Factoring Humanity

Heather considered. “Well, if that happens, I can always point to the overmind archive and say, ‘Look, there’s the proof that I’d figured it out before you.’ ” She paused. “But I suppose that’s old-style thinking,” she said with a little shrug. “In the new world we’re about to create, I doubt the idea of primacy will have any meaning.”

Heather spent all day Sunday exploring psychospace; Kyle and Becky were taking turns doing the same thing over in Mullin Hall, where you really did need someone to help remove the cubic door.

For Heather, it was like swimming in a pristine mountain lake, remote and pellucid, knowing that no one else had ever stumbled across it, knowing that she was the first to ever behold its beauty, to immerse herself in it, to feel it wash over her.

But like landscapes everywhere, the life on the surface was built on top of death, new shoots thrusting through a blanket of decaying organic matter. Although there were many living people whose minds Heather wanted to enter, there were also countless dead ones she wished to connect with — and somehow, entering the dead seemed less an invasion, less a violation of privacy.

Kyle hadn’t spent much time in the dark archive of Mary’s mind, and Heather had yet to touch one of the black hexagons. But now it was time.

Actually, in this case, she didn’t have to search for the hexagon. All she had to do was enter herself — an easy Necker transformation from the hexagon she’d identified as Kyle — and then, from her own memories, conjure up a concrete image of her desired target, and Necker into him.

Josh Huneker.

Dead now for twenty-three years.

She hadn’t been haunted by him, of course. For most of that time, she hadn’t thought about him at all, even though in at least one significant way, he’d had a huge impact on her life; it was he who had introduced her to the fascinations of SETI, after all, and so, quite literally, if it hadn’t been for her relationship with Josh, she wouldn’t be here now.

But she was here. And if there had been an earlier alien message, one that she’d never seen, one that no one still alive had ever seen, then she had to know.

One didn’t need a quantum computer anymore to crack Huneker’s secret — or anyone else’s secret, for that matter. Privacy — even the privacy of the grave — no longer existed.

She swapped into Huneker’s mind.

It was unlike any mind she’d been in before. This one was stone-cold dead, with no active images, no active thoughts. Heather felt as though she were adrift in a starless, moonless night, on a silent sea made of the blackest ink.

But the archive was here. What Josh had been — and whatever had tortured him — was stored here.

She imagined herself as she was back then. Younger, thinner, and if not actually pretty, possessed of an eagerness that might have passed for such.

And after a moment, it clicked.

She saw herself as he had seen her all those years ago: smooth-skinned; short, punky hair, then dyed blond; three little rings of silver — another Toronto experience! — piercing the curve of her left ear.

He had not loved her.

She wasn’t really surprised. He’d been the good-looking grad student, and she’d practically thrown herself at him. Oh, he’d had feelings for her — and they were sexual. And yet he’d already committed, he thought, to a different lifestyle.

He was confused, torn apart.

He’d planned to kill himself. Of course it had been planned — he’d had to think to bring the arsenic.

And like his idol Alan Turing, he had bitten into a poisoned apple. He’d sampled forbidden knowledge.

She’d never known how tortured he’d been, how much he’d agonized over what to do about her, and about himself.

She couldn’t say good-bye; there was no one to say good-bye to. Whatever had happened all those years ago was immutable — and over.

But she was not ready to pull out of his mind.

She’d never been to the Algonquin Radio Observatory, closed now for almost a quarter of a century. It took numerous tries to connect with his memories of the place — moving obliquely from his memories of her to his painful introspection up there, snow barricading the door. But at last she managed it.

Incredibly, there had been an alien message.

It formed a Drake pictogram; if Chomsky’s theories had any validity across species boundaries, the one syntactic structure that might be shared by all races communicating by radio was the grid made up of a prime number of columns by a prime number of rows.

As always, there were two possible interpretations, but here, at least, the correct one was obvious, since in it, a simple one-pixel-wide frame was drawn around the resulting page.

The frame cut across the page vertically at three points, dividing the message into four panels — making it look like a comic strip. Heather thought for a second that maybe Kyle had been right — maybe it was an interstellar killer joke.