Factoring Humanity

32

Heather invited Kyle over to dinner the next night.

There was so much she wanted to say to him, so much that had to be cleared up. But after he arrived, she didn’t know where to begin—and so she began at a distance, with the theoretical: one academic to another.

“Do you think it’s possible,” she asked, “that things that seem to be discrete in three dimensions might all be part of the same bigger object in four dimensions?”

“Oh, sure,” said Kyle. “I tell my students that all the time. You just have to extrapolate, based on how two-dimensional views of three-dimensional objects work. A two-dimensional world would be a plane, like a piece of paperite. If a donut were passing vertically through a horizontal plane, an inhabitant of the two-dimensional world would see two separate circles—or the lines that represent them—instead of the donut.”

“Exactly,” said Heather. “Exactly. Now, consider this. What if humanity—that collective noun we so often employ—really is, at a higher level, a singular noun? What if what we perceive in three dimensions as seven billion individual human beings are really all just aspects of one giant being?”

“That’s a little harder to visualize than a donut, but—”

“Don’t think of it as a donut, then. Think of—I don’t know, think of a sea urchin: a ball with countless spikes sticking out of it. And think of our frame of reference not as a flat sheet of paper, but as a piece of nylon—you know, like stockings are made of. If the nylon was wrapped around the sea urchin, you’d see all those spikes sticking through and you’d think each one was a discrete thing; you wouldn’t necessarily realize that they were all attached, all just extensions of something bigger.”

“Well, it’s an interesting notion,” said Kyle. “But it doesn’t strike me as something you could test.”

“But what if it’s already been tested?” asked Heather. She paused, thinking about how to go on. “Sure, almost all reports of psychic experiences are bunk. Almost all of them can be explained. But there are, occasionally, few and far between, cases that can’t easily be explained. Indeed, they defy scientific explanation because they’re not reproducible—if it happens only once, then how do you study it? But what if, under rare, special circumstances, normally isolated spines on our sea urchin fold over and touch each other, however briefly? It could explain telepathy, and—”

Kyle was frowning. “Oh, come on, Heather. You don’t believe in mind reading any more than I do.”

“I don’t believe people can do it at will, no. But it’s been reported as an occasional phenomenon since the dawn of time; perhaps there is some validity to it. Jung himself argued in his later years that the unconscious functions independently of the laws of causality and normal physics, making such things as clairvoyance and precognition possible.”

“He was just a confused old man by that point.”

“Maybe, but my department head did his Ph.D. at Duke; they’ve done lots of interesting work there about ESP, and he—”

“Work that doesn’t stand up under scrutiny.”

“Well, sure, it’s clear that there’s no such thing as reliably reading minds—but there are a number of pretty solid studies suggesting that under sensory-deprivation conditions, certain people can guess with somewhat enhanced accuracy which of four possibilities someone else is looking at; you’d expect a twenty-five-percent success rate based on random guessing, but there were studies done by Honorton in New Jersey that show a thirty-three- or thirty-seven-percent success rate, and even one test group of twenty subjects that had a fifty-percent success rate. And the four-dimensional overmind—”

“Ah,” said Kyle, amused. “The coveted FDO.”

“The four-dimensional overmind,” repeated Heather firmly, “provides a theoretical model that can account for occasional telepathic linkages.”

Kyle was still grinning. “You looking to get a new research grant?”

Heather internalized a smile of her own. One thing she’d never be lacking again was grant money. “This model could also explain flashes of brilliance,” she said, “especially those that come while sleeping. Remember Kekule, trying to work out the chemical structure of benzene? He dreamed of a snake-ring of atoms—which turned out to be exactly right. But maybe he didn’t come up with that breakthrough on his own.” She paused, reflecting. “And maybe I didn’t come up with this notion on my own. Maybe the reason we sleep so much is that that’s when we interact most closely with the overmind. Maybe dreams occur while our daily individual experiences are being uploaded to the overmind. It can kill you, you know—not dreaming. You can get all the rest in the world, but if you take chemicals that prevent you from dreaming, you’ll die; that contact is essential. And perhaps when a problem is being worked on, maybe sometimes you’re not the only one doing it. It’s like the way your quantum computer is supposed to work—the computer you see will be solving only the smallest part of the problem, but it’ll be working in tandem with all the others. Maybe sometimes during sleep, we touch the overmind and get the benefit of all the nodes.”

“Politely, that sounds like New Age gibberish to me,” said Kyle.

Heather shrugged a little. “Your quantum mechanics sounds like gibberish to most people. But it’s the way the universe works.” She paused. “This is going to excite Noam Chomsky’s followers. In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky proposed that language is innate. That is, we don’t learn to talk the way we learn to tie our shoes or ride a bicycle. Instead, humans have a built-in linguistic ability—special circuits in the brain that allow people to acquire and process language without any conscious awareness of the complex rules. I’ve heard you say it yourself when marking student papers: ‘I know that sentence is grammatically incorrect; I can’t tell you exactly why, but I’m sure it’s not right.’ ”

Kyle nodded. “Yeah, I’ve said that.”

“So you—and just about everyone else—clearly has a sense of language. But Chomsky’s theory is that the sense is something you’re born with. And if you’re born with it, presumably it has to be coded in your DNA.”

“Makes sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Heather earnestly. “Philip Lieberman pointed out a big problem with Chomsky’s theory. Chomsky is essentially saying that there’s a language ‘organ’ in the brain that’s identical in every human being. But it can’t be. No genetically determined trait is the same in all people; there’s always variation. The language organ would have to show the same sort of variability we see in skin and eye color, height, susceptibility to heart disease, and more.”

“Why on earth would that be true?”

“It would have to be that way; genetics demands it. You know, there are people who digest foods in different ways—a diabetic does it one way, someone who is lactose intolerant does it another way. Even people we consider perfectly healthy may have different approaches, using different enzymes. But on a societal level, that doesn’t matter; digestion is utterly personal—the way you do it has no effect on the way I do it. But language has to be shared—that’s the whole point of language. If there were any variation in the way you and I processed language mentally, we wouldn’t be able to communicate.”

“Of course we could; Cheetah uses several speech-processing routines that aren’t based on any human models but rather are simple brute-force engineering solutions.”

“Oh, sure, if there’s some minor variation that makes no gross difference, meaning can still be conveyed. But on a subtle level, you and I both agree, even if Cheetah might not, that ‘big yellow ball’ is a proper construction, while ‘yellow big ball’ is, if not out-and-out improper, certainly not normal—and yet neither of us were ever taught in school that size is more important than color. We—all people speaking the same language—agree on very minute points of syntax and structure, without ever having been taught those things. And Chomsky says that every one of the five thousand different languages currently spoken, plus all the languages that existed in the past, follow essentially the same rules. He’s probably right—we do acquire and use language with extraordinary ease, so much so that it must be innate. But it can’t be genetically innate—as Lieberman points out, that would violate basic biology, which allows for, and indeed is driven evolutionarily by, the concept of individual variation. Besides, the Human Genome Project failed to find any gene or combination of genes that coded for Chomsky’s supposed language organ. Which begs the question: if it’s innate, and it’s not genetic, where does it come from?”

“And you think it’s from your proposed overmind?”

Heather spread her arms. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? And it’s not just language that seems to be hardwired. Symbols are shared, too, across individuals and across cultures. It’s what Jung called ‘the collective unconscious.’ ”

“Surely Jung meant that as a metaphor.”

Heather nodded. “At the outset, yes. But it does seem that we do share a rich background of symbols and ideas. You know Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces? I use it in one of my courses. Mythologies are the same even across cultures that have been isolated from one another. How do you explain that? Coincidence? If not coincidence, then what?”

“The overmind again, you think. But, geez, that’s such a big leap.”

“Is it? Is it really? Occam’s razor says you should prefer the solution that has the fewest elements. Positing one thing—the overmind—solves all sorts of problems in linguistics, comparative mythology, psychology, and even parapsychology. It is a simple solution, and—”

The clock on the mantle made its quarter-hour chime.

“Oh!” said Heather. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to go on so long, and—Damn, look there’s no time to explain it all now. We’ve got a visitor coming.”

“Who?”

“Becky.”

Kyle visibly stiffened. “I’m not sure I want to see her.” He paused. “Damn it, why didn’t you tell me she was coming?”

Heather spread her arms. “Because I wanted to be sure you would come over. Look, it’s going to be okay and—”

The sound of the door bolt disengaging; Becky was operating the lock herself, instead of ringing the bell.

The front door swung open. Becky stood in the entryway, stark against the darkness.

Kyle, now standing by the living-room window, held his breath.

Becky came up into the living room. She was quiet for a moment. Through the open window, Kyle could hear a skimmer whizzing by and the sound of a group of boys yakking away as they walked down the sidewalk.

“Dad,” Becky said.

It was the first time in over a year that Kyle had heard that word from her. He didn’t know what to do. He stood frozen.

“Dad,” she said again. “I am so sorry.”

Kyle’s heart was pounding. “I would never hurt you,” he said.

“I know that,” said Becky. She closed some of the distance between them. “I’m so very sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Kyle didn’t trust his voice. There was still so much anger and resentment in him.

“What changed your mind?” he asked.

Becky looked at her mother, then down at the ground. “I—I realized you couldn’t possibly do anything like that.”

“You were sure enough before.” The words, harsh, were out before Kyle could stop himself.

Becky nodded slightly “I know. I know. But… but I’ve looked into what my therapist did, at the techniques she used. Never knew memories could be manufactured.” She briefly met her father’s gaze, then looked back at the carpet.

“That bitch,” said Kyle. “The trouble she’s caused.”

Becky looked at her mother again; something was passing between the two of them, but Kyle couldn’t tell what.

“Let’s not worry about her now,” said Becky. “Please. The important thing is that this is over… or at least it is if you’ll forgive me.”

She looked up at her father again, with her large brown eyes. Kyle knew that his face was impassive; he didn’t know how to react. He’d been torn apart, reviled, shunned—and now it was all supposed to be over, just like that?

Surely there should be more than just an apology. Surely the wounds would take years—decades—to heal.

And yet—

And yet, more than anything, he’d wanted this. He hadn’t prayed, of course, but if there had been one thing that he would have prayed for, it would have been for his daughter to realize her mistake.

“You’re sure now?” said Kyle. “You won’t change your mind again. I couldn’t take it if—”

“I won’t, Daddy I promise.”

Was it really over? Had the nightmare really come to an end? How many nights he’d wished the clock could be turned back—and now she was apparently offering, in essence, just that.

He thought about poor Stone, standing outside his office, meeting with female students in hallways.

Becky stood still for a while longer, then took a small step closer. Kyle hesitated a moment more, then opened his arms, and Becky stepped into them. Suddenly she collapsed against his shoulder, crying.

“I am so very sorry,” she said between sobs.

Kyle couldn’t find any words; the anger couldn’t be turned off like a switch.

He held her for a long time. He hadn’t hugged her—God, maybe not since her sixteenth birthday. His shoulder was wet; Becky’s tears had soaked through his shirt. He hesitated for a moment—damn it all, but he would probably hesitate for the rest of his life—then brought his hand up to stroke her shoulder-length black hair.

They were quiet for a long time. Finally, Becky pulled away a little bit and looked up at her father. “I love you,” she said, wiping her eyes.

Kyle didn’t know how he felt, but he said the words anyway: “I love you too, Becky.”

She shook her head a little.

Kyle hesitated for another moment, then gently lifted her chin with his finger. “What?”

“Not ‘Becky,’ ” said his daughter. She managed a red-eyed smile. “Pumpkin.”

Tears escaped from Kyle’s eyes now. He swept his daughter back up in his arms, and this time he meant every syllable: “I love you, too—Pumpkin.”