Factoring Humanity

35

Kyle disengaged the cubic door. Heather had clearly been standing close by; he felt her hands lifting the door from the other side.

He swung his feet over the ledge and climbed out. Heather looked at him; doubtless she could tell he had been crying.

Kyle managed a small smile. “Thank you,” he said. His daughter wasn’t in the room. “Where’s Becky?”

“She had to go. She’s got a date with Zack tonight.” Kyle nodded, pleased. But he could see concern on Heather’s face—and he suddenly realized what the concern was. She knew him, of course, and, of late, really knew him. She had to realize that before looking at Mary’s dark hexagon, he would have snuck a peek at his wife’s mind, too. The expression on Heather’s face—he’d seen it once before, ages ago, the first time they’d made out in a well-lit room instead of groping in the darkness. The first time he’d seen her naked. She’d looked precisely this way then: embarrassed, scared that she didn’t measure up to his imaginings, and yet ever so provocative.

He spread his arms, swept her up in them, and hugged her so tight it hurt.

After a minute, they pulled apart. Kyle took her hand, running his index finger around her wedding ring. “I love you,” he said. He sought her eyes. “I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life getting to know you.”

Heather smiled at him—and at the memory. “I love you, too,” she said, for the first time in a year. He brought his face down to hers, and they kissed. When their lips separated, she said it again, “I do love you.”

Kyle nodded. “I know. I really know.”

But Heather’s expression waxed grim. “Mary?”

He was quiet for a moment, then: “I’ve made my peace.”

Heather nodded.

“It’s incredible,” said Kyle. “The overmind. Absolutely incredible.” He paused. “And yet…”

“What?”

“Well, remember Professor Papineau? How mind-expanding I always said his classes were? He taught me a lot of quantum physics—but I never got it, not really, not down deep. Things kept niggling. But it makes sense now.”

“How?”

He spread his arms, as if thinking of a way to express it all, “Do you know about Schrödinger’s cat?”

“I’ve heard the term,” said Heather.

“Simple thought experiment: you seal a cat in a box along with a vial of poison gas and a trigger that’ll release the gas if a quantum event that has precisely a fifty-fifty chance of happening in the next hour occurs. Without opening the box an hour later, can you say whether the cat is alive or dead?”

Heather frowned. “No.”

“ ‘No’ is right. But not because you can’t tell which it is. Rather, because it’s neither. The cat is neither alive nor dead, but instead is a superposition of wave fronts—a mingled combination of both possibilities. Only the act of opening the box and looking causes the wave front to resolve itself into one concrete reality. That’s quantum mechanics: things are indeterminate until they’re observed.”

“All right.”

“But say I look in the box first, see that the cat’s still alive, then seal the box up. You come along a few minutes later and you open the box and look, unaware that I’ve previously had a peek. What do you see?”

“A living cat.”

“Precisely! My having observed it shapes reality for you, too. That’s long been one of the problems in quantum mechanics: why do the observations of a single observer create a concrete reality for everyone simultaneously? The answer, of course, is that everyone is part of the overmind, so the observation made by one person is the observation made by all people—indeed, quantum mechanics requires the overmind in order to work.”

Heather made an impressed face. “Interesting.” She paused. “So what do we do now?”

“We tell the world,” said Kyle.

“Do we?” asked Heather.

“Sure. Everyone has a right to know.”

“But it’ll change everything,” said Heather. “Everything. The civilization we know will cease to exist.”

“If we don’t tell, somebody else will.”

“Maybe. Maybe no one else will figure it out.”

“It’s inevitable. Hell, now that you’ve done it, it’s part of the collective unconscious—someone will have it come to them in a dream.”

“But people will take advantage of this—the ability to spy, to steal thoughts. Whole societies will collapse.”

Kyle frowned. “I can’t believe that the Centaurs would send us instructions on how to build something that would lead to our downfall. Why bother? We can’t possibly be a threat to them.”

“I suppose,” said Heather.

“So let’s go public.”

Heather frowned. “Today is Saturday; I doubt that many science journalists are working on the weekend in the summer, so we can’t even begin to call a press conference until Monday. And if we want a good turnout, we’ll have to give the journalists a day or two’s notice.”

Kyle nodded acceptance. “But what if someone else does announce the discovery over the weekend?”

Heather considered. “Well, if that happens, I can always point to the overmind archive and say, ‘Look, there’s the proof that I’d figured it out before you.’ ” She paused. “But I suppose that’s old-style thinking,” she said with a little shrug. “In the new world we’re about to create, I doubt the idea of primacy will have any meaning.”

Heather spent all day Sunday exploring psychospace; Kyle and Becky were taking turns doing the same thing over in Mullin Hall, where you really did need someone to help remove the cubic door.

For Heather, it was like swimming in a pristine mountain lake, remote and pellucid, knowing that no one else had ever stumbled across it, knowing that she was the first to ever behold its beauty, to immerse herself in it, to feel it wash over her.

But like landscapes everywhere, the life on the surface was built on top of death, new shoots thrusting through a blanket of decaying organic matter. Although there were many living people whose minds Heather wanted to enter, there were also countless dead ones she wished to connect with—and somehow, entering the dead seemed less an invasion, less a violation of privacy.

Kyle hadn’t spent much time in the dark archive of Mary’s mind, and Heather had yet to touch one of the black hexagons. But now it was time.

Actually, in this case, she didn’t have to search for the hexagon. All she had to do was enter herself—an easy Necker transformation from the hexagon she’d identified as Kyle—and then, from her own memories, conjure up a concrete image of her desired target, and Necker into him.

Josh Huneker.

Dead now for twenty-three years.

She hadn’t been haunted by him, of course. For most of that time, she hadn’t thought about him at all, even though in at least one significant way, he’d had a huge impact on her life; it was he who had introduced her to the fascinations of SETI, after all, and so, quite literally, if it hadn’t been for her relationship with Josh, she wouldn’t be here now.

But she was here. And if there had been an earlier alien message, one that she’d never seen, one that no one still alive had ever seen, then she had to know.

One didn’t need a quantum computer anymore to crack Huneker’s secret—or anyone else’s secret, for that matter. Privacy—even the privacy of the grave—no longer existed.

She swapped into Huneker’s mind.

It was unlike any mind she’d been in before. This one was stone-cold dead, with no active images, no active thoughts. Heather felt as though she were adrift in a starless, moonless night, on a silent sea made of the blackest ink.

But the archive was here. What Josh had been—and whatever had tortured him—was stored here.

She imagined herself as she was back then. Younger, thinner, and if not actually pretty, possessed of an eagerness that might have passed for such.

And after a moment, it clicked.

She saw herself as he had seen her all those years ago: smooth-skinned; short, punky hair, then dyed blond; three little rings of silver—another Toronto experience!—piercing the curve of her left ear.

He had not loved her.

She wasn’t really surprised. He’d been the good-looking grad student, and she’d practically thrown herself at him. Oh, he’d had feelings for her—and they were sexual. And yet he’d already committed, he thought, to a different lifestyle.

He was confused, torn apart.

He’d planned to kill himself. Of course it had been planned—he’d had to think to bring the arsenic.

And like his idol Alan Turing, he had bitten into a poisoned apple. He’d sampled forbidden knowledge.

She’d never known how tortured he’d been, how much he’d agonized over what to do about her, and about himself.

She couldn’t say good-bye; there was no one to say good-bye to. Whatever had happened all those years ago was immutable—and over.

But she was not ready to pull out of his mind.

She’d never been to the Algonquin Radio Observatory, closed now for almost a quarter of a century. It took numerous tries to connect with his memories of the place—moving obliquely from his memories of her to his painful introspection up there, snow barricading the door. But at last she managed it.

Incredibly, there had been an alien message.

It formed a Drake pictogram; if Chomsky’s theories had any validity across species boundaries, the one syntactic structure that might be shared by all races communicating by radio was the grid made up of a prime number of columns by a prime number of rows.

As always, there were two possible interpretations, but here, at least, the correct one was obvious, since in it, a simple one-pixel-wide frame was drawn around the resulting page.

The frame cut across the page vertically at three points, dividing the message into four panels—making it look like a comic strip. Heather thought for a second that maybe Kyle had been right—maybe it was an interstellar killer joke.

At first Heather was afraid there was no way to tell which order the panels went in—left to right, right to left, top to bottom, or bottom to top. But the answer was clear on closer inspection; one edge of the frame was broken in a few places. Above the rightmost panel, there was a single pixel isolated by a blank pixel on either side; above the next panel, there were two isolated pixels; above the third, there were three; and above the fourth, there were four—clearly numbering the panels in order from right to left.

The first panel—the one on the far right—showed a number of free-floating units that looked like this, representing each one bit as an asterisk and each zero as a space:

******

* ** *

******

The second panel at first seemed to show much the same thing. The overall deployment of groups was different, but looked equally random. But after concentrating on it for a bit, Heather realized that two of the groups were different. They looked like this:

******

**** *

******

Josh had immediately dubbed the first type “eyes” and the second type “pirates.” It took Heather a moment to get it; by pirates, he meant that one of the eye holes was covered over by a patch.

In the third panel, there were many more pirates than eyes, and they had all arranged themselves so that they surrounded the eyes.

In the fourth panel, all the eyes were gone; only pirates were left.

Heather knew that Josh had had an interpretation, but she chose not to press farther into his mind; she wanted to see if she could solve it for herself.

But finally she gave up and probed Josh’s memories again. He’d seen it rather quickly, and Heather was angry with herself for not getting it on her own. Each group consisted of eighteen pixels—but of those eighteen, fourteen created a simple box around the central group of four: it was those four that—quite literally—counted. Stripping out the frame, and assigning ones and zeros instead of asterisks and spaces, the eyes looked like this:

And the pirates like this:

Binary numbers. Specifically, the eyes represented the binary equivalent of six, and the pirates represented the binary equivalent of fourteen.

The numbers meant nothing special to Heather.

And nor had they at first to Josh. But while Heather was bunched up inside a hypercube, Josh had had access to the library in the telescope building in Algonquin Park, and the very first book he’d opened—The Chemical Rubber Company Handbook of Chemistry and Physics—had the periodic table printed inside its front cover.

Of course. Atomic numbers. Six was carbon.

And fourteen—

Fourteen was silicon.

It had hit Josh in a flash. Heather wasn’t sure whether the shock she felt was all her own or some of his, too—a ghostly echo.

The first panel showed carbons going about their business.

The second, the advent of silicons.

The third, the silicons completely surrounding the carbons.

And the fourth, a world with only silicons left.

It couldn’t be plainer: biological life, based on carbon, being supplanted by silicon-based artificial intelligence.

Heather searched Josh’s mind for the identity of the star the message had come from.

Epsilon Eridani.

A star that had been listened to countless times by SETI projects. A star from which no radio signal had ever again been detected.

Like humanity, whatever civilization had existed around Epsilon Eridani had preferred to listen rather than to broadcast. But one message—a final warning—had been sent by someone from there, before it had been too late.

Heather, Kyle, and Becky met for lunch that day at The Water Hole, which was filled mostly with tourists, this being a Sunday afternoon. Heather told them what she’d plucked from Josh Huneker’s dead mind.

Kyle exhaled noisily and put down his fork.

“Natives,” he said. “Like Native Canadians.”

Heather and Becky looked at him quizzically.

“Or Native Americans—or Australian aborigines. Or even Neanderthals—my friend Stone was telling me about them. Over and over again, those who are there first are supplanted—totally and completely supplanted—by those who come later. The new never incorporates the old—it replaces the old.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how many papers I’ve heard at AI conferences suggesting that computer-based life forms would look after us, would work in tandem with us, would uplift us. But why would they? Once they’ve surpassed us, what would they need us for?” He paused. “The people at Epsilon Eridani found out the hard way, I guess.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Becky.

“I dunno. There was this guy—a banker named Cash—who wanted to bury the research I was doing in quantum computing. Maybe I should have let him. If true consciousness is possible only through a quantum-mechanical element, then maybe we should give up our experiments in quantum computing.”

“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” said Becky.

“No? It’s been over a decade since anyone anywhere exploded a nuclear bomb—which at least in part is because of the efforts of people who continued Josh’s work in Greenpeace. People like that believe you can put the genie back.”

Heather nodded. “For a computer scientist, you make a pretty good psychologist.”

“Hey, I didn’t spend a quarter-century with you for nothing.” He paused. “Josh killed himself in nineteen ninety-four. Roger Penrose’s second book on the quantum nature of consciousness was available, and Shor had just published his algorithm for allowing a hypothetical quantum computer to factor very large numbers. You said Josh loved to talk about the future; maybe he saw the relationship between quantum computing and quantum consciousness before anyone else did. But I bet he also knew that humanity never heeds warnings about things that won’t show their dangerous consequences for years—if we did, there never would have been an ecological crisis for Josh to be up in arms about. No, I’m sure Josh thought he was making certain the message got out just when we would most need to hear it. In fact, I bet he was naïve enough to think that the government wouldn’t hush up an undecoded message. Indeed, he probably suspected it would be the first thing ever decrypted by a quantum computer, in a big public demonstration. What a show it would have made! Just at the point at which humanity would be getting close to the breakthrough that would allow true artificial intelligence, the message from the stars would be unveiled, plain as day, big as life itself: Don’t do it.”

Heather frowned slightly.

Kyle went on. “It was the perfect scenario for a fan of Alan Turing. Not only was encrypting the alien message the kind of thing Turing himself might have enjoyed doing—he cracked the Nazis’ Enigma machine, you know—but the Turing test reinforces what the beings on Epsilon Eridani were trying to get across. Turing’s definition of artificial intelligence demands that thinking computers have all the same failings and pettinesses that real, live, flesh-and-blood life forms are prone to; otherwise, their responses would be easy to distinguish from those made by a real human.”

Heather thought for a moment. “What are you going to tell Cheetah?”

Kyle considered. “The truth. I think that down deep—if any part of Cheetah can be said to be down deep—he knew anyway. ‘Intruders,’ he said, ‘is the perfect word.’ ” Kyle shook his head. “Computers might develop consciousness—but never conscience.” He thought of the beggars on Queen Street. “At least, not any more conscience than we ever did.”