Robert Sawyer - Factoring Humanity

She sat back down on the couch, one leg tucked up underneath her. She opened one of the albums, spread it on her lap.

The pictures were from fifteen or so years ago—the turn of the century. The old house on Merton. God, how she missed that place.

She flipped a page. The photos were under acetate, held in place by a slight adhesive on the backing sheets.

Becky’s fifth birthday party—the last one they’d had in the Merton house. Balloons clinging to the wall with static electricity. Becky’s friends Jasmine and Brandi—such sophisticated names for such little girls!—playing pin the tail on the donkey.

Of course, that was the party that Heather’s sister, Doreen, had failed to show up at—Becky was crushed that her aunt hadn’t made it. Heather was still angry about that; she’d bent over backward making a fuss for Doreen’s children’s birthdays, baking cakes, picking out gifts, and more. But Doreen had been too busy, begging off because some better offer had come along…

She turned the page again and—

Well, fancy that.

More pictures from the party.

And there was Doreen. She had shown up after all.

Heather peeled up the acetate sheet; it made a sucking sound as it pulled away from the adhesive backing. She then removed the print and read the caption she’d written on the back: “Becky’s 5th B-Day.” And just in case there was any doubt, there was the date printed by the photofinisher, two days after Rebecca’s actual birthday.

She’d been mad at Doreen for a decade and a half over this. Doreen must have originally said she wasn’t coming, but had actually shown up at the last minute. Heather had remembered the first part, but had completely forgotten the second.

But there was the photograph: Doreen crouching down next to Becky.

Photos didn’t lie.

Heather exhaled.

Memory was an imperfect process. Of course, the photos reminded her of things. But they were also telling her things she’d never known, or had completely forgotten.

And yet, how many rolls of film had she ever shot? Maybe a couple of hundred—meaning that scattered about in photo albums and shoeboxes, there were a few thousand still frames from her life. Of course there were some home videos, too, and the electronic snapshots she’d saved to disk.

And there were diaries, and copies of old correspondence.

And little mementos and souvenirs that brought to mind events long past.

But that was it. The rest was stored nowhere else but in her fallible brain.

She closed the album. The word “Memories” was stamped in gold foil on its beige vinyl cover, but the gold was flaking off.

She looked across the room, down the hallway.

Her computer was down there; when he’d still lived here, Kyle’s had been in the basement.

They had practiced safe computing. Every morning when she went to work, she had a memory wafer in her purse containing the previous night’s backup of Kyle’s optical drive; the drive itself was almost crash-proof, but off-site storage was the only real insurance against loss due to fire or theft. Kyle, likewise, had always taken a memory wafer to his lab with Heather’s backup on it.

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.

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.