Factoring Humanity

15

The phone rang in Heather’s office. She glanced at the call-display readout; it was an internal U of T call. That was a relief: she was getting tired of the media. But then, it seemed, they had gotten tired of her, too; the cessation of the alien messages was already old news, and reporters seemed to be leaving her alone now. Heather picked up the handset. “Hello?”

“Hi, Heather. It’s Paul Komensky, over at the CAM lab.”

“Hello, Paul.”

“It’s good to hear your voice.”

“Ah, yours, too, thanks.”

Silence, then: “I, ah, I’ve got those substances ready you asked me to mix up.”

“That’s great! Thank you.”

“Yeah. The substrate, it’s unremarkable, essentially just a polystyrene. But the other stuff, well, I was right. It is a liquid at room temperature, but it does dry—into a thin, crystalline film.”

“Really?”

“And it’s piezoelectric.”

“Pi—pi—what?”

“Piezoelectric. It means that when you put it under stress, it generates electricity.”

“Really?”

“Not much, but some.”

“Fascinating!”

“It’s not all that unusual, really; it happens a lot in various minerals. But I wasn’t expecting it. The crystals this stuff dries to are actually similar to what we call relaxor ferroelectrics. That’s a special kind of piezoelectric crystal that can deform—that is, change shape—ten times as much as standard piezoelectric crystals do.”

“Piezoelectric,” Heather said softly. She used her fingertip to write the word on her datapad. “I’ve read something about that—can’t offhand think where, though. Anyway, can you make the tiles now?”

“Sure.”

“How long will it take?”

“The whole run? About a day.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Can you do it for me?”

“Sure.” A pause. “But why not come over here? I want to show you the apparatus, make sure it’s going to produce exactly what you want. Then we can start the run, and then maybe grab some lunch?”

Heather hesitated for a moment, then: “Sure. Sure thing. I’m on my way.”

The manufacturing equipment was simple.

Spread out across the floor of Paul Komensky’s lab was a piece of the substrate material measuring about three meters on a side; two additional panels were leaning against one wall, almost touching the ceiling.

The substrate was a dark green color, like computer circuit boards. And sitting on top of the substrate sheet was a small robot the size of a shoebox, with a cylindrical tank attached to its back.

Heather was standing next to Paul. A computer monitor beside him showed the twelfth radio message—the first one after the basic math and chemistry lessons.

“We just activate the robot,” Paul said, “and it starts moving over the surface of the substrate. See that tank? It contains the second chemical—the liquid. The robot sprays on the chemical in the pattern indicated on the monitor, there. Then it uses a laser to cut the tile out of the substrate. It then flips over the tile and paints the same pattern on the other side; I’ve got it set to do it in exactly the same orientation, so that if the substrate were clear, the patterns would line up perfectly. It then uses one of its little manipulators to place the tile in those boxes over there.

He hit a button, and the robot proceeded to do just as he’d described, producing a rectangular tile measuring about ten centimeters by fifteen centimeters. Heather smiled.

“It’ll take about a day to cut the tiles, and when it’s done, all the tiles will be stored, in the order in which they should be snapped together, in the boxes.”

“What if I drop the box?”

Komensky smiled. “You know, my older brother did that once. His very first computing course was in high school in the early nineteen seventies. They did everything on punch cards back then. He wrote a program to print out a pinup of Farrah Fawcett—remember her? It was all made by printed characters—asterisks, dollar signs, slashes—simulating a halftone photo if you got far enough away from it. He spent months on it and then he dropped the damn box of cards, and they got completely scrambled.” He shuddered. “Anyway, the robot is putting little serial-number stickers on the back of each tile. They’re done with Post-it adhesive—if you want them off later, they’ll peel off easily.” He got the first tile out of the box and showed the label to Heather.

She smiled. “You think of everything.”

“I’m trying to.” The robot was motoring along; it had done six more tiles already. “Now, how about lunch?”

They were eating in the Faculty Club, which was at 41 Willcocks Street, just around the corner from Sid Smith. The dining room was decorated in a Wedgwood design: blue-gray walls with rococo white friezes. Heather was resting her elbows on the white tablecloth, intertwining her fingers in front of her face. She realized she was essentially holding her wedding ring out as a shield. That was the problem with being a psychologist, she reflected: you couldn’t do anything without being self-conscious about it.

She lowered her hands, folding them on the table—and, just as unconsciously as her first act, she put the left hand on top. Heather looked down, saw the ring still prominently displayed, and allowed herself a minuscule shrug.

But it hadn’t been lost on Paul. “You’re married.”

Heather found herself exhibiting the ring again as she lifted her hand. “For twenty-two years, but—” She paused, wondering whether to say it. Then, after a moment’s internal struggle, she did. “But we’re separated.”

Paul’s eyebrows went up. “Children?”

“Two. We had two.”

He tipped his head at the odd phrasing. “Do you see them much?”

“One of them died a few years ago.”

“Oh, my. Oh, I’m sorry.”

He had the good taste not to ask how; he went up a couple of notches in Heather’s estimation. “What about you?”

“Divorced, long ago. One son; he lives in Santa Fe. I spend Christmases there with him and his wife and kids; it’s nice to get away from the cold.”

Heather rolled her eyes slightly, as if some of that cold would have been very welcome at this time of year.

“Your husband,” asked Paul, “what does he do?”

“He’s here at the university. Kyle Graves.”

Paul’s eyebrows went up. “Kyle Graves is your husband?”

“You know him?”

“He’s in computing, right? We were on a committee together a few years ago—establishing the Kelly Gotlieb Centre.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember when he was doing that.”

Paul looked at her, smiling, unblinking. “Kyle must be a fool, to let you get away.”

Heather opened her mouth to protest that she hadn’t got away, that it was only a temporary separation, that things were complex. But then she closed her mouth and tilted her head, accepting the compliment.

The server arrived.

“Would you like some wine with lunch?” asked Paul.

After lunch, while she was walking back alone to her office, Heather used her datapad to access her voice mail. There was a message from Kyle, saying he needed to talk to her about something important. Since she was only a short distance from Mullin Hall, she decided to simply drop by and see what he wanted.

“Oh, hi, Heather,” said Kyle, once the door to his lab had slid aside. “Thanks for stopping by. I need to talk to you. Have a seat.”

Heather was slightly woozy from the wine she’d had with lunch; having a seat sounded like a very good idea indeed. She sat down in front of Cheetah.

Kyle perched himself on the edge of a desk. “I need to talk to you about Josh Huneker.”

Heather stiffened. “What about him?”

“I’m sorry; I know you asked me never to mention him, but, well, his name came up today.”

Heather narrowed her eyes. “In what context?”

“Was there anything unusual about his death?”

“What do you mean ‘unusual’?”

“Well,” said Kyle, “they said he killed himself because he was gay.”

Heather nodded. “It was news to me, but, yeah, that’s what they said.” Then she shrugged a little, as if acknowledging how times had changed; she couldn’t imagine anyone killing themselves just because of that today.

“But you didn’t think he was gay?”

“Oh, Christ, Kyle, I don’t know. He seemed genuinely interested in me, but they said he had a sexual relationship with the guy I thought was just his roommate. What’s this all about?”

Kyle took a deep breath. “A woman came to see me today. She says she represents a consortium”—he’d gone back to the hard-T pronunciation—“that has a copy of a disk containing an alien radio message Huneker received just before he died.”

Heather nodded.

“You don’t look surprised.”

“Well, it’s not the first time I’ve heard the story that he detected a message. It’s a rumor that’s been kicking around for years in SETI circles. But, you know, it’s just a story.”

“It does seem a bit of a coincidence, doesn’t it?” said Kyle. “I mean, two messages, presumably from two different stars, so close together: whoever Huneker supposedly picked up in nineteen ninety-four, and then the sequence of messages from Alpha Centauri beginning thirteen years later.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Heather. “SETI researchers originally thought we would pick up far more messages than we already have by this point. By 1994, we’d only been listening for alien radio signals for thirty years; there could have been countless attempts to contact us before we had radio telescopes, and we could be due for another contact tomorrow—we just don’t know how often radio contact with another civilization should be expected.”

Kyle nodded. “They closed the Algonquin radio telescope shortly after Huneker supposedly detected his message.”

Heather smiled sadly. “You hardly need me to tell you about government cutbacks. Besides, if such a disk exists, why would someone come to you about it?”

“The woman said Huneker had encoded the message using RSA—that’s a system that employs the prime factors of very large numbers as the decryption key.”

“Were people doing things like that then?”

“Sure. As far back as nineteen seventy-seven, Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman—the three MIT scientists who worked out the technique—encoded a message using the 129-digit product of two primes. They offered a hundred-dollar prize to anyone who could decode it.”

“And did anyone?”

“Years later, yeah. Nineteen ninety-four, I think.”

“What’d it say?”

“ ‘The magic words are squeamish ossifrage.’ ”

“What the devil is ‘ossifrage’?”

“It’s a bird of prey, I think. It took six hundred volunteers using computers worldwide each working on part of the problem over an eight-month period, to crack the code—more than a hundred quadrillion instructions.”

“So why haven’t they done that with Josh’s message?”

“He used 512 digits—and each additional digit is an additional order of magnitude, of course. They’ve been working on it, using conventional means, ever since but haven’t cracked it yet.”

“Oh. But why did this consortium come to you?” She was a hard-T person, too.

“Because they think I’m getting close to a breakthrough in quantum computing. I’m not ready yet—we’ve got only one prototype system, and even if we do get the bugs out of it, it’ll work only with numbers exactly three-hundred digits long. But in a few months, with luck, I will have a system that could decode messages of any length almost instantaneously.”

“Ah.”

“This woman who came to see me, I think she wants to patent whatever technology is gleaned from the message.”

“That’s outrageous,” said Heather. “Even if such a message exists—and I really doubt that—it belongs to everyone.” She paused. “And besides…”

“What?”

“Well,” said Heather, frowning, “if it exists, then Josh did kill himself after he saw what it had to say. Maybe—maybe you don’t want to know what it says.”

“You mean maybe his suicide might actually have been related to the message?”

“Maybe. Like I said, as far as I knew, he wasn’t gay or bi.”

“But what kind of message would lead a man to kill himself, but first hide it from the rest of humanity?” asked Kyle.

Heather was quiet for a moment, then: “‘Heaven exists, it’s absolute paradise, and everyone gets in.’”

“Why keep that a secret?”

“So that the human race would go on. If everyone knew that was true, we’d all commit suicide to get there sooner, and Homo sapiens would become extinct overnight.”

Kyle thought about this. “Then why leave an encrypted version of the message at all? Why not just destroy the message altogether?”

“Maybe it’s like the Pope,” said Heather. Kyle’s face telegraphed his lack of comprehension. “They say there’s a prophecy under lock and key at the Vatican; it’s been there for centuries. Every once in a while, a Pope looks at it—and reacts with horror, locking it up again. At least, that’s the story.”

Kyle frowned. “Well, this consortium wants me to go work for them; they’re offering a lot of money.”

“How much?” asked Heather.

She could see hesitation on his face. Even before he spoke, she knew what he must have been thinking: If we don’t reconcile at some point, is it wise for me to disclose the magnitude of a new source of income? “It, ah, was quite a substantial sum,” said Kyle.

“I see,” said Heather.

“They’ve already got a line on another researcher who also is close to making a breakthrough.” He paused. “Saperstein.”

“You hate that guy.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you should do it.”

“Why?”

“Well, suppose Saperstein or someone else does it instead. That doesn’t mean the Huneker message, if it really exists, ever goes public—the government doubtless has a copy of the message, but they’ve kept it under wraps for over twenty years now.”

“Perhaps. But I’m sure the consortium will make me sign an NDA.”

“Ah,” said Heather, imitating her husband. “The coveted NDA.”

He smiled. “An NDA is a nondisclosure agreement. They’d likely make me sign a contract with very stiff penalties, promising not to divulge the message’s content, or even its existence.”

“Hmm. What do you want to do?”

Kyle spread his arms. “There was an old Monty Python skit about a joke so funny you’d literally die laughing if you heard it; it was used as an Allied weapon in World War Two. It had to be translated from English to German by teams, each person translating only one word at a time. One guy accidentally saw two words and ended up in intensive care.” He paused. “I don’t know. If somebody handed you a joke and said it was that funny, wouldn’t you have to look and see for yourself?” He paused. “Even if Huneker did kill himself after he read it, I want to know what the alien message said.”

“It might be indecipherable, you know—just like the Centauri messages. Even if you can figure out the prime factors, it doesn’t mean the message would make sense. I mean, despite what I said a moment ago, I guess it is plausible that Josh killed himself for personal reasons, and the message had nothing to do with it.”

“Perhaps,” said Kyle. “Or perhaps the message made a pictogram that by coincidence meant something only to Huneker.” He jerked a thumb at the Dali painting. “You know, maybe he’d stolen money from his church poor box and the pictogram happened to look like Jesus on the cross, or some such thing. Drove him crazy.”

“In which case you’d be immune, you atheist you.”

Kyle shrugged.

“Maybe you should do it,” said Heather. She lowered her voice. “After all, if Becky…”

Kyle nodded. “If Becky sues me and I lose everything that the world knows I’ve got, it would be nice to have a lucrative source of income.”

Heather was quiet for a moment, then: “I have to get going.”

Kyle stood up. “Thanks for coming by,” he said.

Heather smiled wanly and left.

Kyle returned to his chair and sat thinking. Was there anything—anything at all—that someone could reveal to him that would cause him to kill himself?

No. No, of course not.

Except—

He shuddered.

Yes, there was one thing that someone could reveal that might indeed cause him to take his own life, just as poor Josh Huneker had done all those years ago up in the middle of nowhere.

Proof that it was he, not Becky, who had false memories of what had really happened during her childhood.