Factoring Humanity

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 -