Factoring Humanity

26

Heather decided to pull out, to disentangle herself from Ideko.

But how?

Suddenly, she found herself flummoxed.

Of course she could revisualize the Centauri construct, then open the cubic door; surely that would sever the link.

But how brutal would the severing be? A psychic amputation? Would part of her be left here, inside Ideko, while the rest—her autonomic self, perhaps—was discarded back in Toronto?

She felt her heart pounding, felt sweat beading on her forehead; she had at least that much connection to her body back in her office.

How to separate? The tools must be there; there must be a way. But it was like suddenly being able to see for the first time. The brain experienced the color, the light, but couldn’t make sense of what it was seeing, couldn’t resolve images.

Or it was like being an amputee—that metaphor again, reflecting her anxiety about the upcoming separation. An amputee, fitted with a prosthetic arm. At first it would be just dead metal and plastic, hanging off the stump. The mind had to learn to control it, to activate it. A new concordance had to be established: this thought caused that movement.

If the flesh-and-blood brain could learn to interpret light, to move steel, to contract nylon tendons through Teflon pulleys, surely it could learn to work in this realm, too. The human mind was nothing if not adaptable. Resilience was its stock-in-trade.

And so Heather fought to calm herself, fought to think rationally, systematically.

She visualized what she wanted to do—as well as she could, anyway. Her brain was connected to Ideko’s; she visualized severing that connection.

But she was still here, inside him, his strobing view through the subway’s windows fading in and out of prominence as his imagination—ever lusty, our Ideko—came to the fore, then was fought down.

She tried a different image: a solution in a beaker—Ideko’s mind with hers dissolved into it, a faint difference in the refraction of light marking clear streamers of her in transparent him. She imagined herself precipitating out, white crystals—hexagonal in cross section, echoing the wall of minds—filtering down to the bottom of the beaker.

That did it!

The Tokyo subway tunnel faded.

The babble of Ideko’s thoughts faded.

The chatter of Japanese voices faded.

But no—

No!

Nothing replaced them; it was all darkness. She had left Ideko but had not returned to herself.

Perhaps she should escape the construct. She still had some control over her body, or thought she had. She willed her hand up to where she thought the stop button was.

But was her hand really moving? She felt panic growing within her again. Maybe she was imagining her hand, the way amputees imagined phantom limbs, or the way chronic-pain sufferers learned to imagine a switch inside their heads, a switch they could throw with an effort of will, suppressing the agony for at least a few moments.

To continue the process, to exit psychospace, would confirm or deny whether she did have control over her physical body.

But first—dammit all!—she had to contain the panic, fight it back. She had disconnected from Ideko; she was halfway home.

Solvent precipitating out of solute.

Crystals lying at the bottom of the beaker—

— in a haphazard pile; no order, no structure.

She needed to impose order on her rescued self.

The crystals danced, forming a matrix of white diamonds.

It wasn’t working, it wasn’t helping, it—

Suddenly, gloriously, she was home, inside her own perceptions.

The physical Heather breathed a giant sigh of relief. She was still in psychospace, facing the great wall of hexagons.

Her finger had pulled back a centimeter or so from the Ideko keycap.

Of course, it was all conceptualization, all interpretation. Surely there was no real Ideko key; surely psychospace, whatever it was, took some other form. But she knew now the mental gymnastics that would free her from another’s mind. She knew how to exit, and how to reintegrate.

And she desperately wanted to try again.

But in her mental construct of the index to minds, how were things arranged? That was Ideko’s button there. What about the six that abutted it? His parents? His children? His spouse—or perhaps not his spouse, for she would share no genetic material with him.

But it couldn’t be as simple as that, or as constraining. No orderly packing of humans based on simple blood relationships was possible; there were too many permutations, too many variations in family size and composition.

Still, perhaps she was in the Japanese zone of the wall; perhaps all these hexagons represented people from that culture. Or perhaps they were all people with the same birthday, scattered across the four corners of the globe.

Or perhaps she’d been drawn to this spot instinctively. Maybe Kyle’s own hexagon was that one right there: she’d almost touched that one instead of Ideko’s, but had changed her mind at the very last moment, just as in school she’d always shrunk away from her first, best answer and instead, made the wrong choice, forever muttering when someone else gave the correct reply, “I was going to say that.”

Seven billion buttons.

She tried the button she’d originally intended to touch, bringing her finger closer and—

Contact!

As staggering the second time as the first.

An amazing sensation.

Contact with a different mind.

This person at least was possessed of full color vision. But the colors were a bit off; the flesh looked too green.

Perhaps everyone perceived color slightly differently; perhaps even people with normal vision had different interpretations. Color was a psychological construct, after all. There was no such thing as “red” in the real world; it was simply the way the mind chose to interpret wavelengths ranging from 630 to 750 nanometers. Indeed, the seven colors of the rainbow—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—were Newton’s arbitrary designations; the quantity was chosen because Sir Isaac liked the idea of there being a prime number of colors, but Heather had never really been able to make out the supposed “indigo” between blue and violet.

Soon Heather’s attention was arrested by something other than the mere colors she was seeing.

The person she was inhabiting—male again, or at least that’s how it felt in some ineffable, slightly aggressive way—was highly agitated about something.

He was in a store. A convenience store. But the brands were mostly unfamiliar to Heather. And the prices—

Ah, the pound symbol.

She was in Britain. It was a newsagent’s, not a convenience store.

And this British—this British boy, she felt sure—was looking at the candy rack.

There’d been a language barrier between her and Ideko, but there was none here—at least, not a significant one. “Young man!” she called out. “Young man!”

There was no change in the boy’s mental state; he was utterly unaware of her attempts to contact him.

“Young man! Boy! Lad!” She paused. “Git! Wanker!” The last, at least, should have gotten his attention. But there was nothing. The boy’s mind was utterly intent on—

My goodness!

— on shoplifting something!

That candy. Curly Wurly—crazy name.

Heather cleared her mind. The boy—he was thirteen; she knew it as soon as she wondered about it—had enough money on his SmartCash card to pay for the sweet. He slipped a hand into his pocket and pressed his fingers against the card, warm from the heat of his body.

Sure, he could pay for the sweet—today. But then what would he do tomorrow?

The shopkeeper—an Indian man with an accent Heather found delightful but the boy found laughable—was busy talking with a patron at the till.

The boy picked up the Curly Wurly, glanced over his shoulder.

The shopkeeper was still busy.

The boy was wearing a lightweight jacket with large pockets. Keeping the Curly Wurly tight against his palm, he brought it up, up, lifted the pocket flap, and slipped it in. The boy—and, to her surprise, Heather, too—breathed a sigh of relief. He’d gotten—

“Young man!” said the accented voice.

Absolute terror flooded the boy, terror that set Heather quivering, too.

“Young man!” said the voice again. “Let me see what you have in your pocket.”

The boy froze. He thought about running, but the Indian man—who, strangely, the boy thought of as Asian—was standing now between him and the doorway. He had his hand extended, palm up.

“Nothing,” said the boy.

“You will be giving me back that confectionery.”

The boy’s mind was racing: running was still an option; so was handing back the sweet and begging for mercy. Maybe tell the newsagent that his father hits him and beg him not to ring his parents.

“I told you I didn’t take anything,” said the boy, trying to sound utterly offended at such a baseless accusation.

“You are lying. I saw you—and so did the camera.” The shopkeeper pointed to a small unit mounted on the wall.

The boy closed his eyes. His view of the exterior world went dark, but his brain was still lit up with images—of people who must have been his parents, of a young friend named Geoff. Geoff always got away with it when he nicked sweets.

Heather was fascinated. She recalled her own foolish youthful attempt at shoplifting, trying to steal a pair of jeans from a clothing store. She’d been caught, too. She knew the kid’s fear and anger. She wanted to see what would happen to him—but she didn’t have unlimited time. She’d have to break off eventually to attend to the necessities of life; she was already regretting not visiting the washroom before entering the construct.

She blanked her mind and conjured up the image of crystals of her precipitating out of the liquid, leaving the boy just as she had left Ideko.

Darkness, as before.

She organized the crystals, restoring her sense of self. She was back facing the wall of hexagons.

It was astonishing—and, she had to admit, one hell of a lot of fun.

Suddenly, she was hit by the tourist potential. The problem with virtual-reality simulations was just that: they were simulations. Although Sony and Hitachi and Microsoft had invested billions in creating a VR entertainment industry, it had never really caught on. There was a fundamental difference between skiing in Banff and skiing in your living room; part of the thrill was the possibility you might break a leg, part of the experience was the full bladder that couldn’t be easily voided, part of the fun was the real sunburn that one got during a day on the slopes, even in the middle of winter.

But this popping into other lives was real. That English lad was indeed going to have to face the consequences of his crime. She could stick with it for as long as she wished; follow him through the torment for hours, or even days. All the appeals of voyeurism, plus a simulation more vivid, more exciting, more unpredictable, than any that came in a shrink-wrapped package.

Would it be regulated? Could it be regulated? Or would all of humanity have to face the possibility that countless individuals might be riding around inside their heads, sharing their every experience, their every thought?

Maybe the quantity of seven billion wasn’t that daunting; maybe it was, in fact, a wonderful number; maybe the sheer randomness of the choice, the sheer number of possibilities, would be enough to prevent you from ever ending up in the mind of someone you knew.

But that would be the real appeal, wouldn’t it? It was what Heather had come looking for, and it was surely what those who followed would want as well: a chance to plug into the mind of their parents, their lovers, their children, their boss.

But how to proceed? Heather still had no idea of how to find a particular person. Kyle was here somewhere, if only she could figure out how to access him.

She stared at the vast hexagonal keyboard, perplexed.

Kyle continued to walk through the cemetery. He could feel a sheen of sweat building on his forehead. Mary’s grave was not far behind. He shoved his hands in his pockets.

So much death; so many dead.

He thought about the zebra being stalked and killed by the lion.

It had to be a horrible way to die.

Or did it?

Repression.

Dissociation.

Those were the things Becky was claiming had happened to her.

And not just to Becky. To thousands of men and women. Repressing the memories of war, of torture, of rape.

Maybe, just maybe, the zebra didn’t feel itself dying. Maybe it detached its consciousness from reality the moment the attack began.

Maybe all higher animals could do that.

It beat dying in agony, dying in terror.

But the repression mechanism must be flawed—otherwise, the memories would never come back.

Or, if not flawed, it must at least be being pushed beyond… beyond its design parameters.

In the animal world, there are no truly traumatic physical injuries that aren’t fatal. Yes, an animal could be frightened—indeed, terrified—and go on to live another day. But once a predator had sunk its jaws into its prey, that prey was almost certainly about to die. Repression would have to work for only a matter of minutes—or, at most, hours—to spare the animal the horrors of its own death.

If no one ever survived physically traumatic experiences, there would be no need for the wiring of the brain to be able to suppress a memory for days, or weeks, or months.

Or years.

But humanity—an ironic name, that—had devised non-fatal traumas.

Rape.

Torture.

The horrors of war.

Maybe the mind did come pre-wired to suppress the very worst physical experiences.

And maybe, quite unintentionally, those experiences did indeed resurface after a time. There was no need, until a few tens of thousands of years ago—the tiniest fraction of the time there had been life on Earth—for long-term suppression. Maybe no such skill had ever evolved.

Evolved.

Kyle considered the word, turned it over in his mind; he’d been thinking about it a lot lately since Cheetah’s revelation about how microtubular consciousness might indeed arise spontaneously through preadaptive evolution.

He looked at the various grave markers, with their crucifixes and praying hands.

Evolution could affect only those things that increased survival chances; by definition, it could never fine-tune responses to events that occurred after the last reproductive encounter… and, of course, death was always the final event.

In fact, Kyle couldn’t see any way that evolution could have produced a humane death for animals, no matter how big a percentage of the population would benefit from it. And yet—

And yet, if there was validity to human repressed memory, that capability must have come from somewhere. It could indeed be the work of the mechanism that let animals die peacefully even when they were being eaten alive.

If such a mechanism existed, that is.

And if it did, it meant that the universe did care, after all. Something beyond evolution had shaped life, had given it, if not meaning, at least freedom from torture.

Except for the torture that happened when the memories came back.

Kyle walked slowly back to the subway station. It was mid afternoon on a Friday; the trains arriving from downtown were packed with commuters escaping their corporate prisons. Kyle was teaching two summer courses, one of them, cruelly, met at 4:00 P.M. on Friday afternoon; he headed back to the university to give his final class of the week.