Factoring Humanity

And now Heather and Kyle sat at opposite ends of the giant dining-room table. There were empty seats at either side; the one by the window had always been Becky’s; the one opposite — the chair never removed, even after all this time — had been Mary’s. Heather had made a pasta-salad casserole. It wasn’t one of Kyle’s favorite dishes — that would have been too much, would have sent the wrong signal. But it was a meal, she knew, that he didn’t mind. She served it with a French bread she’d picked up on her way home.

“How was work?” she asked.

Kyle took a forkful of the casserole before he replied. “Okay,” he said.

Heather tried to sound nonchalant. “Anything unusual happen?”

Kyle put down his fork and looked at her. He was used to the perfunctory question about how work had gone — Heather had asked it countless times over the years. But the follow-up clearly left him puzzled.

“No,” he said at last. “Nothing unusual.” He paused for a bit, then, as if such a strange question required more of an answer, added, “My class went fine, I guess. I don’t really remember — I had a headache.”

A headache, thought Heather.

Perhaps her intrusion had had an effect?

“Sorry to hear that,” she said. She was quiet for a moment, wondering if more probing would draw unwanted attention. But she had to know if she could explore further, deeper, with impunity. “Do you get a lot of headaches at work?”

“Sometimes. All that time staring at a computer screen.” He shrugged. “How was your day?”

She didn’t want to lie, but what could she say? That she’d spent the whole day sailing psychospace? That she’d invaded his mind?

“Fine,” she said.

She didn’t meet his eyes.

The next day, Saturday, August 12, Heather returned early to her office.

She brought the video camera with her and set it up on Omar Amir’s vacant desk. She would find out at last what happened externally when the hypercube folded up.

Heather then entered the central cube, pulled the door into place, and hit the start button.

She immediately entered Kyle’s mind — he was working today, too, over in his lab in Mullin Hall, attempting to solve the ongoing problems with his quantum computer.

She tried again, calling out “Rebecca” over and over, while conjuring various views of her.

Nothing.

Had he blocked her out so completely?

She tried calling up memories of Kyle’s brother Jon. Those appeared at once.

Why couldn’t she access his thoughts about Becky?

Becky! Not Rebecca. Becky. She tried again, seeing if the little-girl version of her name was the key.

There had to be countless recollections of his own daughter stored somewhere in his mind: memories of her as a baby, as a toddler, taking her off to daycare, his little Pumpkin…

Pumpkin!

She tried that, the name accompanied by mental pictures: Pumpkin.

And: Pumpkin!

And again: Pump-kin!

And there it was, a clear vision of his daughter — smiling, younger, happier.

That was it. She was in.

But, still, finding specific memories would not be easy. She could spend years poking through this archive of a lifetime.

What she wanted were memories of Kyle alone with Becky. She didn’t know how to access those — not yet. She had to start somewhere else, with something she herself was involved in. Something simple, something she could easily key into.

A family dinner, from a time before Mary had died, from before Kyle and Becky had moved out?

It couldn’t be something generic, like the poster on their kitchen wall, illustrating various types of pasta, or the black-and-green decor of their dining room. Those weren’t tied to specific memories; rather, they formed the backdrop of thousands of events.

No, she needed specific items from a specific meal. Food items: chicken — grilled chicken breast, basted with that barbecue sauce Kyle liked. And one of Kyle’s standard salads: shredded lettuce, little disks of carrot, chopped celery, low-fat mozzarella, and a hedonistic sprinkling of dry-roasted peanuts, tossed in a red-wine vinaigrette and served in a large Corelle bowl.

But they’d had that meal a hundred times. She needed something unique.

Something he’d been wearing — a Toronto Raptors sweatshirt, with that dribbling purple dinosaur on the front. But what might she have been wearing if he’d been wearing that? Let’s see: she usually wore a pantsuit to work, but when she’d get home, she’d change into jeans and — what? — a green shirt. No, no — her dark-blue shirt. She remembered once choosing that because it went well with Kyle’s sweatshirt — a fact that wouldn’t mean a thing to him, but did to her.

That room. That meal. That shirt.

Suddenly, it all clicked. She had accessed a specific dinner.

“ — tough meeting with Dejong.” Kyle’s voice, or at least his memory of the words. Dejong was the university’s comptroller. “We may have to cut back on the APE project.”

For a moment, Heather thought something was amiss — she had no recollection of that conversation.