Factoring Humanity

But, gee, even with the lamps on for a short time, it was warm in here; Heather was sweating in her clothes. She locked her door and feeling slightly self-conscious, removed her blouse and slacks, stripping down to bra and panties. She then lifted off the door cube and scrunched herself into the construct’s body. Then she pulled on the suction-cup handle to reattach the door, waited for her eyes to adjust to the semidarkness, and reached forward and pressed the start button.

Her heart was pounding rapidly; it was just as exhilarating, just as terrifying, as yesterday.

But she was relieved to see that her guess had been right: she found herself floating just where she’d left off last time, next to the vast, curving surface of hexagons. Of course, whether that was their actual shape or simply a form given to them by Heather’s own mind, she had no way to know.

Despite the bizarreness, it all seemed far too real to be simply the result of piezoelectric discharges scrambling her brain. And yet, as a psychologist, Heather knew that hallucinations often seemed strikingly real — indeed, they could have a hyperreality, making the real world appear dull by comparison.

She looked at the hexagons, each perhaps two meters across. The only natural thing she could think of that was made of packed hexagons was honeycomb.

No, wait. Another image came to her. The Giant’s Causeway, in Northern Ireland — a vast field made up of hexagonal basalt columns.

Bees or lava? Either way, it was order out of chaos — and this regular arrangement of six-sided structures was the most orderly thing she’d yet encountered here.

The hexagons didn’t cover the entire inner surface of the sphere — there were vast tracts where none were visible. Still, even if they covered a portion of the surface, there must have been millions, if not billions, of them.

The view shifted again. It had Neckered into another configuration: the one she’d seen yesterday with two spheres, one now very close to hand, the other hugely far away. Forming the backdrop was the maelstrom — which, she now realized, had the same mix of colors as did the hexagons. She defocused and tried again. The image of the vast wall of hexagons reappeared.

If the hexagons and the maelstrom were really the same thing, just seen in different dimensional frameworks, then, seemingly, much energy was tied up in the hexagons. But what did each hexagon represent?

As she watched, one of the hexagons in front of her darkened suddenly to a black deeper than any she’d seen before. No light at all seemed to reflect from it. Indeed, at first she thought it didn’t exist anymore, but soon her eyes adjusted to its perfect ebony surface; it was still there.

Heather looked around to see if she could find any other missing hexagons. It didn’t take long to turn up another, and then another. But whether they had just turned black, or had been black for a long time, she couldn’t say.

Still, that the hexagons changed color made her think they might be pixels. And yet when she’d been flying over this landscape at a great height, no image had been apparent. Heather pursed her lips in frustration.

She continued to hover along the field of hexagons, passing over pockets of emptiness where there were no colored or black hexagons at all, just a silvery nothingness.

At the margins of one such area — a puddle of mercury, she thought — Heather saw a hexagon forming. It started as a point and then expanded rapidly outward to fill the available space, abutting on three sides against other hexagons, and against the silver abyss on its other sides.

What could the hexagons be?

She’d seen them born.

And she’d seen them die.

Just how many of the damn things were there?

Born.

Died.

Born.

Died.

A crazy thought hit her — maybe the kind of thought that was more likely to occur to a Jungian psychologist than to the average Joe, but crazy nonetheless.

It couldn’t be.

And yet…

If she was right, she knew exactly how many active hexagons there were.

Their number wasn’t countless — of that she felt sure. This wasn’t one of Kyle’s noncomputational problems; these weren’t infinite tiles, covering an infinite plane.

No, their number was knowable.

Her heart was thundering and fluttering simultaneously.

It was a flash of insight, but she felt in her bones that it was right. There must be something like — she strained to remember the quantity. Seven billion, four hundred million.

Plus or minus.

Give or take.

Seven billion, four hundred million.

The entire human population of planet Earth.

Jung made concrete; reality, not metaphor.

The collective unconscious.

The collective conscious.

The overmind.

She felt a surge of energy coursing through her system. It fit perfectly. Yes, what she was seeing was biological, but of a kind of biology she’d never encountered before, and on a scale more vast than she’d ever imagined.

She’d always known, down deep, that the construct hadn’t taken her anywhere. She was still in her office, on the second floor of Sid Smith.