Factoring Humanity

The phone rang in Heather’s office. She glanced at the call-display readout; it was an internal U of T call. That was a relief: she was getting tired of the media. But then, it seemed, they had gotten tired of her, too; the cessation of the alien messages was already old news, and reporters seemed to be leaving her alone now. Heather picked up the handset. “Hello?”

“Hi, Heather. It’s Paul Komensky, over at the CAM lab.”

“Hello, Paul.”

“It’s good to hear your voice.”

“Ah, yours, too, thanks.”

Silence, then: “I, ah, I’ve got those substances ready you asked me to mix up.”

“That’s great! Thank you.”

“Yeah. The substrate, it’s unremarkable, essentially just a polystyrene. But the other stuff, well, I was right. It is a liquid at room temperature, but it does dry — into a thin, crystalline film.”

“Really?”

“And it’s piezoelectric.”

“Pi — pi — what?”

“Piezoelectric. It means that when you put it under stress, it generates electricity.”

“Really?”

“Not much, but some.”

“Fascinating!”

“It’s not all that unusual, really; it happens a lot in various minerals. But I wasn’t expecting it. The crystals this stuff dries to are actually similar to what we call relaxor ferroelectrics. That’s a special kind of piezoelectric crystal that can deform — that is, change shape — ten times as much as standard piezoelectric crystals do.”

“Piezoelectric,” Heather said softly. She used her fingertip to write the word on her datapad. “I’ve read something about that — can’t offhand think where, though. Anyway, can you make the tiles now?”

“Sure.”

“How long will it take?”

“The whole run? About a day.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Can you do it for me?”

“Sure.” A pause. “But why not come over here? I want to show you the apparatus, make sure it’s going to produce exactly what you want. Then we can start the run, and then maybe grab some lunch?”

Heather hesitated for a moment, then: “Sure. Sure thing. I’m on my way.”

The manufacturing equipment was simple.

Spread out across the floor of Paul Komensky’s lab was a piece of the substrate material measuring about three meters on a side; two additional panels were leaning against one wall, almost touching the ceiling.

The substrate was a dark green color, like computer circuit boards. And sitting on top of the substrate sheet was a small robot the size of a shoebox, with a cylindrical tank attached to its back.

Heather was standing next to Paul. A computer monitor beside him showed the twelfth radio message — the first one after the basic math and chemistry lessons.

“We just activate the robot,” Paul said, “and it starts moving over the surface of the substrate. See that tank? It contains the second chemical — the liquid. The robot sprays on the chemical in the pattern indicated on the monitor, there. Then it uses a laser to cut the tile out of the substrate. It then flips over the tile and paints the same pattern on the other side; I’ve got it set to do it in exactly the same orientation, so that if the substrate were clear, the patterns would line up perfectly. It then uses one of its little manipulators to place the tile in those boxes over there.

He hit a button, and the robot proceeded to do just as he’d described, producing a rectangular tile measuring about ten centimeters by fifteen centimeters. Heather smiled.

“It’ll take about a day to cut the tiles, and when it’s done, all the tiles will be stored, in the order in which they should be snapped together, in the boxes.”

“What if I drop the box?”

Komensky smiled. “You know, my older brother did that once. His very first computing course was in high school in the early nineteen seventies. They did everything on punch cards back then. He wrote a program to print out a pinup of Farrah Fawcett — remember her? It was all made by printed characters — asterisks, dollar signs, slashes — simulating a halftone photo if you got far enough away from it. He spent months on it and then he dropped the damn box of cards, and they got completely scrambled.” He shuddered. “Anyway, the robot is putting little serial-number stickers on the back of each tile. They’re done with Post-it adhesive — if you want them off later, they’ll peel off easily.” He got the first tile out of the box and showed the label to Heather.

She smiled. “You think of everything.”

“I’m trying to.” The robot was motoring along; it had done six more tiles already. “Now, how about lunch?”

They were eating in the Faculty Club, which was at 41 Willcocks Street, just around the corner from Sid Smith. The dining room was decorated in a Wedgwood design: blue-gray walls with rococo white friezes. Heather was resting her elbows on the white tablecloth, intertwining her fingers in front of her face. She realized she was essentially holding her wedding ring out as a shield. That was the problem with being a psychologist, she reflected: you couldn’t do anything without being self-conscious about it.