Factoring Humanity

Heather approved of those who knew the difference between “can” and “may.”

“I certainly hope so,” she said, smiling. “I’m Heather Davis, from the Psych Department.”

“Somebody got a screw loose?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A joke — sorry. See, a shrink coming to see an engineer. We tighten loose screws all the time.”

Heather laughed a little.

“I’m Paul Komensky,” said the man. He extended his hand. Heather took it.

“I do need some engineering help,” Heather said. “I need something built.”

“What?”

“I’m not sure exactly. A bunch of prefabricated panels.”

“How big are the panels?”

“I don’t know.”

The engineer frowned — but Heather couldn’t tell if it was a “dumb woman” or “dumb artsy” frown. “That’s a little vague,” he said.

Heather smiled her most charming smile. Today the various engineering schools had fifty-percent female undergrads, but Komensky was old enough to remember when engineers were all horny men who would go days without seeing a female. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m working on the alien radio messages, and — ”

“I knew I knew you from somewhere! I saw you on TV — what show was that?”

Heather found the question embarrassing because she’d been on so many shows lately — but it sounded pompous to say that out loud.

“Something on Newsworld?” she offered tentatively.

“Yeah, maybe. So this has to do with the aliens?”

“I’m not sure — I think so. I want to make a series of tiles that represent the alien message grids.”

“How many messages are there?”

“Two thousand, eight hundred and thirty-two — at least, that many undecoded ones; they’re the only ones I want to make into tiles.”

“That’s a lot of tiles.”

“I know.”

“But you don’t know how big they should be?”

“No.”

“What should they be made out of?”

“Two different substances.” She handed him her datapad. Its screen showed two chemical formulas. “Can you synthesize them?”

He squinted at the display. “Sure — nothing difficult about them. You’re certain they’re solid at room temperature?”

Heather’s eyes went wide. She’d read all the papers on the chemicals ten years ago, when they’d first been synthesized, but hadn’t really thought about them much since. “I have no idea.”

“This one will be,” he said, pointing at the top formula. “That one… well, we’ll see. Are these formulas from the alien messages?”

Heather nodded. “From the first eleven pages. People have synthesized these compounds before, of course, but no one ever figured out what they were for.”

Komensky made an impressed face. “Interesting.”

She nodded. “I want the zero bits to be made of one of these substances, and the one bits made of the other.”

“You want one painted onto the other?”

“Painted? No, no, I thought you’d build them out of the two materials.”

Komensky frowned again. “I don’t know. That formula looks to me like it’ll be a liquid, but it might dry into a hard crust. See those oxygens and hydrogens? They could evaporate out as water, leaving a solid behind.”

“Oh. Well, then, yes — and that answers the big question I’d been unable to solve.”

“Which is?”

“Well, I was trying to figure out which substance represented the one bits and which one represented the zero bits. The ones are ‘on’ bits, so the paint must represent the ones; it must go on the — the — ”

“ ‘The substrate’ we call it in materials science.”

“The substrate, yes.” A pause. “How hard would it be to do that?”

“Well, again, it comes back to how big you want the tiles.”

“I don’t know. They’re not all the same size, but even the biggest shouldn’t be more than a few centimeters — I want to fit them together.”

“Fit them?”

“Yeah, you know — lay them side by side. See, if you arrange each group of fifty-nine tiles properly, they form a perfect square — there’s only one layout that’ll do that.”

“Why not just build the big panels instead of the individual tiles?”

“I don’t know — the tiling itself might be significant. I don’t want to make any assumptions.”

“Like the ‘on’ bits go ‘on’ the substrate?” His tone was one of gentle teasing.

Heather shrugged. “It’s as good a guess as any.”

He nodded, conceding the point. “So twenty-eight hundred tiles make up how many bigger squares?”

“Forty-eight.”

“And what are you going to do with the resulting squares?”

“Assemble them into cubes — and then assemble those cubes into an unfolded tesseract.”

“Really? Wow.”

“Yes.”

“Well, do you want the finished thing big enough so that you can crawl inside of one of the cubes?”

“No, that won’t be — ”

She stopped dead.

No scale specified. Nowhere in any of the messages did there seem to be anything suggesting a size for the construct.

Make it any size, the aliens seemed to be saying.

Make it your size.

“Yes, yes — that would be perfect! Big enough to go inside.”

“Well, okay — sure. We can build the substrate tiles, no problem. How thick should they be?”

“I don’t know. As thin as possible, I guess.”

“I can make them one molecule thick if that’s what you want.”

“Oh, not that thin. They’ll have to hold together. A millimeter or two, maybe.”