Factoring Humanity

“No, I’m not. You can prove it to yourself. You’ll see Gurdjieff implanting the memories in you from her point of view, and I’ll show you how you can demonstrate that the memories you have are false. Come on, get inside the construct and — ”

Becky sounded half-wary, half-desperate. “ ‘The construct’? Is that what you call it? Not the ‘Centaurimobile’?”

Heather managed a neutral tone. “I should introduce you to Cheetah — a friend of your father. You’ve got similar senses of humor.” She took a deep breath. “Look, I’m your mother, and I’d never hurt you. Trust me; try what I say. We won’t be able to communicate when you’ve got your eyes open in there, but when you close them, after a few seconds the interior of the construct will reappear in your mind’s eye. If you need further help, press the stop button.” She pointed to it. “The hypercube will unfold, you can open the door, and I’ll be able to tell you what to do next. Don’t worry — when you press the start button again, you’ll end up exactly where you left off.” She paused. “Now, please, get inside. It gets pretty warm in there, by the way. I won’t ask you to do it in your bra and panties like I do, but — ”

“Your bra and panties?” said Becky, stunned.

Heather smiled again. “Trust me, dear. Now get inside.”

Four hours later, Heather assisted Becky in removing the cubic door, and Becky got out of the construct, accepting a helping hand from her mother.

Becky stood quiet for a moment, tears running down her cheeks, clearly utterly at a loss for words; then she collapsed into her mother’s waiting arms.

Heather stroked her daughter’s hair. “It’s all right, honey. It’s all right now.”

Becky’s whole body was shaking. “It was incredible,” she said. “It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”

Heather smiled. “Isn’t it, though?”

Becky’s voice was growing hard. “She used me,” she said. “She manipulated me.”

Heather said nothing, and although it tore her up to see her daughter distraught, her heart soared.

“She used me,” Becky said again. “How could I have been so stupid? How could I have been so wrong?”

“It’s okay,” said Heather. “It’s over.”

“No,” said Becky. “It isn’t.” She was still shaking, and Heather’s shoulder was now moist with Becky’s tears. “There’s still Daddy. What am I going to say to Daddy?”

“The only thing you can say. The only thing there is to say. That you’re sorry.”

Becky’s voice was incredibly tiny. “But he’ll never love me again.”

Heather gently lifted Becky’s head with a hand under her daughter’s chin. “I know for a fact, sweetheart, that he never stopped.”

32

Heather invited Kyle over to dinner the next night.

There was so much she wanted to say to him, so much that had to be cleared up. But after he arrived, she didn’t know where to begin — and so she began at a distance, with the theoretical: one academic to another.

“Do you think it’s possible,” she asked, “that things that seem to be discrete in three dimensions might all be part of the same bigger object in four dimensions?”

“Oh, sure,” said Kyle. “I tell my students that all the time. You just have to extrapolate, based on how two-dimensional views of three-dimensional objects work. A two-dimensional world would be a plane, like a piece of paperite. If a donut were passing vertically through a horizontal plane, an inhabitant of the two-dimensional world would see two separate circles — or the lines that represent them — instead of the donut.”

“Exactly,” said Heather. “Exactly. Now, consider this. What if humanity — that collective noun we so often employ — really is, at a higher level, a singular noun? What if what we perceive in three dimensions as seven billion individual human beings are really all just aspects of one giant being?”

“That’s a little harder to visualize than a donut, but — ”

“Don’t think of it as a donut, then. Think of — I don’t know, think of a sea urchin: a ball with countless spikes sticking out of it. And think of our frame of reference not as a flat sheet of paper, but as a piece of nylon — you know, like stockings are made of. If the nylon was wrapped around the sea urchin, you’d see all those spikes sticking through and you’d think each one was a discrete thing; you wouldn’t necessarily realize that they were all attached, all just extensions of something bigger.”

“Well, it’s an interesting notion,” said Kyle. “But it doesn’t strike me as something you could test.”

“But what if it’s already been tested?” asked Heather. She paused, thinking about how to go on. “Sure, almost all reports of psychic experiences are bunk. Almost all of them can be explained. But there are, occasionally, few and far between, cases that can’t easily be explained. Indeed, they defy scientific explanation because they’re not reproducible — if it happens only once, then how do you study it? But what if, under rare, special circumstances, normally isolated spines on our sea urchin fold over and touch each other, however briefly? It could explain telepathy, and — ”