Factoring Humanity

The girl he’d fallen in love with.

The woman he’d married.

He found himself opening and closing his eyes, slowly enough that the interior of the construct winked in and out of existence for him. And suddenly he realized what he was doing.

Blinking away tears.

As if stunned by a brilliant piece of art.

Stunned by the magnificence of his wife.

They’d been married for twenty-two years. And it hit him, with an impact that almost knocked the wind out of him, how little he actually knew her, how much there was about her yet to discover.

Heather had said she loved him, and he believed it — he believed it with his heart and soul. And he marveled at the fact that anything so complex and intricate as one human being could come to love another.

He knew in an instant that he could spend the rest of his life getting to know her properly — that whatever handful of decades were left to him wouldn’t be enough to truly comprehend the wonder of another human mind.

He’d been angry that Heather had probed him without his permission. But now the anger evaporated like morning dew. There was nothing to be angry about — it wasn’t an invasion. Not from her. It was an intimacy, a closeness that transcended anything they’d ever experienced before.

He would have to return here, spend hours — days, years — exploring her mind, a mind calmer, less aggressive, more reasonable, more intuitive than his own, a mind -

No.

No, that’s not what he’d come for.

Not this time.

He had something else to deal with.

He continued leafing through Heather’s mind only long enough to find a memory of Mary.

And then he did the Necker transformation once more.

But there was nothing happening in his new location. Absolutely nothing. Just darkness. Silence.

Kyle thought about Mary’s high-school graduation; she had been valedictorian. A matching memory of Mary’s own appeared almost at once. Mary’s memories were here — the archive of what she’d been did exist — but that was all; nothing whatsoever was happening in realtime.

Kyle precipitated out, removing himself. Then, through an effort of will, he reintegrated in front of the vast wall of hexagons.

The one directly in front of him was dark.

Dead.

Kyle had seen Mary’s body lying there in the bathroom. Pale, drained dry, white, waxy.

He hadn’t been able to accept that she was dead then. Even having seen her lifeless form sprawled on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor, he still hadn’t accepted it.

But now -

There she was. Dead. Passive storage. Backed-up; part of the archive of humanity.

He realized now that he couldn’t talk to her. There was no way to interact with Mary, no way to tell her that what she thought had happened hadn’t really.

Oh, yes, he could access her memories, leaf through her past.

But he couldn’t communicate with her.

When he’d crouched down by her tombstone, he’d felt as though maybe, somehow, he was connecting with her, somehow she could hear his words. He’d wanted to apologize — not for anything he’d done, but for the fact that he hadn’t protected her from the predation of that therapist, that her daddy hadn’t been there for her when she’d needed him the most.

But even if he’d spoken the words aloud by the tombstone, she couldn’t have heard him. The other hexagons stared at him like eyes, but this one was so abysmally dark there could be no doubt.

She was totally, completely, irretrievably gone.

There was no way to make amends.

And yet -

And yet he found himself not feeling destroyed by that fact.

On the contrary, he felt a release, a letting go.

For so long, in the dark corners of his mind, despite his intellectual atheism, he’d thought that somewhere she was still conscious, still aware, still suffering.

Still hating him.

But she wasn’t. In every sense of the word, Mary simply wasn’t. She no longer existed.

But still, it wasn’t over.

Not yet, not quite.

Kyle had cried when his daughter died.

He’d cried with anger, furious that she could do that.

He’d cried with outrage, unable to understand.

But he hadn’t cried for her.

And suddenly his eyes were brimming over, tears welling up and spilling out.

He did cry for her now — only for her. For the sadness of a beautiful life cut short, for all the things that she had been, and for all the other things she might have become, but never did.

He cried so much that his eyes kept closing, the interior of the construct reappearing in his mind.

But he wasn’t through yet.

He understood, finally, why Heather had brought him here, and what he had to do.

He wiped his eyes and then opened them up all the way. Psychospace reformed around him, with the black hexagon that had been Mary still facing him.

He took a deep breath and let it out, feeling so much pent-up emotion escape with it.

And then he said one gentle, heartfelt word.

“Good-bye.”

He let it echo in his mind softly for a few moments. Then he closed his eyes again, reached forward and pressed the stop button, prepared at last to return to the world of the living.

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