Factoring Humanity

“But that’s the kind of thing I do every night I get up. Sometimes I watch The Six Million Dollar Man, sometimes The John Pellatt Show. And I look at The Weather Channel, see what it’s going to be like tomorrow. They said it was going to rain today, but it didn’t.”

Oh, yes, it did, thought Heather. It came down in fucking buckets.

2

The University of Toronto — the self-styled Harvard of the North — was established in 1827. Some fifty thousand full-time students were enrolled there. The main campus was downtown, not surprisingly anchored at the intersection of University Avenue and College Street. But although there was a traditional central campus, U of T also spilled out into the city proper, lining St. George Street and several other roads with a hodgepodge of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and early twenty-first-century architecture.

The university’s most distinctive landmark was the Robarts Library — often called “Fort Book” by students — a massive, complex concrete structure. Kyle Graves had lived in Toronto all of his forty-five years. Still, it was only recently that he’d seen an architect’s model of the campus and realized that the library was shaped like a concrete peacock, with the hooded Thomas Fisher rare-books tower rising up as a beaked neck in front and two vast wings spreading out behind.

Unfortunately, there was no place on campus where you could look down on Robarts to appreciate the design. U of T did have three associated theological colleges — Emmanuel, affiliated with the United Church of Canada; the Presbyterian Knox; and the Anglican Wycliffe. Perhaps the peacock was meant to be seen only by God or visitors from space: sort of a Canadian Plains of Nazca.

Kyle and Heather had separated shortly after Mary’s suicide; it had been too much for both of them, and their frustration over not understanding what had happened had spilled out in all sorts of ways. The apartment Kyle lived in now was a short walk from Downsview subway station in suburban Toronto. He’d taken the subway down to St. George station this morning and was now walking the short distance south to Dennis Mullin Hall, which was located at 91 St. George Street, directly across the road from the Robarts Library.

He passed the Bata Shoe Museum — the world’s largest museum devoted to footwear, housed in another miracle of twentieth-century design: a building that looked like a slightly squashed shoebox. One of these days he’d actually go inside. In the distance, down at the lakeshore, he could see the CN Tower — no longer the world’s tallest freestanding structure, but still one of its most elegant.

After about two minutes, Kyle reached Mullin Hall, the new four-story circular building that housed the Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computing Department. Kyle entered through the main sliding-glass doors. His lab was on the third floor, but he took the stairs instead of the waiting elevator. Ever since his heart attack, four years ago, he’d made a point of getting little bits of exercise whenever he could. He remembered when he used to huff and puff after just two flights of stairs, but today he emerged without breathing hard at all. He headed down the corridor, the open atrium on his left, until he reached his lab. He pressed his thumb against the scanning plate, and the door slid open.

“Good morning, Dr. Graves,” said a rough male voice as he entered the lab.

“Good morning, Cheetah.”

“I have a new joke for you. Dr. Graves.”

Kyle took off his hat and hung it on the old wooden coat rack — universities never threw anything out; this one must have dated back to the 1950s. He started the coffeemaker, then took a seat in front of a computer console, its front panel banked at forty-five degrees. In the center of the panel were two small lenses that tracked in unison like eyes.

“There’s this French physicist, see,” said Cheetah’s Voice, coming from a speaker grille below the mechanical eyes. “This guy’s working at CERN and he’s devised an experiment to test a new theory. He starts up the particle accelerator and waits for the results of the collision he’s arranged. When the experiment is over, he rushes out of the control room into the corridor, holding a printout showing the trails of the resulting particles. There, he runs into another scientist. And the other scientist says to him, ‘Jacques,’ he says, ‘did you get the two particles you were expecting?’ And Jacques points first to one particle trail and then to the other and exclaims: ‘Mais oui! Higgs boson! Quark!’ ”

Kyle stared at the pair of lenses.

Cheetah repeated the punch line: “Mais oui! Higgs boson! Quark!”

“I don’t get it,” said Kyle.

“A Higgs boson is a particle with zero charge and no intrinsic spin; a quark is a fundamental constituent of protons and neutrons.”

“I know what they are, for Pete’s sake. But I don’t see why the joke is funny.”