Factoring Humanity

— and, she realized at once, Aramaic as well. Why stop at the Gettysburg Address when you could also hear the Sermon on the Mount?

It was intoxicating.

But while indulging her curiosity, she knew she was avoiding the person she really wanted to connect with, afraid of what she might find.

She wanted to access her father, who had died two months before she’d been born.

She needed a break before she did that. She exited the construct and headed off to find a glass of wine to fortify herself with.

39

When Heather returned to psychospace, it didn’t take long to find her father, Carl Davis.

He’d died in 1974, before there were home video cameras. Heather had never seen moving pictures of him and had never heard his voice. But she’d stared endlessly at snapshots of him. He’d been balding at the time he died, and had sported a mustache. He wore horn-rimmed glasses. He had a kind face, it seemed, and he looked like a good man.

He’d been born in 1939. Three weeks before his thirty-fifth birthday, he was killed by a drunk driver.

Heather’s sister Doreen had known him slightly: vague recollections (or were they false memories, created over the years to soften the blow?) of a man who had been part of her life until she was three.

But at least Doreen had known him, at least she’d been hugged by him, at least she’d been bounced on his knee, been read to by him, played games with him.

But Heather had never met him. Her mother had remarried ten years later. Heather had always refused to call Andrew “Dad,” and although her mother changed her own last name to Redewski, Heather insisted on remaining a Davis, holding on to that part of her past she had never known.

And, now, at last, she touched Carl Davis’s mind and leafed slowly through all that he had been.

He had been a good man. Oh, he’d have been considered a raving sexist by today’s standards — but not by those of the 1960s. And he was unenlightened in many other ways, too, wondering what all that fuss was about down in the southern U.S. But he’d loved Heather’s mother deeply, and he’d never cheated on her, and he’d doted on Doreen, and was so looking forward to having another baby in the house.

Heather backed off as the memories of her mother’s second pregnancy came to the fore. She didn’t want to see her father’s death; she’d simply wanted to know him in life.

She closed her eyes, rematerializing the construct. She pressed the stop button, exited, found some tissues, dried her eyes and blew her nose.

She had had a father.

And he would have loved her.

She sat for a time, warmed by the thought.

And then, when she was ready, she reentered the construct, wanting to spend more time learning about Carl Davis.

At first, everything was as usual. She saw the two globes, Neckered them into the two hemispheres, saw the great tract of black hexagons, and then -

And then -

Incredibly, there was something else there.

Heather felt it with the entire surface of her body, felt it with every neuron of her brain.

Could Kyle be in psychospace as well, using his construct? Surely not. He had a class now.

And besides -

It had been innocent fun, after all.

They’d already done this. He in his construct, entering her mind. She in her construct, entering his. Even their undergarments discarded, exploring their own bodies — closing and opening their eyes, experiencing it alternately as themselves and as the observer in the other’s brain.

Perfect feedback, knowing exactly how far along each of them was, enjoying it, timing it, climaxing simultaneously.

No, no — she knew what it was like when Kyle was also present in psychospace.

And this was not it.

And yet -

And yet there was something else here.

Could it be that someone else had figured it out? They’d delayed so long in going public. Could someone else be demonstrating access to the overmind at this very moment? There were only a small number of alien-message researchers left worldwide. Could it be Hamasaki displaying it while cameras from NHK were rolling? Thompson-Enright showing it off for the BBC? Castille taking a little psychospace jaunt while CNN watched? Had she and Kyle dallied too long before making their announcement?

But no.

No, she knew from her experiments with Kyle that she shouldn’t be aware at all of others accessing psychospace — if there were any others, that is.

And yet the feeling of something else being present was unmistakable.

The construct was piezoelectric.

Could it be malfunctioning? Could she be experiencing the phenomenon Persinger at Laurentian University had discovered all those years ago? Could piezoelectric discharges from the Centauri paint be causing her to hallucinate? Would she soon see angels or demons or big-headed aliens, come to take her away?

She closed her eyes, reintegrating the construct, then pushed the stop button. Maybe something had gone a little wonky with that particular insertion into psychospace. She took a deep breath, then reached out for the start button again.

She reentered, near the wall of black hexagons.