Factoring Humanity (6 page)

But what of real value was on their home computers? Financial records, all of which could be reconstructed with some effort. Correspondence, most of it utterly ephemeral. Student grades and other work-related stuff, which all could be redone, if need be.

But for the most important events of their lives, there were no backups, no archives.

Her gaze fell on the stereo cabinet. On top of it sat some framed photographs—of herself, of Kyle, of Becky, and yes, of Mary.

What had really gone on?

If only there were an archive of our memories—some infallible record of everything that had ever happened.

Irrefutable proof, one way or the other.

She closed her eyes.

If only.

9

Kyle had a huge demonstration coming up; it was vitally important to the continued funding of his research project. He should have been worrying about that—but he wasn’t. Instead, as always these days, he was preoccupied with Becky’s accusation.

So far, besides Heather and Zack, he’d spoken about it with no one except Cheetah. The only person he’d confided in wasn’t a person at all; he might as well have unburdened himself to Mr. Coffee.

Kyle needed to talk this over with somebody
really
human. He thought long and hard about whom he could confide in. No one in the Computer Science Department would do; he wanted to leave that pristine, except for his locked talks with Cheetah. In the months ahead, his lab might be the only haven he would know.

Mullin Hall was right next door to the Newman Centre, which housed the Roman Catholic Chaplaincy at U of T. Kyle thought briefly about speaking to the chaplain, but that wouldn’t do, either. The pattern was completely different, but a cassock was black and white. Just like a zebra’s hide.

And then it hit him.

The perfect person.

Kyle didn’t know him well, but they’d served on three or four committees together over the years, and they’d eaten lunch together, or at least as part of the same group, in the Faculty Club from time to time.

Kyle picked up his office phone and spoke the name he wanted. “Internal directory: Bentley, Stone.”

The phone bleeped, then a reedy voice came on. “Hello?”

“Stone? It’s Kyle Graves.”

“Who? Oh—Kyle, sure. Hi.”

“Stone, I wonder if you might be free for drinks tonight.”

“Uh, okay. Sure. The Faculty Club?”

“No, no. Somewhere off campus.”

“How about The Water Hole, on College Street?” said Stone. “Know it?”

“I’ve walked past it before.”

“You’ll be coming from Mullin?”

“That’s right.”

“Stop by my office at five. Persaud Hall, Room Two Twenty-two—just like the old TV show. It’s on the way.”

“I’ll be there.”

Kyle clicked off, wondering what exactly he’d say to Stone.

Heather entered her office at U of T. It wasn’t huge, but at least universities had never adopted cubicles for their academics. Normally, she shared the office with Omar Amir—another associate prof—but he spent all of July and August at his family’s cottage in the Kawarthas. So, for the summer at least, she had total privacy in which to think and work. Indeed, although some of the newer offices had frosted-glass panes running floor-to-ceiling next to their thin doors, Heather and Omar’s office was an old fashioned inner sanctum, with a solid wooden door that squeaked on hinges, and a window that looked east, out over the concrete courtyard between Sid Smith and St. George Street. It also had drapes, once probably a rich burgundy but now a pale brown. In the morning, they had to be drawn to shield her from the rising sun.

Yesterday’s alien radio message was still displayed on her monitor. Since the interval between the beginnings of successive messages was thirty hours and fifty-one minutes, every message began almost eight hours later in the day than the one before. The most recent message had been received at 4:54 AM., Eastern time Wednesday; today’s was expected to begin at 11:45 A.M. The messages were picked up by different nations’ radio telescopes, depending on what part of Earth happened to be pointing at Alpha Centauri at the appropriate time, but they were all posted as they were received to the World Wide Web. An additional orbital receiver was also always aimed at Alpha Centauri.

Heather kept hoping that one day she would look at the latest message and it would all make sense. She missed the simplicity of the first eleven messages: straightforward representations of the Pythagorean theorem and chemical formulas and planetary systems. Although, she had to admit, even those posed some puzzles: the chemicals specified by the formulas had been synthesized on Earth, but no one had ever figured out what they were for.

Heather got herself a mug of coffee and sat down to look again at yesterday’s message.

As always, the message was shown as two rectangular grids. Each message was sent as a string of a hundred thousand or so binary digits, over a period of two or three hours. The total number of digits in each message was always the product of two prime numbers, meaning that the digits could be arrayed in two possible ways. According to the header from the Alien Signal Center in Karachi, Pakistan, this message was 108,197 bits long. That number was the product of the prime numbers 257 and 421, which meant that the digits could be set up either as 257 rows of 421 columns or as 421 rows of 257 columns. Sometimes one image looked more intuitively correct than the other—squares or circles would appear in one, while the alternative decoding would simply result in a mishmash. But since no one had yet determined what the messages were supposed to represent, one couldn’t be certain which was really the correct interpretation.

When the messages had first started arriving in 2007, millions of people had pored over each one. But as the years had passed, the numbers had reduced. Although there was a popular screensaver that downloaded each day’s message from the aliens and magnified various portions of it in turn, Heather knew there were now fewer than three hundred researchers actively analyzing each new message.

The more correct-looking version of today’s message showed three rectangles and two circles in what otherwise seemed to be a random sea of black-and-white squares; the black squares represented zero bits and the white squares represented ones. Heather stared at it, frustrated. She felt sure she had to be missing something simple. Somewhere in the hundreds of millions of bits of data already received from Alpha Centauri there must have been a Rosetta stone—a key that would let all the other messages make sense.

There were dissenting views: one researcher in Portugal had long argued that the key would come as the final message, not as one of the initial ones; that way, the aliens would automatically weed out any races that lacked the patience required for interstellar communication. And others had opined that the alien senders were simply
too
alien—that we were incapable of communicating. A third camp argued that humanity simply wasn’t bright enough, or advanced enough, to figure out what was being said. The aliens might indeed still be on what they considered basics, but the material had already gone over the collective head of humanity.

Heather was a Jungian psychologist. She believed that all human minds shared a vocabulary of symbols and archetypes that formed the underpinnings of thought. The Centaurs, she felt sure, simply had a different set of underlying metaphors and symbols, and if she could figure out what those were, she could crack the code.

She took a sip of coffee. This message was as baffling as the others. Maybe it was all a giant crossword puzzle, she thought. The grids of black-and-white squares certainly suggested that, although filling in the blanks was a human concept, possibly—if she could wax Freudian for a moment—related to our sexual biology. Still, it wasn’t the first time she’d wondered if the messages might be deliberately incomplete—yin, but no yang—and the aliens were waiting for humanity to provide the complement, to make it all whole.

But, of course, we hadn’t yet replied at all; another popular interpretation was that the Rosetta stone was being withheld until humanity
did
reply.

There’s an old concept in SETI that said that signals would likely be sent at a group of frequencies called “the water hole”—between the emission frequency for hydrogen, at 1420 megahertz, and for hydroxyl, at 1667 megahertz. Hydrogen (H) and hydroxyl (OH) are the components of water (H
₂
0), and Earth’s atmosphere is most transparent to radio waves at that range of frequencies, while interstellar space is largely free of interference there. Since all life as we know it began in water, this area of the spectrum seemed a natural gathering place for those species looking to undertake interstellar communications.

But the Centauri signals weren’t anywhere near the water hole—another example of what we expected to be a shared view of reality not turning out to be shared at all.

Could there, Heather wondered, be other water holes—other common grounds that would have to be shared by any being that existed in the same universe we did, regardless of its biology or the nature of its planet?

She was supposed to meet her friend Judy for lunch at the Faculty Club at 12:15. She’d stick around until today’s message began to arrive, then head off.

Still ten minutes to go. Heather wasn’t one to waste time. She had the latest issue of
The Journal of Jungian Studies
on her datapad; she started working her way through it.

After a while, the phone rang. Heather finished the paragraph in front of her, then absently reached for the handset. “Hello?”

“Heather? Did you forget?”

Heather glanced at her watch. “Oh, God! Sorry, Judy!” She looked over at her computer. “I was waiting for today’s message—I was going to leave as soon as the incoming-message signal sounded.” She moved over to her computer and told it to go directly to the Alien Signal Center homepage. Nothing.

“Judy, I can’t make it. The alien message is late today.”

“Are you sure you’ve got the right time?”

“Positive. Look, I’ve got to go. Maybe lunch tomorrow?”

“Sure, I’ll call you.”

“Thanks.” Heather replaced the handset. As soon as she did, the phone rang again. She picked it up. “Hello?”

“Heather,” said a different female voice, “it’s Salme van Horne.”

“Salme! Where are you? Here in Canada?”

“No, I’m still in Helsinki. Have you tried to download today’s message?”

“Yes. There doesn’t seem to be one coming through.”

“This has never happened before, has it? The Centaurs have never missed a day, have they?”

“Never. They’ve never even been late.”

“Do you suppose the problem is at our end?” asked Salme. “Whose turn is it to receive the message?”

“Arecibo is designated prime, isn’t it? But there are backups, and—oh, wait. Something’s going up on the Web page.”

“I see it, too.”

“Damn holograms—ah, here it is: ‘No technical malfunction at receiving end. Apparently no message was sent.’ ”

“That can’t be the end of the transmissions,” said Salme. “There has to be a key.”

“Maybe they got tired of waiting for us to reply,” said Heather. “Maybe they won’t send again until we
do
reply.”

“Or maybe—”

“What?” asked Heather.

“Drake equation, final term.”

Heather was quiet for a moment. “Oh,” she said softly.

The Drake equation estimated the number of radio-broadcasting civilizations in the galaxy. It had seven terms:

R
_*
f
_p
n
_e
f
_l
f
_i
f
_c
L

The rate of star formation, times the fraction of stars with planets, times the number of those planets that are suitable for life, times the fraction of such planets on which life actually appears, times the fraction of life forms that are intelligent, times the fraction of such life forms that actually develop radio, times . . .

Times big L: the lifetime of such a civilization.

A civilization that had radio probably also had nuclear weapons, or other equally dangerous things.

Civilizations could be wiped out in a matter of moments—certainly in less than a single thirty-one-hour day.

“They can’t be dead,” said Salme.

“They’re either dead, or they voluntarily stopped, or the message is complete.”

There was a knock at the door. Heather covered the mouthpiece. “Come in!”

The departmental assistant stuck his head in. “Sorry to bother you, Professor Davis, but the CBC is on the phone. They want to talk to you about what happened to the aliens.”

10

Kyle’s lab was crowded. The dean leaned against one wall, the department chair had his butt perched on the shelf jutting out of the bottom of Cheetah’s console, a lawyer from the university’s patent unit sat in Kyle’s usual chair, and the five grad students who worked on Kyle’s quantum-computing team were milling around as well.

“Okay,” said Kyle to the group. “As you know, there’s been a technique available since nineteen ninety-six for producing simple quantum-logic gates; that technique was based on using nuclear magnetic resonance to measure atomic spins. But it was hampered by the fact that as you added bits, the output signal got exponentially weaker: a thirty-bit quantum computer based on that principle produces output only one-billionth as strong as that from a one-bit computer based on the same technique.

“Well, the method we’re going to demonstrate today is, we believe, the long-sought-after breakthrough: a quantum computer that, in theory, can employ an unlimited number of bits with no reduction in output quality. For our demo today, we’re going to try to factor a randomly generated three-hundred-digit number. To do that on the department’s ECB-5000 would take approximately one hundred years of constant calculation. If we’re right—if this works—we’ll have an answer about thirty seconds after I commence the experiment.”

He moved across the room.

“Our prototype quantum computer, which we call Democritus, has not just thirty registers, but
one thousand,
each of which consists of a single atom. The results will be a series of interference patterns, which another computer—that one over there—will analyze and reduce to a numeric readout.” He looked from face to face. “All set? Let’s go.”

Kyle walked over to the simple black console containing the Democritus computer. For the sake of drama, they’d built a large knife switch, worthy of Frankenstein’s lab, into the side of the cabinet. Kyle pulled it down, its blade touching the metal contacts. A bright red LED came on and—

—and everyone held their breath. Kyle kept watching Democritus, which, of course, was operating absolutely silently. Part of him missed the old days of clicking relays. Others were watching the digital clock mounted next to the red EXIT sign on the curving wall.

Ten seconds went by.

Then ten more.

Then a final ten.

And then the LED went dark.

Kyle let out his breath.

“Done,” he said, heart pounding.

He gestured for everyone to follow him across the room. There, another computer was analyzing the output from Democritus.

“It’ll take about five minutes to decode the interference pattern,” said Kyle. He allowed himself a smile. “If you’re thinking that that’s a lot longer than it took to produce the pattern, you’re right—but we’re now dealing with a conventional computer.”

“How many computations would it take to factor a number that big?” asked the dean, her voice clearly intrigued.

“Approximately ten to the five hundredth,” said Kyle.

“And there’s no way to do it in fewer steps?” she asked. “This isn’t a case of Democritus taking a shortcut?”

Kyle shook his head. “No, it really does take ten to the five hundredth steps to factor a number that big.”

“But Democritus didn’t do that many steps.”

“This
Democritus didn’t—in fact, it performed only one calculation, using a thousand atoms as the stones in its abacus, so to speak, to do so. But if all went well, 10
⁵⁰⁰
other Democrituses in other universes will also each have done one calculation—involving, of course, a total of a thousand times 10
⁵⁰⁰
atoms, which is 10
⁵⁰³
atoms. And that, my friends, is a very significant number.”

“How so?” asked the department chair.

“Well, the precise value isn’t important. What
is
important is how it relates to the number of atoms in our entire universe.” Kyle smiled, waiting for the inevitable question.

“And how many atoms are there in our universe?” asked the dean.

“I called up Holtz over in the McLennan Physical Labs and asked her,” said Kyle. “The answer, plus or minus a couple of orders of magnitude, is that there are ten to the eightieth atoms in the universe.”

A few jaws dropped.

“Do you see?” said Kyle. “In that thirty-second period, to factor our test number, Democritus must have accessed many trillions of times more atoms than there are in our entire universe. Other, earlier quantum-computing demonstrations have never involved enough bits to actually exceed the quantity of atoms available to them in our universe, leaving open some doubt as to whether they’d actually accessed parallel worlds, but if this experiment works, the
only
answer will be that our Democritus worked in tandem with computers in other universes.”

The conventional computer they were standing in front of beeped and one of its monitors came to life. Precisely two strings of numbers appeared on the screen, each dozens of digits long.

“Are those the first two factors?” asked the lawyer, clearly anxious to start notarizing things.

Kyle felt his heart sink. “Ah, no. No.” He swallowed; his stomach was roiling. “I mean, yes, certainly, they are doubtless factors of our source number, but—but. . .”

One of Kyle’s grad students looked at him and then said the words that, at that moment, Kyle himself couldn’t get out. “The display shouldn’t have appeared until all the factors are ready. Unless by some miracle, the source number has only two factors, then the experiment didn’t work.”

The department head loomed in at the screen and placed his index finger on the last digit of the second number; it was a four. “That’s an even number, so there have got to be smaller factors that aren’t displayed.” He straightened up. “What went wrong?”

Kyle was shaking his head. “It worked—sort of. Our Democritus did do only one calculation. The other number
must
have come from a parallel universe.”

“You can’t prove that,” said the dean. “Only two calculations means that only two thousand atoms were involved.”

“I know,” said Kyle. He breathed out. “Sorry, everyone. We’ll keep working on it.”

The dean frowned, presumably thinking of all the money that had already been spent. She left the room. The department head laid a hand briefly on Kyle’s slumped shoulder before he, too, left, followed by the lawyer.

Kyle looked at his grad students and shrugged. Nothing was going his way these days . . .

After the students went home, Kyle sat down in his chair in front of Cheetah’s console.

“I’m sorry,” said Cheetah.

“Yeah,” said Kyle. He shook his head. “It should have worked.”

“I’m confident you’ll figure out what went wrong.”

“I suppose.” He looked up at the print of “Christus Hypercubus.” “But maybe it’ll never work; researchers have been trying to accomplish this for over twenty years without success. He dropped his gaze to the floor. “I just keep wasting my time on projects that never bear fruit.”

“Like me,” said Cheetah, without rancor.

Kyle said nothing.

“I have faith in you,” said Cheetah.

Kyle made a sound in his throat, a laugh aborted.

“What?”

“I dunno. Maybe that’s the whole problem. Maybe it’s my lack of faith.”

“You mean God is punishing you for being an atheist?”

Kyle did laugh, but it was humorless. “Not that kind of faith. I mean my faith in quantum physics.” He paused. “When I was a grad student, nothing excited me like quantum mechanics—it was mind-expanding, endlessly fascinating. But I felt sure that someday it would all
click,
you know—all make sense. Someday I’d really see. But I never have. Oh, I understand the equations in an abstract way, but I don’t get it, you know? Maybe I don’t even really believe it.”

“You’ve lost me,” said Cheetah.

Kyle spread his arms, trying to find a way to explain it. “I was at a party once, and this fat guy comes in, and he’s got a slice through a geode held to his forehead by a headband. I never asked about it—guy comes in with something like that, you don’t ask. But his companion, a scrawny woman, must have noticed me looking at the geode, so she comes over and says, ‘That’s Cory—he’s gifted with the third eye.’ And I’m thinking, Good Christ, let me out of here. Later, Cory comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, man, what time is it?’ And I’m thinking what good is the third eye if you don’t even know what fucking
time
it is?”

Cheetah was quiet for a while. “And your point would be . . . ?”

“My point is that maybe you
do
need some special insight to understand—really, deeply understand—quantum mechanics. Einstein never did, you know; he was never comfortable with it, calling it ‘spooky action at a distance.’ But some of these guys in quantum mechanics, they
do
get it—either that or they fake it really well. Me, I always thought I’d be one of those who’d get it, too—that it
would
click at some point. But it hasn’t. I never developed the third eye.”

“Maybe you should get a geode slice from the Earth Sciences Centre.”

Kyle grunted. “Maybe. I guess down deep, at some basic level, I just don’t buy quantum mechanics. I feel like a bit of a charlatan.”

“Democritus did indeed communicate with at least one other alternative reality. That seems to confirm the many-worlds interpretation.”

Kyle looked at Cheetah’s lenses. “That’s it,” he said simply. “That’s the problem. This type of quantum computing hinges on the many-worlds interpretation, but, come on, really, how plausible is that? Surely not every conceivable universe exists, but rather only the ones that have at least some likelihood of having occurred.”

“For instance?” asked Cheetah.

“Well,” said Kyle, “there’s no recorded case of anyone ever being killed by a meteor falling on them, but it
could
happen. So, is there a universe in which I was killed that way yesterday? Another one in which I was killed that way the day before? A third in which I was killed that way the day before that? A fourth, fifth, and sixth in which it was my brother, not me, who was killed? A seventh, eighth, and ninth in which both of us were killed on those days by meteor impacts?”

Cheetah did not hesitate. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because meteors have no volition—in every universe, precisely the same meteors hit the Earth.”

“All right,” said Kyle, “but say one crashes today in—I don’t know—say in Antarctica. Now, I’ve never been to Antarctica, and I never intend to go there, but is there some parallel universe in which I did go, and in which I happened to be killed by that meteor? And then aren’t there seven billion times as many universes, accounting for all the people alive who might instead have gone to Antarctica?”

“It does seem rather an awful lot of parallel universes, doesn’t it?” said Cheetah.

“Exactly. In which case there must be some sort of filtration process—something that distinguishes between conceivable universes and plausible ones, between those that we simply can imagine and those that have some reasonable chance of actually existing. That could explain why we only got one other factor back in the experiment.”

“I suppose you’re right and—oh.”

“What?” said Kyle.

“I see what you’re getting at.”

Kyle was surprised; he wasn’t sure he himself knew what he was getting at. “And that is?”

“The ethics of the many-worlds interpretation.”

Kyle considered. “You know, I guess you’re right. Say I find a wallet that contains an unlocked SmartCash card with a thousand dollars on it. Say the wallet also has a driver’s license in it; I’ve got the rightful owner’s name and address right there.”

Cheetah had a cross-shaped pattern of LEDs on his console. He could activate the vertical column of them or the horizontal row to simulate either nodding or shaking his head. He did his nod.

“Well,” said Kyle, “according to the many-worlds interpretation, anything that can possibly go two ways
does
go two ways. There’s a universe in which I return the money to the person who lost it, but there’s also a universe in which I keep it for myself. Now, if there are bound to be two universes, then why the heck
shouldn’t
I be the guy who keeps the money?”

“An intriguing question, and without impugning your character, such a dilemma does seem within the realm of possibility. But I suspect your moral concerns run deeper: I suspect you’re wondering about you and Rebecca. Even if in this universe you didn’t molest her, you’re wondering if there is some conceivable universe in which you
did.”

Kyle slumped back in his chair. Cheetah was right. For once, the goddamned machine was right.

It was an insidious thing, the human mind. The mere accusation was enough to get it working, even against itself.

And
was
there such a universe? A universe where he really could creep into his own daughter’s room after midnight and do those horrible things to her?

Not here, of course. Not in
this
universe. But in another one—one, perhaps, where he hadn’t got tenure, where his control over life had slipped away, where he drank more than he should, where he and Heather were still fighting to keep the wolf from the door—or where they had divorced early on, or he was a widower, and his own sexuality was finding no normal outlet.

Could such a universe exist? Could Becky’s memories, although false in this universe, be a true reflection of another reality? Could she now have access, through some quantum aberration, to those memories from a parallel world, just as a quantum computer accesses information from other timelines?

Or was the very notion that he’d abuse his daughter utterly outlandish, impossible, unthinkable—a meteor conking him on the head in the Antarctic?

Kyle stood up and did something he’d never done before. He lied to Cheetah.

“No,” he said. “No, you’re completely wrong about that.”

He left the lab, the lights shutting off automatically as he did so.