Factoring Humanity

  On the east side of Beecroft, filling the space between it and Yonge, was the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts. Kyle remembered the first play that had been presented there: Showboat. It had had its initial run here before going to Broadway. That was—what?—almost twenty-five years ago. Kyle had gone to that one—he still fondly remembered Michel Bell’s rendition of “Ol’ Man River”—and to every production since, although, since he and Heather had separated, he hadn’t yet been to see the current blockbuster, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of Dracula.

  The west side of Beecroft also held powerful memories. There had been vacant lots here in his youth, and he’d played football with little Jimmy Korematsu, the Haskins twins, and—what was his name? The bully with the misshapen head. Calvino, that was it. Kyle had never been much of an athlete; he played the game to fit in, but his mind was always wandering elsewhere. Once, when he’d actually caught the ball and kept from fumbling it, he’d run—oh, it must have been eighty meters, no, eighty yards (this was the 1980s, after all)—all the way into the imaginary end zone, its perimeter marked by a Haskins’s dropped sweatshirt.

  All the way into the wrong end zone.

  He’d thought he’d never live that down.

  The fields were just the right size for football games, and at their margins were wooded areas.

  Those held fonder memories.

  He’d made out there, often, with his high-school girlfriend Lisa, after movies at the Willow or dinners out at the Crock & Block.

  Now, though, the fields were paved over—parking lots for the Ford Centre.

  But behind them, as it had been since before he was born, was York Cemetery, one of Toronto’s largest.

  Some of his schoolmates had made out in the cemetery—there was a wooded strip, perhaps fifteen meters thick, running along its north edge so that the houses on Park Home Avenue didn’t have to look out at tombstones. But Kyle could never bring himself to do it there.

  He walked into the cemetery, following the curving road. The grounds were beautifully kept. In the distance, just before the cemetery was bisected by Senlac Road, he could see the giant concrete cenotaph, looking like an Egyptian obelisk, honoring the Canadians who had died in the World Wars.

  A pair of black squirrels—ubiquitous in Toronto—scampered across the road in front of him. Once when he was driving, he’d hit a squirrel. Mary had been in the car; she was four, maybe five years old then.

  It had been an accident of course, but she wouldn’t talk to him for weeks.

  He was a monster in her eyes then.

  Then, and now.

  Many of the graves had flowers on them, but not Mary’s. He’d meant to visit more often. When she’d died, he’d told himself he’d come every weekend.

  It had been three months since his last visit.

  But now he didn’t know where else to go, how else to speak to her.

  Kyle stepped off the roadway, onto the grass. A man riding a power mower was passing by. He averted his eyes from Kyle—perhaps just indifference, perhaps not knowing what to say to a mourner. To him, doubtless this was just a job; surely he never stopped to think about why the grass grew so luxuriously.

  Kyle shoved his hands into his pockets and made his way over to his daughter’s grave.

  He passed four tombstones before he realized his mistake. He was in the wrong row; Mary’s plot was one row farther along. He felt a pang of guilt. For Christ’s sake, he didn’t even know where his own daughter was buried!

  Kyle had walked across graves often enough in his life, but he couldn’t bring himself to cut over to the next row that way. Not here; not this close to Mary.

  He retraced his steps down the path, walked along the road, and made his way down the proper row.

  Mary’s stone was made of polished red granite. The flecks of mica flared in the sunlight.

  He read the words, wondering if someday they would be as illegible as those on the worn marble slabs he’d seen in old churchyards:

  MARY LORRAINE GRAVES

  BELOVED DAUGHTER, BELOVED SISTER

  2 NOVEMBER 1996 — 23 MARCH 2016

  AT PEACE NOW

  It had seemed an appropriate epitaph at the time. They’d had no idea why Mary had killed herself. The note she’d left, written in red pen on lined paper, had said simply, “This is the only way I can stay silent.” At the time, none of them had known what it meant.

  Kyle reread the last line on the stone again. At Peace Now.

  He hoped that was true.

  But how could it be?

  If what Becky said was true, Mary had killed herself convinced that her father had molested her. What peace could she have?

  The only way I can stay silent.

  A sacrifice—but surely not to protect Kyle. No, she must have seen it as being for her mother’s sake—to protect Heather, to save her from the horror, the guilt.

  Kyle looked down at the grave. The wound in the landscape had healed, of course. There was no rectangular discontinuity, no scar of dirt between the old ground and the sod laid overtop of it once the hole had been filled in.

  He lifted his gaze back to the stone.

  “Mary,” he said out loud. He felt self-conscious. The riding mower was far away now, its sound having diminished to almost nothing.

  He wanted to say more—so much more—but he didn’t know where to begin. He became conscious that his head was shaking slowly back and forth, and he stopped it with an effort.

  He was quiet for several minutes, then he said his daughter’s name once more—softly, the sound almost lost against the background noise of birds, a passing skimmer, and the mower, which was now slowly returning, cutting another swath through the lush lawn.

  Kyle tried to read the headstone again and found that he couldn’t. He blinked the tears away.

  He thought, I’m so sorry, but never gave the words voice.

  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—hex
agonal 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 organi
zed 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.