Factoring Humanity (30 page)

But the archive was here. What Josh had been—and whatever had tortured him—was stored here.

She imagined herself as she was back then. Younger, thinner, and if not actually pretty, possessed of an eagerness that might have passed for such.

And after a moment, it clicked.

She saw herself as he had seen her all those years ago: smooth-skinned; short, punky hair, then dyed blond; three little rings of silver—another Toronto experience!—piercing the curve of her left ear.

He had not loved her.

She wasn’t really surprised. He’d been the good-looking grad student, and she’d practically thrown herself at him. Oh, he’d had feelings for her—and they
were
sexual. And yet he’d already committed, he thought, to a different lifestyle.

He was confused, torn apart.

He’d planned to kill himself. Of course it had been planned—he’d had to think to bring the arsenic.

And like his idol Alan Turing, he had bitten into a poisoned apple. He’d sampled forbidden knowledge.

She’d never known how tortured he’d been, how much he’d agonized over what to do about her, and about himself.

She couldn’t say good-bye; there was no one to say good-bye to. Whatever had happened all those years ago was immutable—and over.

But she was not ready to pull out of his mind.

She’d never been to the Algonquin Radio Observatory, closed now for almost a quarter of a century. It took numerous tries to connect with his memories of the place—moving obliquely from his memories of her to his painful introspection up there, snow barricading the door. But at last she managed it.

Incredibly, there
had
been an alien message.

It formed a Drake pictogram; if Chomsky’s theories had any validity across species boundaries, the one syntactic structure that might be shared by all races communicating by radio was the grid made up of a prime number of columns by a prime number of rows.

As always, there were two possible interpretations, but here, at least, the correct one was obvious, since in it, a simple one-pixel-wide frame was drawn around the resulting page.

The frame cut across the page vertically at three points, dividing the message into four panels—making it look like a comic strip. Heather thought for a second that maybe Kyle had been right—maybe it was an interstellar killer joke.

At first Heather was afraid there was no way to tell which order the panels went in—left to right, right to left, top to bottom, or bottom to top. But the answer was clear on closer inspection; one edge of the frame was broken in a few places. Above the rightmost panel, there was a single pixel isolated by a blank pixel on either side; above the next panel, there were two isolated pixels; above the third, there were three; and above the fourth, there were four—clearly numbering the panels in order from right to left.

The first panel—the one on the far right—showed a number of free-floating units that looked like this, representing each one bit as an asterisk and each zero as a space:

******

* ** *

******

The second panel at first seemed to show much the same thing. The overall deployment of groups was different, but looked equally random. But after concentrating on it for a bit, Heather realized that two of the groups
were
different. They looked like this:

******

**** *

******

Josh had immediately dubbed the first type “eyes” and the second type “pirates.” It took Heather a moment to get it; by pirates, he meant that one of the eye holes was covered over by a patch.

In the third panel, there were many more pirates than eyes, and they had all arranged themselves so that they surrounded the eyes.

In the fourth panel, all the eyes were gone; only pirates were left.

Heather knew that Josh had had an interpretation, but she chose not to press farther into his mind; she wanted to see if she could solve it for herself.

But finally she gave up and probed Josh’s memories again. He’d seen it rather quickly, and Heather was angry with herself for not getting it on her own. Each group consisted of eighteen pixels—but of those eighteen, fourteen created a simple box around the central group of four: it was those four that—quite literally—counted. Stripping out the frame, and assigning ones and zeros instead of asterisks and spaces, the eyes looked like this:

0110

And the pirates like this:

1110

Binary numbers. Specifically, the eyes represented the binary equivalent of six, and the pirates represented the binary equivalent of fourteen.

The numbers meant nothing special to Heather.

And nor had they at first to Josh. But while Heather was bunched up inside a hypercube, Josh had had access to the library in the telescope building in Algonquin Park, and the very first book he’d opened—
The Chemical Rubber Company Handbook of Chemistry and Physics
—had the periodic table printed inside its front cover.

Of course. Atomic numbers. Six was carbon.

And fourteen—

Fourteen was silicon.

It had hit Josh in a flash. Heather wasn’t sure whether the shock she felt was all her own or some of his, too—a ghostly echo.

The first panel showed carbons going about their business.

The second, the advent of silicons.

The third, the silicons completely surrounding the carbons.

And the fourth, a world with only silicons left.

It couldn’t be plainer: biological life, based on carbon, being supplanted by silicon-based artificial intelligence.

Heather searched Josh’s mind for the identity of the star the message had come from.

Epsilon Eridani.

A star that had been listened to countless times by SETI projects. A star from which no radio signal had ever again been detected.

Like humanity, whatever civilization had existed around Epsilon Eridani had preferred to listen rather than to broadcast. But one message—a final warning—had been sent by someone from there, before it had been too late.

Heather, Kyle, and Becky met for lunch that day at The Water Hole, which was filled mostly with tourists, this being a Sunday afternoon. Heather told them what she’d plucked from Josh Huneker’s dead mind.

Kyle exhaled noisily and put down his fork.

“Natives,” he said. “Like Native Canadians.”

Heather and Becky looked at him quizzically.

“Or Native Americans—or Australian aborigines. Or even Neanderthals—my friend Stone was telling me about them. Over and over again, those who are there first are supplanted—totally and completely supplanted—by those who come later. The new never incorporates the old—it
replaces
the old.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how many papers I’ve heard at AI conferences suggesting that computer-based life forms would look after us, would work in tandem with us, would uplift us. But
why
would they? Once they’ve surpassed us, what would they need us for?” He paused. “The people at Epsilon Eridani found out the hard way, I guess.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Becky.

“I dunno. There was this guy—a banker named Cash—who wanted to bury the research I was doing in quantum computing. Maybe I should have let him. If true consciousness is possible only through a quantum-mechanical element, then maybe we should give up our experiments in quantum computing.”

“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” said Becky.

“No? It’s been over a decade since anyone anywhere exploded a nuclear bomb—which at least in part is because of the efforts of people who continued Josh’s work in Greenpeace. People like that believe you
can
put the genie back.”

Heather nodded. “For a computer scientist, you make a pretty good psychologist.”

“Hey, I didn’t spend a quarter-century with you for nothing.” He paused. “Josh killed himself in nineteen ninety-four. Roger Penrose’s second book on the quantum nature of consciousness was available, and Shor had just published his algorithm for allowing a hypothetical quantum computer to factor very large numbers. You said Josh loved to talk about the future; maybe he saw the relationship between quantum computing and quantum consciousness before anyone else did. But I bet he also knew that humanity never heeds warnings about things that won’t show their dangerous consequences for years—if we did, there never would have been an ecological crisis for Josh to be up in arms about. No, I’m sure Josh thought he was making certain the message got out just when we would most need to hear it. In fact, I bet he was naïve enough to think that the government wouldn’t hush up an undecoded message. Indeed, he probably suspected it would be the first thing ever decrypted by a quantum computer, in a big public demonstration. What a show it would have made! Just at the point at which humanity would be getting close to the breakthrough that would allow true artificial intelligence, the message from the stars would be unveiled, plain as day, big as life itself:
Don’t do it.”

Heather frowned slightly.

Kyle went on. “It was the perfect scenario for a fan of Alan Turing. Not only was encrypting the alien message the kind of thing Turing himself might have enjoyed doing—he cracked the Nazis’ Enigma machine, you know—but the Turing test reinforces what the beings on Epsilon Eridani were trying to get across. Turing’s definition of artificial intelligence demands that thinking computers have all the same failings and pettinesses that real, live, flesh-and-blood life forms are prone to; otherwise, their responses would be easy to distinguish from those made by a real human.”

Heather thought for a moment. “What are you going to tell Cheetah?”

Kyle considered. “The truth. I think that down deep—if any part of Cheetah can be said to be down deep—he knew anyway. ‘Intruders,’ he said, ‘is the perfect word.’ ” Kyle shook his head. “Computers might develop consciousness—but never conscience.” He thought of the beggars on Queen Street. “At least, not any more conscience than we ever did.”

36

After lunch, Heather headed back across campus to continue her work in her construct. Meanwhile, Kyle and Becky told Cheetah what Heather had learned about the Huneker message. The APE was as phlegmatic as always.

Becky had been using the large construct just before lunch, so it was now Kyle’s turn again. He left Cheetah running while, with his daughter’s help, he got back into the construct to deal with a final outstanding issue in psychospace.

Kyle had had it all planned out in his mind—every detail of how it would go down. He’d wait in the alley off Lawrence Avenue West; he’d driven by the building enough times now to know its external layout well. He knew that Lydia Gurdjieff worked until nine or so each evening. He’d wait for her to leave the old converted house and start down the alley on its east side. And then Kyle would step from the shadows.

“Ms. Gurdjieff?” he’d say.

Gurdjieff would look up, startled. “Yes?”

“Lydia Gurdjieff?” Kyle would repeat, as if there could be any doubt.

“That’s me.”

“My name is Kyle Graves. I’m Mary and Becky’s father.”

Gurdjieff would start to back away. “Leave me alone,” she’d say. “I’ll call the police.”

“By all means, please do so,” Kyle would reply. “And even though you’re not licensed, let’s get the Ontario Psychiatric Association and the Ontario Medical Board down here, too.”

Gurdjieff would continue to back away. She’d look over her shoulder and see another figure silhouetted at the end of the alley.

Kyle would keep his eyes on Gurdjieff. “That’s my wife Heather,” he’d say offhandedly. “I think perhaps you’ve met her once before.”

“M-Miss Davis?” Gurdjieff would stammer, if she could recall the name and face of the one time they’d met before. Then: “I’ve got a rape whistle.”

Kyle would nod, almost nonchalantly. He’d keep his voice absolutely even. “And no doubt you’d be willing to use it even when no rape was occurring.”

Heather would speak up at this point: “Just as you were willing to indict my father for abusing me, even though he died before I was born.”

Gurdjieff would hesitate.

Heather would close some of the distance. “We’re not going to hurt you, Ms. Gurdjieff,” she would say, spreading her arms slightly. “Even my husband, there, is not going to lay a finger on you. But you’re going to hear us out. You’re going to hear what you’ve done to Kyle and to our family.” Heather would raise her hand, a camcorder nestled in her palm. “As you can see, I’ve got a video camera. I’m going to record all this—so there will be no ambiguity, no possible misinterpretation, no way to put a different spin on it after it’s happened.” She’d pause, then let her voice take on a sharper edge. “No false memories.”

“You can’t do this,” Gurdjieff would say.

“After what you did to me and my family,” Kyle would reply, his voice low, “I rather imagine we can do just about anything we want—including making public the tape of this, along with our supporting proof. My wife has become a bit of a celebrity of late; she’s been on TV a lot. She’s in a position to alert the whole world to the kind of sick, evil fraud you are. You may be unlicensed, but we can still put you out of business.”

Gurdjieff would look left and right, like a cornered animal sizing up escape possibilities; then she’d turn back to Kyle. “I’m listening,” she’d say at last, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

“You have no idea,” Kyle would say, “how much I love my daughters.” He’d pause, letting that sink in. “When Mary was born, I was the happiest man on the planet. I spent hours just staring at her.” He’d look away, casting his mind back. “She was so tiny, so very tiny. Her little fingers and toes—I couldn’t believe anything could be so small and so delicate. I knew the moment I first saw her that I would
die
for her. Do you understand that, Ms. Gurdjieff? I would take a bullet in the heart for her; I’d walk into a burning house for her. She meant
everything
to me. I’m not a religious person, but for the first time in my life, I actually felt
blessed.”