Factoring Humanity

38

On Monday morning, Heather phoned the reporters she’d come to know back when the alien signals had stopped arriving. She invited them to come by Kyle’s lab in two days’ time—on Wednesday August 23, 2017; she and Kyle had decided that to ensure the kind of turnout they wanted, they’d have to give the reporters at least forty-eight hours’ notice. Heather simply told them that she’d had a breakthrough in decoding the alien radio messages; they were given no hint as to what sort of demonstration they were going to experience.

Of course, both constructs had been seen by several people now; it was unavoidable with grad students and cleaners constantly buzzing around. And although Kyle’s summer students certainly recognized an unfolded hypercube when they saw one—at least, the ones who were going to pass did—no one had yet realized that the markings on its surface were the Centauri radio messages.

Once she’d finished making her phone calls, Heather had two more days to enjoy psychospace knowing that only she and her husband might be accessing it.

She entered the construct in her office—Kyle’s was more comfortable, but she had a fondness for what, in honor of Becky, she now called the Alpha Centaurimobile (Kyle’s, of course, was the Beta Centaurimobile). Besides, Kyle would be spending much of the time sailing psychospace, too, and he left his construct parked in the damnedest places. How anyone could leaf through Gene Roddenberry’s mind before they’d visited Charles Dickens’s was beyond her.

Heather stripped to her undergarments and entered the central cube. She pulled the cubic door into place, then touched the start button and let the tesseract fold up around her.

She explored.

She was getting better at making connections, at digging up memories. Concentrating on a single famous quote was often enough to bring someone else’s memories of a famous person to the fore.

She soon found the dark hexagon of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister. She was surprised to find that he didn’t drink as much as history claimed. From there she Neckered into Rutherford B. Hayes, the nineteenth American president, and worked her way back through influential U.S. families to Abraham Lincoln. It was easy enough to find the reference to “Fourscore and seven years ago.” She Neckered into a Gettysburg farmer, watching the speech from his point of view. The farmer didn’t think much of the oratory, but Heather enjoyed the whole thing, although she was shocked when Honest Abe lost his place at “The world will little note nor long remember…” and had to do that line twice.

Other journeys let her watch Thomas Henry Huxley—“Darwin’s bulldog”—demolish Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce in the great evolution debate… which just whetted her appetite for watching the Scopes Monkey Trial, from John Scopes’s point of view at Clarence Darrow’s defense table.

Such drama! Such theater!

And that made her want to see some more. In honor of Kyle, she watched parts of the 1961 Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival production of Julius Caesar, Neckering back and forth between Lorne Greene’s perspective as Brutus and William Shatner’s as Mark Antony.

And although it took a lot longer to find it, she eventually got to see Richard Burbage doing the first-ever interpretations of Hamlet and Macbeth at the Globe Theatre, watching from Shakespeare’s own eyes in the wings. Burbage’s accent was almost incomprehensible, but Heather knew the plays by heart and enjoyed every second of the flamboyant performances.

Picking black hexagons at random took her to all sorts of times and places in the past, but the languages were mostly gibberish to her, and she only rarely could figure out where or when she was. She saw what was probably England during the Dark Ages, possibly the Holy Land during the Crusades, China in (if her one art-history course was a guide) the Liao Dynasty. And ancient Rome—one day, she would have to return and track down someone who had been in Pompeii on August 24, A.D. 79, when Vesuvius blew its stack.

A young Aztec girl.

An old Australian aborigine, before the coming of white men.

An Inuit hunter in the far, frozen north.

A street beggar in colonial India.

A woman making a porno movie.

A man at the funeral of his twin brother.

A South American boy playing soccer.

A prehistoric woman, carefully chipping a stone arrowhead.

An athletic young woman working on a kibbutz.

A terrified soldier behind a trench in World War I.

A boy working as a child laborer in Singapore.

A woman on the American or Canadian prairie, perhaps a century ago, giving birth—and dying in the process.

A hundred other lives, briefly glimpsed.

She continued to journey, sampling here, tarrying there, enjoying the smorgasbord of the human experience. Young, old; male, female; black, white; straight, gay; brilliant, dull-witted; rich, poor; healthy, sick—a panoply of possibilities, a hundred billion lives to choose from.

Whenever she thought she’d found a lead on characters of historical import, she followed the chain.

She saw Marilyn Monroe sing “Happy Birthday” to JFK—through Jackie’s eyes.

Through John Lennon’s eyes, she saw Mark Chapman pull the trigger. Heather’s own heart almost stopped when the bullet hit. She waited to see if something would escape Lennon’s body at the moment of his demise; if it did, she couldn’t detect it.

She saw the first-ever footprint on the moon through Neil Armstrong’s curving space helmet. He’d rehearsed that “one small step for a man” line so many times, he didn’t even notice when he flubbed it.

Although she spoke not a word of German, she found Jung and Freud. Fortunately, she knew the transcripts of Freud’s Clark University lectures of 1909 well enough to access the memories of that trip, during which he’d spoken mostly in English.

Heather realized that universities were going to enjoy an incredible boom once the overmind discovery was made public. She herself was certainly going to sign up to learn German—

— and, she realized at once, Aramaic as well. Why stop at the Gettysburg Address when you could also hear the Sermon on the Mount?

It was intoxicating.

But while indulging her curiosity, she knew she was avoiding the person she really wanted to connect with, afraid of what she might find.

She wanted to access her father, who had died two months before she’d been born.

She needed a break before she did that. She exited the construct and headed off to find a glass of wine to fortify herself with.