Factoring Humanity

11

Heather pushed the door buzzer outside Kyle’s lab. There was no response. She touched her thumb to the scanning plate, wondering for a moment whether he’d delisted her from the index. But the door slid aside, and she entered the lab.

“Is that you, Professor Davis?”

“Oh, hello, Cheetah.”

“It’s been some time since you’ve dropped by. It’s good to see you.”

“Thanks. Is Kyle around?”

“He had to go down to Professor Montgomery’s office; he said he would be back shortly.”

“Thanks. I’ll wait, if that’s—Good grief, what’s that?”

“What’s what?” asked Cheetah.

“That poster. It’s Dali, isn’t it?” The style was unmistakable, but it was a Dali she’d never seen before: a painting of Jesus nailed to a most unusual cross.

“That’s right,” said Cheetah. “Dr. Graves says it’s been exhibited under several names, but it’s best known as ‘Christus hypercubus.’ Christ on the hypercube.”

“What’s a hypercube?”

“That is,” said Cheetah. “Well, actually it’s not a real hypercube. Rather, it’s an unfolded one.” One of the monitors on Cheetah’s angled console lit up. “Here’s another picture of one.” The screen displayed this:

“But what the heck is it?” asked Heather.

“A hypercube is a four-dimensional cube. It’s sometimes also called a tesseract.”

“What did you mean a moment ago when you said it was ‘unfolded’?”

Cheetah’s lenses whirred. “That’s an intriguing question, actually. Dr. Graves has told me about hypercubes. He uses them in his first-year computing class; he says it helps students learn to visualize problems in a new way.” Cheetah’s cameras swiveled as he looked around the room. “See that box on the shelf there?”

Heather followed Cheetah’s line of sight. She nodded.

“Pick it up.”

Heather shrugged a little, then did so.

“Now that’s a cube,” said Cheetah. “Use your fingernail to pull the tab out of the slot. See it?”

Heather nodded again. She did as Cheetah asked, and the box started to come apart. She continued to unfold it, then laid it out on the tabletop: six squares forming a cross—four in a row, plus two sticking off the sides of the third one.

“A cross,” said Heather.

Cheetah’s LEDs nodded. “Of course, it doesn’t have to be—there are eleven fundamentally different ways you can unfold a cube, including into…hape and an S shape. Well, not that cube—it’s cut and scored for unfolding in that particular way. Anyway, that’s an unfolded cube—a flat, two-dimensional plan that can be folded through the third dimension to make a cube.” Cheetah’s eyes swiveled back toward the Dali painting. “The cross in the painting consists of eight cubes—four making the vertical shaft, and four more making the two mutually perpendicular sets of arms. That’s an unfolded tesseract: a three-dimensional plan that could be folded through the fourth dimension to make a hypercube.”

“Folded how? In what direction?”

“As I said, through the fourth dimension, which is perpendicular to the other three, just as height, length, and width are perpendicular to each other. In fact, there are two ways to fold up a hypercube, just as you could fold that two-dimensional piece of cardboard either up or down—up resulting in the shiny, white side of the cardboard making up the outside, and down resulting in the dull, plain side making up the outside. All dimensions have two directions: length has left and right; depth has forward and backward; height has up and down. And the fourth dimension, it has ana and kata.”

“Why those terms?”

“Ana is Greek for up; kata is Greek for down.”

“So if you fold a group of eight cubes like those in the Dali painting in the kata direction, it makes a hypercube?”

“Yes. Or in the ana direction.”

“Fascinating,” said Heather. “And Kyle finds this kind of thinking helps his students?”

“He thinks so. He had a professor named Papineau when he was a student here twenty years ago—”

“I remember him.”

“Well, Dr. Graves says he doesn’t recall much of what Papineau taught him, except that he was always finding ways to expand his students’ minds, giving them new ways of looking at things. He is trying to do something similar for his students today, and—”

The door slid open. Kyle walked in. “Heather!” he said, clearly surprised. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you.”

Without a word, Kyle reached over and flicked Cheetah’s SUSPEND switch. “What brings you by?”

“The alien messages have stopped.”

“So I’d heard. Was there a Rosetta stone at the end?”

Heather shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” said Kyle.

“Me, too. But it means the race for the answer is on; we now have everything the Centaurs were trying to say to us. Now it’s only a question of time before somebody figures out what it all means. I’m going to be very busy.” She spread her arms slightly. “I know this couldn’t have come at a worse time, what with the problem with Becky, but I’m going to have to immerse myself in this. I wanted you to understand that—I didn’t want you to think I was shutting you out, or just sticking my head in the sand, hoping the problem would go away.”

“I’m going to be busy, too,” said Kyle.

“Oh?”

“My quantum-computing experiment failed; I’ve got a lot of work to do figuring out what went wrong.”

Under other circumstances, she might have consoled him. But now, now with this between them, with the uncertainty…

“That’s too bad,” she said. “Really.” She looked at him a little longer, then shrugged a bit. “So it looks like we’re both going to be tied up.” She paused. Dammit, their separation was never supposed to be permanent—and, for Christ’s sake, surely Kyle couldn’t have done what he’d been accused of. “Look,” she said, tentatively, “it’s almost five; do you want to grab an early dinner?”

Kyle looked pleased at the suggestion, but then he frowned. “I’ve already made other plans.”

“Oh,” said Heather. She wondered for a moment whether his plans were with a man or a woman. “Well, then.”

They looked at each other a moment longer, then Heather left.

Kyle entered Persaud Hall and headed down the narrow corridor, but stopped short before he got to Room 222.

There was Stone Bentley, standing outside his office, talking with a female student. Stone was white, maybe fifty-five, balding, and not particularly fit; he saw Kyle approaching and signaled him to wait for a short time. Stone finished up whatever he was saying to the young lady, then she smiled and went on her way.

Kyle closed the distance. “Hi, Stone. Sorry to interrupt.”

“No, not at all. I like being interrupted during meetings.”

Kyle tilted his head; Stone’s voice hadn’t sounded sarcastic, but the words certainly seemed to be.

“I’m serious,” said Stone. “I have all my meetings with female students in the corridor—and the more people that see what’s going on, the better. I don’t ever want a repeat of what happened five years ago.”

“Ah,” said Kyle. Stone ducked into his office, grabbed his briefcase, and they headed out to The Water Hole. It was a small pub, with perhaps two dozen round tables scattered across a hardwood floor. Lighting was from Tiffany lamps; the windows were covered over by thick drapes. An electronic board displayed specials in white against a black background in a font that resembled chalk writing; a neon sign advertised Moose-head beer.

A server drifted into view. “Blue Light,” said Stone.

“Rye and ginger ale,” said Kyle.

Once the server was gone, Stone turned his attention to Kyle; they’d made small talk on the way over, but now, it was clear. Stone felt it was time to get to the reason for the meeting. “So,” he said, “what’s on your mind?”

Kyle had been mentally rehearsing this all afternoon, but now that the moment was here, he found himself rejecting his planned words. “I—I’ve got a problem, Stone. I—I needed somebody to talk to. I know we’ve never been close, but I’ve always thought of you as a friend.”

Stone looked at him, but said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” said Kyle. “I know you’re busy. I shouldn’t be bothering you.”

Stone was quiet for a moment, then: “What’s wrong?”

Kyle dropped his gaze. “My daughter has…” He fell silent, but Stone simply waited for him to go on. At last, Kyle felt ready to do so. “My daughter has accused me of molesting her.”

He waited for the question he’d expected: “Did you do it?” But the question never came.

“Oh,” said Stone.

Kyle couldn’t stand the question not being addressed. “I didn’t do it.”

Stone nodded.

The server appeared again, depositing their drinks.

Kyle looked down at his glass, the rye swirling in the ginger ale. He waited again for Stone to volunteer that he understood the connection, understood why Kyle had called him, of all people. But Stone didn’t.

“You’ve been through something like this yourself,” said Kyle. “False accusation.”

Stone’s turn to look away. “That was years ago.”

“How do you deal with it?” asked Kyle. “How do you make it go away?”

“You’re here,” said Stone. “You thought of me. Doesn’t that prove it? This shit never goes away.”

Kyle took a sip of his drink. The bar was smoke-free, of course, but still the atmosphere seemed oppressive, choking. He looked at Stone. “I am innocent,” he said, feeling the need to assert it again.

“Do you have any other children?” asked Stone.

“We did. My older daughter Mary killed herself a little over a year ago.

Stone frowned. “Oh.”

“I know what you’re thinking. We don’t know for sure why yet, but, well, we suspect a therapist might have given both girls false memories.”

Stone took a sip of his beer. “So what are you going to do now?” he said.

“I don’t know. I’ve lost one daughter; I don’t want to lose the other.”

The evening wore on. Stone and Kyle continued to drink, the conversation got less serious, and Kyle, at last, found himself relaxing.

“I hate what’s happened to television,” said Stone.

Kyle lifted his eyebrows.

“I’m teaching one summer course,” said Stone. “I mentioned Archie Bunker in class yesterday. All I got were blank stares.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Kids today, they don’t know the classics. I Love Lucy, All in the Family, Barney Miller, Seinfeld, The Pellatt Show. They don’t know any of them.”

“Even Pellatt is going back ten years,” said Kyle gently. “We’re just getting old.”

“No,” said Stone. “No, that’s not it at all.”

Kyle’s gaze lifted slightly to Stone’s bald pate, then shifted left and right, observing the snowy fringe around it.

Stone didn’t seem to notice. He raised a hand, palm out. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s just that kids today, they watch different shows, and I’m just some old fart who’s out of it.” He shook his head. “But that’s not it. Well, no, actually I guess that is it, in a way—the first part, I mean. They do watch different shows. They all watch different shows. A thousand channels to choose from, from all over the damned world, plus all the desktop-TV shit being produced out of people’s homes coming in over the net.”

He took a swig of beer. “You know how much Jerry Seinfeld got for the last season of Seinfeld, back in 1997-98? A million bucks an episode—U.S. bucks, too! That’s ’cause half the bloody world was watching him. But these days, everybody’s watching something different.” He looked down into his mug. “They don’t make shows like Seinfeld anymore.”

Kyle nodded. “It was a good program.”

“They were all good programs. And not just the sitcoms. Dramas, too. Hill Street Blues. Perry Mason. Colorado Springs. But nobody knows them anymore.”

“You do. I do.”

“Oh, sure. Guys from our generation, guys who grew up in the twentieth century. But kids today—they’ve got no culture. No shared background.” He took another sip of beer. “Marshall was wrong, you know.” Marshall McLuhan had been dead for thirty-seven years, but many members of the U of T community still referred to him as “Marshall,” the prof who put U of T on the worldwide map. “He said the new media were remaking the world into a global village. Well, the global village has been balkanized.” Stone looked at Kyle. “Your wife, she teaches Jung, right? So she’s into archetypes and all that shit? Well, nobody shares anything anymore. And without shared culture, civilization is doomed.”

“Maybe,” said Kyle.

“It’s true,” said Stone. He took another sip of beer. “You know what really bugs me, though?”

Kyle lifted his eyebrows again.

“Quincy’s first name. That’s what bugs me.”

“Quincy?”

“You know—from the TV series: Quincy, M.E. Remember it? Jack Klugman was in it, after The Odd Couple. Played a coroner in L.A.”

“Sure.…ad it on every bloody day when I was in university.”

“What was Quincy’s first name?”

“He didn’t have one.”

“ ’Course he did. Everybody has one. I’m Stone, you’re Kyle.”

“Actually, Kyle’s my middle name. My first name is Brian—Brian Kyle Graves.”

“No shit? Well, it doesn’t matter. Point is, you do have a first name—and so must Quincy.”

“I don’t recall them ever mentioning it in the TV series.”

“Oh, yes they did. Every time someone called him ‘Quince’—that’s not a shortening of his last name. That’s a shortening of his first name.”

“You’re saying his name was Quincy Quincy? What kind of a name is that?”

“A perfectly good one.”

“You’re just guessing.”

“No. No, I can prove it. In the final episode, Quincy gets married. You know what the minister says who’s performing the service? ‘Do you, Quincy, take…’ Ain’t no way he’d say that if it wasn’t the guy’s first name.”

“Yeah, but who has the same first and last name?”

“You’re not thinking, Kyle. Biggest hit TV series of all time, one of the main characters had the same first and last name.”

“Spock Spock?” said Kyle, deadpan.

“No, no, no. I Love Lucy.”

“Lucy’s last name was Ricardo.” And then Kyle brightened. “And her maiden name was McGillicuddy.” He folded his arms, quite pleased with himself.

“But what about her husband?”

“Who? Ricky?”

“Ricky Ricardo.”

“That’s not—”

“Oh, yes it is. No way his real first name was Ricky. He was Cuban; his first name had to be Ricardo: Ricardo Ricardo.”

“Oh, come on. Surely, then, ‘Ricky’ was a nickname based on his last name—like calling a guy named John MacTavish ‘Mac.’ ”

“No, it was his first name. Remember, even though they had separate beds, Lucy and Ricky still managed to have a baby. They named him after his father—‘Little Ricky,’ they called him. Well, nobody calls a baby ‘Little Mac.’ The father was Ricardo Ricardo, and the kid had to be Ricardo Ricardo, Jr.”

Kyle shook his head. “You think about the damnedest stuff, Stone.”

Stone frowned. “You gotta think about stuff, Kyle. If you don’t keep your mind busy, the shit takes over.”

Kyle was quiet for several seconds. “Yeah,” he said, then signaled the server to bring him another drink.

More time passed; more alcohol was consumed.

“You think that’s weird,” Kyle said. “You want to hear weird? I lived in a house with three women—my wife, my two daughters. And you know, they ended up synchronized. I tell ya, Stone, that can be brutal. It was like walking on eggshells for a week out of every month.”

Stone laughed. “Must have been rough.”

“It’s strange, though. I mean, how does that happen? It’s like—I dunno—it’s like they communicate somehow, on a higher level, in a way we can’t see.”

“It’s probably pheromones,” said Stone, frowning sagely.

“It’s spooky, whatever it is. Like something right out of Star Trek.”

“Star Trek,” said Stone dismissively. He polished off his fourth beer. “Don’t talk to me about Star Trek!”

“It was better than fucking Quincy,” said Kyle.

“ ’Course it was, but it was never consistent. Now, if all the writers had been women and they’d all lived together, maybe everything would have been in sync.”

“What’re you talking about? I’ve got lots of the background stuff—models, blueprints, tech manuals; I was quite a Trekker right up through my university years. I’ve never seen such attempts at making things consistent.”

“Yeah, but they ignored stuff all the time.”

“Like what?”

“Well, let’s see. What’s your single favorite incarnation of Trek?”

“I dunno. The movie Wrath of Khan, I suppose.”

“Good choice. That’s Ricardo Montalban’s real chest, you know.”

“No way,” said Kyle.

“It is, honest. Great pecs for a man his age. Anyway, let’s set aside the obvious stuff—like Khan recognizing Chekov, even though Chekov wasn’t in the TV series at the time that Khan was introduced. No, let’s poke holes in your vaunted tech manuals. On the upper and lower faces of the movie Enterprise’s saucer section, there are little yellow patches near the rim. The blueprints say those are attitude-control thrusters. Well, near the end of the film, Shatner orders the ship to drop ‘zee minus ten thousand meters’—God, I hate to hear a good Canadian boy saying ‘zee’ instead of ‘zed.’ Anyway, the ship does just that—but the thrusters never light up.”

“Oh, I’m sure they wouldn’t make a mistake like that,” said Kyle. “They were very careful.”

“Check it yourself. Do you have the chip?”

“Yeah, my daughter Mary gave me a boxed set of the original Trek films a few years ago for Christmas.”

“Go ahead, check. You’ll see.”

The next day—Tuesday, August 1, 2017—Kyle called Heather and got her permission to come by the house that night.

When he arrived, Heather let him in. He went straight to the living room and started scanning the bookshelves.

“What on earth are you looking for?” asked Heather.

“My copy of Star Trek II.”

“Is that the one with the whales?”

“No, that’s IV—II is the one with Khan.”

“Oh, yeah.” Heather held her fist in front of her face, as if gripping a communicator, and shouted in her best imitation of William Shatner, “Khannnnn!” She pointed. “It’s in the bookcase over there.”

Kyle sprinted across the room and found the DVC he was looking for. “Do you mind?” he said, indicating the TV hanging on the wall. Heather shook her head, and he slipped the chip into the player, then sat down on the couch opposite the screen. He found the remote and jammed his finger against the fast-forward button.

“What are you looking for?” asked Heather.

“This guy I know in Anthropology said there’s a mistake in the film: a shot where some thrusters should be firing but they don’t actually light up.”

Heather smiled indulgently. “Let me get this straight. You bought that bit about the Genesis Wave that can turn a lifeless hunk of rock into a fully formed ecosystem in a matter of hours, but you’re bothered by whether the thrusters light up?”

“Shh,” said Kyle. “We’re almost there.”

The bridge doors hiss open. Chekov walks in, with a bandage on his ear. The crew looks at him precisely the way you should look at someone who recently had an alien parasite crawl out of his head. He takes the weapons station. The pan following Chekov reveals Uhura, Sulu, Saavik, Kirk, and Spock—all wearing those red serge uniforms that make them look like Mounties. Kirk leaves his central chair and moves over to Spock’s station. They’re being pursued through the Mutara nebula by Khan Noonien Singh, who has hijacked a Federation starship.

“He won’t break off now,” says Kirk, looking at the main viewscreen, filled with static caused by the nebula. “He followed me this far. He’ll be back. But from where?”

Spock looks up from his scanner. “He’s intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.” He raises his upswept eyebrows as he says “two dimensional,” and he and Kirk exchange a meaningful glance, then a tight little grin appears on Kirk’s face. He moves back to his command chair and points at Sulu. “Full stop.”

Sulu touches controls. “Full stop, sir.”

Kirk to Sulu: “Zee minus ten thousand meters.” And to Chekov: “Stand by photon torpedoes.”

And there it was: a shot from directly above, looking down on the Enterprise. Kyle had always admired the way the ships in the classic Star Trek movies were self-illuminating—a spotlight from the central, raised part of the saucer was lighting up the registration number NCC-1701. Directly beneath the ship was a swirling purple-and-pink maelstrom, part of the Mutara nebula.

For a second, Kyle thought Stone had been wrong—there were lights flashing on the edge of the saucer. But they were precisely positioned at the bow and directly to port: running lights. The starboard one wasn’t working, which Kyle thought was admirable attention to detail, since that side of the ship had been damaged earlier in battle.

But—damn, Stone was right. The four clusters of ACS thrusters were clearly visible on the upper surface of the saucer section, each one offset forty-five degrees from the center line. And they weren’t firing at all.

If his original set of Pocket Books’ Star Trek: The Motion Picture blueprints wasn’t worth twelve hundred bucks on the collector’s market, why, he’d demand his money back.

Heather was leaning against the wall, watching Kyle as he watched the movie. She was amused by it all. Her husband, she knew, thought that William Shatner was a marvelous actor—there was something endearing about Kyle’s utter lack of taste. Then again, she thought, he also thinks I’m beautiful. One shouldn’t be too quick to elevate another’s standards.

She’d been drinking white wine while Kyle watched the movie through to the end.

“I always liked Khan,” said Heather with a smile, moving now to sit on the couch. “A guy who goes absolutely nuts when his wife dies—just the way it should be.”

Kyle smiled back at her.

He’d lived on his own for a year now, but it was never supposed to be permanent. Just for a few weeks; give them each some space, some time, some privacy.

And then suddenly, Becky, too, had moved out.

And Heather was alone.

And, somehow, there seemed to be less drawing Kyle back—less a sense that the family had to be restored.

The family—it had never even had a name. It wasn’t the Graveses; it wasn’t the Davises. It had just been.

Heather looked now at Kyle, the wine having warmed her. She did love him. It had never been like that romp with Josh Huneker. With Kyle, it had always been deeper, more important, more satisfying on a dozen different levels. Even if he was, in so many ways, still just a little boy—his fondness for Star Trek and a million other things simultaneously amusing her and melting her heart.

She reached out, put her hand on top of his.

And he responded, placing his other hand on top of hers.

He smiled.

She smiled.

And they leaned together in a kiss.

There had been perfunctory kisses over the past year, but this one lingered. Their tongues touched.

The lights had dimmed automatically when the wall TV had been turned on. Kyle and Heather moved even closer together.

It was like old times. They kissed some more, then he nibbled on her earlobe and ran his tongue around the curves of her ear.

And then his hand found her breast, rolling her nipple through the fabric of her shirt between thumb and forefinger.

She felt warm—the wine, the pent-up desire, the summer’s night.

His hand wandered down, flittering across her belly, sliding along her thigh toward her crotch.

Just like it had so many times before.

Suddenly she tensed, the muscles in her thighs bunching.

Kyle lifted his hand. “What’s wrong?”

She looked into his eyes.

If only she could know. If only she could know for sure.

She dropped her gaze.

Kyle sighed. “I guess I should be going,” he said.

Heather closed her eyes and didn’t stop him from leaving.