Factoring Humanity

And suddenly, incredibly, everything was different. Heather gasped.

The spheres were now two great bowls joined at their rims — as if Heather were now inside a giant ball, everything turned inside out.

The inner surface of the ball now seemed to be granular, almost like the surface of a star — again, she thought perhaps she was somehow seeing a vision of the Centauri system, despite the pulsing biological feel it all had.

She now seemed to be drifting backward — another perspective shift. She rotated around, swimming through space, so that she was facing in the direction of apparent movement. As she got closer to the surface, she saw that the granularity was made up of millions of hexagons, packed tightly together.

As she watched, one of the hexagons began to recede away, forming a long, deep tunnel. As it elongated, Heather could see its sides grow slick, then iridescent — and she realized that from her new perspective, she was seeing one of the snakes from the inside. Eventually the tunnel pinched off, presumably as the snake broke free from the surface.

At last she was within a few hundred meters of the vast, curving wall.

She was woozy, disoriented — as if she’d spun around on her heels over and over again, making herself dizzy. She was dying to explore some more, but — God damn it, what an unfortunate intrusion of reality! She had to urinate. She hoped that when she next returned, it would be back here, at this spot, not at where she’d begun from. It would be awkward making progress in her explorations if she always entered this wondrous realm at the same place.

She closed her eyes, waited for the vision of the construct to appear in her mind, touched the stop button, and staggered out into the oddly angular world she called home.

21

When Heather left her office and entered the corridor, she was shocked to see through the window at the end of the hall that it was nighttime. She looked at her watch.

Eleven P.M.!

Heather entered the staff women’s washroom, its door yielding to her thumbprint. She sat on the toilet, which had a refreshing solidness to it, contemplating everything that had happened. Her first thought was to tell everyone what she’d discovered — to go running through the campus shouting “Eureka!”

But she knew she had to contain herself. This was the breakthrough that could earn her not just a full professorship (and tenure!) at U of T, but at any university she wanted, anywhere in the world. She needed to delay making her announcement until she knew what she was dealing with, but not so long that someone else would scoop her. She’d lived enough years in the world of publish-or-perish to know that tipping one’s hand at the wrong point was the difference between a Nobel Prize and nothing.

Discovering what that strange realm was would be the real breakthrough; that’s what the public would want to know.

She finished in the washroom, then headed out into the corridor. Damn, but she was tired. She desperately wanted to take another journey — if “journey” was the right word for a trip that didn’t actually go anywhere.

Or did it? She’d have to get a video camera and record the proceedings; Kyle currently had the camera that belonged jointly to them. Maybe the hypercube did indeed fold up in a spectacular display of special effects — and maybe she really did go where no one had gone before.

But -

Heather was fighting to stifle a yawn, fighting to convince herself that she wasn’t bone tired. But she was still sleep-deprived from yesterday’s late-night session building the construct.

She reentered her office, startled, as always, by how bright and warm it was with the stage lamps on, and taken aback by the green phosphorescence of the paint.

That strange word Paul had used to describe the paint kept running through Heather’s mind: piezoelectric.

It wasn’t just that it was funny-sounding. No, there was more to it than that. She’d heard it once before; of that much she was certain. But where?

It couldn’t have been in a geological context — Heather had never taken a course in that subject, and she had no friends who worked in the Geology Department.

No, she was sure that wherever she’d heard it, it had had something to do with psychology.

She went to her desk, fought back another yawn, and accessed the Web.

And could find nothing at all on the topic. Finally, she consulted an online dictionary and discovered she’d been spelling the word wrong — it was P-I-E-Z-O, not P-Y-E-E-Z-O, although she thought her version came closer to transcribing the sound Paul had made.

Suddenly her screen was filled with references: papers from the United States Geological Survey, reports from various mining firms, even a poem whose author had rhymed “piezoelectricity” with “government duplicity.”