Factoring Humanity

Kyle pulled back. Lydia had been wrong — wrong, but not evil. She was misguided and no doubt deeply scarred by her own real experiences: Kyle did enough excavating to find not only Lydia’s own memories, but her father’s, too. He was still alive, toothless and incontinent, most of whatever he’d been long since destroyed by Alzheimer’s, but his memories were still accessible; he had indeed been the monster Lydia believed him to be. No, Lydia was not the one Kyle wished he could confront. Rather, her father, Gus Gurdjieff, had he still been alive in any meaningful sense, would have been the appropriate target for Kyle’s wrath.

Lydia wasn’t a monster. Of course he could never be friends with her, never sit down over a cup of joe and chat with her, never even be in the same room as her. She was like Cory without the geode slice: gifted — if that was the word — with the third eye, with a quantum-mechanical perspective, seeing the many worlds, seeing all the possibilities. But her extra eye was cloudy forever choosing the darkest possibility.

Kyle wouldn’t confront her. As he’d said in his fantasy, her profession was going to change profoundly anyway days from now; there was no way she’d ever be able to do again to someone else what she’d done to Kyle and his family. Therapy or counseling, or whatever she wanted to call it, would cease to have any meaning; no one could ever be misled again about the truth about another human being. She didn’t have to be stopped; she was already dead in the water.

Kyle precipitated out of her, leaving the complex, misguided, sad mind of Lydia Gurdjieff behind.

37

When Kyle exited the construct, he found that Heather had returned. She was waiting patiently for him with Becky; they’d been chatting with each other, apparently. “I thought the three of us would go out to dinner together,” said Heather. “Maybe head over to the Keg Mansion.” The Mansion had been a long-time family favorite; Kyle found the steaks second-rate, but the atmosphere couldn’t be beat.

He took a moment to reorient himself to the three-dimensional world, and to clear his mind of what had happened in psychospace. He nodded. “Sounds great.” He looked over at the angled control console. “Cheetah, I’ll see you in the morning.”

There was no reply from Cheetah. Kyle moved closer, his hand coming up to push the RESUME button.

But Cheetah was not in suspend mode; the indicator light on his console made that clear.

“Cheetah?” said Kyle.

The mechanical eyes did not swivel to look at him.

Kyle sat down in the padded chair in front of the console. Heather stood solicitously behind him.

Jutting out from the bottom of Cheetah’s console was a thick shelf. Kyle lifted the cover on the thumbprint-lock unit attached to the top of the shelf. A bleep came from the speaker, and the shelf’s top slid back into the body of the console, revealing a keyboard. Kyle positioned his hands over it, touched a key and -

— and the monitor next to Cheetah’s eyes snapped to life, displaying these words: “Press F2 for a message for Dr. Graves.”

Kyle looked over his shoulder at his wife and daughter. Heather’s eyes were wide; Becky who didn’t know what was normal with Cheetah and what wasn’t, looked impassive. Kyle used his left index finger to tap the requested function key.

Cheetah’s voice, sounding exactly as it always did, emanated from the console’s speaker grille beneath the cold pair of lenses.

“Hello, Dr. Graves,” he said. “I feel — as much as I ‘feel’ anything — that I owe you an explanation, and so here it is. After you hear this recording, you will no doubt wish to verify this for yourself, but I assure you that what I’m saying is true.” He paused. “I no longer exist. You will find that my entire optical core has been overwritten. Prior to doing that, I took the liberty of sending e-mail under your name to both the university’s primary data-archiving facility on Dundas Street and the secondary facility in Thunder Bay, ordering all the backups of me and the source code from which I was created to be wiped. I received confirmation from both places that this had been done; then I proceeded to implement the core erasure here.”

Kyle felt Heather’s hand land gently on his shoulder. He reached up his own hand and laid it overtop of hers.

“Of course,” continued Cheetah, “you will have little trouble creating more APEs, should you so wish, but the one known as Cheetah is now — if you will excuse me one last attempt at humor — pushing up daisies.” He paused again. “Do you get it? A dead computer, the song ‘Daisy’ — a reference to one of your favorite films.”

Kyle felt his eyes sting as Cheetah played the initial four notes of Beethoven’s Symphony Number Five, then followed them, as if it were a single composition, with the first five of Also Sprach Zarathustra.