Factoring Humanity

And maybe, quite unintentionally, those experiences did indeed resurface after a time. There was no need, until a few tens of thousands of years ago — the tiniest fraction of the time there had been life on Earth — for long-term suppression. Maybe no such skill had ever evolved.

Evolved.

Kyle considered the word, turned it over in his mind; he’d been thinking about it a lot lately since Cheetah’s revelation about how microtubular consciousness might indeed arise spontaneously through preadaptive evolution.

He looked at the various grave markers, with their crucifixes and praying hands.

Evolution could affect only those things that increased survival chances; by definition, it could never fine-tune responses to events that occurred after the last reproductive encounter… and, of course, death was always the final event.

In fact, Kyle couldn’t see any way that evolution could have produced a humane death for animals, no matter how big a percentage of the population would benefit from it. And yet -

And yet, if there was validity to human repressed memory, that capability must have come from somewhere. It could indeed be the work of the mechanism that let animals die peacefully even when they were being eaten alive.

If such a mechanism existed, that is.

And if it did, it meant that the universe did care, after all. Something beyond evolution had shaped life, had given it, if not meaning, at least freedom from torture.

Except for the torture that happened when the memories came back.

Kyle walked slowly back to the subway station. It was mid afternoon on a Friday; the trains arriving from downtown were packed with commuters escaping their corporate prisons. Kyle was teaching two summer courses, one of them, cruelly, met at 4:00 P.M. on Friday afternoon; he headed back to the university to give his final class of the week.

27

Heather continued to stare at the vast wall of hexagons, thinking, trying to keep her rationality from being overpowered by giddiness.

She decided to simply try again. She touched another hexagon.

And recoiled in horror.

The mind she entered was twisted, dark, every perception askew, every thought frayed and disjointed.

It was a man — again! White: that was important to him, his whiteness, his pureness. He was in a park, near an artificial lake. It was pitch dark. Heather assumed the connections she was making were in real time, meaning that this had to be somewhere other than North America; it was still afternoon here. Yet the man was thinking in French.

It was likely France or Belgium, then, rather than Quebec.

The man was hiding — lurking — behind a tree, waiting.

There was something wrong, though. Something straining, as if trying to burst out.

My God, thought Heather. An erection, bulging against his pants. So that’s what it feels like. Good grief!

Freud was wrong — envying that was impossible. The penis felt as though it was going to split along its length, a sausage bursting from its skin.

A woman was approaching, visible intermittently under the lamplight.

Young, pretty, white, wearing pink leather boots, walking alone.

He let her pass by and then -

And then he emerged from behind the trees and brought a knife to her throat, and she heard his voice. He spoke in French — and his accent was Parisian, not Québecois. Heather knew enough French to understand that he was saying she should not struggle, that she better make it good for him…

Heather couldn’t take it; she slammed her eyes closed, letting the construct reform around her. She felt helpless; frustrated. It was said that a woman was raped somewhere on Earth every eleven seconds — a meaningless statistic before. But this was going on right now.

She had to do something.

She took a deep breath, then opened her eyes again.

“Stop!”

Heather shouted it inside the cube.

Stop!

Heather screamed it with her mind.

And then, “Arrêt!”

Arrêt!

But the monster continued, hands now pawing the woman’s breasts through her bra.

Heather pulled her own arms back, trying to drag his with them.

But it was no good. Nothing she did had any effect on him. Heather was shaking with outrage and anger and fear, but the man continued, as oblivious to Heather’s cries as he was to those of his victim.

No — no, he wasn’t oblivious to the victim’s cries. Her whimpering was making him harder still -

Heather couldn’t stomach it.

The man tore at the woman’s panties, and -

— and Heather managed to visualize the precipitation, solute out of solvent, releasing herself from his malfunctioning, poisoned mind, returning to the wall of hexagons.

She closed her eyes, the construct rematerializing in her own mind, and leaned back against the rear substrate wall, waiting for her heart to stop pounding, waiting for her fury to subside, doing calming breathing exercises.

Whether Kyle was innocent or guilty, there was one truth that no one could doubt, no one could question. Men sometimes did horrible things, unspeakable things.

Her body continued to shake.