Factoring Humanity

And the sensation that something else was there was stronger than before.

Something was moving through the realm, a coruscating wave undulating through all of human thought, all of human experience. It packed a wallop, this wave; it disturbed everything in its path. Heather tried to clear her mind, to act merely as a receiver rather than an interpreter, to open herself to whatever was passing through psychospace…

Kyle was walking up St. George, heading back from his class at New College to Mullin Hall. His favorite hot-dog vendor was positioned at his usual spot in front of the Robarts Library, a black-and-yellow Shopsy’s umbrella protecting him from the summer sun. Kyle stopped.

“ ’Afternoon, Professor,” said the Italian-accented voice. “The usual?”

Kyle considered for a moment. “I think I need a new usual, Tony. What have you got that’s healthy?”

“We got a veggie-dog. Fat-free, cholesterol-free.”

“How’s it taste?”

The little man shrugged. “It could be worse.”

Kyle smiled. “I’ll just have an apple,” he said, picking one from a basket. He handed Tony his SmartCash card.

Tony transferred the cost and returned the card.

Kyle continued on his way, polishing the apple on his blue shirt, unaware of the chubby figure that was following him.

Heather tried to suppress all the thoughts rushing through her brain.

She fought down thoughts about Kyle. She fought down thoughts about her daughters. She fought down thoughts about Lydia Gurdjieff, the therapist who had torn her family apart. She fought down thoughts about her work, her neighbors, TV shows she’d seen, music she’d heard, social encounters that had left her miffed. She fought it all down, trying to return her mind to its original tabula rasa form, trying to simply hear, simply detect, simply understand what it was that was rippling through psychospace.

And at last she made it out.

During her life, Heather had encountered people who were experiencing joy — and she’d seen how she herself could become joyous, the emotion transferring from the other person to her. The same thing could happen with anger; it was contagious.

But this emotion — well, she’d felt it often enough on her own, but had never experienced the transferring of it from the outside into herself.

Until now.

The sensation moving through psychospace was astonishment.

Absolute surprise; complete amazement — the very jaw of God dropping.

Something completely new was happening — something the overmind had never experienced even once before in all the countless millennia it had existed.

Heather struggled to keep her mind clear, trying to detect the reason for such profound amazement.

And at last she felt it, a strange sensation, as though she’d been touched by a ghostly hand, as if suddenly something was there.

That was it.

Something was there.

For the first time in its existence, the overmind was aware of something else, of someone else.

It was incredible — absolutely incredible.

The word “loneliness” didn’t even have a definition at the overmind level. It was only meaningful in three dimensions, referring to the apparent isolation of individual nodes. But in fourspace, it was meaningless — as meaningless as asking where the edge of the universe was.

Or so the overmind had apparently thought.

But now, incredibly, there was another presence in fourspace.

Another overmind.

The human overmind was struggling to comprehend. The sensation was as foreign to it as it would be for Heather to see a new color, to detect magnetism directly, to hear the music of the spheres.

Another overmind.

What could it be?

Heather thought of apes — gorillas, chimpanzees, and the handful of remaining orangutans. Perhaps one of those species had finally broken through, stepping beyond its animal limitations and achieving consciousness, a sentience if not comparable to humanity’s today, perhaps on a par with that of our Homo habilis ancestors.

But that wasn’t it. Heather knew in the very core of her being that that wasn’t the answer.

Heather then thought of APEs — the approximation of psychological experiences her husband and others had been building for years. They had never quite worked, never quite been human. But perhaps that had changed; they were constantly being tweaked, endless updates on the road to sentience. Perhaps Saperstein, or someone else, had solved the problems with quantum computing; she and Kyle hadn’t yet made the Huneker message public — Saperstein wouldn’t have known any better.

But, no, that was not it either.

The Other wasn’t here — however broadly one defined “here” in the fourspace of the overmind.

No — no, it was there. Elsewhere. Reaching out, making contact, touching the human collective unconscious for the very first time.

And then Heather knew.

It was another overmind — but not a terrestrial overmind.

It was the Centaurs. Their thoughts, their archetypes, their symbols.