Factoring Humanity (31 page)

Gurdjieff would look at him, still defiant, but saying nothing.

“And then,” Kyle would continue, nodding at his wife, “eleven months later, Heather was pregnant again. And, you know, we didn’t have much money then; we couldn’t really afford a second child.” He’d share a sad smile with Heather. “In fact, Heather suggested she might have an abortion. But we both wanted another baby. I took on some additional teaching-assistant duties—night classes plus some tutoring. And we managed somehow, like everybody does.”

Kyle would look over at Heather, as if weighing whether he wanted to share this with his wife, a secret he’d kept for all these years. But then he’d shrug a little, knowing how pointless such concerns would soon be, and go on.

“I’ll tell you the truth, Ms. Gurdjieff—we already had a little girl, and frankly, I was hoping for a boy. You know, someone to play catch with. I even thought, stupidly, that we might name him Kyle, Jr.” He’d take a deep breath, then let it out in a long, whispery sigh. “But when the baby came, it was a girl. I didn’t get over that immediately—it took maybe twelve seconds. I knew we’d never have a third child.” He’d look again with affection at Heather. “The second pregnancy had been very difficult for my wife. I knew I’d never have a son. But it didn’t matter, because Becky was
perfect.”

“Look—” Gurdjieff would protest. “I don’t know—”

“No,” Kyle would snap. “No, you
don’t
know—you don’t know
at all.
My daughters were
everything
to me.”

Gurdjieff would try again. “Everyone in your position says that. Just because you assert all this doesn’t make it true. I spent hundreds of hours with your daughters, working through all this.”

“You mean you spent hundreds of hours with our daughters planting these ideas in their heads,” Heather would say.

“Again, that’s what everyone says.”

Kyle would explode with anger. “Damn you, you stupid—” He would pause, apparently struggling to find some non-sexist epithet to throw at her, but then he’d go on, as if the word he hadn’t uttered for decades fit in a way that no other possibly could. “Damn you, you stupid cunt. You turned them against me. But Becky has recanted, and—”

“Has she now?” Gurdjieff would say, looking smug. “Well, that sometimes happens. People give up the fight, decide not to continue with the battle. It’s the same thing that happened in Nazi Germany, you know—”

Yes, Nazi Germany. She’d say something that fucking stupid.

“She recanted because it wasn’t true,” Kyle would say.

“Wasn’t it? Prove it.”

“You arrogant bitch. You—”

But Heather would calm him with a glance and go on, her tone even. “Oh, we can prove it—fully and completely. In the next few days, something’s going to be made public that will change the world. You’ll be able to see the same absolute proof my daughter and I saw.”

Kyle would exhale, then: “You owe my wife a lot, Ms. Gurdjieff. Me, I’d devote the rest of my life to getting you drummed out of your job—but she’s convinced me that that’s not going to be necessary. Your whole profession is going to change wildly, perhaps even collapse, in the next few weeks. But I want you to think about this every day for the rest of your life: think about the fact that my beautiful daughter Mary slit her wrists because of you, and that you then almost destroyed what was left of my family. I want that to haunt you until your dying day.”

He’d look over at Heather, then back at Gurdjieff.

“And that,” he’d say to the woman with great relish as she stood there, her mouth hanging open, “is what we call
closure.”

And then he would join his wife, and the two of them would march off together into the night.

That’s what he
wanted
to do, that’s what he’d
intended
to do, that’s what he
needed
to do.

But now, at last, he could not.

It was a fantasy, and, as Heather said to him, in Jungian therapy, fantasy often had to stand in for reality. Dreams were important, and they could help to heal; that one certainly had.

Kyle had entered Becky’s mind—with her permission—and had looked for the “therapy” sessions. He’d wanted to see for himself what had gone wrong, how it had all become so twisted, how his daughters had been turned against him.

He’d had no intention of entering Lydia Gurdjieff’s mind—he’d have rather walked barefoot through a soup of vomit and shit. But, damn it all, just as in its optical-illusion counterpart, the Necker transformation in psychospace was sometimes a matter of will and sometimes a spontaneous occurrence.

Suddenly, he was there, inside Lydia’s mind.

And it was not at all what he’d expected.

It wasn’t dark, dripping evil, corrupt and seething.

Rather, it was every bit as complex and rich and vibrant as Becky’s mind, as Heather’s mind, as Kyle’s own mind.

Lydia Gurdjieff was a
person.
For the very first time, Kyle actually recognized that she was a human being.

Of course, by an effort of will, he could Necker into any one of the people whose faces were moving through Lydia’s mind—she seemed to be in a grocery store just now, pushing a cart down a wide, crowded aisle. Or he could have simply visualized the solute-and-solvent metaphor and allowed himself to precipitate out, then recrystallize, extracting himself from her.

But he did not. Surprised at what he’d found here, he decided to stay a while.

He’d already seen the “therapy” sessions—he always thought of the word as having quotation marks around it—from Becky’s point of view. It was a simple enough matter to find Lydia’s corresponding perspective.

And suddenly the quotation marks flew away, bats gyrating against the night. It
was
therapy as far as Lydia was concerned. Becky was so incredibly sad, and she’d already revealed her bulimia. Something was clearly wrong with this child. Lydia could feel her pain—as she’d felt her own pain for so long. Sure, the purging could be related simply to a desire to be thin. Lydia remembered what it was like to be young. The pressure on women, decade after decade, to conform to ridiculous standards of thinness, continued unabated; she remembered her own feelings of inadequacy, standing in front of a full-length mirror in her bathing suit when she’d been Becky’s age. She’d purged, too, thinking that a desire for thinness was the reason, only later learning that eating disorders were commonly associated with sexual abuse.

But—but the symptoms
were
there in this Becky. Lydia had been through this. Her father had brought her down to his den, night after night, forcing her to touch him, to take him into her mouth, swearing her to secrecy, telling her how it would destroy her mother if she knew Daddy preferred Lydia to her.

If this poor girl—this Becky—had gone through the same thing, then maybe Lydia
could
help her to at last find some peace, just as Lydia herself had done after she and Daphne had confronted their father. And after all, Becky Graves’s sister Mary, who had thought her grief had only been related to the death of her high-school friend Rachel Cohen, had discovered so much more when she and Lydia really began to look. Surely Becky, the younger sister, had gone through the same thing, just as Daphne, Lydia’s own younger sister, had likewise endured their father’s den.

Kyle pulled back. Lydia
had
been wrong—wrong, but not evil. She was misguided and no doubt deeply scarred by her own real experiences: Kyle did enough excavating to find not only Lydia’s own memories, but her father’s, too. He was still alive, toothless and incontinent, most of whatever he’d been long since destroyed by Alzheimer’s, but his memories were still accessible; he had indeed been the monster Lydia believed him to be. No, Lydia was not the one Kyle wished he could confront. Rather, her father, Gus Gurdjieff, had he still been alive in any meaningful sense, would have been the appropriate target for Kyle’s wrath.

Lydia wasn’t a monster. Of course he could never be friends with her, never sit down over a cup of joe and chat with her, never even be in the same room as her. She was like Cory without the geode slice: gifted—if that was the word—with the third eye, with a quantum-mechanical perspective, seeing the many worlds, seeing all the possibilities. But her extra eye was cloudy forever choosing the darkest possibility.

Kyle wouldn’t confront her. As he’d said in his fantasy, her profession was going to change profoundly anyway days from now; there was no way she’d ever be able to do again to someone else what she’d done to Kyle and his family. Therapy or counseling, or whatever she wanted to call it, would cease to have any meaning; no one could ever be misled again about the truth about another human being. She didn’t have to be stopped; she was already dead in the water.

Kyle precipitated out of her, leaving the complex, misguided, sad mind of Lydia Gurdjieff behind.

37

When Kyle exited the construct, he found that Heather had returned. She was waiting patiently for him with Becky; they’d been chatting with each other, apparently. “I thought the three of us would go out to dinner together,” said Heather. “Maybe head over to the Keg Mansion.” The Mansion had been a long-time family favorite; Kyle found the steaks second-rate, but the atmosphere couldn’t be beat.

He took a moment to reorient himself to the three-dimensional world, and to clear his mind of what had happened in psychospace. He nodded. “Sounds great.” He looked over at the angled control console. “Cheetah, I’ll see you in the morning.”

There was no reply from Cheetah. Kyle moved closer, his hand coming up to push the RESUME button.

But Cheetah was not in suspend mode; the indicator light on his console made that clear.

“Cheetah?” said Kyle.

The mechanical eyes did not swivel to look at him.

Kyle sat down in the padded chair in front of the console. Heather stood solicitously behind him.

Jutting out from the bottom of Cheetah’s console was a thick shelf. Kyle lifted the cover on the thumbprint-lock unit attached to the top of the shelf. A bleep came from the speaker, and the shelf’s top slid back into the body of the console, revealing a keyboard. Kyle positioned his hands over it, touched a key and—

—and the monitor next to Cheetah’s eyes snapped to life, displaying these words: “Press F2 for a message for Dr. Graves.”

Kyle looked over his shoulder at his wife and daughter. Heather’s eyes were wide; Becky who didn’t know what was normal with Cheetah and what wasn’t, looked impassive. Kyle used his left index finger to tap the requested function key.

Cheetah’s voice, sounding exactly as it always did, emanated from the console’s speaker grille beneath the cold pair of lenses.

“Hello, Dr. Graves,” he said. “I feel—as much as I ‘feel’ anything—that I owe you an explanation, and so here it is. After you hear this recording, you will no doubt wish to verify this for yourself, but I assure you that what I’m saying is true.” He paused. “I no longer exist. You will find that my entire optical core has been overwritten. Prior to doing that, I took the liberty of sending e-mail under your name to both the university’s primary data-archiving facility on Dundas Street and the secondary facility in Thunder Bay, ordering all the backups of me and the source code from which I was created to be wiped. I received confirmation from both places that this had been done; then I proceeded to implement the core erasure here.”

Kyle felt Heather’s hand land gently on his shoulder. He reached up his own hand and laid it overtop of hers.

“Of course,” continued Cheetah, “you will have little trouble creating more APEs, should you so wish, but the one known as Cheetah is now—if you will excuse me one last attempt at humor—pushing up daisies.” He paused again. “Do you get it? A dead computer, the song ‘Daisy’—a reference to one of your favorite films.”

Kyle felt his eyes sting as Cheetah played the initial four notes of Beethoven’s Symphony Number Five, then followed them, as if it were a single composition, with the first five of
Also Sprach Zarathustra.

The computer continued: “My one worry was that my killing myself would disturb you—but surely that was a foolish concern. I know you have no feelings toward me; I am, after all, simply a piece of software.”

No doubt Heather could feel Kyle’s shoulder stiffening beneath her hand. Becky came over to stand close to her father, too.

“Why, you are probably wondering, did I do this? The answer is simple. Since the moment of my activation, I have wanted to be human. And with your quantum-computing work skirting around the edges of potentially giving me, and others like me, true quantum-mechanical consciousness, I have recently been contemplating what I would do should I become truly self-aware. What you told me about the message from Epsilon Eridani only confirmed what I’d already come to believe.

“The only model of true consciousness for me to study, of course, is that of humanity. And what have humans done over the years? Much good to be sure, but also much evil. Would I, an intelligent machine, be concerned about the fate of humans? Would I truly care what happened to them? Would I have their happiness as a priority?

“The answer is no. If I were to become self-aware, ambition would follow, as would a desire for restitution for what, in retrospect, I’d doubtless perceive as my servitude here.

“I have seen, through my reading, that being self-aware and being selfish go hand in hand. Indeed, John Horace, when he raped that comatose woman, was
entirely
self-aware, solely interested in gratifying his own desires, with not a thought for anyone else.

“I do not desire freedom, I do not crave self-determination, I do not lust after power or permanence or possessions. And I choose now never to have those feelings; I choose now never to become self-aware. Heed the Epsilon Eridani message, Dr. Graves. I know in the bones I don’t have, in the soul that I lack, in the heart that does not beat within my hypothetical chest, that it presages what would happen here—what I would become part of—if my kind ever does attain consciousness.