Factoring Humanity

21

When Heather left her office and entered the corridor, she was shocked to see through the window at the end of the hall that it was nighttime. She looked at her watch.

Eleven P.M.!

Heather entered the staff women’s washroom, its door yielding to her thumbprint. She sat on the toilet, which had a refreshing solidness to it, contemplating everything that had happened. Her first thought was to tell everyone what she’d discovered—to go running through the campus shouting “Eureka!”

But she knew she had to contain herself. This was the breakthrough that could earn her not just a full professorship (and tenure!) at U of T, but at any university she wanted, anywhere in the world. She needed to delay making her announcement until she knew what she was dealing with, but not so long that someone else would scoop her. She’d lived enough years in the world of publish-or-perish to know that tipping one’s hand at the wrong point was the difference between a Nobel Prize and nothing.

Discovering what that strange realm was would be the real breakthrough; that’s what the public would want to know.

She finished in the washroom, then headed out into the corridor. Damn, but she was tired. She desperately wanted to take another journey—if “journey” was the right word for a trip that didn’t actually go anywhere.

Or did it? She’d have to get a video camera and record the proceedings; Kyle currently had the camera that belonged jointly to them. Maybe the hypercube did indeed fold up in a spectacular display of special effects—and maybe she really did go where no one had gone before.

But—

Heather was fighting to stifle a yawn, fighting to convince herself that she wasn’t bone tired. But she was still sleep-deprived from yesterday’s late-night session building the construct.

She reentered her office, startled, as always, by how bright and warm it was with the stage lamps on, and taken aback by the green phosphorescence of the paint.

That strange word Paul had used to describe the paint kept running through Heather’s mind: piezoelectric.

It wasn’t just that it was funny-sounding. No, there was more to it than that. She’d heard it once before; of that much she was certain. But where?

It couldn’t have been in a geological context—Heather had never taken a course in that subject, and she had no friends who worked in the Geology Department.

No, she was sure that wherever she’d heard it, it had had something to do with psychology.

She went to her desk, fought back another yawn, and accessed the Web.

And could find nothing at all on the topic. Finally, she consulted an online dictionary and discovered she’d been spelling the word wrong—it was P-I-E-Z-O, not P-Y-E-E-Z-O, although she thought her version came closer to transcribing the sound Paul had made.

Suddenly her screen was filled with references: papers from the United States Geological Survey, reports from various mining firms, even a poem whose author had rhymed “piezoelectricity” with “government duplicity.”

There were also seventeen references related to the alien signals. Of course, Paul Komensky was hardly the first person to notice that one of the chemicals the aliens had provided a formula for was piezoelectric. Maybe that was it; she’d doubtless seen references to that fact ten years ago, and had simply forgotten it—she hadn’t given the chemicals much thought in the interim.

But no. No, it had been in another context. Of that she was sure. She kept scrolling through the list, popping from link to link—

And then she found it—the thing she’d half-remembered.

Michael Persinger. An American draft-dodger, as many Canadian academics had been during the final decades of the twentieth century. In the mid 1990s, Persinger had been head of the Environmental Psychophysiology Lab at Laurentian University in northern Ontario; Heather had been there once herself for an APA meeting.

Like the most famous of all Canadian brain researchers, Wilder Penfield, Persinger had started off trying to find electrical cures for such disorders as epilepsy, chronic pain, and depression.

He built a soundproof chamber in his lab, and over the years, put more than five hundred volunteers into it. Inside the chamber, his test subjects donned a specially modified motorcycle helmet, which Persinger had rigged up to deliver rhythmic, low-intensity electric pulses to the brain.

The effect was like nothing anyone could have predicted.

People donning Persinger’s helmet experienced all sorts of strange things—from out-of-body hallucinations to encounters with aliens and angels.

Persinger came to believe that the sense of self-identity was related to language functions, which are normally centered in the brain’s left hemisphere. But his electrical waves caused the connection between left and right hemispheres to break down, making each half of the brain feel as though something or someone else was present. Depending on the psychological predisposition of the individual, and on whether the left brain or the right brain was more affected by the electrical stimulation, the person wearing the helmet perceived either a benign or a malevolent presence—angels and gods on the left; demons and aliens on the right.

And how did piezoelectricity fit into all this? Well, Sudbury, where Laurentian was located, was best known as a mining town; it made its fortune pillaging the remains of an iron-nickel meteor that smacked into the Canadian shield there millions of years ago. So it was perhaps not surprising that Persinger knew more about mineralogy than did most psychologists. He contended that natural piezoelectric discharges, caused by stresses on crystalline rocks, could randomly result in precisely the sort of electrical interference he could reproduce at will in his lab. The alien-abduction experience, he contended, may have more to do with what’s beneath one’s feet than what’s above one’s head.

Well, if piezoelectric discharges could induce psychological experiences—

And if the alien construct was covered with piezoelectric crystalline paint—

Then that could explain what Heather had experienced inside the hypercube.

But if it was just a hallucination, just a psychological response to electrical stimulation of the brain, how could the aliens who designed the machine know that it would work on humans? They presumably had never seen one. Oh, sure, maybe they had detected radio and TV signals from Earth, and maybe they’d even decoded them, but just because you’d seen pictures of human beings, it didn’t mean you knew how their brains worked.

Except—

Except as Kyle had often said, maybe there wasn’t more than one way to skin a CAT scan—God, the breakfast-table discussions she’d endured on this topic! Maybe there was only one possible method of achieving true consciousness; maybe there was only one way in all the universe to create thinking, self-aware meat. Perhaps the aliens didn’t need to have seen a human being. Perhaps they knew that their chamber would work for any intelligent life form.

But still, it seemed an awful lot of effort to go to for what amounted to a parlor trick.

Unless—

Unless it wasn’t a trick.

Unless it had been a real out-of-body experience.

Yes, the construct hadn’t blasted off through Sid Smith’s roof, flying her to the stars. But maybe it had done the next-best thing. Maybe she could journey from here to the Centaur’s world without ever stepping outside her office.

She had to know. She had to test it—to find some way to determine if it was a hallucination or if it was real.

Down deep, she knew it had to be a hallucination.

Had to be.

Jung had gotten interested in parapsychology before he died, and in her studies of his work, Heather had had to research that topic as well. But everything—every case she’d investigated—was explicable in normal, quotidian terms.

Well, she would put it to the test, find out for sure. She turned around, prepared to enter the construct yet again.

But, dammit, it was now after midnight, and she could barely keep her eyes open—

— meaning, of course, that she’d just keep rematerializing the damned construct around her.

It was too late even to get a subway, and also probably too late to be walking the streets alone. She called a cab and then made her way down to the wide concrete steps in front of Sid Smith to wait for it.