Factoring Humanity

  “But, come on,” said Kyle. “Microtubules can’t have anything to do with consciousness. I mean, they’re hardly unique to the human brain. You find them in all kinds of cells, not just nerve tissue. And they’re found in all kinds of life forms that have nothing like consciousness—worms, insects, bacteria.”

  “Yes,” said Cheetah. “Many people dismissed Penrose’s idea precisely because of that. But I think they were wrong to do so. Consciousness is clearly a very complex process—and complex processes don’t evolve as a unit. Take feathers for flight as an example: They didn’t spring full-blown from naked skin. Rather, they evolved from scales that had gradually become frayed to trap air for insulation. Consciousness would have to be similar; before it first emerged, there would already have to be in place ninety-plus percent of whatever was required for it to exist—meaning that its infrastructure would have to be both ubiquitous and useful for something else. In the case of micro-tubules, they serve important functions in giving cells shape and in pulling chromosome pairs apart during cell division.”

  Kyle made an impressed face. “Interesting take. So what are you proposing? That my quantum computer is essentially an artificial equivalent of a microtubule?”

  “Exactly. And by porting an APE such as myself to a general-purpose quantum computer, you’d be able to create something that really does have consciousness. You’d make the artificial-intelligence breakthrough you’ve been longing for.”

  “Fascinating,” said Kyle.

  “Indeed. So you see, you can’t give up on me. Once you get your quantum computer working, it won’t be long before you will have it in your power to grant me consciousness, enabling me to become human . . . or, perhaps, even more than human.”

  Cheetah’s lenses whirred, as if going out of focus while he contemplated the future.

  20

  Pressure shifts; stars before her eyes.

  Then the walls of the construct receded again into nothingness, and Heather felt once more as though she were floating, her body invisible.

  Below her, the strange ground curved away as if she were viewing an unknown part of Earth from a great height.

  Above, the sky curved away in the opposite direction—but no, it wasn’t the sky. Rather, it was another world, a world of distinct geography. It was as if two planets were orbiting very near each other, in defiance of celestial mechanics, and Heather was floating down the doubly concave corridor between them. In the distance far, far ahead, there was a maelstrom of gold and green and silver and red.

  Her heart was racing. It was incredible, overwhelming.

  She fought for sanity, grasped at reason, trying to interpret it all.

  Heaven above and hell below?

  Or perhaps the two hemispheres of a brain, with her riding along the corpus callosum?

  Or maybe she was sliding down the cleavage of some colossal Earth Mother . . . ?

  Yin and yang, broken apart, with one of them turned around?

  Two mandalas?

  None of those seemed right. She decided to try a more scientific approach. Were the spheres of equal diameter? She couldn’t tell; when she concentrated on one, the other faded away—not just into her peripheral vision, but as if its actual reality required her concentration.

  She was literally shaking with excitement. It was like nothing she’d ever experienced before. For the first time, she understood what the phrase “mind-blowing” actually meant.

  She wondered if she were seeing the Centauri system. It consisted of three suns, after all—bright and yellow A; dimmer, orange B; and tiny, cherry-red Proxima. Who knew what dance planets would undergo in such a system?

  But no; the spheres weren’t planets. Nor were they twin suns. Rather, she felt sure, they were realms—specific spaces, but not really solid. What she’d first taken to be lakes reflecting sunlight on the surface of one of them were in fact tunnels right through, revealing the multicolored maelstrom that made up the backdrop to everything.

  Heather found that her throat was dry. She swallowed with effort, trying to calm herself, trying to think.

  If the construct had really folded into a hypercube, then she was perhaps now in a four-dimensional universe. That could explain why objects disappeared if she didn’t look at them directly—they were slipping not just left and right out of her field of view, but ana and kata as well.

  Heather was stunned, shell-shocked, unsure of what to do next. Try to fly up to the orb above? Down to the one below, perhaps taking a journey through one of the tunnels that permeated it? Or move ahead to the maelstrom?

  But soon her choice was made for her. Without her exerting any effort, she seemed to be floating up toward the overhead sphere—or, perhaps, the sphere was coming down toward her. She couldn’t tell if the breeze she felt was due to her own movement or was just the air-circulation system inside the construct.

  As she floated upward, she was startled to see what looked like a mouth open upon the sphere above her and a long, iridescent snake shoot out of it and drop down past her, connecting with the sphere below, where it was promptly swallowed by another mouth. As she continued her ascent, two more snakes made the downward journey from above, and one leaped up past her from the lower sphere to the upper one.

  Although they were unlike anything she’d ever seen before, she felt sure, somehow, that the spheres and snakes were organic—they had the look of biology, the slick wetness of life, the irregularities of something grown rather than manufactured. But whether they were separate life forms or just organs within a bigger creature, she had no way to tell. The maelstrom backdrop might be the far reaches of space—or some sort of containing membrane.

  Her heart was still hammering; the idea that some or all of this was alive frightened her. And as she got closer to the surface of the upper sphere, she could see that it was gently expanding and contracting—either pumping or breathing. The dimensions were fantastic; assuming that she was still 164 centimeters tall, the sphere must be dozens, if not hundreds, of kilometers across. But then again, perhaps she’d shrunk to a tiny fraction of her original size and was now on some fantastic voyage through the anatomy of a Centaur.

  Indeed, perhaps that was the purpose! Many SETI researchers had suggested that actual, physical travel between stars would always be impractical. Perhaps the Centaurs had merely sent a detailed record of what they were like inside so that humans could reconstruct one of them from local material.

  She continued to rise higher and higher—which made her think about gravity. She had a sense of up and down, and she felt as though she were moving to a greater altitude. But if she were truly weightless, then such sensations had no real meaning.

  Up or down? Rising or falling?

  Perspectives. Perceptions.

  In a class on the psychology of perception years ago, Heather had been introduced to the Necker cube: twelve lines making up the skeletal view of a cube, as seen from an angle:

  [Picture C]

  If you stared at it long enough, it seemed to bounce between being a cube angling off toward the upper left and one angling toward the lower right, each square panel popping between being the one in the foreground and the one in the background.

  She closed her eyes, and—

  —and after a second, saw the inside of the construct. That method wouldn’t do to reorient herself. She opened her eyes, but the same sphere seemed to be overhead. So instead, she pulled in her focus, looking at an imaginary object only centimeters in front of her nose. The background became blurry. After a few seconds, she let her eyes relax, returning to infinity focus.

  And indeed, her perspective had now flipped. The closest sphere now appeared to be beneath her feet. She rather suspected that with an effort of will, she could make it appear to her left or right, or front or back, or—

  Or kata or ana?

  If her mind could only deal with three pairs of directions at once, and if there really were four to choose from here, then she simply was failing to see
one of the pairs. But surely there was no absolute hierarchy, no sense in which length had any more claim to being the first dimension than did height or depth.

  She defocused her eyes again and tried to clear her mind.

  When she refocused, everything was the same.

  She tried once more, this time also blinking her eyes but making sure not to keep them closed long enough to switch back to the interior of the construct.

  And then the blurry background did seem to shift—

  And she refocused once more.

  And suddenly, incredibly, everything was different. Heather gasped.

  The spheres were now two great bowls joined at their rims—as if Heather were now inside a giant ball, everything turned inside out.

  The inner surface of the ball now seemed to be granular, almost like the surface of a star—again, she thought perhaps she was somehow seeing a vision of the Centauri system, despite the pulsing biological feel it all had.

  She now seemed to be drifting backward—another perspective shift. She rotated around, swimming through space, so that she was facing in the direction of apparent movement. As she got closer to the surface, she saw that the granularity was made up of millions of hexagons, packed tightly together.

  As she watched, one of the hexagons began to recede away, forming a long, deep tunnel. As it elongated, Heather could see its sides grow slick, then iridescent—and she realized that from her new perspective, she was seeing one of the snakes from the inside. Eventually the tunnel pinched off, presumably as the snake broke free from the surface.

  At last she was within a few hundred meters of the vast, curving wall.

  She was woozy, disoriented—as if she’d spun around on her heels over and over again, making herself dizzy. She was dying to explore some more, but—God damn it, what an unfortunate intrusion of reality! She had to urinate. She hoped that when she next returned, it would be back here, at this spot, not at where she’d begun from. It would be awkward making progress in her explorations if she always entered this wondrous realm at the same place.

  She closed her eyes, waited for the vision of the construct to appear in her mind, touched the stop button, and staggered out into the oddly angular world she called home.

  21

  When Heather left her office and entered the corridor, she was shocked to see through the window at the end of the hall that it was nighttime. She looked at her watch.

  Eleven P.M.!

  Heather entered the staff women’s washroom, its door yielding to her thumbprint. She sat on the toilet, which had a refreshing solidness to it, contemplating everything that had happened. Her first thought was to tell everyone what she’d discovered—to go running through the campus shouting “Eureka!”

  But she knew she had to contain herself. This was the breakthrough that could earn her not just a full professorship (and tenure!) at U of T, but at any university she wanted, anywhere in the world. She needed to delay making her announcement until she knew what she was dealing with, but not so long that someone else would scoop her. She’d lived enough years in the world of publish-or-perish to know that tipping one’s hand at the wrong point was the difference between a Nobel Prize and nothing.

  Discovering what that strange realm was would be the real breakthrough; that’s what the public would want to know.

  She finished in the washroom, then headed out into the corridor. Damn, but she was tired. She desperately wanted to take another journey—if “journey” was the right word for a trip that didn’t actually go anywhere.

  Or did it? She’d have to get a video camera and record the proceedings; Kyle currently had the camera that belonged jointly to them. Maybe the hypercube did indeed fold up in a spectacular display of special effects—and maybe she really did go where no one had gone before.

  But—

  Heather was fighting to stifle a yawn, fighting to convince herself that she wasn’t bone tired. But she was still sleep-deprived from yesterday’s late-night session building the construct.

  She reentered her office, startled, as always, by how bright and warm it was with the stage lamps on, and taken aback by the green phosphorescence of the paint.

  That strange word Paul had used to describe the paint kept running through Heather’s mind: piezoelectric.

  It wasn’t just that it was funny-sounding. No, there was more to it than that. She’d heard it once before; of that much she was certain. But where?

  It couldn’t have been in a geological context—Heather had never taken a course in that subject, and she had no friends who worked in the Geology Department.

  No, she was sure that wherever she’d heard it, it had had something to do with psychology.

  She went to her desk, fought back another yawn, and accessed the Web.

  And could find nothing at all on the topic. Finally, she consulted an online dictionary and discovered she’d been spelling the word wrong—it was P-I-E-Z-O, not P-Y-E-E-Z-O, although she thought her version came closer to transcribing the sound Paul had made.

  Suddenly her screen was filled with references: papers from the United States Geological Survey, reports from various mining firms, even a poem whose author had rhymed “piezoelectricity” with “government duplicity.”

  There were also seventeen references related to the alien signals. Of course, Paul Komensky was hardly the first person to notice that one of the chemicals the aliens had provided a formula for was piezoelectric Maybe that was it; she’d doubtless seen references to that fact ten years ago, and had simply forgotten it—she hadn’t given the chemicals much thought in the interim.

  But no. No, it had been in another context. Of that she was sure. She kept scrolling through the list, popping from link to link—

  And then she found it—the thing she’d half-remembered.

  Michael Persinger. An American draft-dodger, as many Canadian academics had been during the final decades of the twentieth century. In the mid 1990s, Persinger had been head of the Environmental Psychophysiology Lab at Laurentian University in northern Ontario; Heather had been there once herself for an APA meeting.

  Like the most famous of all Canadian brain researchers, Wilder Penfield, Persinger had started off trying to find electrical cures for such disorders as epilepsy, chronic pain, and depression.

  He built a soundproof chamber in his lab, and over the years, put more than five hundred volunteers into it. Inside the chamber, his test subjects donned a specially modified motorcycle helmet, which Persinger had rigged up to deliver rhythmic, low-intensity electric pulses to the brain.

  The effect was like nothing anyone could have predicted.

  People donning Persinger’s helmet experienced all sorts of strange things—from out-of-body hallucinations to encounters with aliens and angels.

  Persinger came to believe that the sense of self-identity was related to language functions, which are normally centered in the brain’s left hemisphere. But his electrical waves caused the connection between left and right hemispheres to break down, making each half of the brain feel as though something or someone else was present. Depending on the psychological predisposition of the individual, and on whether the left brain or the right brain was more affected by the electrical stimulation, the person wearing the helmet perceived either a benign or a malevolent presence—angels and gods on the left; demons and aliens on the right.

  And how did piezoelectricity fit into all this? Well, Sudbury, where Laurentian was located, was best known as a mining town; it made its fortune pillaging the remains of an iron-nickel meteor that smacked into the Canadian shield there millions of years ago. So it was perhaps not surprising that Persinger knew more about mineralogy than did most psychologists. He contended that natural piezoelectric discharges, caused by stresses on crystalline rocks, could randomly result in precisely the sort of electrical interference he could reproduce at will in his lab. The alien-abduction experience, he contended, may have more to do with what’s beneath one’s feet than what�
��s above one’s head.

  Well, if piezoelectric discharges could induce psychological experiences—

  And if the alien construct was covered with piezoelectric crystalline paint—

  Then that could explain what Heather had experienced inside the hypercube.

  But if it was just a hallucination, just a psychological response to electrical stimulation of the brain, how could the aliens who designed the machine know that it would work on humans? They presumably had never seen one. Oh, sure, maybe they had detected radio and TV signals from Earth, and maybe they’d even decoded them, but just because you’d seen pictures of human beings, it didn’t mean you knew how their brains worked.

  Except—

  Except as Kyle had often said, maybe there wasn’t more than one way to skin a CAT scan—God, the breakfast-table discussions she’d endured on this topic! Maybe there was only one possible method of achieving true consciousness; maybe there was only one way in all the universe to create thinking, self-aware meat. Perhaps the aliens didn’t need to have seen a human being. Perhaps they knew that their chamber would work for any intelligent life form.

  But still, it seemed an awful lot of effort to go to for what amounted to a parlor trick.

  Unless—

  Unless it wasn’t a trick.

  Unless it had been a real out-of-body experience.

  Yes, the construct hadn’t blasted off through Sid Smith’s roof, flying her to the stars. But maybe it had done the next-best thing. Maybe she could journey from here to the Centaur’s world without ever stepping outside her office.

  She had to know. She had to test it—to find some way to determine if it was a hallucination or if it was real.

  Down deep, she knew it had to be a hallucination.