Factoring Humanity

Kyle disengaged the cubic door. Heather had clearly been standing close by; he felt her hands lifting the door from the other side.

He swung his feet over the ledge and climbed out. Heather looked at him; doubtless she could tell he had been crying.

Kyle managed a small smile. “Thank you,” he said. His daughter wasn’t in the room. “Where’s Becky?”

“She had to go. She’s got a date with Zack tonight.” Kyle nodded, pleased. But he could see concern on Heather’s face — and he suddenly realized what the concern was. She knew him, of course, and, of late, really knew him. She had to realize that before looking at Mary’s dark hexagon, he would have snuck a peek at his wife’s mind, too. The expression on Heather’s face — he’d seen it once before, ages ago, the first time they’d made out in a well-lit room instead of groping in the darkness. The first time he’d seen her naked. She’d looked precisely this way then: embarrassed, scared that she didn’t measure up to his imaginings, and yet ever so provocative.

He spread his arms, swept her up in them, and hugged her so tight it hurt.

After a minute, they pulled apart. Kyle took her hand, running his index finger around her wedding ring. “I love you,” he said. He sought her eyes. “I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life getting to know you.”

Heather smiled at him — and at the memory. “I love you, too,” she said, for the first time in a year. He brought his face down to hers, and they kissed. When their lips separated, she said it again, “I do love you.”

Kyle nodded. “I know. I really know.”

But Heather’s expression waxed grim. “Mary?”

He was quiet for a moment, then: “I’ve made my peace.”

Heather nodded.

“It’s incredible,” said Kyle. “The overmind. Absolutely incredible.” He paused. “And yet…”

“What?”

“Well, remember Professor Papineau? How mind-expanding I always said his classes were? He taught me a lot of quantum physics — but I never got it, not really, not down deep. Things kept niggling. But it makes sense now.”

“How?”

He spread his arms, as if thinking of a way to express it all, “Do you know about Schrödinger’s cat?”

“I’ve heard the term,” said Heather.

“Simple thought experiment: you seal a cat in a box along with a vial of poison gas and a trigger that’ll release the gas if a quantum event that has precisely a fifty-fifty chance of happening in the next hour occurs. Without opening the box an hour later, can you say whether the cat is alive or dead?”

Heather frowned. “No.”

“ ‘No’ is right. But not because you can’t tell which it is. Rather, because it’s neither. The cat is neither alive nor dead, but instead is a superposition of wave fronts — a mingled combination of both possibilities. Only the act of opening the box and looking causes the wave front to resolve itself into one concrete reality. That’s quantum mechanics: things are indeterminate until they’re observed.”

“All right.”

“But say I look in the box first, see that the cat’s still alive, then seal the box up. You come along a few minutes later and you open the box and look, unaware that I’ve previously had a peek. What do you see?”

“A living cat.”

“Precisely! My having observed it shapes reality for you, too. That’s long been one of the problems in quantum mechanics: why do the observations of a single observer create a concrete reality for everyone simultaneously? The answer, of course, is that everyone is part of the overmind, so the observation made by one person is the observation made by all people — indeed, quantum mechanics requires the overmind in order to work.”

Heather made an impressed face. “Interesting.” She paused. “So what do we do now?”

“We tell the world,” said Kyle.

“Do we?” asked Heather.

“Sure. Everyone has a right to know.”

“But it’ll change everything,” said Heather. “Everything. The civilization we know will cease to exist.”

“If we don’t tell, somebody else will.”

“Maybe. Maybe no one else will figure it out.”

“It’s inevitable. Hell, now that you’ve done it, it’s part of the collective unconscious — someone will have it come to them in a dream.”

“But people will take advantage of this — the ability to spy, to steal thoughts. Whole societies will collapse.”

Kyle frowned. “I can’t believe that the Centaurs would send us instructions on how to build something that would lead to our downfall. Why bother? We can’t possibly be a threat to them.”

“I suppose,” said Heather.

“So let’s go public.”

Heather frowned. “Today is Saturday; I doubt that many science journalists are working on the weekend in the summer, so we can’t even begin to call a press conference until Monday. And if we want a good turnout, we’ll have to give the journalists a day or two’s notice.”

Kyle nodded acceptance. “But what if someone else does announce the discovery over the weekend?”