Factoring Humanity

She got out, stretched again, and let herself calm down a bit. And then she tried once more, climbing back into the construct and using the glass handle to close what she was already thinking of as “the cubic door.”

This time she just sat, letting her eyes adjust to the semidarkness and breathing the warm air.

Heather looked at the phosphorescent pattern on the panel in front of her, trying to make out any meaning in the design. Of course she’d had no way of knowing whether she’d oriented the construct the right way. She might have it on its side, or -

Or backward. That is, she could be sitting in it backward. The confines were too tight for her to turn around with the door closed. She removed the cubic door, swung her legs outside, swiveling on her butt. Once she was in place, facing the short end of the shaft instead of the long one, she pulled on the suction-cup handle to bring the cubic door — which was now on her right — into position.

She’d wrecked her night vision by opening the door again, so she sat waiting for her eyes to readjust.

And, slowly, they did.

In front of her were two circles. One was continuous, the other was broken into eight short arcs.

It came to her in a flash. The closed circle was “On,” quite literally a completed circuit. And the broken circle was “Off.”

She took a deep breath, then started to move her left hand forward.

“Alpha Centauri, here I come,” she said softly, and pressed her palm against the closed circle.

18

At first, nothing seemed to happen. But then Heather felt a sinking sensation in her stomach, as though she were in an elevator that was dropping rapidly down its shaft. A moment later her ears popped.

She smashed her fist against the stop button -

— and everything returned to normal.

Heather waited for her breathing to calm down. She tried the door, disengaging it slightly.

Okay: she could halt the process at any time, and she could get out at any time.

And so she resolved to try again. She closed her eyes, summoning inner strength, then pulled on the handle to reseal the door, and with an extended index finger, touched the center of the area on the panel in front of her circumscribed by the solid circle.

Heather’s stomach dropped away from her again, and her ears, not yet recovered enough from the last time to pop, ached a bit.

And in front of her, the constellations of phosphorescent squares started shifting, moving, rearranging, as -

As the unfolded hypercube she’d built began to close in on itself, moving ana or kata, collapsing into a tesseract, with Heather at its very heart.

She felt herself twisting, and although the landscape around her was all just apparently random patterns of piezoelectric paint, it seemed that the design visible in her left peripheral vision was the same one she could detect in her right. The straight edges of the square panels were bowing in and out, now convex, now concave. Heather looked down in the dim light at her body and saw it stretched and flattened, as if someone had painted an image of her on paper, then pasted that paper to the inside of a bowl.

And yet, except for the undeniable feeling of rapid motion in her stomach and the pressure shifts in her ears, and now and again stars before her eyes — also, she knew, a phenomenon associated with pressure shifts — there was no real discomfort. She could see her surroundings folding over and bending, and she could see herself doing the same things, but her bones were twisting without breaking.

The folding continued. The whole process took no more than a few seconds — judging by the runaway metronome of her heart pounding in her ears — but as it was happening, it seemed as though time were attenuated.

And then suddenly everything stopped moving. The transformation was complete: she was imprisoned in a tesseract.

No.

She fought for calmness. No, she wasn’t imprisoned. At every step, she’d been able to stop the process, to escape. The aliens, whoever they were, wouldn’t have gone to all this effort just to hurt her. She was still in control, she reminded herself. A willing visitor, not a prisoner.

But she felt there must be more to this than just the sensation of folding space over on itself. Surely the Centaurs hadn’t spent ten years telling humanity how to make a fancy amusement-park ride. There had to be more -

And there was.

Suddenly, the tesseract exploded open, the panels breaking apart at their edges. It happened like sped-up film of a flower blooming with grace and absolute quiet.

The panels seemed to recede into infinity, each one racing away in a different direction. Heather found herself floating freely.

But not in space.

At least, not in open space.

Heather stretched out, extending her limbs. There was air to breathe and multicolored light to see by.

She looked down at her body -

— and could not see it.

She could feel it — her proprioception was operating just fine. But she’d lost material form.

Which made her think that the whole thing was a hallucination.