Since the early years of the twenty-first Century, Earth has been receiving signals from interstellar space -- but no one can understand them. Now they are simply the background noise of daily life, until the day they stop, message complete. Heather is one of the many scientists who has been working on the signals over the years, and now her whole life has gone astray, with one child a suicide, and her marriage failing. But she is the one who realizes that the signal contains instructions to build something: an extraordinary machine that allows one to mind travel into the collective subconscious of the human race. Factoring Humanity is a mindbending journey into a universe transformed.