Factoring Humanity (21 page)

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 organized 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.

So much death; so many dead.

He thought about the zebra being stalked and killed by the lion.

It
had
to be a horrible way to die.

Or did it?

Repression.

Dissociation.

Those were the things Becky was claiming had happened to her.

And not just to Becky. To thousands of men and women. Repressing the memories of war, of torture, of rape.

Maybe, just maybe, the zebra
didn’t
feel itself dying. Maybe it detached its consciousness from reality the moment the attack began.

Maybe all higher animals could do that.

It beat dying in agony, dying in terror.

But the repression mechanism must be flawed—otherwise, the memories would never come back.

Or, if not flawed, it must at least be being pushed beyond . . . beyond its design parameters.

In the animal world, there are no truly traumatic physical injuries that aren’t fatal. Yes, an animal could be frightened—indeed, terrified—and go on to live another day. But once a predator had sunk its jaws into its prey, that prey was almost certainly about to die. Repression would have to work for only a matter of minutes—or, at most, hours—to spare the animal the horrors of its own death.

If no one ever survived physically traumatic experiences, there would be no need for the wiring of the brain to be able to suppress a memory for days, or weeks, or months.

Or years.

But humanity—an ironic name, that—had devised non-fatal traumas.

Rape.

Torture.

The horrors of war.

Maybe the mind did come pre-wired to suppress the very worst physical experiences.

And maybe, quite unintentionally, those experiences did indeed resurface after a time. There was no need, until a few tens of thousands of years ago—the tiniest fraction of the time there had been life on Earth—for long-term suppression. Maybe no such skill had ever evolved.

Evolved.

Kyle considered the word, turned it over in his mind; he’d been thinking about it a lot lately since Cheetah’s revelation about how microtubular consciousness might indeed arise spontaneously through preadaptive evolution.

He looked at the various grave markers, with their crucifixes and praying hands.

Evolution could affect only those things that increased survival chances; by definition, it could never fine-tune responses to events that occurred after the last reproductive encounter . . . and, of course, death was always the final event.

In fact, Kyle couldn’t see any way that evolution could have produced a humane death for animals, no matter how big a percentage of the population would benefit from it. And yet—

And yet, if there
was
validity to human repressed memory, that capability must have come from somewhere. It could indeed be the work of the mechanism that let animals die peacefully even when they were being eaten alive.

If such a mechanism existed, that is.

And if it did, it meant that the universe did care, after all. Something beyond evolution had shaped life, had given it, if not meaning, at least freedom from torture.

Except for the torture that happened when the memories came back.

Kyle walked slowly back to the subway station. It was mid afternoon on a Friday; the trains arriving from downtown were packed with commuters escaping their corporate prisons. Kyle was teaching two summer courses, one of them, cruelly, met at 4:00 P.M. on Friday afternoon; he headed back to the university to give his final class of the week.

27

Heather continued to stare at the vast wall of hexagons, thinking, trying to keep her rationality from being overpowered by giddiness.

She decided to simply try again. She touched another hexagon.

And recoiled in horror.

The mind she entered was twisted, dark, every perception askew, every thought frayed and disjointed.

It was a man—again! White: that was important to him, his whiteness, his pureness. He was in a park, near an artificial lake. It was pitch dark. Heather assumed the connections she was making were in real time, meaning that this had to be somewhere other than North America; it was still afternoon here. Yet the man was thinking in French.

It was likely France or Belgium, then, rather than Quebec.

The man was hiding—
lurking
—behind a tree, waiting.

There was something wrong, though. Something straining, as if trying to burst out.

My God, thought Heather. An erection, bulging against his pants. So
that’s
what it feels like. Good grief!

Freud was wrong—envying
that
was impossible. The penis felt as though it was going to split along its length, a sausage bursting from its skin.

A woman was approaching, visible intermittently under the lamplight.

Young, pretty, white, wearing pink leather boots, walking alone.

He let her pass by and then—

And then he emerged from behind the trees and brought a knife to her throat, and she heard his voice. He spoke in French—and his accent
was
Parisian, not Québecois. Heather knew enough French to understand that he was saying she should not struggle, that she better make it good for him . . .

Heather couldn’t take it; she slammed her eyes closed, letting the construct reform around her. She felt helpless; frustrated. It was said that a woman was raped somewhere on Earth every eleven seconds—a meaningless statistic before. But this was going on
right now.

She had to do
something.

She took a deep breath, then opened her eyes again.

“Stop!”

Heather shouted it inside the cube.

Stop!

Heather screamed it with her mind.

And then,
“Arrêt!”

Arrêt!

But the monster continued, hands now pawing the woman’s breasts through her bra.

Heather pulled her own arms back, trying to drag his with them.

But it was no good. Nothing she did had any effect on him. Heather was shaking with outrage and anger and fear, but the man continued, as oblivious to Heather’s cries as he was to those of his victim.

No—no, he
wasn’t
oblivious to the victim’s cries. Her whimpering was making him harder still—

Heather couldn’t stomach it.

The man tore at the woman’s panties, and—

—and Heather managed to visualize the precipitation, solute out of solvent, releasing herself from his malfunctioning, poisoned mind, returning to the wall of hexagons.

She closed her eyes, the construct rematerializing in her own mind, and leaned back against the rear substrate wall, waiting for her heart to stop pounding, waiting for her fury to subside, doing calming breathing exercises.

Whether Kyle was innocent or guilty, there was one truth that no one could doubt, no one could question. Men sometimes did horrible things, unspeakable things.

Her body continued to shake.

Damn it all, that monster in France should have his penis sliced clean off.

She felt as though she herself had been assaulted. It took time for her equilibrium to reappear, time to distance herself from the horror.

But at last she was ready to try again. She reached forward, tentatively, frightened of what she might be thrust into, and touched another button.

A woman—at last! But much, much older than Heather. Italian, maybe; the moon visible through a window. Stuccoed walls; labored breathing. An old Italian woman, in an ancient house—thinking hardly at all, just watching, breathing, waiting, waiting year after year after—

Heather precipitated out, reintegrated, then touched another hexagon.

At first she thought she’d entered a retarded person, but then she realized the truth, and smiled.

A newborn—a baby lying in a crib, looking up. The slightly unfocused faces beaming down at it, grinning with pride and joy, were of a black man in his early twenties, with dreadlocks and a short beard, and a black woman, the same age, with beautiful, clear skin. The image was mostly meaningless to the child except for a feeling of contentment, of happiness, of simplicity, of belonging. Heather lingered for quite some time, letting the innocence and purity of the moment wash the remaining horror from France out of her.

But then she pulled out, and tried once more.

Darkness. Silence. Images flowing, fading at the periphery, distorted proportions.

A sleeping person; a dream of . . . of what? Ironic for a Jungian: to see someone else’s dream instead of hearing it described, and being utterly unable to interpret even the overt content, let alone any deeper meaning.

She left the dreamer and tried once more.

A doctor—a dermatologist, perhaps. Somewhere in China, looking at a scaly growth on a middle-aged man’s leg.