Factoring Humanity

Factoring Humanity, Robert J. Sawyer, Tor, 1999

Set in near-future Toronto, for the past several years humanity has been receiving messages, so far untranslated, from a planet in the Centauri system. One day, the messages stop. Have the aliens sent everything they planned to send, or have they destroyed themselves through some sort of holocaust?

Heather Davis, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, has spent her career trying to decipher the messages. Her personal life is something of a shambles; she and her husband, Kyle, a computer professor at the same school, separated after their older daughter, Mary, killed herself. After seeing a therapist, Becky, their younger daughter, confronted Kyle with the accusation that he sexually molested her many times, something he vehemently denies.

Heather is able to understand the pattern of the messages, rather than actually translate them. With help from the school's Engineering Department, she puts together something that looks like a giant three-dimensional cross, big enough for somebody to get inside. She undertakes a journey that cuts through barriers of space and time like a knife through warm butter. It isn't exactly space travel; it's more like touching the human Overmind, being able to enter the mind of anybody, anywhere, at any time. Heather brings Becky on a later journey, and, by touching the mind of Becky's therapist, convinces Becky that she has been the victim of false memory syndrome. The technology, and the resulting loss of human privacy, promises either a quantum jump in human evolution, or the end of mankind.

I loved this book. Some of the science gets a little overwhelming, but, otherwise, it�s a well done, idea filled story that is very highly recommended.