Factoring Humanity

The lab’s door chime sounded. Two grad students were working in the lab along with Kyle. One of them went to the door, which opened for him.

“I’d like to see Professor Graves,” said the man who was revealed on the other side of the doorway.

Kyle looked up. “Mr. Cash, isn’t it?” he said, crossing the room, hand extended.

“That’s right. I hope you don’t mind me coming by without an appointment, but — ”

“No, no. Not at all.”

“Is there somewhere we can talk?”

“My office,” said Kyle. He turned to one of the grad students. “Pietro, see if you can make some headway on the indeterminacy bug, would you? I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

The student nodded, and Kyle and Cash headed down the curving corridor to Kyle’s wedge of an office. When they entered, Kyle bustled about cleaning off the second chair, while Cash admired the Allosaurus poster.

“Sorry about the mess,” said Kyle. Cash folded his angular form into the chair.

“You’ve had a weekend, Professor Graves. I’m hoping you’ve had a chance to consider the Banking Association’s offer.”

Kyle nodded. “I have thought about it, yes.”

Cash waited patiently.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Cash. I really don’t want to leave the university. This place has been very good to me over the years.”

Cash nodded. “I know you met your wife here, and you did all three of your degrees here.”

“Exactly.” He shrugged. “It’s home.”

“I believe the offer I made was very generous,” said Cash.

“It was.”

“But if need be, I can offer more.”

“It’s not a question of money; I was just telling someone else that earlier today. I like it here, and I like doing research that’s going to be published.”

“But the impact on the banking industry — ”

“I understand that there are potential problems. Do you think I want to cause chaos? We’re still years away from posing a real threat to smartcard security. Look at it this way: you’ve had a warning that quantum computers are likely coming down the pike; now you can get working on a new encryption solution. You survived Year 2000, and you’re going to survive this.”

“My hope,” said Cash, “was to deal with this situation in the most cost-effective manner possible.”

“By buying me off,” said Kyle.

Cash was quiet. “There is a great deal at stake here, Professor. Name your price.”

“To my rather significant delight, Mr. Cash, I’ve discovered I don’t have one.”

Cash rose. “Everyone does, Professor. Everyone does.” He headed for the office door. “If you change your mind, let me know.”

And with that, he was gone.

Heather needed to convince her only living daughter of the truth. If the family was ever to reconcile, it had to start with Becky.

But that raised a larger question.

When was Heather going to go public with her psychospace discovery?

At first she’d kept it secret because she’d wanted to develop a sufficient theory for publication.

But now she had that — in spades.

And still she hadn’t gone public. All it would take to establish priority would be a preemptive posting to the Alien Signal newsgroup. Peer-reviewed journals would follow later, but she could, this minute, announce her discovery if she wanted to.

Plato had said that an unexamined life is not worth living.

But he was referring to self-examination.

Who could live with the knowledge that anyone and everyone might be scrutinizing their own thoughts? What would happen to privacy? To trade secrets? To criminal justice? To interpersonal relationships?

It would change everything — and Heather was not at all sure that it would be for the better.

But no — that wasn’t why she was keeping it a secret. Not some lofty concern about other people’s privacy, although she liked to think she was giving that at least some consideration; except for Kyle, she’d refrained from giving in to temptation, staying out of the minds of others she knew personally.

No, the real reason she hadn’t gone public was much simpler; she liked, at least for a time, being the only one with this power. She had something no one else had — and she didn’t quite yet want to share it.

She wasn’t proud of that fact, but there it was. Did Superman ever spend even one second trying to figure out how to give the rest of humanity superpowers? Of course not; he’d just lucked into them. Then why should her first priority be to share this?

She’d yet to find anything in psychospace that directly corresponded to Jungian archetypes. She couldn’t point to some part of the maelstrom and say that it represented the wellspring of human symbols, couldn’t point to a bank of hexagons and say that it housed the archetype of the warrior-hero. And yet simply reflecting upon what to do about her discovery was indeed giving her insights into her own mind.

First and foremost, which was she? Mother? Wife? Scientist? There were archetypes of parents, and there were archetypes of spouses — but the Western concept of the scientist didn’t have a Jungian definition.

She’d made the same decision once before. Her career could wait; science could wait. Family was more important.