw unwanted attention. But she had to know if she could explore further, deeper, with impunity. “Do you get a lot of headaches at work?”

  “Sometimes. All that time staring at a computer screen.” He shrugged. “How was your day?”

  She didn't want to lie, but what could she say? That she'd spent the whole day sailing psychospace? That she'd invaded his mind?

  “Fine,” she said.

  She didn't meet his eyes.

  The next day, Saturday, August 12, Heather returned early to her office.

  She brought the video camera with her and set it up on Omar Amir's vacant desk. She would find out at last what happened externally when the hypercube folded up.

  Heather then entered the central cube, pulled the door into place, and hit the start button.

  She immediately entered Kyle's mind—he was working today, too, over in his lab in Mullin Hall, attempting to solve the ongoing problems with his quantum computer.

  She tried again, calling out “Rebecca” over and over, while conjuring various views of her.

  Nothing.

  Had he blocked her out so completely?

  She tried calling up memories of Kyle's brother Jon. Those appeared at once.

  Why couldn't she access his thoughts about Becky?

  Becky! Not Rebecca. Becky. She tried again, seeing if the little-girl version of her name was the key.

  There had to be c
ountless recollections of his own daughter stored somewhere in his mind: memories of her as a baby, as a toddler, taking her off to daycare, his little Pumpkin. . .

  Pumpkin!

  She tried that, the name accompanied by mental pictures: Pumpkin.

  And: Pumpkin!

  And again: Pump-kin!

  And there it was, a clear vision of his daughter—smiling, younger, happier.

  That was it. She was in.

  But, still, finding specific memories would not be easy. She could spend years poking through this archive of a lifetime.

  What she wanted were memories of Kyle alone with Becky. She didn't know how to access those—not yet. She had to start somewhere else, with something she herself was involved in. Something simple, something she could easily key into.

  A family dinner, from a time before Mary had died, from before Kyle and Becky had moved out?

  It couldn't be something generic, like the poster on their kitchen wall, illustrating various types of pasta, or the black-and-green decor of their dining room. Those weren't tied to specific memories; rather, they formed the backdrop of thousands of events.

  No, she needed specific items from a specific meal. Food items: chicken—grilled chicken breast, basted with that barbecue sauce Kyle liked. And one of Kyle's standard salads: shredded lettuce, little disks of carrot, chopped celery, low-fat mozzarella, and a hedonistic sprinkling of dry-roasted peanuts, tossed in a red-wine vinaigrette and served in a large Corelle bowl.

  But they'd had that meal a hundred times. She needed something unique.

  Something he'd been wearing—a Toronto Raptors sweatshirt, with that dribbling purple dinosaur on the front. But what might she have been wearing if he'd been wearing that? Let's see: she usually wore a pantsuit to work, but when she'd get home, she'd change into jeans and—what?—a green shirt. No, no—her dark-blue shirt. She remembered once choosing that because it went well with Kyle's sweatshirt—a fact that wouldn't mean a thing to him, but did to her.

  That room. That meal. That shirt.

  Suddenly, it all clicked. She had accessed a specific dinner.

  “—tough meeting with Dejong.” Kyle's voice, or at least his memory of the words. Dejong was the university's comptroller. “We may have to cut back on the APE project.”

  For a moment, Heather thought something was amiss—she had no recollection of that conversation.

  No, she'd doubtless tuned it out at the time; Kyle often lamented budget cuts. Heather felt chastened—it had been important to him, and she'd paid no attention. But after a moment, Kyle began mentioning Dejong's problems with his wife, and Heather did recognize the exchange. Was she that shallow, ignoring the serious problem and homing in on the gossip?

  It was startling to see herself as Kyle saw her. For one thing—God bless him—she looked perhaps ten years younger than she really was; she hadn't had that shirt long enough for him to ever have seen her in it looking this young.

  Becky came in and took a chair. She had much longer hair back then, tumbling halfway down her back.

  “'Evening, Pumpkin,” said Kyle.

  Becky smiled.

  They had been a family once. It pained Heather to be reminded of what they'd lost.

  But now she had an image of Becky to lock onto. She used it as a starting point to explore her husband's memories of Becky. She could, of course, jump into Becky's mind from his, but how would she ever justify that? Although violating Kyle's privacy was wrong—she knew that and hated herself for doing it—there was a reason for it. But to invade Becky's mind. . .

  No, no, she wouldn't do that—especially since as yet she didn't know if there was any way to distinguish false memories from real ones. She'd continue her searching, her archeology, here, in Kyle's mind. He was the one on trial.

  She pressed on, wondering what the verdict would be.

  Kyle arrived at the lab early Monday morning. As he left the elevator on the third floor and came around the curve of the corridor, his heart jumped. An Asian woman was leaning against the railing around the edge of the atrium.

  “Good morning, Dr. Graves.”

  “Ah, good morning,—um—”

  “Chikamatsu.”

  “Yes, of course, Ms. Chikamatsu.” This dark-gray suit looked even more expensive than the one she had worn last time.

  “You have not returned my phone calls and you have not replied to my e-mail messages.”

  “Sorry about that. I've been rather busy. And I haven't solved the problem yet. We've stabilized the Dembinski fields, but we're still getting massive decoherence.” Kyle pressed his thumb against the scanning plate by the lab door. It bleeped in acknowledgment and the door bolt snapped free, sounding like a gunshot.

  “ 'Morning, Dr. Graves,” said Cheetah, who had been left running since Saturday. “I've got another joke for—oh, forgive me, I didn't realize you had anyone with you.”

  Kyle put his hat on the ancient rack; he always wore a hat in the summer, to protect his bald spot.

  “Cheetah, this is Ms. Chikamatsu.”

  Cheetah's eyes whirred into focus. “Pleased to meet you, Ms. Chikamatsu.”

  Chikamatsu lifted her thin eyebrows, perplexed.

  “Cheetah is an APE,” said Kyle. “You know, a computer simulation that apes humanity.”

  “I really do find the use of the term 'ape' offensive,” said Cheetah.

  Kyle smiled. “See? Genuine-sounding indignation. I programmed that myself. It's the first thing you need in a university environment: the ability to take offense at any slight, real or imagined.”

  The opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth issued from Cheetah's speakers.

  “What was that?” asked Chikamatsu.

  “His laughter. I'm going to fix that at some point.”

  “Yeah,” said Cheetah. “Get rid of those Vienna string instruments. How about a woodwind instead? Maybe a Bonn oboe?”

  “What?” said Kyle. “Oh. I get it.” He looked at Chikamatsu. “Cheetah is trying to master humor.”

  “Bonn oboe?” repeated the woman.

  Kyle grinned despite himself. “Bonn is where Beethoven was born; a bonobo is a pygmy chimp—an APE, see?”

  The Japanese woman shook her head, perplexed. “If you say so. Now, about my consortium's offer? We know you will be busy once you do make your breakthrough; we want you to give us a commitment to immediately deal with our problem.”

  Kyle busied himself with the coffeemaker. “My wife, she really thinks that whatever Huneker detected belongs to all of humanity—and I guess I agree. I'd gladly undertake to decode the message for you, but I won't sign an NDA about its contents.”

  Chikamatsu frowned. “I am empowered to sweeten the deal. We can offer you a three-percent royalty—”

  “It's not that. Really, it's not.”

  “We will have to approach Dr. Saperstein, then.”

  Kyle gritted his teeth. “I understand that.” But then he smiled. “Tell Shlomo I say hi.” Let Saperstein know that they came to me first—that he was getting my discards.

  “I really wish you would reconsider,” said Chikamatsu.

  “I'm sorry.”

  “If you change your mind,” she said, proffering a plastic business card, “call me.” Kyle took the card and glanced at it. It had only the word “Chikamatsu” printed on it, but there was a magstripe along one edge. “I will be at the Royal York for another two days—but swipe that card through any phone anywhere in the world and it will call my cellular at my expense.”

  “I won't change my mind,” said Kyle.

  Chikamatsu nodded and headed for the door.

  “What was that all about?” asked Cheetah after she was gone.

  Kyle did his best Bogart. “The shtuff that dreams are made of.”

  “Pardon?” said Cheetah.

  Kyle rolled his eyes. “Kids today,” he said.

  30

  Heather found all sorts of memories of Becky in Kyle's mind, but none of them were rele
vant to Becky's accusation.

  Heather went as long as she could in psychospace between bathroom breaks, but on one of the breaks she watched the videotape through the viewfinder on the camcorder.

  To her astonishment, the collection of cubes did shimmer—both the paint and the substrate aglow—and then the components seemed to recede, each constituent cube twisting free as it did so.

  And then, incredibly, it was gone.

  She fast-forwarded, watched it bloom into existence again out of nothingness.

  Amazing.

  It really did fold up kata or ana; it really did transcend to another realm.

  Heather kept searching throughout the weekend, encountering many aspects of Kyle. Although she was concentrating on his thoughts about his daughters, she also encountered memories of his work, of their marriage—and of her. Apparently he didn't always see her with uncritical eyes. Corrugated thighs indeed!

  It was illuminating, fascinating, compelling. There was so much more she wanted to learn about him.

  But she could not tarry. She was on a mission.

  And, finally, at last, on Monday morning, she found what she was looking for.

  She was scared, not wanting to go on.

  The rape of that anonymous French woman haunted her still, but this—

  This, if what she feared were true—

  This would haunt her, scar her, disgust her, make her homicidally enraged.

  And, she knew, she'd never be able to wash the images from her mind.

  But it was what she'd been looking for—of that there could be no doubt.

  Nighttime. Becky's bedroom, illuminated by light from the street coming in around the edges of her venetian blinds. On the wall, difficult to make out in the wan illumination, was a holoposter of Cutthroat Jenkins, a rock star Becky had idolized when she was fourteen or so.

  The view was from Kyle's point of view. He was standing on the threshold of the room. The corridor he was in was dark. He could see Becky lying in the bed, beneath the heavy green comforter she'd had then. Becky was awake. She looked up at him. Heather expected to see fear, or revulsion, or even melancholy resignation on her face, but to her shock, Becky smiled: a glint in the night; she'd worn braces back then.