Factoring Humanity (13 page)

“What the devil is ‘ossifrage’?”

“It’s a bird of prey, I think. It took six hundred volunteers using computers worldwide each working on part of the problem over an eight-month period, to crack the code—more than a hundred quadrillion instructions.”

“So why haven’t they done that with Josh’s message?”

“He used 512 digits—and each additional digit is an additional order of magnitude, of course. They’ve been working on it, using conventional means, ever since but haven’t cracked it yet.”

“Oh. But why did this consortium come to you?” She was a hard-T person, too.

“Because they think I’m getting close to a breakthrough in quantum computing. I’m not ready yet—we’ve got only one prototype system, and even if we do get the bugs out of it, it’ll work only with numbers exactly three-hundred digits long. But in a few months, with luck, I will have a system that could decode messages of any length almost instantaneously.”

“Ah.”

“This woman who came to see me, I think she wants to patent whatever technology is gleaned from the message.”

“That’s outrageous,” said Heather. “Even if such a message exists—and I really doubt that—it belongs to everyone.” She paused. “And besides . . .”

“What?”

“Well,” said Heather, frowning, “if it exists, then Josh
did
kill himself
after
he saw what it had to say. Maybe—maybe you don’t want to know what it says.”

“You mean maybe his suicide might actually have been related to the message?”

“Maybe. Like I said, as far as I knew, he wasn’t gay or bi.”

“But what kind of message would lead a man to kill himself, but first hide it from the rest of humanity?” asked Kyle.

Heather was quiet for a moment, then: “‘Heaven exists, it’s absolute paradise, and everyone gets in.’”

“Why keep that a secret?”

“So that the human race would go on. If everyone knew that was true, we’d all commit suicide to get there sooner, and
Homo sapiens
would become extinct overnight.”

Kyle thought about this. “Then why leave an encrypted version of the message at all? Why not just destroy the message altogether?”

“Maybe it’s like the Pope,” said Heather. Kyle’s face telegraphed his lack of comprehension. “They say there’s a prophecy under lock and key at the Vatican; it’s been there for centuries. Every once in a while, a Pope looks at it—and reacts with horror, locking it up again. At least, that’s the story.”

Kyle frowned. “Well, this consortium wants me to go work for them; they’re offering a lot of money.”

“How much?” asked Heather.

She could see hesitation on his face. Even before he spoke, she knew what he must have been thinking: If we don’t reconcile at some point, is it wise for me to disclose the magnitude of a new source of income? “It, ah, was quite a substantial sum,” said Kyle.

“I see,” said Heather.

“They’ve already got a line on another researcher who also is close to making a breakthrough.” He paused. “Saperstein.”

“You hate that guy.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you should do it.”

“Why?”

“Well, suppose Saperstein or someone else does it instead. That doesn’t mean the Huneker message, if it really exists, ever goes public—the government doubtless has a copy of the message, but they’ve kept it under wraps for over twenty years now.”

“Perhaps. But I’m sure the consortium will make me sign an NDA.”

“Ah,” said Heather, imitating her husband. “The coveted NDA.”

He smiled. “An NDA is a nondisclosure agreement. They’d likely make me sign a contract with very stiff penalties, promising not to divulge the message’s content, or even its existence.”

“Hmm. What do you want to do?”

Kyle spread his arms. “There was an old
Monty Python
skit about a joke so funny you’d literally die laughing if you heard it; it was used as an Allied weapon in World War Two. It had to be translated from English to German by teams, each person translating only one word at a time. One guy accidentally saw two words and ended up in intensive care.” He paused. “I don’t know. If somebody handed you a joke and said it was
that
funny, wouldn’t you have to look and see for yourself?” He paused. “Even if Huneker did kill himself after he read it, I want to know what the alien message said.”

“It might be indecipherable, you know—just like the Centauri messages. Even if you can figure out the prime factors, it doesn’t mean the message would make sense. I mean, despite what I said a moment ago, I guess it is plausible that Josh killed himself for personal reasons, and the message had nothing to do with it.”

“Perhaps,” said Kyle. “Or perhaps the message made a pictogram that by coincidence meant something only to Huneker.” He jerked a thumb at the Dali painting. “You know, maybe he’d stolen money from his church poor box and the pictogram happened to look like Jesus on the cross, or some such thing. Drove him crazy.”

“In which case you’d be immune, you atheist you.”

Kyle shrugged.

“Maybe you should do it,” said Heather. She lowered her voice. “After all, if Becky . . .”

Kyle nodded. “If Becky sues me and I lose everything that the world knows I’ve got, it would be nice to have a lucrative source of income.”

Heather was quiet for a moment, then: “I have to get going.”

Kyle stood up. “Thanks for coming by,” he said.

Heather smiled wanly and left.

Kyle returned to his chair and sat thinking. Was there anything—anything at all—that someone could reveal to him that would cause him to kill himself?

No. No, of course not.

Except—

He shuddered.

Yes, there was one thing that someone could reveal that might indeed cause him to take his own life, just as poor Josh Huneker had done all those years ago up in the middle of nowhere.

Proof that it was he, not Becky, who had false memories of what had really happened during her childhood.

16

Heather returned to Paul Komensky’s lab late the next afternoon. The little robot was still chugging along, but it had consumed most of the third and final substrate sheet. “It should be just a few more minutes,” Paul said, coming over to greet her.

Heather thought of something she’d once heard about never trusting engineers’ time estimates. “Okay.”

As if feeling a need to demonstrate that he wasn’t
that
far off, Paul gestured at two large boxes, which were indeed mostly full of little rectangular pieces of painted substrate.

Heather went over to the boxes and picked up the first two tiles. She snapped them together; they held nicely.

The robot made an electronic chirping sound. Heather turned around. She was blocking its path. She got out of its way, and it rolled over to the second box, dropped in a tile, then made a different series of bleeps and stopped.

“Done,” said Paul.

Heather lifted one of the boxes. It must have weighed over twenty kilos.

“You’ll need help getting that back to your office,” said Paul.

She certainly would have appreciated a hand, but she’d imposed enough. Or, she thought more honestly, she’d incurred all the obligation she wanted to. She’d enjoyed Paul’s company yesterday, but it had felt wrong afterward—and now it was almost dinnertime; she knew things would not end with him simply helping her across campus.

“No, I’ll be fine,” she said.

Heather thought Paul looked disappointed, but he was no doubt able to read the signs; you didn’t survive in a university environment if you couldn’t, that guy in Anthropology—Bentley, Bailey, whatever his name was—notwithstanding.

But then Heather turned back to the two boxes; she’d kill herself trying to get them over to Sid Smith in this heat. Really, she
could
use some assistance.

“On the other hand . . .” she said.

Paul brightened.

“Sure,” said Heather. “Sure, I’d be very grateful for some help.”

Paul held up a single finger, indicating he’d be back in one minute. He left the lab and returned shortly, pushing two hand trucks in front of him, one with each hand. It was a bit awkward; they seemed to want to go in separate directions. Heather came over to him. Their hands touched briefly as she took the handles of one of the units.

“Thanks,” she said.

Paul smiled. “My pleasure.” He wheeled his hand truck in front of him, pushed its lip under one of the boxes, then tilted the whole unit back so that the box rested against the red metal frame. Heather duplicated the procedure with her hand truck and the second box.

Paul held his finger up again. “You’ll need a supply of clamps and clips if you want to make the squares into cubes.” He got a third box—he’d already had it prepared, it seemed—and set it on top of the one on his hand truck.

“There are also a couple of glass handles in there.” He opened the box and removed one. It was a suction-cup affair with a black handle on it. “You seen these before? They’re used for handling panes of glass, but you might find them useful for maneuvering your big sheets once you assemble them.”

“Thanks,” Heather said again.

“Of course you know that a real tesseract has only twenty-four faces.”

“What?”
said Heather. She couldn’t have screwed up in such a fundamental way. “But Kyle said—”

“Oh, when it’s unfolded, it appears to have forty-eight faces, but when it folds up, each of the faces touches another face, leaving only twenty-four. The one on the bottom folds over to touch the one on the top, the side cubes fold in, and so on. Not that there’s any way to really fold it, of course.” He paused. “Shall we get going?”

Heather nodded, and they set off, rolling the hand trucks in front of them.

Of course, once they got back to her office, she could just thank him and let him go, but—

But twenty-eight hundred tiles! It would take forever to assemble them on her own.

Paul might be willing to help, and—

No. No. She couldn’t ask, couldn’t spend more time with him. Things had to be resolved first with Kyle.

But—

But how could they ever be? How could she ever know for sure? And if she didn’t know, would she forever tense up every time Kyle’s hand touched her body?

She looked over at Paul as they made their way up St. George.

His hands were wrapped around the rubber-coated handles. Nice hands, strong hands. Long fingers.

“You know,” said Heather, tentatively, “if you’ve got nothing to do, I could sure use a hand snapping all those tiles together.”

He looked over at her and smiled—and a really nice smile it was, too.

“Sure,” he said. “I’d love to.”

Paul and Heather eventually got the boxes across campus, after stopping to rest at a couple of park benches along the way. They came up the wheelchair ramp to the entrance to Sidney Smith Hall. There was a husky student right in front of them wearing a Varsity Blues leather jacket with the name “Kolmex” on the back. Heather thought the guy’s status as a football player must have been very important to his self-image for him to be wearing a leather jacket in the middle of August. She hoped he’d at least hold the door for them, but he let it slam shut, with a clatter of glass, behind him. Paul raised his eyebrows, sharing an expression with Heather, one teacher to another—the caliber of the kids today. He then jockeyed his hand truck so that he could free up one hand long enough to open the door.

Finally, they both made it down to her office.

“Ah,” said Paul, looking around as they entered. “You share an office.”

Heather nodded; even universities had their pecking order. “I’m only an associate prof,” she said. “I took several years off to raise my daughters—I guess I’ve got some catching-up to do. My office mate, Omar Amir, he’s off for the summer.”

Heather used her foot to push the box off her hand truck’s platform, then collapsed in a chair to catch her breath. She shook her head slightly and looked around the room. They’d have to move Omar’s desk—oh, joy—but if they pushed it against that bookcase, there would be enough room on the low-pile carpeted floor to start assembling the alien jigsaw puzzle.

Paul was resting, too, using Omar’s chair. After a couple of minutes, though, they both got up and moved the desk. Then she got a hardcopy of the CAD program’s plan for the first panel, opened the first box of tiles, and sat down on the floor, her legs tucked one under the other. Paul sat down a meter away from her. She could smell his sweat a bit; it had been a long time since she’d smelled a man’s sweat.

They started clicking the tiles together. It was gratifying to see the way the seemingly random patterns on each one connected across tile boundaries.

As she worked, she kept thinking idly of the kind of joint Paul had said he was employing on the tiles’ edges: tongue and groove. Several really good jokes about it occurred to her, but she kept them all to herself.

Around 8:30, Paul and Heather ordered in pizza and Cokes; to Heather’s delight, they were able to agree on pizza toppings in a matter of moments; it was always a major negotiating game with Kyle.

Paul offered his SmartCash card when the delivery boy showed up, but Heather insisted that he was the one doing her the favor, and so she paid. She was pleased that Paul acquiesced with grace.

It was 10:00 P.M. before they had all forty-eight large squares assembled. Each measured about seventy centimeters on a side. They had leaned each one against the edge of Omar’s desk after its completion.

Now it was time to build the damn thing. Using the clips and clamps Paul had brought along, they connected the sides. Eventually they had all eight cubes assembled.

Overall, the paint markings—which glistened slightly, like mica—still didn’t make up a recognizable pattern, but they did flow over the surface of the boxes in an intricate grid-work, reminiscent of printed circuits.

Using the CAD diagram as a guide, they continued on, assembling the cubes into a greater whole. They couldn’t stand the thing up—the ceiling wasn’t high enough—so they made it horizontally, with the shaft of four cubes running parallel to the floor: