Factoring Humanity

18

At first, nothing seemed to happen. But then Heather felt a sinking sensation in her stomach, as though she were in an elevator that was dropping rapidly down its shaft. A moment later her ears popped.

She smashed her fist against the stop button—

— and everything returned to normal.

Heather waited for her breathing to calm down. She tried the door, disengaging it slightly.

Okay: she could halt the process at any time, and she could get out at any time.

And so she resolved to try again. She closed her eyes, summoning inner strength, then pulled on the handle to reseal the door, and with an extended index finger, touched the center of the area on the panel in front of her circumscribed by the solid circle.

Heather’s stomach dropped away from her again, and her ears, not yet recovered enough from the last time to pop, ached a bit.

And in front of her, the constellations of phosphorescent squares started shifting, moving, rearranging, as—

As the unfolded hypercube she’d built began to close in on itself, moving ana or kata, collapsing into a tesseract, with Heather at its very heart.

She felt herself twisting, and although the landscape around her was all just apparently random patterns of piezoelectric paint, it seemed that the design visible in her left peripheral vision was the same one she could detect in her right. The straight edges of the square panels were bowing in and out, now convex, now concave. Heather looked down in the dim light at her body and saw it stretched and flattened, as if someone had painted an image of her on paper, then pasted that paper to the inside of a bowl.

And yet, except for the undeniable feeling of rapid motion in her stomach and the pressure shifts in her ears, and now and again stars before her eyes—also, she knew, a phenomenon associated with pressure shifts—there was no real discomfort. She could see her surroundings folding over and bending, and she could see herself doing the same things, but her bones were twisting without breaking.

The folding continued. The whole process took no more than a few seconds—judging by the runaway metronome of her heart pounding in her ears—but as it was happening, it seemed as though time were attenuated.

And then suddenly everything stopped moving. The transformation was complete: she was imprisoned in a tesseract.

No.

She fought for calmness. No, she wasn’t imprisoned. At every step, she’d been able to stop the process, to escape. The aliens, whoever they were, wouldn’t have gone to all this effort just to hurt her. She was still in control, she reminded herself. A willing visitor, not a prisoner.

But she felt there must be more to this than just the sensation of folding space over on itself. Surely the Centaurs hadn’t spent ten years telling humanity how to make a fancy amusement-park ride. There had to be more—

And there was.

Suddenly, the tesseract exploded open, the panels breaking apart at their edges. It happened like sped-up film of a flower blooming with grace and absolute quiet.

The panels seemed to recede into infinity, each one racing away in a different direction. Heather found herself floating freely.

But not in space.

At least, not in open space.

Heather stretched out, extending her limbs. There was air to breathe and multicolored light to see by.

She looked down at her body—

— and could not see it.

She could feel it—her proprioception was operating just fine. But she’d lost material form.

Which made her think that the whole thing was a hallucination.

The air seemed no thicker than regular air, and yet she found she could swim in it, paddling with cupped hands or kicking with her feet.

It hit her: If the panels had receded, so had the stop button. Adrenaline coursed through her. Dammit, how could she have been so stupid?

No. No. There’s no such thing as an out-of-body experience. It had to be a hallucination of some sort—meaning that she was still in the unfolded construct, still hunched over in that confined space.

And the stop button had to still be in front of her—a short distance ahead, to the right of center.

She reached an arm forward.

Nothing.

Another wave of panic washed over her. It had to be there.

She closed her eyes.

And a half-second after she did so, a mental image of the interior of the construct formed around her, looking, in her mind’s eye, just as it had at the beginning.

She opened her eyes, and the construct disappeared; closed her eyes, and it reappeared. There was a slight delay—more than enough for persistence of vision to decay—before each switch-over occurred.

So it was an illusion. She closed her eyes, let the construct reappear in her mind, reached forward, pressed the stop button, opened her eyes, saw the panels come rushing back in, then felt the hypercube unfolding around her—bowing and bending, a reversing of the previous dance.

After a minute, the view with eyes open and closed was identical: the construct had reintegrated. She was back in her office, back at the university—she knew it in her bones. Still, to prove it absolutely, she operated the cubic door—she was getting adept at disengaging it—and stepped outside. Light from the stage lamps stung her eyes.

All right: She could return home whenever she wanted. Now it was time to explore.

She got back in, pulled the door into place, took a deep breath, and pressed the start button.

And the hypercube folded up around her once more.