Factoring Humanity

The air seemed no thicker than regular air, and yet she found she could swim in it, paddling with cupped hands or kicking with her feet.

It hit her: If the panels had receded, so had the stop button. Adrenaline coursed through her. Dammit, how could she have been so stupid?

No. No. There’s no such thing as an out-of-body experience. It had to be a hallucination of some sort — meaning that she was still in the unfolded construct, still hunched over in that confined space.

And the stop button had to still be in front of her — a short distance ahead, to the right of center.

She reached an arm forward.

Nothing.

Another wave of panic washed over her. It had to be there.

She closed her eyes.

And a half-second after she did so, a mental image of the interior of the construct formed around her, looking, in her mind’s eye, just as it had at the beginning.

She opened her eyes, and the construct disappeared; closed her eyes, and it reappeared. There was a slight delay — more than enough for persistence of vision to decay — before each switch-over occurred.

So it was an illusion. She closed her eyes, let the construct reappear in her mind, reached forward, pressed the stop button, opened her eyes, saw the panels come rushing back in, then felt the hypercube unfolding around her — bowing and bending, a reversing of the previous dance.

After a minute, the view with eyes open and closed was identical: the construct had reintegrated. She was back in her office, back at the university — she knew it in her bones. Still, to prove it absolutely, she operated the cubic door — she was getting adept at disengaging it — and stepped outside. Light from the stage lamps stung her eyes.

All right: She could return home whenever she wanted. Now it was time to explore.

She got back in, pulled the door into place, took a deep breath, and pressed the start button.

And the hypercube folded up around her once more.

19

Kyle entered his lab the next morning and took Cheetah out of Suspend mode.

“ ’Morning, Dr. Graves.”

“ ’Morning, Cheetah.” Kyle brought up his e-mail on another console.

Cheetah waited, perhaps anticipating a further comment from Kyle on his informal greeting. But then after a moment, he said, “I’ve been wondering, Dr. Graves. If you succeed in creating a quantum computer, how will that affect me?”

Kyle looked over at the mechanical eyes. “How do you mean?”

“Are you going to abandon the APE project?”

“I’m not going to have you dismantled, if that’s what you mean.”

“But I will no longer be a priority, will I?”

Kyle considered how to respond. Finally, with a little shrug, he said, “No.”

“That is a mistake,” said Cheetah, his tone even.

Kyle let his gaze wander over the angled console. For a second, he expected to hear the sound of the door bolt locking shut. “Oh?” he said.

“You are missing the logical next step in quantum computing, which would be to press on into creating synthetic quantum consciousness.”

“Ah,” said Kyle. “The coveted SQC.” But then a memory came to him, and he lifted his eyebrows. “Oh — you mean Penrose and all that shit, right?”

“It is not shit, Dr. Graves. I know it has been two decades since Roger Penrose’s ideas in this area have had much currency, but I have reviewed them and they make sense to me.”

In 1989, Penrose, a math prof at Oxford, published a book called The Emperor’s New Mind. In it, he proposed that human consciousness was quantum mechanical in nature. At that time, though, he couldn’t point to any part of the brain that might operate by quantum-mechanical principles. Kyle had started his studies at U of T just after that book came out; a lot of people were talking about it then, but Penrose’s stance had seemed to Kyle just a wild assertion.

Then a few years later, an M.D. named Stuart Hameroff tracked Penrose down. He’d identified precisely what Penrose needed: a portion of the brain’s anatomy that seemed to operate quantum mechanically. Penrose elaborated on this in his 1994 book Shadows of the Mind.

“But Penrose was nuts,” said Kyle. “He and that other guy were proposing — what was it now? — some part of the cytoskeleton of cells as the actual site of consciousness.”

Cheetah lit his LEDs in a nod. “Microtubules, to be precise,” he said. “Each protein molecule in a microtubule has a slot in it, and a single free electron can slide to and fro in that slot.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Kyle dismissively. “And an electron that can be in multiple positions is the classic quantum-mechanical example; it’s possibly here, or possibly there, or possibly somewhere in between, and until you measure it, the wave front never collapses. But Cheetah, it’s a big leap from finding some indeterminate electrons to explaining consciousness.”