Factoring Humanity

39

When Heather returned to psychospace, it didn’t take long to find her father, Carl Davis.

He’d died in 1974, before there were home video cameras. Heather had never seen moving pictures of him and had never heard his voice. But she’d stared endlessly at snapshots of him. He’d been balding at the time he died, and had sported a mustache. He wore horn-rimmed glasses. He had a kind face, it seemed, and he looked like a good man.

He’d been born in 1939. Three weeks before his thirty-fifth birthday, he was killed by a drunk driver.

Heather’s sister Doreen had known him slightly: vague recollections (or were they false memories, created over the years to soften the blow?) of a man who had been part of her life until she was three.

But at least Doreen had known him, at least she’d been hugged by him, at least she’d been bounced on his knee, been read to by him, played games with him.

But Heather had never met him. Her mother had remarried ten years later. Heather had always refused to call Andrew “Dad,” and although her mother changed her own last name to Redewski, Heather insisted on remaining a Davis, holding on to that part of her past she had never known.

And, now, at last, she touched Carl Davis’s mind and leafed slowly through all that he had been.

He had been a good man. Oh, he’d have been considered a raving sexist by today’s standards—but not by those of the 1960s. And he was unenlightened in many other ways, too, wondering what all that fuss was about down in the southern U.S. But he’d loved Heather’s mother deeply, and he’d never cheated on her, and he’d doted on Doreen, and was so looking forward to having another baby in the house.

Heather backed off as the memories of her mother’s second pregnancy came to the fore. She didn’t want to see her father’s death; she’d simply wanted to know him in life.

She closed her eyes, rematerializing the construct. She pressed the stop button, exited, found some tissues, dried her eyes and blew her nose.

She had had a father.

And he would have loved her.

She sat for a time, warmed by the thought.

And then, when she was ready, she reentered the construct, wanting to spend more time learning about Carl Davis.

At first, everything was as usual. She saw the two globes, Neckered them into the two hemispheres, saw the great tract of black hexagons, and then—

And then—

Incredibly, there was something else there.

Heather felt it with the entire surface of her body, felt it with every neuron of her brain.

Could Kyle be in psychospace as well, using his construct? Surely not. He had a class now.

And besides—

It had been innocent fun, after all.

They’d already done this. He in his construct, entering her mind. She in her construct, entering his. Even their undergarments discarded, exploring their own bodies—closing and opening their eyes, experiencing it alternately as themselves and as the observer in the other’s brain.

Perfect feedback, knowing exactly how far along each of them was, enjoying it, timing it, climaxing simultaneously.

No, no—she knew what it was like when Kyle was also present in psychospace.

And this was not it.

And yet—

And yet there was something else here.

Could it be that someone else had figured it out? They’d delayed so long in going public. Could someone else be demonstrating access to the overmind at this very moment? There were only a small number of alien-message researchers left worldwide. Could it be Hamasaki displaying it while cameras from NHK were rolling? Thompson-Enright showing it off for the BBC? Castille taking a little psychospace jaunt while CNN watched? Had she and Kyle dallied too long before making their announcement?

But no.

No, she knew from her experiments with Kyle that she shouldn’t be aware at all of others accessing psychospace—if there were any others, that is.

And yet the feeling of something else being present was unmistakable.

The construct was piezoelectric.

Could it be malfunctioning? Could she be experiencing the phenomenon Persinger at Laurentian University had discovered all those years ago? Could piezoelectric discharges from the Centauri paint be causing her to hallucinate? Would she soon see angels or demons or big-headed aliens, come to take her away?

She closed her eyes, reintegrating the construct, then pushed the stop button. Maybe something had gone a little wonky with that particular insertion into psychospace. She took a deep breath, then reached out for the start button again.

She reentered, near the wall of black hexagons.

And the sensation that something else was there was stronger than before.

Something was moving through the realm, a coruscating wave undulating through all of human thought, all of human experience. It packed a wallop, this wave; it disturbed everything in its path. Heather tried to clear her mind, to act merely as a receiver rather than an interpreter, to open herself to whatever was passing through psychospace…

Kyle was walking up St. George, heading back from his class at New College to Mullin Hall. His favorite hot-dog vendor was positioned at his usual spot in front of the Robarts Library, a black-and-yellow Shopsy’s umbrella protecting him from the summer sun. Kyle stopped.

“ ’Afternoon, Professor,” said the Italian-accented voice. “The usual?”

Kyle considered for a moment. “I think I need a new usual, Tony. What have you got that’s healthy?”

“We got a veggie-dog. Fat-free, cholesterol-free.”

“How’s it taste?”

The little man shrugged. “It could be worse.”

Kyle smiled. “I’ll just have an apple,” he said, picking one from a basket. He handed Tony his SmartCash card.

Tony transferred the cost and returned the card.

Kyle continued on his way, polishing the apple on his blue shirt, unaware of the chubby figure that was following him.

Heather tried to suppress all the thoughts rushing through her brain.

She fought down thoughts about Kyle. She fought down thoughts about her daughters. She fought down thoughts about Lydia Gurdjieff, the therapist who had torn her family apart. She fought down thoughts about her work, her neighbors, TV shows she’d seen, music she’d heard, social encounters that had left her miffed. She fought it all down, trying to return her mind to its original tabula rasa form, trying to simply hear, simply detect, simply understand what it was that was rippling through psychospace.

And at last she made it out.

During her life, Heather had encountered people who were experiencing joy—and she’d seen how she herself could become joyous, the emotion transferring from the other person to her. The same thing could happen with anger; it was contagious.

But this emotion—well, she’d felt it often enough on her own, but had never experienced the transferring of it from the outside into herself.

Until now.

The sensation moving through psychospace was astonishment.

Absolute surprise; complete amazement—the very jaw of God dropping.

Something completely new was happening—something the overmind had never experienced even once before in all the countless millennia it had existed.

Heather struggled to keep her mind clear, trying to detect the reason for such profound amazement.

And at last she felt it, a strange sensation, as though she’d been touched by a ghostly hand, as if suddenly something was there.

That was it.

Something was there.

For the first time in its existence, the overmind was aware of something else, of someone else.

It was incredible—absolutely incredible.

The word “loneliness” didn’t even have a definition at the overmind level. It was only meaningful in three dimensions, referring to the apparent isolation of individual nodes. But in fourspace, it was meaningless—as meaningless as asking where the edge of the universe was.

Or so the overmind had apparently thought.

But now, incredibly, there was another presence in fourspace.

Another overmind.

The human overmind was struggling to comprehend. The sensation was as foreign to it as it would be for Heather to see a new color, to detect magnetism directly, to hear the music of the spheres.

Another overmind.

What could it be?

Heather thought of apes—gorillas, chimpanzees, and the handful of remaining orangutans. Perhaps one of those species had finally broken through, stepping beyond its animal limitations and achieving consciousness, a sentience if not comparable to humanity’s today, perhaps on a par with that of our Homo habilis ancestors.

But that wasn’t it. Heather knew in the very core of her being that that wasn’t the answer.

Heather then thought of APEs—the approximation of psychological experiences her husband and others had been building for years. They had never quite worked, never quite been human. But perhaps that had changed; they were constantly being tweaked, endless updates on the road to sentience. Perhaps Saperstein, or someone else, had solved the problems with quantum computing; she and Kyle hadn’t yet made the Huneker message public—Saperstein wouldn’t have known any better.

But, no, that was not it either.

The Other wasn’t here—however broadly one defined “here” in the fourspace of the overmind.

No—no, it was there. Elsewhere. Reaching out, making contact, touching the human collective unconscious for the very first time.

And then Heather knew.

It was another overmind—but not a terrestrial overmind.

It was the Centaurs. Their thoughts, their archetypes, their symbols.

They’d sent their radio messages as harbingers, heralding their arrival. But the human overmind, locked into its own ways, unable to comprehend, had missed the point. Individual humans had long proclaimed that we must not be alone in the universe, but the human overmind had known—known down to its very essence—that nothing but isolation was possible.

But it had been wrong.

The Centaurs had broken through.

Contact had been made.

Were the individual threespace Centaurs en route to Earth? Had they stretched the confines of their overmind, extending a lobe from Alpha Centauri toward the yellow star in whatever name they gave to the constellation humans called Cassiopeia, and in that stretching, had they sufficiently closed the gap so that the overmind of Earth and the overmind of the Centaurs now touched, now interfaced, now—in the most tenuous, tentative way—mingled?

If the Centaurs were coming closer, who knew how long it would be before they arrived in the flesh? The radio messages had begun a decade ago; even an overmind might be constrained by Einstein. The Centaurs would have had to have managed half the speed of light to arrive here by now, assuming they’d left at the same time they sent their first message; at a quarter of light-speed, they would still be over two light-years from Earth.

Heather realized that her mind was racing, despite her efforts to keep it clear, and—

No. No, it wasn’t her mind. It was every mind. The human overmind was trying to make sense of it all, puzzling it through, looking for answers.

Heather decided not to fight it. She let herself go, giving herself up to the waves of astonishment and curiosity and wonder washing over her…