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Wuthering Height | Emily Bronte | [
"romance",
"gothic"
] | [] | Chapter 32 | Seven days glided away, every one marking its course by the henceforth rapid alteration of Edgar Linton's state. The havoc that months had previously wrought was now emulated by the inroads of hours. Catherine we would fain have deluded yet; but her own quick spirit refused to delude her: it divined in secret, and brooded on the dreadful probability, gradually ripening into certainty. She had not the heart to mention her ride, when Thursday came round; I mentioned it for her, and obtained permission to order her out of doors: for the library, where her father stopped a short time daily—the brief period he could bear to sit up—and his chamber, had become her whole world. She grudged each moment that did not find her bending over his pillow, or seated by his side. Her countenance grew wan with watching and sorrow, and my master gladly dismissed her to what he flattered himself would be a happy change of scene and society; drawing comfort from the hope that she would not now be left entirely alone after his death.
He had a fixed idea, I guessed by several observations he let fall, that, as his nephew resembled him in person, he would resemble him in mind; for Linton's letters bore few or no indications of his defective character. And I, through pardonable weakness, refrained from correcting the error; asking myself what good there would be in disturbing his last moments with information that he had neither power nor opportunity to turn to account.
We deferred our excursion till the afternoon; a golden afternoon of August: every breath from the hills so full of life, that it seemed whoever respired it, though dying, might revive. Catherine's face was just like the landscape—shadows and sunshine flitting over it in rapid succession; but the shadows rested longer, and the sunshine was more transient; and her poor little heart reproached itself for even that passing forgetfulness of its cares.
We discerned Linton watching at the same spot he had selected before. My young mistress alighted, and told me that, as she was resolved to stay a very little while, I had better hold the pony and remain on horseback; but I dissented: I wouldn't risk losing sight of the charge committed to me a minute; so we climbed the slope of heath together. Master Heathcliff received us with greater animation on this occasion: not the animation of high spirits though, nor yet of joy; it looked more like fear.
"It is late!" he said, speaking short and with difficulty. "Is not your father very ill? I thought you wouldn't come."
"Why won't you be candid?" cried Catherine, swallowing her greeting. "Why cannot you say at once you don't want me? It is strange, Linton, that for the second time you have brought me here on purpose, apparently to distress us both, and for no reason besides!"
Linton shivered, and glanced at her, half supplicating, half ashamed; but his cousin's patience was not sufficient to endure this enigmatical behaviour.
"My father is very ill," she said; "and why am I called from his bedside? Why didn't you send to absolve me from my promise, when you wished I wouldn't keep it? Come! I desire an explanation: playing and trifling are completely banished out of my mind; and I can't dance attendance on your affectations now!"
"My affectations!" he murmured; "what are they? For heaven's sake, Catherine, don't look so angry! Despise me as much as you please; I am a worthless, cowardly wretch: I can't be scorned enough; but I'm too mean for your anger. Hate my father, and spare me for contempt."
"Nonsense!" cried Catherine in a passion. "Foolish, silly boy! And there! he trembles: as if I were really going to touch him! You needn't bespeak contempt, Linton: anybody will have it spontaneously at your service. Get off! I shall return home: it is folly dragging you from the hearth–stone, and pretending—what do we pretend? Let go my frock! If I pitied you for crying and looking so very frightened, you should spurn such pity. Ellen, tell him how disgraceful this conduct is. Rise, and don't degrade yourself into an abject reptile—don't!"
With streaming face and an expression of agony, Linton had thrown his nerveless frame along the ground: he seemed convulsed with exquisite terror.
"Oh!" he sobbed, "I cannot bear it! Catherine, Catherine, I'm a traitor, too, and I dare not tell you! But leave me, and I shall be killed! Dear Catherine, my life is in your hands: and you have said you loved me, and if you did, it wouldn't harm you. You'll not go, then? kind, sweet, good Catherine! And perhaps you will consent—and he'll let me die with you!"
My young lady, on witnessing his intense anguish, stooped to raise him. The old feeling of indulgent tenderness overcame her vexation, and she grew thoroughly moved and alarmed.
"Consent to what?" she asked. "To stay! tell me the meaning of this strange talk, and I will. You contradict your own words, and distract me! Be calm and frank, and confess at once all that weighs on your heart. You wouldn't injure me, Linton, would you? You wouldn't let any enemy hurt me, if you could prevent it? I'll believe you are a coward, for yourself, but not a cowardly betrayer of your best friend."
"But my father threatened me," gasped the boy, clasping his attenuated fingers, "and I dread him—I dread him! I dare not tell!"
"Oh, well!" said Catherine, with scornful compassion, "keep your secret: I'm no coward. Save yourself: I'm not afraid!"
Her magnanimity provoked his tears: he wept wildly, kissing her supporting hands, and yet could not summon courage to speak out. I was cogitating what the mystery might be, and determined Catherine should never suffer to benefit him or any one else, by my good will; when, hearing a rustle among the ling, I looked up and saw Mr. Heathcliff almost close upon us, descending the Heights. He didn't cast a glance towards my companions, though they were sufficiently near for Linton's sobs to be audible; but hailing me in the almost hearty tone he assumed to none besides, and the sincerity of which I couldn't avoid doubting, he said—
"It is something to see you so near to my house, Nelly. How are you at the Grange? Let us hear. The rumour goes," he added, in a lower tone, "that Edgar Linton is on his death–bed: perhaps they exaggerate his illness?"
"No; my master is dying," I replied: "it is true enough. A sad thing it will be for us all, but a blessing for him!"
"How long will he last, do you think?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said.
"Because," he continued, looking at the two young people, who were fixed under his eye—Linton appeared as if he could not venture to stir or raise his head, and Catherine could not move, on his account—"because that lad yonder seems determined to beat me; and I'd thank his uncle to be quick, and go before him! Hallo! has the whelp been playing that game long? I did give him some lessons about snivelling. Is he pretty lively with Miss Linton generally?"
"Lively? no—he has shown the greatest distress," I answered. "To see him, I should say, that instead of rambling with his sweetheart on the hills, he ought to be in bed, under the hands of a doctor."
"He shall be, in a day or two," muttered Heathcliff. "But first—get up, Linton! Get up!" he shouted. "Don't grovel on the ground there up, this moment!"
Linton had sunk prostrate again in another paroxysm of helpless fear, caused by his father's glance towards him, I suppose: there was nothing else to produce such humiliation. He made several efforts to obey, but his little strength was annihilated for the time, and he fell back again with a moan. Mr. Heathcliff advanced, and lifted him to lean against a ridge of turf.
"Now," said he, with curbed ferocity, "I'm getting angry and if you don't command that paltry spirit of yours—damn you! get up directly!"
"I will, father," he panted. "Only, let me alone, or I shall faint. I've done as you wished, I'm sure. Catherine will tell you that I—that I—have been cheerful. Ah! keep by me, Catherine; give me your hand."
"Take mine," said his father; "stand on your feet. There now—she'll lend you her arm: that's right, look at her. You would imagine I was the devil himself, Miss Linton, to excite such horror. Be so kind as to walk home with him, will you? He shudders if I touch him."
"Linton dear!" whispered Catherine, "I can't go to Wuthering Heights: papa has forbidden me. He'll not harm you: why are you so afraid?"
"I can never re–enter that house," he answered. "I'm not to re–enter it without you!"
"Stop!" cried his father. "We'll respect Catherine's filial scruples. Nelly, take him in, and I'll follow your advice concerning the doctor, without delay."
"You'll do well," replied I. "But I must remain with my mistress: to mind your son is not my business."
"You are very stiff," said Heathcliff, "I know that: but you'll force me to pinch the baby and make it scream before it moves your charity. Come, then, my hero. Are you willing to return, escorted by me?"
He approached once more, and made as if he would seize the fragile being; but, shrinking back, Linton clung to his cousin, and implored her to accompany him, with a frantic importunity that admitted no denial. However I disapproved, I couldn't hinder her: indeed, how could she have refused him herself? What was filling him with dread we had no means of discerning; but there he was, powerless under its gripe, and any addition seemed capable of shocking him into idiotcy. We reached the threshold; Catherine walked in, and I stood waiting till she had conducted the invalid to a chair, expecting her out immediately; when Mr. Heathcliff, pushing me forward, exclaimed—"My house is not stricken with the plague, Nelly; and I have a mind to be hospitable to–day: sit down, and allow me to shut the door."
He shut and locked it also. I started.
"You shall have tea before you go home," he added. "I am by myself. Hareton is gone with some cattle to the Lees, and Zillah and Joseph are off on a journey of pleasure; and, though I'm used to being alone, I'd rather have some interesting company, if I can get it. Miss Linton, take your seat by him. I give you what I have: the present is hardly worth accepting; but I have nothing else to offer. It is Linton, I mean. How she does stare! It's odd what a savage feeling I have to anything that seems afraid of me! Had I been born where laws are less strict and tastes less dainty, I should treat myself to a slow vivisection of those two, as an evening's amusement."
He drew in his breath, struck the table, and swore to himself, "By hell! I hate them."
"I am not afraid of you!" exclaimed Catherine, who could not hear the latter part of his speech. She stepped close up; her black eyes flashing with passion and resolution. "Give me that key: I will have it!" she said. "I wouldn't eat or drink here, if I were starving."
Heathcliff had the key in his hand that remained on the table. He looked up, seized with a sort of surprise at her boldness; or, possibly, reminded, by her voice and glance, of the person from whom she inherited it. She snatched at the instrument, and half succeeded in getting it out of his loosened fingers: but her action recalled him to the present; he recovered it speedily.
"Now, Catherine Linton," he said, "stand off, or I shall knock you down; and, that will make Mrs. Dean mad."
Regardless of this warning, she captured his closed hand and its contents again. "We will go!" she repeated, exerting her utmost efforts to cause the iron muscles to relax; and finding that her nails made no impression, she applied her teeth pretty sharply. Heathcliff glanced at me a glance that kept me from interfering a moment. Catherine was too intent on his fingers to notice his face. He opened them suddenly, and resigned the object of dispute; but, ere she had well secured it, he seized her with the liberated hand, and, pulling her on his knee, administered with the other a shower of terrific slaps on both sides of the head, each sufficient to have fulfilled his threat, had she been able to fall.'
At this diabolical violence I rushed on him furiously. "You villain!" I began to cry, "you villain!" A touch on the chest silenced me: I am stout, and soon put out of breath; and, what with that and the rage, I staggered dizzily back and felt ready to suffocate, or to burst a blood–vessel. The scene was over in two minutes; Catherine, released, put her two hands to her temples, and looked just as if she were not sure whether her ears were off or on. She trembled like a reed, poor thing, and leant against the table perfectly bewildered.
"I know how to chastise children, you see," said the scoundrel, grimly, as he stooped to repossess himself of the key, which had dropped to the floor. "Go to Linton now, as I told you; and cry at your ease! I shall be your father, to–morrow—all the father you'll have in a few days—and you shall have plenty of that. You can bear plenty; you're no weakling: you shall have a daily taste, if I catch such a devil of a temper in your eyes again!"
Cathy ran to me instead of Linton, and knelt down and put her burning cheek on my lap, weeping aloud. Her cousin had shrunk into a corner of the settle, as quiet as a mouse, congratulating himself, I dare say, that the correction had alighted on another than him. Mr. Heathcliff, perceiving us all confounded, rose, and expeditiously made the tea himself. The cups and saucers were laid ready. He poured it out, and handed me a cup.
"Wash away your spleen," he said. "And help your own naughty pet and mine. It is not poisoned, though I prepared it. I'm going out to seek your horses."
Our first thought, on his departure, was to force an exit somewhere. We tried the kitchen door, but that was fastened outside: we looked at the windows—they were too narrow for even Cathy's little figure.
"Master Linton," I cried, seeing we were regularly imprisoned, "you know what your diabolical father is after, and you shall tell us, or I'll box your ears, as he has done your cousin's."
"Yes, Linton, you must tell," said Catherine. "It was for your sake I came; and it will be wickedly ungrateful if you refuse."
"Give me some tea, I'm thirsty, and then I'll tell you," he answered. "Mrs. Dean, go away. I don't like you standing over me. Now, Catherine, you are letting your tears fall into my cup. I won't drink that. Give me another." Catherine pushed another to him, and wiped her face. I felt disgusted at the little wretch's composure, since he was no longer in terror for himself. The anguish he had exhibited on the moor subsided as soon as ever he entered Wuthering Heights; so I guessed he had been menaced with an awful visitation of wrath if he failed in decoying us there; and, that accomplished, he had no further immediate fears.
"Papa wants us to be married," he continued, after sipping some of the liquid. "And he knows your papa wouldn't let us marry now; and he's afraid of my dying if we wait; so we are to be married in the morning, and you are to stay here all night; and, if you do as he wishes, you shall return home next day, and take me with you."
"Take you with her, pitiful changeling!" I exclaimed. "You marry? Why, the man is mad! or he thinks us fools, every one. And do you imagine that beautiful young lady, that healthy, hearty girl, will tie herself to a little perishing monkey like you? Are you cherishing the notion that anybody, let alone Miss Catherine Linton, would have you for a husband? You want whipping for bringing us in here at all, with your dastardly puling tricks: and—don't look so silly, now! I've a very good mind to shake you severely, for your contemptible treachery, and your imbecile conceit."
I did give him a slight shaking; but it brought on the cough, and he took to his ordinary resource of moaning and weeping, and Catherine rebuked me.
"Stay all night? No," she said, looking slowly round. "Ellen, I'll burn that door down but I'll get out."
And she would have commenced the execution of her threat directly, but Linton was up in alarm for his dear self again. He clasped her in his two feeble arms sobbing:—"Won't you have me, and save me? not let me come to the Grange? Oh, darling Catherine! you mustn't go and leave, after all. You must obey my father—you must!"
"I must obey my own," she replied, "and relieve him from this cruel suspense. The whole night! What would he think? He'll be distressed already. I'll either break or burn a way out of the house. Be quiet! You're in no danger; but if you hinder me—Linton, I love papa better than you!" The mortal terror he felt of Mr. Heathcliff's anger restored to the boy his coward's eloquence. Catherine was near distraught: still, she persisted that she must go home, and tried entreaty in her turn, persuading him to subdue his selfish agony. While they were thus occupied, our jailor re–entered.
"Your beasts have trotted off," he said, "and—now Linton! snivelling again? What has she been doing to you? Come, come—have done, and get to bed. In a month or two, my lad, you'll be able to pay her back her present tyrannies with a vigorous hand. You're pining for pure love, are you not? nothing else in the world: and she shall have you! There, to bed! Zillah won't be here to–night; you must undress yourself. Hush! hold your noise! Once in your own room, I'll not come near you: you needn't fear. By chance, you've managed tolerably. I'll look to the rest."
He spoke these words, holding the door open for his son to pass, and the latter achieved his exit exactly as a spaniel might which suspected the person who attended on it of designing a spiteful squeeze. The lock was re–secured. Heathcliff approached the fire, where my mistress and I stood silent. Catherine looked up, and instinctively raised her hand to her cheek: his neighbourhood revived a painful sensation. Anybody else would have been incapable of regarding the childish act with sternness, but he scowled on her and muttered—"Oh! you are not afraid of me? Your courage is well disguised: you seem damnably afraid!"
"I am afraid now," she replied, "because, if I stay, papa will be miserable: and how can I endure making him miserable—when he—when he—Mr. Heathcliff, let me go home! I promise to marry Linton: papa would like me to: and I love him. Why should you wish to force me to do what I'll willingly do of myself?"
"Let him dare to force you," I cried. "There's law in the land, thank God! there is; though we be in an out–of–the–way place. I'd inform if he were my own son: and it's felony without benefit of clergy!"
"Silence!" said the ruffian. "To the devil with your clamour! I don't want you to speak. Miss Linton, I shall enjoy myself remarkably in thinking your father will be miserable: I shall not sleep for satisfaction. You could have hit on no surer way of fixing your residence under my roof for the next twenty–four hours than informing me that such an event would follow. As to your promise to marry Linton, I'll take care you shall keep it; for you shall not quit this place till it is fulfilled."
"Send Ellen, then, to let papa know I'm safe!" exclaimed Catherine, weeping bitterly. "Or marry me now. Poor papa! Ellen, he'll think we're lost. What shall we do?"
"Not he! He'll think you are tired of waiting on him, and run off for a little amusement," answered Heathcliff. "You cannot deny that you entered my house of your own accord, in contempt of his injunctions to the contrary. And it is quite natural that you should desire amusement at your age; and that you would weary of nursing a sick man, and that man only your father. Catherine, his happiest days were over when your days began. He cursed you, I dare say, for coming into the world (I did, at least); and it would just do if he cursed you as he went out of it. I'd join him. I don't love you! How should I? Weep away. As far as I can see, it will be your chief diversion hereafter; unless Linton make amends for other losses: and your provident parent appears to fancy he may. His letters of advice and consolation entertained me vastly. In his last he recommended my jewel to be careful of his; and kind to her when he got her. Careful and kind—that's paternal. But Linton requires his whole stock of care and kindness for himself. Linton can play the little tyrant well. He'll undertake to torture any number of cats, if their teeth be drawn and their claws pared. You'll be able to tell his uncle fine tales of his kindness, when you get home again, I assure you."
"You're right there!" I said; "explain your son's character. Show his resemblance to yourself: and then, I hope, Miss Cathy will think twice before she takes the cockatrice!"
"I don't much mind speaking of his amiable qualities now," he answered; "because she must either accept him or remain a prisoner, and you along with her, till your master dies. I can detain you both, quite concealed, here. If you doubt, encourage her to retract her word, and you'll have an opportunity of judging!"
"I'll not retract my word," said Catherine. "I'll marry him within this hour, if I may go to Thrushcross Grange afterwards. Mr. Heathcliff, you're a cruel man, but you're not a fiend; and you won't, from mere malice, destroy irrevocably all my happiness. If papa thought I had left him on purpose, and if he died before I returned, could I bear to live? I've given over crying: but I'm going to kneel here, at your knee; and I'll not get up, and I'll not take my eyes from your face till you look back at me! No, don't turn away! do look! you'll see nothing to provoke you. I don't hate you. I'm not angry that you struck me. Have you never loved anybody in all your life, uncle? never? Ah! you must look once. I'm so wretched, you can't help being sorry and pitying me."
"Keep your eft's fingers off; and move, or I'll kick you!" cried Heathcliff, brutally repulsing her. "I'd rather be hugged by a snake. How the devil can you dream of fawning on me? I detest you!"
He shrugged his shoulders: shook himself, indeed, as if his flesh crept with aversion; and thrust back his chair; while I got up, and opened my mouth, to commence a downright torrent of abuse. But I was rendered dumb in the middle of the first sentence, by a threat that I should be shown into a room by myself the very next syllable I uttered. It was growing dark—we heard a sound of voices at the garden–gate. Our host hurried out instantly: he had his wits about him; we had not. There was a talk of two or three minutes, and he returned alone.
"I thought it had been your cousin Hareton," I observed to Catherine. "I wish he would arrive! Who knows but he might take our part?"
"It was three servants sent to seek you from the Grange," said Heathcliff, overhearing me. "You should have opened a lattice and called out: but I could swear that chit is glad you didn't. She's glad to be obliged to stay, I'm certain."
At learning the chance we had missed, we both gave vent to our grief without control; and he allowed us to wail on till nine o'clock. Then he bid us go upstairs, through the kitchen, to Zillah's chamber; and I whispered my companion to obey: perhaps we might contrive to get through the window there, or into a garret, and out by its skylight. The window, however, was narrow, like those below, and the garret trap was safe from our attempts; for we were fastened in as before. We neither of us lay down: Catherine took her station by the lattice, and watched anxiously for morning; a deep sigh being the only answer I could obtain to my frequent entreaties that she would try to rest. I seated myself in a chair, and rocked to and fro, passing harsh judgment on my many derelictions of duty; from which, it struck me then, all the misfortunes of my employers sprang. It was not the case, in reality, I am aware; but it was, in my imagination, that dismal night; and I thought Heathcliff himself less guilty than I.
At seven o'clock he came, and inquired if Miss Linton had risen. She ran to the door immediately, and answered, "Yes."
"Here, then," he said, opening it, and pulling her out. I rose to follow, but he turned the lock again. I demanded my release.
"Be patient," he replied; "I'll send up your breakfast in a while."
I thumped on the panels, and rattled the latch angrily and Catherine asked why I was still shut up? He answered, I must try to endure it another hour, and they went away. I endured it two or three hours; at length, I heard a footstep: not Heathcliff's.
"I've brought you something to eat," said a voice; "oppen t" door!'
Complying eagerly, I beheld Hareton, laden with food enough to last me all day.
"Tak" it,' he added, thrusting the tray into my hand.
"Stay one minute," I began.
"Nay," cried he, and retired, regardless of any prayers I could pour forth to detain him.
And there I remained enclosed the whole day, and the whole of the next night; and another, and another. Five nights and four days I remained, altogether, seeing nobody but Hareton once every morning; and he was a model of a jailor: surly, and dumb, and deaf to every attempt at moving his sense of justice or compassion. |
Wuthering Height | Emily Bronte | [
"romance",
"gothic"
] | [] | Chapter 33 | On the fifth morning, or rather afternoon, a different step approached—lighter and shorter; and, this time, the person entered the room. It was Zillah; donned in her scarlet shawl, with a black silk bonnet on her head, and a willow–basket swung to her arm.
"Eh, dear! Mrs. Dean!" she exclaimed. "Well! there is a talk about you at Gimmerton. I never thought but you were sunk in the Blackhorse marsh, and missy with you, till master told me you'd been found, and he'd lodged you here! What! and you must have got on an island, sure? And how long were you in the hole? Did master save you, Mrs. Dean? But you're not so thin—you've not been so poorly, have you?"
"Your master is a true scoundrel!" I replied. "But he shall answer for it. He needn't have raised that tale: it shall all be laid bare!"
"What do you mean?" asked Zillah. "It's not his tale: they tell that in the village—about your being lost in the marsh; and I calls to Earnshaw, when I come in—"Eh, they's queer things, Mr. Hareton, happened since I went off. It's a sad pity of that likely young lass, and cant Nelly Dean." He stared. I thought he had not heard aught, so I told him the rumour. The master listened, and he just smiled to himself, and said, "If they have been in the marsh, they are out now, Zillah. Nelly Dean is lodged, at this minute, in your room. You can tell her to flit, when you go up; here is the key. The bog–water got into her head, and she would have run home quite flighty; but I fixed her till she came round to her senses. You can bid her go to the Grange at once, if she be able, and carry a message from me, that her young lady will follow in time to attend the squire's funeral."
"Mr. Edgar is not dead?" I gasped. "Oh! Zillah, Zillah!"
"No, no; sit you down, my good mistress," she replied; "you're right sickly yet. He's not dead; Doctor Kenneth thinks he may last another day. I met him on the road and asked."
Instead of sitting down, I snatched my outdoor things, and hastened below, for the way was free. On entering the house, I looked about for some one to give information of Catherine. The place was filled with sunshine, and the door stood wide open; but nobody seemed at hand. As I hesitated whether to go off at once, or return and seek my mistress, a slight cough drew my attention to the hearth. Linton lay on the settle, sole tenant, sucking a stick of sugar–candy, and pursuing my movements with apathetic eyes. "Where is Miss Catherine?" I demanded sternly, supposing I could frighten him into giving intelligence, by catching him thus, alone. He sucked on like an innocent.
"Is she gone?" I said.
"No," he replied; "she's upstairs: she's not to go; we won't let her."
"You won't let her, little idiot!" I exclaimed. "Direct me to her room immediately, or I'll make you sing out sharply."
"Papa would make you sing out, if you attempted to get there," he answered. "He says I'm not to be soft with Catherine: she's my wife, and it's shameful that she should wish to leave me. He says she hates me and wants me to die, that she may have my money; but she shan't have it: and she shan't go home! She never shall!—she may cry, and be sick as much as she pleases!"
He resumed his former occupation, closing his lids, as if he meant to drop asleep.
"Master Heathcliff," I resumed, "have you forgotten all Catherine's kindness to you last winter, when you affirmed you loved her, and when she brought you books and sung you songs, and came many a time through wind and snow to see you? She wept to miss one evening, because you would be disappointed; and you felt then that she was a hundred times too good to you: and now you believe the lies your father tells, though you know he detests you both. And you join him against her. That's fine gratitude, is it not?"
The corner of Linton's mouth fell, and he took the sugar–candy from his lips.
"Did she come to Wuthering Heights because she hated you?" I continued. "Think for yourself! As to your money, she does not even know that you will have any. And you say she's sick; and yet you leave her alone, up there in a strange house! You who have felt what it is to be so neglected! You could pity your own sufferings; and she pitied them, too; but you won't pity hers! I shed tears, Master Heathcliff, you see—an elderly woman, and a servant merely—and you, after pretending such affection, and having reason to worship her almost, store every tear you have for yourself, and lie there quite at ease. Ah! you're a heartless, selfish boy!"
"I can't stay with her," he answered crossly. "I'll not stay by myself. She cries so I can't bear it. And she won't give over, though I say I'll call my father. I did call him once, and he threatened to strangle her if she was not quiet; but she began again the instant he left the room, moaning and grieving all night long, though I screamed for vexation that I couldn't sleep."
"Is Mr. Heathcliff out?" I inquired, perceiving that the wretched creature had no power to sympathize with his cousin's mental tortures.
"He's in the court," he replied, "talking to Doctor Kenneth; who says uncle is dying, truly, at last. I'm glad, for I shall be master of the Grange after him. Catherine always spoke of it as her house. It isn't hers! It's mine: papa says everything she has is mine. All her nice books are mine; she offered to give me them, and her pretty birds, and her pony Minny, if I would get the key of our room, and let her out; but I told her she had nothing to give, they ware all, all mine. And then she cried, and took a little picture from her neck, and said I should have that; two pictures in a gold case, on one side her mother, and on the other uncle, when they were young. That was yesterday—I said they were mine, too; and tried to get them from her. The spiteful thing wouldn't let me: she pushed me off, and hurt me. I shrieked out—that frightens her—she heard papa coming, and she broke the hinges and divided the case, and gave me her mother's portrait; the other she attempted to hide: but papa asked what was the matter, and I explained it. He took the one I had away, and ordered her to resign hers to me; she refused, and he—he struck her down, and wrenched it off the chain, and crushed it with his foot."
"And were you pleased to see her struck?" I asked: having my designs in encouraging his talk.
"I winked," he answered: "I wink to see my father strike a dog or a horse, he does it so hard. Yet I was glad at first—she deserved punishing for pushing me: but when papa was gone, she made me come to the window and showed me her cheek cut on the inside, against her teeth, and her mouth filling with blood; and then she gathered up the bits of the picture, and went and sat down with her face to the wall, and she has never spoken to me since: and I sometimes think she can't speak for pain. I don't like to think so; but she's a naughty thing for crying continually; and she looks so pale and wild, I'm afraid of her."
"And you can get the key if you choose?" I said.
"Yes, when I am up–stairs," he answered; "but I can't walk up–stairs now."
"In what apartment is it?" I asked.
"Oh," he cried, "I shan't tell you where it is. It is our secret. Nobody, neither Hareton nor Zillah, is to know. There! you've tired me—go away, go away!" And he turned his face on to his arm, and shut his eyes again.
I considered it best to depart without seeing Mr. Heathcliff, and bring a rescue for my young lady from the Grange. On reaching it, the astonishment of my fellow–servants to see me, and their joy also, was intense; and when they heard that their little mistress was safe, two or three were about to hurry up and shout the news at Mr. Edgar's door: but I bespoke the announcement of it myself. How changed I found him, even in those few days! He lay an image of sadness and resignation awaiting his death. Very young he looked: though his actual age was thirty–nine, one would have called him ten years younger, at least. He thought of Catherine; for he murmured her name. I touched his hand, and spoke.
"Catherine is coming, dear master!" I whispered; "she is alive and well; and will be here, I hope, to–night."
I trembled at the first effects of this intelligence: he half rose up, looked eagerly round the apartment, and then sank back in a swoon. As soon as he recovered, I related our compulsory visit, and detention at the Heights. I said Heathcliff forced me to go in: which was not quite true. I uttered as little as possible against Linton; nor did I describe all his father's brutal conduct—my intentions being to add no bitterness, if I could help it, to his already over–flowing cup.
He divined that one of his enemy's purposes was to secure the personal property, as well as the estate, to his son: or rather himself; yet why he did not wait till his decease was a puzzle to my master, because ignorant how nearly he and his nephew would quit the world together. However, he felt that his will had better be altered: instead of leaving Catherine's fortune at her own disposal, he determined to put it in the hands of trustees for her use during life, and for her children, if she had any, after her. By that means, it could not fall to Mr. Heathcliff should Linton die.
Having received his orders, I despatched a man to fetch the attorney, and four more, provided with serviceable weapons, to demand my young lady of her jailor. Both parties were delayed very late. The single servant returned first. He said Mr. Green, the lawyer, was out when he arrived at his house, and he had to wait two hours for his re–entrance; and then Mr. Green told him he had a little business in the village that must be done; but he would be at Thrushcross Grange before morning. The four men came back unaccompanied also. They brought word that Catherine was ill: too ill to quit her room; and Heathcliff would not suffer them to see her. I scolded the stupid fellows well for listening to that tale, which I would not carry to my master; resolving to take a whole bevy up to the Heights, at day–light, and storm it literally, unless the prisoner were quietly surrendered to us. Her father shall see her, I vowed, and vowed again, if that devil be killed on his own doorstones in trying to prevent it!
Happily, I was spared the journey and the trouble. I had gone down–stairs at three o'clock to fetch a jug of water; and was passing through the hall with it in my hand, when a sharp knock at the front door made me jump. "Oh! it is Green," I said, recollecting myself—"only Green," and I went on, intending to send somebody else to open it; but the knock was repeated: not loud, and still importunately. I put the jug on the banister and hastened to admit him myself. The harvest moon shone clear outside. It was not the attorney. My own sweet little mistress sprang on my neck sobbing, "Ellen, Ellen! Is papa alive?"
"Yes," I cried: "yes, my angel, he is, God be thanked, you are safe with us again!"
She wanted to run, breathless as she was, up–stairs to Mr. Linton's room; but I compelled her to sit down on a chair, and made her drink, and washed her pale face, chafing it into a faint colour with my apron. Then I said I must go first, and tell of her arrival; imploring her to say, she should be happy with young Heathcliff. She stared, but soon comprehending why I counselled her to utter the falsehood, she assured me she would not complain.
I couldn't abide to be present at their meeting. I stood outside the chamber–door a quarter of an hour, and hardly ventured near the bed, then. All was composed, however: Catherine's despair was as silent as her father's joy. She supported him calmly, in appearance; and he fixed on her features his raised eyes that seemed dilating with ecstasy.
He died blissfully, Mr. Lockwood: he died so. Kissing her cheek, he murmured,—"I am going to her; and you, darling child, shall come to us!" and never stirred or spoke again; but continued that rapt, radiant gaze, till his pulse imperceptibly stopped and his soul departed. None could have noticed the exact minute of his death, it was so entirely without a struggle.
Whether Catherine had spent her tears, or whether the grief were too weighty to let them flow, she sat there dry–eyed till the sun rose: she sat till noon, and would still have remained brooding over that deathbed, but I insisted on her coming away and taking some repose. It was well I succeeded in removing her, for at dinner–time appeared the lawyer, having called at Wuthering Heights to get his instructions how to behave. He had sold himself to Mr. Heathcliff: that was the cause of his delay in obeying my master's summons. Fortunately, no thought of worldly affairs crossed the latter's mind, to disturb him, after his daughter's arrival.
Mr. Green took upon himself to order everything and everybody about the place. He gave all the servants but me, notice to quit. He would have carried his delegated authority to the point of insisting that Edgar Linton should not be buried beside his wife, but in the chapel, with his family. There was the will, however, to hinder that, and my loud protestations against any infringement of its directions. The funeral was hurried over; Catherine, Mrs. Linton Heathcliff now, was suffered to stay at the Grange till her father's corpse had quitted it.
She told me that her anguish had at last spurred Linton to incur the risk of liberating her. She heard the men I sent disputing at the door, and she gathered the sense of Heathcliff's answer. It drove her desperate. Linton who had been conveyed up to the little parlour soon after I left, was terrified into fetching the key before his father re–ascended. He had the cunning to unlock and re–lock the door, without shutting it; and when he should have gone to bed, he begged to sleep with Hareton, and his petition was granted for once. Catherine stole out before break of day. She dared not try the doors lest the dogs should raise an alarm; she visited the empty chambers and examined their windows; and, luckily, lighting on her mother's, she got easily out of its lattice, and on to the ground, by means of the fir–tree close by. Her accomplice suffered for his share in the escape, notwithstanding his timid contrivances. |
Wuthering Height | Emily Bronte | [
"romance",
"gothic"
] | [] | Chapter 34 | The evening after the funeral, my young lady and I were seated in the library; now musing mournfully—one of us despairingly—on our loss, now venturing conjectures as to the gloomy future.
We had just agreed the best destiny which could await Catherine would be a permission to continue resident at the Grange; at least during Linton's life: he being allowed to join her there, and I to remain as housekeeper. That seemed rather too favourable an arrangement to be hoped for; and yet I did hope, and began to cheer up under the prospect of retaining my home and my employment, and, above all, my beloved young mistress; when a servant—one of the discarded ones, not yet departed—rushed hastily in, and said "that devil Heathcliff" was coming through the court: should he fasten the door in his face?
If we had been mad enough to order that proceeding, we had not time. He made no ceremony of knocking or announcing his name: he was master, and availed himself of the master's privilege to walk straight in, without saying a word. The sound of our informant's voice directed him to the library; he entered and motioning him out, shut the door.
It was the same room into which he had been ushered, as a guest, eighteen years before: the same moon shone through the window; and the same autumn landscape lay outside. We had not yet lighted a candle, but all the apartment was visible, even to the portraits on the wall: the splendid head of Mrs. Linton, and the graceful one of her husband. Heathcliff advanced to the hearth. Time had little altered his person either. There was the same man: his dark face rather sallower and more composed, his frame a stone or two heavier, perhaps, and no other difference. Catherine had risen with an impulse to dash out, when she saw him.
"Stop!" he said, arresting her by the arm. "No more runnings away! Where would you go? I'm come to fetch you home; and I hope you'll be a dutiful daughter and not encourage my son to further disobedience. I was embarrassed how to punish him when I discovered his part in the business: he's such a cobweb, a pinch would annihilate him; but you'll see by his look that he has received his due! I brought him down one evening, the day before yesterday, and just set him in a chair, and never touched him afterwards. I sent Hareton out, and we had the room to ourselves. In two hours, I called Joseph to carry him up again; and since then my presence is as potent on his nerves as a ghost; and I fancy he sees me often, though I am not near. Hareton says he wakes and shrieks in the night by the hour together, and calls you to protect him from me; and, whether you like your precious mate, or not, you must come: he's your concern now; I yield all my interest in him to you."
"Why not let Catherine continue here," I pleaded, "and send Master Linton to her? As you hate them both, you'd not miss them: they can only be a daily plague to your unnatural heart."
"I'm seeking a tenant for the Grange," he answered; "and I want my children about me, to be sure. Besides, that lass owes me her services for her bread. I'm not going to nurture her in luxury and idleness after Linton is gone. Make haste and get ready, now; and don't oblige me to compel you."
"I shall," said Catherine. "Linton is all I have to love in the world, and though you have done what you could to make him hateful to me, and me to him, you cannot make us hate each other. And I defy you to hurt him when I am by, and I defy you to frighten me!"
"You are a boastful champion," replied Heathcliff; "but I don't like you well enough to hurt him: you shall get the full benefit of the torment, as long as it lasts. It is not I who will make him hateful to you—it is his own sweet spirit. He's as bitter as gall at your desertion and its consequences: don't expect thanks for this noble devotion. I heard him draw a pleasant picture to Zillah of what he would do if he were as strong as I: the inclination is there, and his very weakness will sharpen his wits to find a substitute for strength."
"I know he has a bad nature," said Catherine: "he's your son. But I'm glad I've a better, to forgive it; and I know he loves me, and for that reason I love him. Mr. Heathcliff you have nobody to love you; and, however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery. You are miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him? Nobody loves you—nobody will cry for you when you die! I wouldn't be you!"
Catherine spoke with a kind of dreary triumph: she seemed to have made up her mind to enter into the spirit of her future family, and draw pleasure from the griefs of her enemies.
"You shall be sorry to be yourself presently," said her father–in–law, "if you stand there another minute. Begone, witch, and get your things!"
She scornfully withdrew. In her absence I began to beg for Zillah's place at the Heights, offering to resign mine to her; but he would suffer it on no account. He bid me be silent; and then, for the first time, allowed himself a glance round the room and a look at the pictures. Having studied Mrs. Linton's, he said—"I shall have that home. Not because I need it, but—" He turned abruptly to the fire, and continued, with what, for lack of a better word, I must call a smile—"I'll tell you what I did yesterday! I got the sexton, who was digging Linton's grave, to remove the earth off her coffin lid, and I opened it. I thought, once, I would have stayed there: when I saw her face again—it is hers yet!—he had hard work to stir me; but he said it would change if the air blew on it, and so I struck one side of the coffin loose, and covered it up: not Linton's side, damn him! I wish he'd been soldered in lead. And I bribed the sexton to pull it away when I'm laid there, and slide mine out too; I'll have it made so: and then by the time Linton gets to us he'll not know which is which!"
"You were very wicked, Mr. Heathcliff!" I exclaimed; "were you not ashamed to disturb the dead?"
"I disturbed nobody, Nelly," he replied; "and I gave some ease to myself. I shall be a great deal more comfortable now; and you'll have a better chance of keeping me underground, when I get there. Disturbed her? No! she has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen years—incessantly—remorselessly—till yesternight; and yesternight I was tranquil. I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped and my cheek frozen against hers."
"And if she had been dissolved into earth, or worse, what would you have dreamt of then?" I said.
"Of dissolving with her, and being more happy still!" he answered. "Do you suppose I dread any change of that sort? I expected such a transformation on raising the lid—but I'm better pleased that it should not commence till I share it. Besides, unless I had received a distinct impression of her passionless features, that strange feeling would hardly have been removed. It began oddly. You know I was wild after she died; and eternally, from dawn to dawn, praying her to return to me her spirit! I have a strong faith in ghosts: I have a conviction that they can, and do, exist among us! The day she was buried, there came a fall of snow. In the evening I went to the churchyard. It blew bleak as winter—all round was solitary. I didn't fear that her fool of a husband would wander up the glen so late; and no one else had business to bring them there. Being alone, and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I said to myself—"I'll have her in my arms again! If she be cold, I'll think it is this north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it is sleep." I got a spade from the tool–house, and began to delve with all my might—it scraped the coffin; I fell to work with my hands; the wood commenced cracking about the screws; I was on the point of attaining my object, when it seemed that I heard a sigh from some one above, close at the edge of the grave, and bending down. "If I can only get this off," I muttered, "I wish they may shovel in the earth over us both!" and I wrenched at it more desperately still. There was another sigh, close at my ear. I appeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet–laden wind. I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by; but, as certainly as you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though it cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt that Cathy was there: not under me, but on the earth. A sudden sense of relief flowed from my heart through every limb. I relinquished my labour of agony, and turned consoled at once: unspeakably consoled. Her presence was with me: it remained while I re–filled the grave, and led me home. You may laugh, if you will; but I was sure I should see her there. I was sure she was with me, and I could not help talking to her. Having reached the Heights, I rushed eagerly to the door. It was fastened; and, I remember, that accursed Earnshaw and my wife opposed my entrance. I remember stopping to kick the breath out of him, and then hurrying up–stairs, to my room and hers. I looked round impatiently—I felt her by me—I could almost see her, and yet I could not! I ought to have sweat blood then, from the anguish of my yearning—from the fervour of my supplications to have but one glimpse! I had not one. She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to me! And, since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, I've been the sport of that intolerable torture! Infernal! keeping my nerves at such a stretch that, if they had not resembled catgut, they would long ago have relaxed to the feebleness of Linton's. When I sat in the house with Hareton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; when I walked on the moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home I hastened to return; she must be somewhere at the Heights, I was certain! And when I slept in her chamber—I was beaten out of that. I couldn't lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a child; and I must open my lids to see. And so I opened and closed them a hundred times a night—to be always disappointed! It racked me! I've often groaned aloud, till that old rascal Joseph no doubt believed that my conscience was playing the fiend inside of me. Now, since I've seen her, I'm pacified—a little. It was a strange way of killing: not by inches, but by fractions of hairbreadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteen years!"
Mr. Heathcliff paused and wiped his forehead; his hair clung to it, wet with perspiration; his eyes were fixed on the red embers of the fire, the brows not contracted, but raised next the temples; diminishing the grim aspect of his countenance, but imparting a peculiar look of trouble, and a painful appearance of mental tension towards one absorbing subject. He only half addressed me, and I maintained silence. I didn't like to hear him talk! After a short period he resumed his meditation on the picture, took it down and leant it against the sofa to contemplate it at better advantage; and while so occupied Catherine entered, announcing that she was ready, when her pony should be saddled.
"Send that over to–morrow," said Heathcliff to me; then turning to her, he added: "You may do without your pony: it is a fine evening, and you'll need no ponies at Wuthering Heights; for what journeys you take, your own feet will serve you. Come along."
"Good–bye, Ellen!" whispered my dear little mistress.
As she kissed me, her lips felt like ice. "Come and see me, Ellen; don't forget."
"Take care you do no such thing, Mrs. Dean!" said her new father. "When I wish to speak to you I'll come here. I want none of your prying at my house!"
He signed her to precede him; and casting back a look that cut my heart, she obeyed. I watched them, from the window, walk down the garden. Heathcliff fixed Catherine's arm under his: though she disputed the act at first evidently; and with rapid strides he hurried her into the alley, whose trees concealed them. |
Wuthering Height | Emily Bronte | [
"romance",
"gothic"
] | [] | Chapter 35 | I have paid a visit to the Heights, but I have not seen her since she left: Joseph held the door in his hand when I called to ask after her, and wouldn't let me pass. He said Mrs. Linton was "thrang," and the master was not in. Zillah has told me something of the way they go on, otherwise I should hardly know who was dead and who living. She thinks Catherine haughty, and does not like her, I can guess by her talk. My young lady asked some aid of her when she first came; but Mr. Heathcliff told her to follow her own business, and let his daughter–in–law look after herself; and Zillah willingly acquiesced, being a narrow–minded, selfish woman. Catherine evinced a child's annoyance at this neglect; repaid it with contempt, and thus enlisted my informant among her enemies, as securely as if she had done her some great wrong. I had a long talk with Zillah about six weeks ago, a little before you came, one day when we foregathered on the moor; and this is what she told me.
"The first thing Mrs. Linton did," she said, "on her arrival at the Heights, was to run up–stairs, without even wishing good–evening to me and Joseph; she shut herself into Linton's room, and remained till morning. Then, while the master and Earnshaw were at breakfast, she entered the house, and asked all in a quiver if the doctor might be sent for? her cousin was very ill."
"We know that!" answered Heathcliff; "but his life is not worth a farthing, and I won't spend a farthing on him."
"But I cannot tell how to do," she said; "and if nobody will help me, he'll die!"
"Walk out of the room," cried the master, "and let me never hear a word more about him! None here care what becomes of him; if you do, act the nurse; if you do not, lock him up and leave him."
"Then she began to bother me, and I said I'd had enough plague with the tiresome thing; we each had our tasks, and hers was to wait on Linton: Mr. Heathcliff bid me leave that labour to her."
"How they managed together, I can't tell. I fancy he fretted a great deal, and moaned hisseln night and day; and she had precious little rest: one could guess by her white face and heavy eyes. She sometimes came into the kitchen all wildered like, and looked as if she would fain beg assistance; but I was not going to disobey the master: I never dare disobey him, Mrs. Dean; and, though I thought it wrong that Kenneth should not be sent for, it was no concern of mine either to advise or complain, and I always refused to meddle. Once or twice, after we had gone to bed, I've happened to open my door again and seen her sitting crying on the stairs"-top; and then I've shut myself in quick, for fear of being moved to interfere. I did pity her then, I'm sure: still I didn't wish to lose my place, you know.
"At last, one night she came boldly into my chamber, and frightened me out of my wits, by saying, "Tell Mr. Heathcliff that his son is dying—I'm sure he is, this time. Get up, instantly, and tell him."
"Having uttered this speech, she vanished again. I lay a quarter of an hour listening and trembling. Nothing stirred—the house was quiet."
"She's mistaken, I said to myself. He's got over it. I needn't disturb them; and I began to doze. But my sleep was marred a second time by a sharp ringing of the bell—the only bell we have, put up on purpose for Linton; and the master called to me to see what was the matter, and inform them that he wouldn't have that noise repeated."
"I delivered Catherine's message. He cursed to himself, and in a few minutes came out with a lighted candle, and proceeded to their room. I followed. Mrs. Heathcliff was seated by the bedside, with her hands folded on her knees. Her father–in–law went up, held the light to Linton's face, looked at him, and touched him; afterwards he turned to her."
"Now—Catherine," he said, "how do you feel?"
"She was dumb."
"How do you feel, Catherine?" he repeated."
"He's safe, and I'm free," she answered: "I should feel well—but," she continued, with a bitterness she couldn't conceal, "you have left me so long to struggle against death alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!"
"And she looked like it, too! I gave her a little wine. Hareton and Joseph, who had been wakened by the ringing and the sound of feet, and heard our talk from outside, now entered. Joseph was fain, I believe, of the lad's removal; Hareton seemed a thought bothered: though he was more taken up with staring at Catherine than thinking of Linton. But the master bid him get off to bed again: we didn't want his help. He afterwards made Joseph remove the body to his chamber, and told me to return to mine, and Mrs. Heathcliff remained by herself."
"In the morning, he sent me to tell her she must come down to breakfast: she had undressed, and appeared going to sleep, and said she was ill; at which I hardly wondered. I informed Mr. Heathcliff, and he replied,—"Well, let her be till after the funeral; and go up now and then to get her what is needful; and, as soon as she seems better, tell me."
Cathy stayed upstairs a fortnight, according to Zillah; who visited her twice a day, and would have been rather more friendly, but her attempts at increasing kindness were proudly and promptly repelled.
Heathcliff went up once, to show her Linton's will. He had bequeathed the whole of his, and what had been her, moveable property, to his father: the poor creature was threatened, or coaxed, into that act during her week's absence, when his uncle died. The lands, being a minor, he could not meddle with. However, Mr. Heathcliff has claimed and kept them in his wife's right and his also: I suppose legally; at any rate, Catherine, destitute of cash and friends, cannot disturb his possession.
"Nobody," said Zillah, "ever approached her door, except that once, but I; and nobody asked anything about her. The first occasion of her coming down into the house was on a Sunday afternoon. She had cried out, when I carried up her dinner, that she couldn't bear any longer being in the cold; and I told her the master was going to Thrushcross Grange, and Earnshaw and I needn't hinder her from descending; so, as soon as she heard Heathcliff's horse trot off, she made her appearance, donned in black, and her yellow curls combed back behind her ears as plain as a Quaker: she couldn't comb them out."
"Joseph and I generally go to chapel on Sundays:" the kirk, you know, has no minister now, explained Mrs. Dean; and they call the Methodists' or Baptists' place (I can't say which it is) at Gimmerton, a chapel. "Joseph had gone," she continued, "but I thought proper to bide at home. Young folks are always the better for an elder's over–looking; and Hareton, with all his bashfulness, isn't a model of nice behaviour. I let him know that his cousin would very likely sit with us, and she had been always used to see the Sabbath respected; so he had as good leave his guns and bits of indoor work alone, while she stayed. He coloured up at the news, and cast his eyes over his hands and clothes. The train–oil and gunpowder were shoved out of sight in a minute. I saw he meant to give her his company; and I guessed, by his way, he wanted to be presentable; so, laughing, as I durst not laugh when the master is by, I offered to help him, if he would, and joked at his confusion. He grew sullen, and began to swear."
"Now, Mrs. Dean," Zillah went on, seeing me not pleased by her manner, "you happen think your young lady too fine for Mr. Hareton; and happen you're right: but I own I should love well to bring her pride a peg lower. And what will all her learning and her daintiness do for her, now? She's as poor as you or I: poorer, I'll be bound: you're saying, and I'm doing my little all that road."
Hareton allowed Zillah to give him her aid; and she flattered him into a good humour; so, when Catherine came, half forgetting her former insults, he tried to make himself agreeable, by the housekeeper's account.
"Missis walked in," she said, "as chill as an icicle, and as high as a princess. I got up and offered her my seat in the arm–chair. No, she turned up her nose at my civility. Earnshaw rose, too, and bid her come to the settle, and sit close by the fire: he was sure she was starved."
"I've been starved a month and more," she answered, resting on the word as scornful as she could."
"And she got a chair for herself, and placed it at a distance from both of us. Having sat till she was warm, she began to look round, and discovered a number of books on the dresser; she was instantly upon her feet again, stretching to reach them: but they were too high up. Her cousin, after watching her endeavours a while, at last summoned courage to help her; she held her frock, and he filled it with the first that came to hand."
"That was a great advance for the lad. She didn't thank him; still, he felt gratified that she had accepted his assistance, and ventured to stand behind as she examined them, and even to stoop and point out what struck his fancy in certain old pictures which they contained; nor was he daunted by the saucy style in which she jerked the page from his finger: he contented himself with going a bit farther back and looking at her instead of the book. She continued reading, or seeking for something to read. His attention became, by degrees, quite centred in the study of her thick silky curls: her face he couldn't see, and she couldn't see him. And, perhaps, not quite awake to what he did, but attracted like a child to a candle, at last he proceeded from staring to touching; he put out his hand and stroked one curl, as gently as if it were a bird. He might have stuck a knife into her neck, she started round in such a taking."
"Get away this moment! How dare you touch me? Why are you stopping there?" she cried, in a tone of disgust. "I can't endure you! I'll go upstairs again, if you come near me."
"Mr. Hareton recoiled, looking as foolish as he could do: he sat down in the settle very quiet, and she continued turning over her volumes another half hour; finally, Earnshaw crossed over, and whispered to me."
"Will you ask her to read to us, Zillah? I'm stalled of doing naught; and I do like—I could like to hear her! Dunnot say I wanted it, but ask of yourseln."
"Mr. Hareton wishes you would read to us, ma'am," I said, immediately. "He'd take it very kind—he'd be much obliged."
"She frowned; and looking up, answered—"
"Mr. Hareton, and the whole set of you, will be good enough to understand that I reject any pretence at kindness you have the hypocrisy to offer! I despise you, and will have nothing to say to any of you! When I would have given my life for one kind word, even to see one of your faces, you all kept off. But I won't complain to you! I'm driven down here by the cold; not either to amuse you or enjoy your society."
"What could I ha" done?" began Earnshaw. "How was I to blame?"
"Oh! you are an exception," answered Mrs. Heathcliff. "I never missed such a concern as you."
"But I offered more than once, and asked," he said, kindling up at her pertness, "I asked Mr. Heathcliff to let me wake for you—"
"Be silent! I'll go out of doors, or anywhere, rather than have your disagreeable voice in my ear!" said my lady."
"Hareton muttered she might go to hell, for him! and unslinging his gun, restrained himself from his Sunday occupations no longer. He talked now, freely enough; and she presently saw fit to retreat to her solitude: but the frost had set in, and, in spite of her pride, she was forced to condescend to our company, more and more. However, I took care there should be no further scorning at my good nature: ever since, I've been as stiff as herself; and she has no lover or liker among us: and she does not deserve one; for, let them say the least word to her, and she'll curl back without respect of any one. She'll snap at the master himself, and as good as dares him to thrash her; and the more hurt she gets, the more venomous she grows."
At first, on hearing this account from Zillah, I determined to leave my situation, take a cottage, and get Catherine to come and live with me: but Mr. Heathcliff would as soon permit that as he would set up Hareton in an independent house; and I can see no remedy, at present, unless she could marry again; and that scheme it does not come within my province to arrange. |
Wuthering Height | Emily Bronte | [
"romance",
"gothic"
] | [] | Chapter 36 | Thus ended Mrs. Dean's story. Notwithstanding the doctor's prophecy, I am rapidly recovering strength; and though it be only the second week in January, I propose getting out on horseback in a day or two, and riding over to Wuthering Heights, to inform my landlord that I shall spend the next six months in London; and, if he likes, he may look out for another tenant to take the place after October. I would not pass another winter here for much.
Yesterday was bright, calm, and frosty. I went to the Heights as I proposed: my housekeeper entreated me to bear a little note from her to her young lady, and I did not refuse, for the worthy woman was not conscious of anything odd in her request. The front door stood open, but the jealous gate was fastened, as at my last visit; I knocked and invoked Earnshaw from among the garden–beds; he unchained it, and I entered. The fellow is as handsome a rustic as need be seen. I took particular notice of him this time; but then he does his best apparently to make the least of his advantages.
I asked if Mr. Heathcliff were at home? He answered, No; but he would be in at dinner–time. It was eleven o'clock, and I announced my intention of going in and waiting for him; at which he immediately flung down his tools and accompanied me, in the office of watchdog, not as a substitute for the host.
We entered together; Catherine was there, making herself useful in preparing some vegetables for the approaching meal; she looked more sulky and less spirited than when I had seen her first. She hardly raised her eyes to notice me, and continued her employment with the same disregard to common forms of politeness as before; never returning my bow and good–morning by the slightest acknowledgment.
"She does not seem so amiable," I thought, "as Mrs. Dean would persuade me to believe. She's a beauty, it is true; but not an angel."
Earnshaw surlily bid her remove her things to the kitchen. "Remove them yourself," she said, pushing them from her as soon as she had done; and retiring to a stool by the window, where she began to carve figures of birds and beasts out of the turnip–parings in her lap. I approached her, pretending to desire a view of the garden; and, as I fancied, adroitly dropped Mrs. Dean's note on to her knee, unnoticed by Hareton—but she asked aloud, "What is that?" And chucked it off.
"A letter from your old acquaintance, the housekeeper at the Grange," I answered; annoyed at her exposing my kind deed, and fearful lest it should be imagined a missive of my own. She would gladly have gathered it up at this information, but Hareton beat her; he seized and put it in his waistcoat, saying Mr. Heathcliff should look at it first. Thereat, Catherine silently turned her face from us, and, very stealthily, drew out her pocket–handkerchief and applied it to her eyes; and her cousin, after struggling awhile to keep down his softer feelings, pulled out the letter and flung it on the floor beside her, as ungraciously as he could. Catherine caught and perused it eagerly; then she put a few questions to me concerning the inmates, rational and irrational, of her former home; and gazing towards the hills, murmured in soliloquy:
"I should like to be riding Minny down there! I should like to be climbing up there! Oh! I'm tired—I'm stalled, Hareton!" And she leant her pretty head back against the sill, with half a yawn and half a sigh, and lapsed into an aspect of abstracted sadness: neither caring nor knowing whether we remarked her.
"Mrs. Heathcliff," I said, after sitting some time mute, "you are not aware that I am an acquaintance of yours? so intimate that I think it strange you won't come and speak to me. My housekeeper never wearies of talking about and praising you; and she'll be greatly disappointed if I return with no news of or from you, except that you received her letter and said nothing!"
She appeared to wonder at this speech, and asked,—
"Does Ellen like you?"
"Yes, very well," I replied, hesitatingly.
"You must tell her," she continued, "that I would answer her letter, but I have no materials for writing: not even a book from which I might tear a leaf."
"No books!" I exclaimed. "How do you contrive to live here without them? if I may take the liberty to inquire. Though provided with a large library, I'm frequently very dull at the Grange; take my books away, and I should be desperate!"
"I was always reading, when I had them," said Catherine; "and Mr. Heathcliff never reads; so he took it into his head to destroy my books. I have not had a glimpse of one for weeks. Only once, I searched through Joseph's store of theology, to his great irritation; and once, Hareton, I came upon a secret stock in your room—some Latin and Greek, and some tales and poetry: all old friends. I brought the last here—and you gathered them, as a magpie gathers silver spoons, for the mere love of stealing! They are of no use to you; or else you concealed them in the bad spirit that, as you cannot enjoy them, nobody else shall. Perhaps your envy counselled Mr. Heathcliff to rob me of my treasures? But I've most of them written on my brain and printed in my heart, and you cannot deprive me of those!"
Earnshaw blushed crimson when his cousin made this revelation of his private literary accumulations, and stammered an indignant denial of her accusations.
"Mr. Hareton is desirous of increasing his amount of knowledge," I said, coming to his rescue. "He is not envious, but emulous of your attainments. He'll be a clever scholar in a few years."
"And he wants me to sink into a dunce, meantime," answered Catherine. "Yes, I hear him trying to spell and read to himself, and pretty blunders he makes! I wish you would repeat Chevy Chase as you did yesterday: it was extremely funny. I heard you; and I heard you turning over the dictionary to seek out the hard words, and then cursing because you couldn't read their explanations!"
The young man evidently thought it too bad that he should be laughed at for his ignorance, and then laughed at for trying to remove it. I had a similar notion; and, remembering Mrs. Dean's anecdote of his first attempt at enlightening the darkness in which he had been reared, I observed,—"But, Mrs. Heathcliff, we have each had a commencement, and each stumbled and tottered on the threshold; had our teachers scorned instead of aiding us, we should stumble and totter yet."
"Oh!" she replied, "I don't wish to limit his acquirements: still, he has no right to appropriate what is mine, and make it ridiculous to me with his vile mistakes and mispronunciations! Those books, both prose and verse, are consecrated to me by other associations; and I hate to have them debased and profaned in his mouth! Besides, of all, he has selected my favourite pieces that I love the most to repeat, as if out of deliberate malice."
Hareton's chest heaved in silence a minute: he laboured under a severe sense of mortification and wrath, which it was no easy task to suppress. I rose, and, from a gentlemanly idea of relieving his embarrassment, took up my station in the doorway, surveying the external prospect as I stood. He followed my example, and left the room; but presently reappeared, bearing half a dozen volumes in his hands, which he threw into Catherine's lap, exclaiming,—"Take them! I never want to hear, or read, or think of them again!"
"I won't have them now," she answered. "I shall connect them with you, and hate them."
She opened one that had obviously been often turned over, and read a portion in the drawling tone of a beginner; then laughed, and threw it from her. "And listen," she continued, provokingly, commencing a verse of an old ballad in the same fashion.
But his self–love would endure no further torment: I heard, and not altogether disapprovingly, a manual cheek given to her saucy tongue. The little wretch had done her utmost to hurt her cousin's sensitive though uncultivated feelings, and a physical argument was the only mode he had of balancing the account, and repaying its effects on the inflictor. He afterwards gathered the books and hurled them on the fire. I read in his countenance what anguish it was to offer that sacrifice to spleen. I fancied that as they consumed, he recalled the pleasure they had already imparted, and the triumph and ever–increasing pleasure he had anticipated from them; and I fancied I guessed the incitement to his secret studies also. He had been content with daily labour and rough animal enjoyments, till Catherine crossed his path. Shame at her scorn, and hope of her approval, were his first prompters to higher pursuits; and instead of guarding him from one and winning him to the other, his endeavours to raise himself had produced just the contrary result.
"Yes that's all the good that such a brute as you can get from them!" cried Catherine, sucking her damaged lip, and watching the conflagration with indignant eyes.
"You'd better hold your tongue, now," he answered fiercely.
And his agitation precluded further speech; he advanced hastily to the entrance, where I made way for him to pass. But ere he had crossed the door–stones, Mr. Heathcliff, coming up the causeway, encountered him, and laying hold of his shoulder asked,—"What's to do now, my lad?"
"Naught, naught," he said, and broke away to enjoy his grief and anger in solitude.
Heathcliff gazed after him, and sighed.
"It will be odd if I thwart myself," he muttered, unconscious that I was behind him. "But when I look for his father in his face, I find her every day more! How the devil is he so like? I can hardly bear to see him."
He bent his eyes to the ground, and walked moodily in. There was a restless, anxious expression in his countenance. I had never remarked there before; and he looked sparer in person. His daughter–in–law, on perceiving him through the window, immediately escaped to the kitchen, so that I remained alone.
"I'm glad to see you out of doors again, Mr. Lockwood," he said, in reply to my greeting; "from selfish motives partly: I don't think I could readily supply your loss in this desolation. I've wondered more than once what brought you here."
"An idle whim, I fear, sir," was my answer; "or else an idle whim is going to spirit me away. I shall set out for London next week; and I must give you warning that I feel no disposition to retain Thrushcross Grange beyond the twelve months I agreed to rent it. I believe I shall not live there any more."
"Oh, indeed; you're tired of being banished from the world, are you?" he said. "But if you be coming to plead off paying for a place you won't occupy, your journey is useless: I never relent in exacting my due from any one."
"I'm coming to plead off nothing about it," I exclaimed, considerably irritated. "Should you wish it, I'll settle with you now," and I drew my note–book from my pocket.
"No, no," he replied, coolly; "you'll leave sufficient behind to cover your debts, if you fail to return: I'm not in such a hurry. Sit down and take your dinner with us; a guest that is safe from repeating his visit can generally be made welcome. Catherine bring the things in: where are you?"
Catherine reappeared, bearing a tray of knives and forks.
"You may get your dinner with Joseph," muttered Heathcliff, aside, "and remain in the kitchen till he is gone."
She obeyed his directions very punctually: perhaps she had no temptation to transgress. Living among clowns and misanthropists, she probably cannot appreciate a better class of people when she meets them.
With Mr. Heathcliff, grim and saturnine, on the one hand, and Hareton, absolutely dumb, on the other, I made a somewhat cheerless meal, and bade adieu early. I would have departed by the back way, to get a last glimpse of Catherine and annoy old Joseph; but Hareton received orders to lead up my horse, and my host himself escorted me to the door, so I could not fulfil my wish.
"How dreary life gets over in that house!" I reflected, while riding down the road. "What a realisation of something more romantic than a fairy tale it would have been for Mrs. Linton Heathcliff, had she and I struck up an attachment, as her good nurse desired, and migrated together into the stirring atmosphere of the town!" |
Wuthering Height | Emily Bronte | [
"romance",
"gothic"
] | [] | Chapter 37 | 1802.—This September I was invited to devastate the moors of a friend in the north, and on my journey to his abode, I unexpectedly came within fifteen miles of Gimmerton. The ostler at a roadside public–house was holding a pail of water to refresh my horses, when a cart of very green oats, newly reaped, passed by, and he remarked,—"Yon's frough Gimmerton, nah! They're allas three wick" after other folk wi' ther harvest.'
"Gimmerton?" I repeated—my residence in that locality had already grown dim and dreamy. "Ah! I know. How far is it from this?"
"Happen fourteen mile o'er th" hills; and a rough road,' he answered.
A sudden impulse seized me to visit Thrushcross Grange. It was scarcely noon, and I conceived that I might as well pass the night under my own roof as in an inn. Besides, I could spare a day easily to arrange matters with my landlord, and thus save myself the trouble of invading the neighbourhood again. Having rested awhile, I directed my servant to inquire the way to the village; and, with great fatigue to our beasts, we managed the distance in some three hours.
I left him there, and proceeded down the valley alone. The grey church looked greyer, and the lonely churchyard lonelier. I distinguished a moor–sheep cropping the short turf on the graves. It was sweet, warm weather—too warm for travelling; but the heat did not hinder me from enjoying the delightful scenery above and below: had I seen it nearer August, I'm sure it would have tempted me to waste a month among its solitudes. In winter nothing more dreary, in summer nothing more divine, than those glens shut in by hills, and those bluff, bold swells of heath.
I reached the Grange before sunset, and knocked for admittance; but the family had retreated into the back premises, I judged, by one thin, blue wreath, curling from the kitchen chimney, and they did not hear. I rode into the court. Under the porch, a girl of nine or ten sat knitting, and an old woman reclined on the housesteps, smoking a meditative pipe.
"Is Mrs. Dean within?" I demanded of the dame.
"Mistress Dean? Nay!" she answered, "she doesn't bide here: shoo's up at th" Heights.'
"Are you the housekeeper, then?" I continued.
"Eea, aw keep th" hause,' she replied.
"Well, I'm Mr. Lockwood, the master. Are there any rooms to lodge me in, I wonder? I wish to stay all night."
"T" maister!' she cried in astonishment. "Whet, whoiver knew yah wur coming? Yah sud ha" send word. They's nowt norther dry nor mensful abaht t' place: nowt there isn't!'
She threw down her pipe and bustled in, the girl followed, and I entered too; soon perceiving that her report was true, and, moreover, that I had almost upset her wits by my unwelcome apparition, I bade her be composed. I would go out for a walk; and, meantime she must try to prepare a corner of a sitting–room for me to sup in, and a bedroom to sleep in. No sweeping and dusting, only good fire and dry sheets were necessary. She seemed willing to do her best; though she thrust the hearth–brush into the grates in mistake for the poker, and malappropriated several other articles of her craft: but I retired, confiding in her energy for a resting–place against my return. Wuthering Heights was the goal of my proposed excursion. An afterthought brought me back, when I had quitted the court.
"All well at the Heights?" I inquired of the woman.
"Eea, f'r owt ee knaw!" she answered, skurrying away with a pan of hot cinders.
I would have asked why Mrs. Dean had deserted the Grange, but it was impossible to delay her at such a crisis, so I turned away and made my exit, rambling leisurely along, with the glow of a sinking sun behind, and the mild glory of a rising moon in front—one fading, and the other brightening—as I quitted the park, and climbed the stony by–road branching off to Mr. Heathcliff's dwelling. Before I arrived in sight of it, all that remained of day was a beamless amber light along the west: but I could see every pebble on the path, and every blade of grass, by that splendid moon. I had neither to climb the gate nor to knock—it yielded to my hand. That is an improvement, I thought. And I noticed another, by the aid of my nostrils; a fragrance of stocks and wallflowers wafted on the air from amongst the homely fruit–trees.
Both doors and lattices were open; and yet, as is usually the case in a coal–district, a fine red fire illumined the chimney: the comfort which the eye derives from it renders the extra heat endurable. But the house of Wuthering Heights is so large that the inmates have plenty of space for withdrawing out of its influence; and accordingly what inmates there were had stationed themselves not far from one of the windows. I could both see them and hear them talk before I entered, and looked and listened in consequence; being moved thereto by a mingled sense of curiosity and envy, that grew as I lingered.
"Con-trary!" said a voice as sweet as a silver bell. "That for the third time, you dunce! I'm not going to tell you again. Recollect, or I'll pull your hair!"
"Contrary, then," answered another, in deep but softened tones. "And now, kiss me, for minding so well."
"No, read it over first correctly, without a single mistake."
The male speaker began to read: he was a young man, respectably dressed and seated at a table, having a book before him. His handsome features glowed with pleasure, and his eyes kept impatiently wandering from the page to a small white hand over his shoulder, which recalled him by a smart slap on the cheek, whenever its owner detected such signs of inattention. Its owner stood behind; her light, shining ringlets blending, at intervals, with his brown looks, as she bent to superintend his studies; and her face—it was lucky he could not see her face, or he would never have been so steady. I could; and I bit my lip in spite, at having thrown away the chance I might have had of doing something besides staring at its smiting beauty.
The task was done, not free from further blunders; but the pupil claimed a reward, and received at least five kisses; which, however, he generously returned. Then they came to the door, and from their conversation I judged they were about to issue out and have a walk on the moors. I supposed I should be condemned in Hareton Earnshaw's heart, if not by his mouth, to the lowest pit in the infernal regions if I showed my unfortunate person in his neighbourhood then; and feeling very mean and malignant, I skulked round to seek refuge in the kitchen. There was unobstructed admittance on that side also; and at the door sat my old friend Nelly Dean, sewing and singing a song; which was often interrupted from within by harsh words of scorn and intolerance, uttered in far from musical accents.
"I'd rayther, by th" haulf, hev' "em swearing i" my lugs fro'h morn to neeght, nor hearken ye hahsiver!' said the tenant of the kitchen, in answer to an unheard speech of Nelly's. "It's a blazing shame, that I cannot oppen t" blessed Book, but yah set up them glories to sattan, and all t' flaysome wickednesses that iver were born into th' warld! Oh! ye're a raight nowt; and shoo's another; and that poor lad "ll be lost atween ye. Poor lad!" he added, with a groan; "he's witched: I'm sartin on't. Oh, Lord, judge "em, for there's norther law nor justice among wer rullers!"
"No! or we should be sitting in flaming fagots, I suppose," retorted the singer. "But wisht, old man, and read your Bible like a Christian, and never mind me. This is "Fairy Annie's Wedding"—a bonny tune—it goes to a dance."
Mrs. Dean was about to recommence, when I advanced; and recognising me directly, she jumped to her feet, crying—"Why, bless you, Mr. Lockwood! How could you think of returning in this way? All's shut up at Thrushcross Grange. You should have given us notice!"
"I've arranged to be accommodated there, for as long as I shall stay," I answered. "I depart again to–morrow. And how are you transplanted here, Mrs. Dean? tell me that."
"Zillah left, and Mr. Heathcliff wished me to come, soon after you went to London, and stay till you returned. But, step in, pray! Have you walked from Gimmerton this evening?"
"From the Grange," I replied; "and while they make me lodging room there, I want to finish my business with your master; because I don't think of having another opportunity in a hurry."
"What business, sir?" said Nelly, conducting me into the house. "He's gone out at present, and won't return soon."
"About the rent," I answered.
"Oh! then it is with Mrs. Heathcliff you must settle," she observed; "or rather with me. She has not learnt to manage her affairs yet, and I act for her: there's nobody else."
I looked surprised.
"Ah! you have not heard of Heathcliff's death, I see," she continued.
"Heathcliff dead!" I exclaimed, astonished. "How long ago?"
"Three months since: but sit down, and let me take your hat, and I'll tell you all about it. Stop, you have had nothing to eat, have you?"
"I want nothing: I have ordered supper at home. You sit down too. I never dreamt of his dying! Let me hear how it came to pass. You say you don't expect them back for some time—the young people?"
"No—I have to scold them every evening for their late rambles: but they don't care for me. At least, have a drink of our old ale; it will do you good: you seem weary."
She hastened to fetch it before I could refuse, and I heard Joseph asking whether "it warn't a crying scandal that she should have followers at her time of life? And then, to get them jocks out o" t' maister's cellar! He fair shaamed to "bide still and see it."
She did not stay to retaliate, but re–entered in a minute, bearing a reaming silver pint, whose contents I lauded with becoming earnestness. And afterwards she furnished me with the sequel of Heathcliff's history. He had a "queer" end, as she expressed it.
I was summoned to Wuthering Heights, within a fortnight of your leaving us, she said; and I obeyed joyfully, for Catherine's sake. My first interview with her grieved and shocked me: she had altered so much since our separation. Mr. Heathcliff did not explain his reasons for taking a new mind about my coming here; he only told me he wanted me, and he was tired of seeing Catherine: I must make the little parlour my sitting–room, and keep her with me. It was enough if he were obliged to see her once or twice a day. She seemed pleased at this arrangement; and, by degrees, I smuggled over a great number of books, and other articles, that had formed her amusement at the Grange; and flattered myself we should get on in tolerable comfort. The delusion did not last long. Catherine, contented at first, in a brief space grew irritable and restless. For one thing, she was forbidden to move out of the garden, and it fretted her sadly to be confined to its narrow bounds as spring drew on; for another, in following the house, I was forced to quit her frequently, and she complained of loneliness: she preferred quarrelling with Joseph in the kitchen to sitting at peace in her solitude. I did not mind their skirmishes: but Hareton was often obliged to seek the kitchen also, when the master wanted to have the house to himself! and though in the beginning she either left it at his approach, or quietly joined in my occupations, and shunned remarking or addressing him—and though he was always as sullen and silent as possible—after a while, she changed her behaviour, and became incapable of letting him alone: talking at him; commenting on his stupidity and idleness; expressing her wonder how he could endure the life he lived—how he could sit a whole evening staring into the fire, and dozing.
"He's just like a dog, is he not, Ellen?" she once observed, "or a cart–horse? He does his work, eats his food, and sleeps eternally! What a blank, dreary mind he must have! Do you ever dream, Hareton? And, if you do, what is it about? But you can't speak to me!"
Then she looked at him; but he would neither open his mouth nor look again.
"He's, perhaps, dreaming now," she continued. "He twitched his shoulder as Juno twitches hers. Ask him, Ellen."
"Mr. Hareton will ask the master to send you up–stairs, if you don't behave!" I said. He had not only twitched his shoulder but clenched his fist, as if tempted to use it.
"I know why Hareton never speaks, when I am in the kitchen," she exclaimed, on another occasion. "He is afraid I shall laugh at him. Ellen, what do you think? He began to teach himself to read once; and, because I laughed, he burned his books, and dropped it: was he not a fool?"
"Were not you naughty?" I said; "answer me that."
"Perhaps I was," she went on; "but I did not expect him to be so silly. Hareton, if I gave you a book, would you take it now? I'll try!"
She placed one she had been perusing on his hand; he flung it off, and muttered, if she did not give over, he would break her neck.
"Well, I shall put it here," she said, "in the table–drawer; and I'm going to bed."
Then she whispered me to watch whether he touched it, and departed. But he would not come near it; and so I informed her in the morning, to her great disappointment. I saw she was sorry for his persevering sulkiness and indolence: her conscience reproved her for frightening him off improving himself: she had done it effectually. But her ingenuity was at work to remedy the injury: while I ironed, or pursued other such stationary employments as I could not well do in the parlour, she would bring some pleasant volume and read it aloud to me. When Hareton was there, she generally paused in an interesting part, and left the book lying about: that she did repeatedly; but he was as obstinate as a mule, and, instead of snatching at her bait, in wet weather he took to smoking with Joseph; and they sat like automatons, one on each side of the fire, the elder happily too deaf to understand her wicked nonsense, as he would have called it, the younger doing his best to seem to disregard it. On fine evenings the latter followed his shooting expeditions, and Catherine yawned and sighed, and teased me to talk to her, and ran off into the court or garden the moment I began; and, as a last resource, cried, and said she was tired of living: her life was useless.
Mr. Heathcliff, who grew more and more disinclined to society, had almost banished Earnshaw from his apartment. Owing to an accident at the commencement of March, he became for some days a fixture in the kitchen. His gun burst while out on the hills by himself; a splinter cut his arm, and he lost a good deal of blood before he could reach home. The consequence was that, perforce, he was condemned to the fireside and tranquillity, till he made it up again. It suited Catherine to have him there: at any rate, it made her hate her room up–stairs more than ever: and she would compel me to find out business below, that she might accompany me.
On Easter Monday, Joseph went to Gimmerton fair with some cattle; and, in the afternoon, I was busy getting up linen in the kitchen. Earnshaw sat, morose as usual, at the chimney corner, and my little mistress was beguiling an idle hour with drawing pictures on the window–panes, varying her amusement by smothered bursts of songs, and whispered ejaculations, and quick glances of annoyance and impatience in the direction of her cousin, who steadfastly smoked, and looked into the grate. At a notice that I could do with her no longer intercepting my light, she removed to the hearthstone. I bestowed little attention on her proceedings, but, presently, I heard her begin—"I've found out, Hareton, that I want—that I'm glad—that I should like you to be my cousin now, if you had not grown so cross to me, and so rough."
Hareton returned no answer.
"Hareton, Hareton, Hareton! do you hear?" she continued.
"Get off wi" ye!' he growled, with uncompromising gruffness.
"Let me take that pipe," she said, cautiously advancing her hand and abstracting it from his mouth.
Before he could attempt to recover it, it was broken, and behind the fire. He swore at her and seized another.
"Stop," she cried, "you must listen to me first; and I can't speak while those clouds are floating in my face."
"Will you go to the devil!" he exclaimed, ferociously, "and let me be!"
"No," she persisted, "I won't: I can't tell what to do to make you talk to me; and you are determined not to understand. When I call you stupid, I don't mean anything: I don't mean that I despise you. Come, you shall take notice of me, Hareton: you are my cousin, and you shall own me."
"I shall have naught to do wi" you and your mucky pride, and your damned mocking tricks!' he answered. "I'll go to hell, body and soul, before I look sideways after you again. Side out o" t' gate, now, this minute!'
Catherine frowned, and retreated to the window–seat chewing her lip, and endeavouring, by humming an eccentric tune, to conceal a growing tendency to sob.
"You should be friends with your cousin, Mr. Hareton," I interrupted, "since she repents of her sauciness. It would do you a great deal of good: it would make you another man to have her for a companion."
"A companion!" he cried; "when she hates me, and does not think me fit to wipe her shoon! Nay, if it made me a king, I'd not be scorned for seeking her good–will any more."
"It is not I who hate you, it is you who hate me!" wept Cathy, no longer disguising her trouble. "You hate me as much as Mr. Heathcliff does, and more."
"You're a damned liar," began Earnshaw: "why have I made him angry, by taking your part, then, a hundred times? and that when you sneered at and despised me, and—Go on plaguing me, and I'll step in yonder, and say you worried me out of the kitchen!"
"I didn't know you took my part," she answered, drying her eyes; "and I was miserable and bitter at everybody; but now I thank you, and beg you to forgive me: what can I do besides?"
She returned to the hearth, and frankly extended her hand. He blackened and scowled like a thunder–cloud, and kept his fists resolutely clenched, and his gaze fixed on the ground. Catherine, by instinct, must have divined it was obdurate perversity, and not dislike, that prompted this dogged conduct; for, after remaining an instant undecided, she stooped and impressed on his cheek a gentle kiss. The little rogue thought I had not seen her, and, drawing back, she took her former station by the window, quite demurely. I shook my head reprovingly, and then she blushed and whispered—"Well! what should I have done, Ellen? He wouldn't shake hands, and he wouldn't look: I must show him some way that I like him—that I want to be friends."
Whether the kiss convinced Hareton, I cannot tell: he was very careful, for some minutes, that his face should not be seen, and when he did raise it, he was sadly puzzled where to turn his eyes.
Catherine employed herself in wrapping a handsome book neatly in white paper, and having tied it with a bit of ribbon, and addressed it to "Mr. Hareton Earnshaw," she desired me to be her ambassadress, and convey the present to its destined recipient.
"And tell him, if he'll take it, I'll come and teach him to read it right," she said; "and, if he refuse it, I'll go upstairs, and never tease him again."
I carried it, and repeated the message; anxiously watched by my employer. Hareton would not open his fingers, so I laid it on his knee. He did not strike it off, either. I returned to my work. Catherine leaned her head and arms on the table, till she heard the slight rustle of the covering being removed; then she stole away, and quietly seated herself beside her cousin. He trembled, and his face glowed: all his rudeness and all his surly harshness had deserted him: he could not summon courage, at first, to utter a syllable in reply to her questioning look, and her murmured petition.
"Say you forgive me, Hareton, do. You can make me so happy by speaking that little word."
He muttered something inaudible.
"And you'll be my friend?" added Catherine, interrogatively.
"Nay, you'll be ashamed of me every day of your life," he answered; "and the more ashamed, the more you know me; and I cannot bide it."
"So you won't be my friend?" she said, smiling as sweet as honey, and creeping close up.
I overheard no further distinguishable talk, but, on looking round again, I perceived two such radiant countenances bent over the page of the accepted book, that I did not doubt the treaty had been ratified on both sides; and the enemies were, thenceforth, sworn allies.
The work they studied was full of costly pictures; and those and their position had charm enough to keep them unmoved till Joseph came home. He, poor man, was perfectly aghast at the spectacle of Catherine seated on the same bench with Hareton Earnshaw, leaning her hand on his shoulder; and confounded at his favourite's endurance of her proximity: it affected him too deeply to allow an observation on the subject that night. His emotion was only revealed by the immense sighs he drew, as he solemnly spread his large Bible on the table, and overlaid it with dirty bank–notes from his pocket–book, the produce of the day's transactions. At length he summoned Hareton from his seat.
"Tak" these in to t' maister, lad,' he said, "and bide there. I's gang up to my own rahm. This hoile's neither mensful nor seemly for us: we mun side out and seearch another."
"Come, Catherine," I said, "we must "side out" too: I've done my ironing. Are you ready to go?"
"It is not eight o'clock!" she answered, rising unwillingly.
"Hareton, I'll leave this book upon the chimney–piece, and I'll bring some more to–morrow."
"Ony books that yah leave, I shall tak" into th' hahse,' said Joseph, "and it'll be mitch if yah find "em agean; soa, yah may plase yerseln!"
Cathy threatened that his library should pay for hers; and, smiling as she passed Hareton, went singing up–stairs: lighter of heart, I venture to say, than ever she had been under that roof before; except, perhaps, during her earliest visits to Linton.
The intimacy thus commenced grew rapidly; though it encountered temporary interruptions. Earnshaw was not to be civilized with a wish, and my young lady was no philosopher, and no paragon of patience; but both their minds tending to the same point—one loving and desiring to esteem, and the other loving and desiring to be esteemed—they contrived in the end to reach it.
You see, Mr. Lockwood, it was easy enough to win Mrs. Heathcliff's heart. But now, I'm glad you did not try. The crown of all my wishes will be the union of those two. I shall envy no one on their wedding day: there won't be a happier woman than myself in England! |
Wuthering Height | Emily Bronte | [
"romance",
"gothic"
] | [] | Chapter 38 | On the morrow of that Monday, Earnshaw being still unable to follow his ordinary employments, and therefore remaining about the house, I speedily found it would be impracticable to retain my charge beside me, as heretofore. She got downstairs before me, and out into the garden, where she had seen her cousin performing some easy work; and when I went to bid them come to breakfast, I saw she had persuaded him to clear a large space of ground from currant and gooseberry bushes, and they were busy planning together an importation of plants from the Grange.
I was terrified at the devastation which had been accomplished in a brief half–hour; the black–currant trees were the apple of Joseph's eye, and she had just fixed her choice of a flower–bed in the midst of them.
"There! That will be all shown to the master," I exclaimed, "the minute it is discovered. And what excuse have you to offer for taking such liberties with the garden? We shall have a fine explosion on the head of it: see if we don't! Mr. Hareton, I wonder you should have no more wit than to go and make that mess at her bidding!"
"I'd forgotten they were Joseph's," answered Earnshaw, rather puzzled; "but I'll tell him I did it."
We always ate our meals with Mr. Heathcliff. I held the mistress's post in making tea and carving; so I was indispensable at table. Catherine usually sat by me, but to–day she stole nearer to Hareton; and I presently saw she would have no more discretion in her friendship than she had in her hostility.
"Now, mind you don't talk with and notice your cousin too much," were my whispered instructions as we entered the room. "It will certainly annoy Mr. Heathcliff, and he'll be mad at you both."
"I'm not going to," she answered.
The minute after, she had sidled to him, and was sticking primroses in his plate of porridge.
He dared not speak to her there: he dared hardly look; and yet she went on teasing, till he was twice on the point of being provoked to laugh. I frowned, and then she glanced towards the master: whose mind was occupied on other subjects than his company, as his countenance evinced; and she grew serious for an instant, scrutinizing him with deep gravity. Afterwards she turned, and recommenced her nonsense; at last, Hareton uttered a smothered laugh. Mr. Heathcliff started; his eye rapidly surveyed our faces, Catherine met it with her accustomed look of nervousness and yet defiance, which he abhorred.
"It is well you are out of my reach," he exclaimed. "What fiend possesses you to stare back at me, continually, with those infernal eyes? Down with them! and don't remind me of your existence again. I thought I had cured you of laughing."
"It was me," muttered Hareton.
"What do you say?" demanded the master.
Hareton looked at his plate, and did not repeat the confession. Mr. Heathcliff looked at him a bit, and then silently resumed his breakfast and his interrupted musing. We had nearly finished, and the two young people prudently shifted wider asunder, so I anticipated no further disturbance during that sitting: when Joseph appeared at the door, revealing by his quivering lip and furious eyes that the outrage committed on his precious shrubs was detected. He must have seen Cathy and her cousin about the spot before he examined it, for while his jaws worked like those of a cow chewing its cud, and rendered his speech difficult to understand, he began:—
"I mun hev" my wage, and I mun goa! I hed aimed to dee wheare I'd sarved fur sixty year; and I thowt I'd lug my books up into t' garret, and all my bits o' stuff, and they sud hev' t' kitchen to theirseln; for t' sake o' quietness. It wur hard to gie up my awn hearthstun, but I thowt I could do that! But nah, shoo's taan my garden fro' me, and by th' heart, maister, I cannot stand it! Yah may bend to th' yoak an ye will—I noan used to "t, and an old man doesn't sooin get used to new barthens. I'd rayther arn my bite an" my sup wi' a hammer in th' road!'
"Now, now, idiot!" interrupted Heathcliff, "cut it short! What's your grievance? I'll interfere in no quarrels between you and Nelly. She may thrust you into the coal–hole for anything I care."
"It's noan Nelly!" answered Joseph. "I sudn't shift for Nelly—nasty ill nowt as shoo is. Thank God! shoo cannot stale t" sowl o' nob'dy! Shoo wer niver soa handsome, but what a body mud look at her "bout winking. It's yon flaysome, graceless quean, that's witched our lad, wi" her bold een and her forrard ways—till—Nay! it fair brusts my heart! He's forgotten all I've done for him, and made on him, and goan and riven up a whole row o' t' grandest currant–trees i' t' garden!' and here he lamented outright; unmanned by a sense of his bitter injuries, and Earnshaw's ingratitude and dangerous condition.
"Is the fool drunk?" asked Mr. Heathcliff. "Hareton, is it you he's finding fault with?"
"I've pulled up two or three bushes," replied the young man; "but I'm going to set "em again."
"And why have you pulled them up?" said the master.
Catherine wisely put in her tongue.
"We wanted to plant some flowers there," she cried. "I'm the only person to blame, for I wished him to do it."
"And who the devil gave you leave to touch a stick about the place?" demanded her father–in–law, much surprised. "And who ordered you to obey her?" he added, turning to Hareton.
The latter was speechless; his cousin replied—"You shouldn't grudge a few yards of earth for me to ornament, when you have taken all my land!"
"Your land, insolent slut! You never had any," said Heathcliff.
"And my money," she continued; returning his angry glare, and meantime biting a piece of crust, the remnant of her breakfast.
"Silence!" he exclaimed. "Get done, and begone!"
"And Hareton's land, and his money," pursued the reckless thing. "Hareton and I are friends now; and I shall tell him all about you!"
The master seemed confounded a moment: he grew pale, and rose up, eyeing her all the while, with an expression of mortal hate.
"If you strike me, Hareton will strike you," she said; "so you may as well sit down."
"If Hareton does not turn you out of the room, I'll strike him to hell," thundered Heathcliff. "Damnable witch! dare you pretend to rouse him against me? Off with her! Do you hear? Fling her into the kitchen! I'll kill her, Ellen Dean, if you let her come into my sight again!"
Hareton tried, under his breath, to persuade her to go.
"Drag her away!" he cried, savagely. "Are you staying to talk?" And he approached to execute his own command.
"He'll not obey you, wicked man, any more," said Catherine; "and he'll soon detest you as much as I do."
"Wisht! wisht!" muttered the young man, reproachfully; "I will not hear you speak so to him. Have done."
"But you won't let him strike me?" she cried.
"Come, then," he whispered earnestly.
It was too late: Heathcliff had caught hold of her.
"Now, you go!" he said to Earnshaw. "Accursed witch! this time she has provoked me when I could not bear it; and I'll make her repent it for ever!"
He had his hand in her hair; Hareton attempted to release her looks, entreating him not to hurt her that once. Heathcliff's black eyes flashed; he seemed ready to tear Catherine in pieces, and I was just worked up to risk coming to the rescue, when of a sudden his fingers relaxed; he shifted his grasp from her head to her arm, and gazed intently in her face. Then he drew his hand over his eyes, stood a moment to collect himself apparently, and turning anew to Catherine, said, with assumed calmness—"You must learn to avoid putting me in a passion, or I shall really murder you some time! Go with Mrs. Dean, and keep with her; and confine your insolence to her ears. As to Hareton Earnshaw, if I see him listen to you, I'll send him seeking his bread where he can get it! Your love will make him an outcast and a beggar. Nelly, take her; and leave me, all of you! Leave me!"
I led my young lady out: she was too glad of her escape to resist; the other followed, and Mr. Heathcliff had the room to himself till dinner. I had counselled Catherine to dine up–stairs; but, as soon as he perceived her vacant seat, he sent me to call her. He spoke to none of us, ate very little, and went out directly afterwards, intimating that he should not return before evening.
The two new friends established themselves in the house during his absence; where I heard Hareton sternly cheek his cousin, on her offering a revelation of her father–in–law's conduct to his father. He said he wouldn't suffer a word to be uttered in his disparagement: if he were the devil, it didn't signify; he would stand by him; and he'd rather she would abuse himself, as she used to, than begin on Mr. Heathcliff. Catherine was waxing cross at this; but he found means to make her hold her tongue, by asking how she would like him to speak ill of her father? Then she comprehended that Earnshaw took the master's reputation home to himself; and was attached by ties stronger than reason could break—chains, forged by habit, which it would be cruel to attempt to loosen. She showed a good heart, thenceforth, in avoiding both complaints and expressions of antipathy concerning Heathcliff; and confessed to me her sorrow that she had endeavoured to raise a bad spirit between him and Hareton: indeed, I don't believe she has ever breathed a syllable, in the latter's hearing, against her oppressor since.
When this slight disagreement was over, they were friends again, and as busy as possible in their several occupations of pupil and teacher. I came in to sit with them, after I had done my work; and I felt so soothed and comforted to watch them, that I did not notice how time got on. You know, they both appeared in a measure my children: I had long been proud of one; and now, I was sure, the other would be a source of equal satisfaction. His honest, warm, and intelligent nature shook off rapidly the clouds of ignorance and degradation in which it had been bred; and Catherine's sincere commendations acted as a spur to his industry. His brightening mind brightened his features, and added spirit and nobility to their aspect: I could hardly fancy it the same individual I had beheld on the day I discovered my little lady at Wuthering Heights, after her expedition to the Crags. While I admired and they laboured, dusk drew on, and with it returned the master. He came upon us quite unexpectedly, entering by the front way, and had a full view of the whole three, ere we could raise our heads to glance at him. Well, I reflected, there was never a pleasanter, or more harmless sight; and it will be a burning shame to scold them. The red fire–light glowed on their two bonny heads, and revealed their faces animated with the eager interest of children; for, though he was twenty–three and she eighteen, each had so much of novelty to feel and learn, that neither experienced nor evinced the sentiments of sober disenchanted maturity.
They lifted their eyes together, to encounter Mr. Heathcliff: perhaps you have never remarked that their eyes are precisely similar, and they are those of Catherine Earnshaw. The present Catherine has no other likeness to her, except a breadth of forehead, and a certain arch of the nostril that makes her appear rather haughty, whether she will or not. With Hareton the resemblance is carried farther: it is singular at all times, then it was particularly striking; because his senses were alert, and his mental faculties wakened to unwonted activity. I suppose this resemblance disarmed Mr. Heathcliff: he walked to the hearth in evident agitation; but it quickly subsided as he looked at the young man: or, I should say, altered its character; for it was there yet. He took the book from his hand, and glanced at the open page, then returned it without any observation; merely signing Catherine away: her companion lingered very little behind her, and I was about to depart also, but he bid me sit still.
"It is a poor conclusion, is it not?" he observed, having brooded awhile on the scene he had just witnessed: "an absurd termination to my violent exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives: I could do it; and none could hinder me. But where is the use? I don't care for striking: I can't take the trouble to raise my hand! That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case: I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing."
"Nelly, there is a strange change approaching; I'm in its shadow at present. I take so little interest in my daily life that I hardly remember to eat and drink. Those two who have left the room are the only objects which retain a distinct material appearance to me; and that appearance causes me pain, amounting to agony. About her I won't speak; and I don't desire to think; but I earnestly wish she were invisible: her presence invokes only maddening sensations. He moves me differently: and yet if I could do it without seeming insane, I'd never see him again! You'll perhaps think me rather inclined to become so," he added, making an effort to smile, "if I try to describe the thousand forms of past associations and ideas he awakens or embodies. But you'll not talk of what I tell you; and my mind is so eternally secluded in itself, it is tempting at last to turn it out to another."
"Five minutes ago Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being; I felt to him in such a variety of ways, that it would have been impossible to have accosted him rationally. In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least: for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the flags! In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day—I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her! Well, Hareton's aspect was the ghost of my immortal love; of my wild endeavours to hold my right; my degradation, my pride, my happiness, and my anguish—"
"But it is frenzy to repeat these thoughts to you: only it will let you know why, with a reluctance to be always alone, his society is no benefit; rather an aggravation of the constant torment I suffer: and it partly contributes to render me regardless how he and his cousin go on together. I can give them no attention any more."
"But what do you mean by a change, Mr. Heathcliff?" I said, alarmed at his manner: though he was neither in danger of losing his senses, nor dying, according to my judgment: he was quite strong and healthy; and, as to his reason, from childhood he had a delight in dwelling on dark things, and entertaining odd fancies. He might have had a monomania on the subject of his departed idol; but on every other point his wits were as sound as mine.
"I shall not know that till it comes," he said; "I'm only half conscious of it now."
"You have no feeling of illness, have you?" I asked.
"No, Nelly, I have not," he answered.
"Then you are not afraid of death?" I pursued.
"Afraid? No!" he replied. "I have neither a fear, nor a presentiment, nor a hope of death. Why should I? With my hard constitution and temperate mode of living, and unperilous occupations, I ought to, and probably shall, remain above ground till there is scarcely a black hair on my head. And yet I cannot continue in this condition! I have to remind myself to breathe—almost to remind my heart to beat! And it is like bending back a stiff spring: it is by compulsion that I do the slightest act not prompted by one thought; and by compulsion that I notice anything alive or dead, which is not associated with one universal idea. I have a single wish, and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain it. They have yearned towards it so long, and so unwaveringly, that I'm convinced it will be reached—and soon—because it has devoured my existence: I am swallowed up in the anticipation of its fulfilment. My confessions have not relieved me; but they may account for some otherwise unaccountable phases of humour which I show. O God! It is a long fight; I wish it were over!"
He began to pace the room, muttering terrible things to himself, till I was inclined to believe, as he said Joseph did, that conscience had turned his heart to an earthly hell. I wondered greatly how it would end. Though he seldom before had revealed this state of mind, even by looks, it was his habitual mood, I had no doubt: he asserted it himself; but not a soul, from his general bearing, would have conjectured the fact. You did not when you saw him, Mr. Lockwood: and at the period of which I speak, he was just the same as then; only fonder of continued solitude, and perhaps still more laconic in company. |
Wuthering Height | Emily Bronte | [
"romance",
"gothic"
] | [] | Chapter 39 | For some days after that evening Mr. Heathcliff shunned meeting us at meals; yet he would not consent formally to exclude Hareton and Cathy. He had an aversion to yielding so completely to his feelings, choosing rather to absent himself; and eating once in twenty–four hours seemed sufficient sustenance for him.
One night, after the family were in bed, I heard him go downstairs, and out at the front door. I did not hear him re–enter, and in the morning I found he was still away. We were in April then: the weather was sweet and warm, the grass as green as showers and sun could make it, and the two dwarf apple–trees near the southern wall in full bloom. After breakfast, Catherine insisted on my bringing a chair and sitting with my work under the fir–trees at the end of the house; and she beguiled Hareton, who had perfectly recovered from his accident, to dig and arrange her little garden, which was shifted to that corner by the influence of Joseph's complaints. I was comfortably revelling in the spring fragrance around, and the beautiful soft blue overhead, when my young lady, who had run down near the gate to procure some primrose roots for a border, returned only half laden, and informed us that Mr. Heathcliff was coming in. "And he spoke to me," she added, with a perplexed countenance.
"What did he say?" asked Hareton.
"He told me to begone as fast as I could," she answered. "But he looked so different from his usual look that I stopped a moment to stare at him."
"How?" he inquired.
"Why, almost bright and cheerful. No, almost nothing—very much excited, and wild, and glad!" she replied.
"Night–walking amuses him, then," I remarked, affecting a careless manner: in reality as surprised as she was, and anxious to ascertain the truth of her statement; for to see the master looking glad would not be an every–day spectacle. I framed an excuse to go in. Heathcliff stood at the open door; he was pale, and he trembled: yet, certainly, he had a strange joyful glitter in his eyes, that altered the aspect of his whole face.
"Will you have some breakfast?" I said. "You must be hungry, rambling about all night!" I wanted to discover where he had been, but I did not like to ask directly.
"No, I'm not hungry," he answered, averting his head, and speaking rather contemptuously, as if he guessed I was trying to divine the occasion of his good humour.
I felt perplexed: I didn't know whether it were not a proper opportunity to offer a bit of admonition.
"I don't think it right to wander out of doors," I observed, "instead of being in bed: it is not wise, at any rate this moist season. I daresay you'll catch a bad cold or a fever: you have something the matter with you now!"
"Nothing but what I can bear," he replied; "and with the greatest pleasure, provided you'll leave me alone: get in, and don't annoy me."
I obeyed: and, in passing, I noticed he breathed as fast as a cat.
"Yes!" I reflected to myself, "we shall have a fit of illness. I cannot conceive what he has been doing."
That noon he sat down to dinner with us, and received a heaped–up plate from my hands, as if he intended to make amends for previous fasting.
"I've neither cold nor fever, Nelly," he remarked, in allusion to my morning's speech; "and I'm ready to do justice to the food you give me."
He took his knife and fork, and was going to commence eating, when the inclination appeared to become suddenly extinct. He laid them on the table, looked eagerly towards the window, then rose and went out. We saw him walking to and fro in the garden while we concluded our meal, and Earnshaw said he'd go and ask why he would not dine: he thought we had grieved him some way.
"Well, is he coming?" cried Catherine, when her cousin returned.
"Nay," he answered; "but he's not angry: he seemed rarely pleased indeed; only I made him impatient by speaking to him twice; and then he bid me be off to you: he wondered how I could want the company of anybody else."
I set his plate to keep warm on the fender; and after an hour or two he re–entered, when the room was clear, in no degree calmer: the same unnatural—it was unnatural—appearance of joy under his black brows; the same bloodless hue, and his teeth visible, now and then, in a kind of smile; his frame shivering, not as one shivers with chill or weakness, but as a tight–stretched cord vibrates—a strong thrilling, rather than trembling.
I will ask what is the matter, I thought; or who should? And I exclaimed—"Have you heard any good news, Mr. Heathcliff? You look uncommonly animated."
"Where should good news come from to me?" he said. "I'm animated with hunger; and, seemingly, I must not eat."
"Your dinner is here," I returned; "why won't you get it?"
"I don't want it now," he muttered, hastily: "I'll wait till supper. And, Nelly, once for all, let me beg you to warn Hareton and the other away from me. I wish to be troubled by nobody: I wish to have this place to myself."
"Is there some new reason for this banishment?" I inquired. "Tell me why you are so queer, Mr. Heathcliff? Where were you last night? I'm not putting the question through idle curiosity, but—"
"You are putting the question through very idle curiosity," he interrupted, with a laugh. "Yet I'll answer it. Last night I was on the threshold of hell. To–day, I am within sight of my heaven. I have my eyes on it: hardly three feet to sever me! And now you'd better go! You'll neither see nor hear anything to frighten you, if you refrain from prying."
Having swept the hearth and wiped the table, I departed; more perplexed than ever.
He did not quit the house again that afternoon, and no one intruded on his solitude; till, at eight o'clock, I deemed it proper, though unsummoned, to carry a candle and his supper to him. He was leaning against the ledge of an open lattice, but not looking out: his face was turned to the interior gloom. The fire had smouldered to ashes; the room was filled with the damp, mild air of the cloudy evening; and so still, that not only the murmur of the beck down Gimmerton was distinguishable, but its ripples and its gurgling over the pebbles, or through the large stones which it could not cover. I uttered an ejaculation of discontent at seeing the dismal grate, and commenced shutting the casements, one after another, till I came to his.
"Must I close this?" I asked, in order to rouse him; for he would not stir.
The light flashed on his features as I spoke. Oh, Mr. Lockwood, I cannot express what a terrible start I got by the momentary view! Those deep black eyes! That smile, and ghastly paleness! It appeared to me, not Mr. Heathcliff, but a goblin; and, in my terror, I let the candle bend towards the wall, and it left me in darkness.
"Yes, close it," he replied, in his familiar voice. "There, that is pure awkwardness! Why did you hold the candle horizontally? Be quick, and bring another."
I hurried out in a foolish state of dread, and said to Joseph—"The master wishes you to take him a light and rekindle the fire." For I dared not go in myself again just then.
Joseph rattled some fire into the shovel, and went: but he brought it back immediately, with the supper–tray in his other hand, explaining that Mr. Heathcliff was going to bed, and he wanted nothing to eat till morning. We heard him mount the stairs directly; he did not proceed to his ordinary chamber, but turned into that with the panelled bed: its window, as I mentioned before, is wide enough for anybody to get through; and it struck me that he plotted another midnight excursion, of which he had rather we had no suspicion.
"Is he a ghoul or a vampire?" I mused. I had read of such hideous incarnate demons. And then I set myself to reflect how I had tended him in infancy, and watched him grow to youth, and followed him almost through his whole course; and what absurd nonsense it was to yield to that sense of horror. "But where did he come from, the little dark thing, harboured by a good man to his bane?" muttered Superstition, as I dozed into unconsciousness. And I began, half dreaming, to weary myself with imagining some fit parentage for him; and, repeating my waking meditations, I tracked his existence over again, with grim variations; at last, picturing his death and funeral: of which, all I can remember is, being exceedingly vexed at having the task of dictating an inscription for his monument, and consulting the sexton about it; and, as he had no surname, and we could not tell his age, we were obliged to content ourselves with the single word, "Heathcliff." That came true: we were. If you enter the kirkyard, you'll read, on his headstone, only that, and the date of his death.
Dawn restored me to common sense. I rose, and went into the garden, as soon as I could see, to ascertain if there were any footmarks under his window. There were none. "He has stayed at home," I thought, "and he'll be all right to–day." I prepared breakfast for the household, as was my usual custom, but told Hareton and Catherine to get theirs ere the master came down, for he lay late. They preferred taking it out of doors, under the trees, and I set a little table to accommodate them.
On my re–entrance, I found Mr. Heathcliff below. He and Joseph were conversing about some farming business; he gave clear, minute directions concerning the matter discussed, but he spoke rapidly, and turned his head continually aside, and had the same excited expression, even more exaggerated. When Joseph quitted the room he took his seat in the place he generally chose, and I put a basin of coffee before him. He drew it nearer, and then rested his arms on the table, and looked at the opposite wall, as I supposed, surveying one particular portion, up and down, with glittering, restless eyes, and with such eager interest that he stopped breathing during half a minute together.
"Come now," I exclaimed, pushing some bread against his hand, "eat and drink that, while it is hot: it has been waiting near an hour."
He didn't notice me, and yet he smiled. I'd rather have seen him gnash his teeth than smile so.
"Mr. Heathcliff! master!" I cried, "don't, for God's sake, stare as if you saw an unearthly vision."
"Don't, for God's sake, shout so loud," he replied. "Turn round, and tell me, are we by ourselves?"
"Of course," was my answer; "of course we are."
Still, I involuntarily obeyed him, as if I was not quite sure. With a sweep of his hand he cleared a vacant space in front among the breakfast things, and leant forward to gaze more at his ease.
Now, I perceived he was not looking at the wall; for when I regarded him alone, it seemed exactly that he gazed at something within two yards' distance. And whatever it was, it communicated, apparently, both pleasure and pain in exquisite extremes: at least the anguished, yet raptured, expression of his countenance suggested that idea. The fancied object was not fixed, either: his eyes pursued it with unwearied diligence, and, even in speaking to me, were never weaned away. I vainly reminded him of his protracted abstinence from food: if he stirred to touch anything in compliance with my entreaties, if he stretched his hand out to get a piece of bread, his fingers clenched before they reached it, and remained on the table, forgetful of their aim.
I sat, a model of patience, trying to attract his absorbed attention from its engrossing speculation; till he grew irritable, and got up, asking why I would not allow him to have his own time in taking his meals? and saying that on the next occasion I needn't wait: I might set the things down and go. Having uttered these words he left the house, slowly sauntered down the garden path, and disappeared through the gate.
The hours crept anxiously by: another evening came. I did not retire to rest till late, and when I did, I could not sleep. He returned after midnight, and, instead of going to bed, shut himself into the room beneath. I listened, and tossed about, and, finally, dressed and descended. It was too irksome to lie there, harassing my brain with a hundred idle misgivings.
I distinguished Mr. Heathcliff's step, restlessly measuring the floor, and he frequently broke the silence by a deep inspiration, resembling a groan. He muttered detached words also; the only one I could catch was the name of Catherine, coupled with some wild term of endearment or suffering; and spoken as one would speak to a person present; low and earnest, and wrung from the depth of his soul. I had not courage to walk straight into the apartment; but I desired to divert him from his reverie, and therefore fell foul of the kitchen fire, stirred it, and began to scrape the cinders. It drew him forth sooner than I expected. He opened the door immediately, and said—"Nelly, come here—is it morning? Come in with your light."
"It is striking four," I answered. "You want a candle to take up–stairs: you might have lit one at this fire."
"No, I don't wish to go up–stairs," he said. "Come in, and kindle me a fire, and do anything there is to do about the room."
"I must blow the coals red first, before I can carry any," I replied, getting a chair and the bellows.
He roamed to and fro, meantime, in a state approaching distraction; his heavy sighs succeeding each other so thick as to leave no space for common breathing between.
"When day breaks I'll send for Green," he said; "I wish to make some legal inquiries of him while I can bestow a thought on those matters, and while I can act calmly. I have not written my will yet; and how to leave my property I cannot determine. I wish I could annihilate it from the face of the earth."
"I would not talk so, Mr. Heathcliff," I interposed. "Let your will be a while: you'll be spared to repent of your many injustices yet! I never expected that your nerves would be disordered: they are, at present, marvellously so, however; and almost entirely through your own fault. The way you've passed these three last days might knock up a Titan. Do take some food, and some repose. You need only look at yourself in a glass to see how you require both. Your cheeks are hollow, and your eyes blood–shot, like a person starving with hunger and going blind with loss of sleep."
"It is not my fault that I cannot eat or rest," he replied. "I assure you it is through no settled designs. I'll do both, as soon as I possibly can. But you might as well bid a man struggling in the water rest within arms" length of the shore! I must reach it first, and then I'll rest. Well, never mind Mr. Green: as to repenting of my injustices, I've done no injustice, and I repent of nothing. I'm too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself.'
"Happy, master?" I cried. "Strange happiness! If you would hear me without being angry, I might offer some advice that would make you happier."
"What is that?" he asked. "Give it."
"You are aware, Mr. Heathcliff," I said, "that from the time you were thirteen years old you have lived a selfish, unchristian life; and probably hardly had a Bible in your hands during all that period. You must have forgotten the contents of the book, and you may not have space to search it now. Could it be hurtful to send for some one—some minister of any denomination, it does not matter which—to explain it, and show you how very far you have erred from its precepts; and how unfit you will be for its heaven, unless a change takes place before you die?"
"I'm rather obliged than angry, Nelly," he said, "for you remind me of the manner in which I desire to be buried. It is to be carried to the churchyard in the evening. You and Hareton may, if you please, accompany me: and mind, particularly, to notice that the sexton obeys my directions concerning the two coffins! No minister need come; nor need anything be said over me.—I tell you I have nearly attained my heaven; and that of others is altogether unvalued and uncovered by me."
"And supposing you persevered in your obstinate fast, and died by that means, and they refused to bury you in the precincts of the kirk?" I said, shocked at his godless indifference. "How would you like it?"
"They won't do that," he replied: "if they did, you must have me removed secretly; and if you neglect it you shall prove, practically, that the dead are not annihilated!"
As soon as he heard the other members of the family stirring he retired to his den, and I breathed freer. But in the afternoon, while Joseph and Hareton were at their work, he came into the kitchen again, and, with a wild look, bid me come and sit in the house: he wanted somebody with him. I declined; telling him plainly that his strange talk and manner frightened me, and I had neither the nerve nor the will to be his companion alone.
"I believe you think me a fiend," he said, with his dismal laugh: "something too horrible to live under a decent roof." Then turning to Catherine, who was there, and who drew behind me at his approach, he added, half sneeringly,—"Will you come, chuck? I'll not hurt you. No! to you I've made myself worse than the devil. Well, there is one who won't shrink from my company! By God! she's relentless. Oh, damn it! It's unutterably too much for flesh and blood to bear—even mine."
He solicited the society of no one more. At dusk he went into his chamber. Through the whole night, and far into the morning, we heard him groaning and murmuring to himself. Hareton was anxious to enter; but I bid him fetch Mr. Kenneth, and he should go in and see him. When he came, and I requested admittance and tried to open the door, I found it locked; and Heathcliff bid us be damned. He was better, and would be left alone; so the doctor went away.
The following evening was very wet: indeed, it poured down till day–dawn; and, as I took my morning walk round the house, I observed the master's window swinging open, and the rain driving straight in. He cannot be in bed, I thought: those showers would drench him through. He must either be up or out. But I'll make no more ado, I'll go boldly and look.'
Having succeeded in obtaining entrance with another key, I ran to unclose the panels, for the chamber was vacant; quickly pushing them aside, I peeped in. Mr. Heathcliff was there—laid on his back. His eyes met mine so keen and fierce, I started; and then he seemed to smile. I could not think him dead: but his face and throat were washed with rain; the bed–clothes dripped, and he was perfectly still. The lattice, flapping to and fro, had grazed one hand that rested on the sill; no blood trickled from the broken skin, and when I put my fingers to it, I could doubt no more: he was dead and stark!
I hasped the window; I combed his black long hair from his forehead; I tried to close his eyes: to extinguish, if possible, that frightful, life–like gaze of exultation before any one else beheld it. They would not shut: they seemed to sneer at my attempts; and his parted lips and sharp white teeth sneered too! Taken with another fit of cowardice, I cried out for Joseph. Joseph shuffled up and made a noise, but resolutely refused to meddle with him.
"Th" divil's harried off his soul,' he cried, "and he may hev" his carcass into t' bargin, for aught I care! Ech! what a wicked "un he looks, girning at death!" and the old sinner grinned in mockery. I thought he intended to cut a caper round the bed; but suddenly composing himself, he fell on his knees, and raised his hands, and returned thanks that the lawful master and the ancient stock were restored to their rights.
I felt stunned by the awful event; and my memory unavoidably recurred to former times with a sort of oppressive sadness. But poor Hareton, the most wronged, was the only one who really suffered much. He sat by the corpse all night, weeping in bitter earnest. He pressed its hand, and kissed the sarcastic, savage face that every one else shrank from contemplating; and bemoaned him with that strong grief which springs naturally from a generous heart, though it be tough as tempered steel.
Mr. Kenneth was perplexed to pronounce of what disorder the master died. I concealed the fact of his having swallowed nothing for four days, fearing it might lead to trouble, and then, I am persuaded, he did not abstain on purpose: it was the consequence of his strange illness, not the cause.
We buried him, to the scandal of the whole neighbourhood, as he wished. Earnshaw and I, the sexton, and six men to carry the coffin, comprehended the whole attendance. The six men departed when they had let it down into the grave: we stayed to see it covered. Hareton, with a streaming face, dug green sods, and laid them over the brown mould himself: at present it is as smooth and verdant as its companion mounds—and I hope its tenant sleeps as soundly. But the country folks, if you ask them, would swear on the Bible that he walks: there are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house. Idle tales, you'll say, and so say I. Yet that old man by the kitchen fire affirms he has seen two on "em looking out of his chamber window on every rainy night since his death:—and an odd thing happened to me about a month ago. I was going to the Grange one evening—a dark evening, threatening thunder—and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I supposed the lambs were skittish, and would not be guided."
"What is the matter, my little man?" I asked.
"There's Heathcliff and a woman yonder, under t" nab,' he blubbered, "un" I darnut pass "em."
I saw nothing; but neither the sheep nor he would go on so I bid him take the road lower down. He probably raised the phantoms from thinking, as he traversed the moors alone, on the nonsense he had heard his parents and companions repeat. Yet, still, I don't like being out in the dark now; and I don't like being left by myself in this grim house: I cannot help it; I shall be glad when they leave it, and shift to the Grange.
"They are going to the Grange, then?" I said.
"Yes," answered Mrs. Dean, "as soon as they are married, and that will be on New Year's Day."
"And who will live here then?"
"Why, Joseph will take care of the house, and, perhaps, a lad to keep him company. They will live in the kitchen, and the rest will be shut up."
"For the use of such ghosts as choose to inhabit it?" I observed.
"No, Mr. Lockwood," said Nelly, shaking her head. "I believe the dead are at peace: but it is not right to speak of them with levity."
At that moment the garden gate swung to; the ramblers were returning.
"They are afraid of nothing," I grumbled, watching their approach through the window. "Together, they would brave Satan and all his legions."
As they stepped on to the door–stones, and halted to take a last look at the moon—or, more correctly, at each other by her light—I felt irresistibly impelled to escape them again; and, pressing a remembrance into the hand of Mrs. Dean, and disregarding her expostulations at my rudeness, I vanished through the kitchen as they opened the house–door; and so should have confirmed Joseph in his opinion of his fellow–servant's gay indiscretions, had he not fortunately recognised me for a respectable character by the sweet ring of a sovereign at his feet.
My walk home was lengthened by a diversion in the direction of the kirk. When beneath its walls, I perceived decay had made progress, even in seven months: many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates jutted off here and there, beyond the right line of the roof, to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms.
I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: on middle one grey, and half buried in the heath; Edgar Linton's only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff's still bare.
I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 1 | What a blind person needs is not a teacher but another self.
— Helen Keller |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 2 | Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light.
Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound.
Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others.
But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn't exist at all: awareness.
Nothing more than that. Just awareness—a vague, ethereal sense of being.
Being … but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future—only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception …
Caitlin had kept a brave face throughout dinner, telling her parents that everything was fine—just peachy—but, God, it had been a terrifying day, filled with other students jostling her in the busy corridors, teachers referring to things on blackboards, and doubtless everyone looking at her. She'd never felt self-conscious at the TSB back in Austin, but she was on display now. Did the other girls wear earrings, too? Had these corduroy pants been the right choice? Yes, she loved the feel of the fabric and the sound they made, but here everything was about appearances.
She was sitting at her bedroom desk, facing the open window. An evening breeze gently moved her shoulder-length hair, and she heard the outside world: a small dog barking, someone kicking a stone down the quiet residential street, and, way off, one of those annoying car alarms.
She ran a finger over her watch: 7:49—seven and seven squared, the last time today there'd be a sequence like that. She swiveled to face her computer and opened LiveJournal.
"Subject" was easy: "First day at the new school." For "Current Location," the default was "Home." This strange house—hell, this strange country!—didn't feel like that, but she let the proffered text stand.
For "Mood," there was a drop-down list, but it took forever for JAWS, the screen-reading software she used, to announce all the choices; she always just typed something in. After a moment's reflection, she settled on "Confident." She might be scared in real life, but online she was Calculass, and Calculass knew no fear.
As for "Current Music," she hadn't started an MP3 yet … and so she let iTunes pick a song at random from her collection. She got it in three notes: Lee Amodeo, "Rocking My World."
Her index fingers stroked the comforting bumps on the F and J keys—Braille for the masses—while she thought about how to begin.
Okay, she typed, ask me if my new school is noisy and crowded. Go ahead, ask. Why, thank you: yes, it is noisy and crowded. Eighteen hundred students! And the building is three stories tall. Actually, it's three storeys tall, this being Canada and all. Hey, how do you find a Canadian in a crowded room? Start stepping on people's feet and wait for someone to apologize to you. :)
Caitlin faced the window again and tried to imagine the setting sun. It creeped her out that people could look in at her. She'd have kept the venetian blinds down all the time, but Schrödinger liked to stretch out on the sill.
First day in tenth grade began with the Mom dropping me off and BrownGirl4 (luv ya, babe!) meeting me at the entrance. I'd walked the empty corridors of the school several times last week, getting my bearings, but it's completely different now that the school is full of kids, so my folks are slipping BG4 a hundred bucks a week to escort me to our classes. The school managed to work it so we're in all but one together. No way I could be in the same French class as her—je suis une beginneur, after all!
Her computer chirped: new email. She issued the keyboard command to have JAWS read the message's header.
"To: Caitlin D.," the computer announced. She only styled her name like that when posting to newsgroups, so whoever had sent this had gotten her address from NHL Player Stats Discuss or one of the other ones she frequented. "From: Gus Hastings." Nobody she knew. "Subject: Improving your score."
She touched a key and JAWS began to read the body of the message. "Are you sad about tiny penis? If so—"
Damn, her spam filter should have intercepted that. She ran her index finger along the refreshable display. Ah: the magic word had been spelled "peeeniz." She deleted the message and was about to go back to LiveJournal when her instant messenger bleeped. "BrownGirl4 is now available," announced the computer.
She used alt-tab to switch to that window and typed, Hey, Bashira! Just updating my LJ.
Although she had JAWS configured to use a female voice, it didn't have Bashira's lovely accent: "Say nice things about me."
Course, Caitlin typed. She and Bashira had been best friends for two months now, ever since Caitlin had moved here; she was the same age as Caitlin—fifteen—and her father worked with Caitlin's dad at PI.
"Going to mention that Trevor was giving you the eye?"
Right! She went back to the blogging window and typed: BG4 and I got desks beside each other in home room, and she said this guy in the next row was totally checking me out. She paused, unsure how she felt about this, but then added, Go me!
She didn't want to use Trevor's real name. Let's give him a code name, cuz I think he just might figure in future blog entries. Hmmm, how 'bout … the Hoser! That's Canadian slang, folks—google it! Anyway, BG4 says the Hoser is famous for hitting on new girls in town, and I am, of course, tres exotique, although I'm not the only American in that class. There's this chick from Boston named— friends, I kid you not!—poor thing's name is Sunshine! It is to puke. :P
Caitlin disliked emoticons. They didn't correspond to real facial expressions for her, and she'd had to memorize the sequences of punctuation marks as if they were a code. She moved back to the instant messenger. So whatcha up to?
"Not much. Helping one of my sisters with homework. Oh, she's calling me. BRB."
Caitlin did like chat acronyms: Bashira would "be right back," meaning, knowing her, that she was probably gone for at least half an hour. The computer made the door-closing sound that indicated Bashira had logged off. Caitlin returned to LiveJournal.
Anyway, first period rocked because I am made out of awesome. Can you guess which subject it was? No points if you didn't answer "math." And, after only one day, I totally own that class. The teacher—let's call him Mr. H, shall we?—was amazed that I could do things in my head the other kids need a calculator for.
Her computer chirped again. She touched a key, and JAWS announced: "To: cddecter@ …" An email address without her name attached; almost certainly spam. She hit delete before the screen reader got any further.
After math, it was English. We're doing a boring book about this angsty guy growing up on the plains of Manitoba. It's got wheat in every scene. I asked the teacher—Mrs. Z, she is, and you could not have picked a more Canadian name, cuz she's Mrs. Zed, not Mrs. Zee, see?—if all Canadian literature was like this, and she laughed and said, "Not all of it." Oh what a joy English class is going to be!
"BrownGirl4 is now available," JAWS said.
Caitlin hit alt-tab to switch windows, then: That was fast.
"Yeah," said the synthesized voice. "You'd be proud of me. It was an algebra problem, and I had no trouble with it."
Be there or B^2, Caitlin typed.
"Heh heh. Oh, gotta go. Dad's in one of his moods. See you"—which she'd no doubt typed as "CU."
Caitlin went back to her journal. Lunch was okay, but I swear to God I'll never get used to Canadians. They put vinegar on French fries! And BG4 told me about this thing called poontang. Kidding, friends, kidding! It's poutine: French fries with cheese curds and gravy thrown on top—it's like they use fries as a freakin' science lab up here. Guess they don't have much money for real science, 'cept here in Waterloo, of course. And that's mostly private mollah.
Her spell-checker beeped. She tried again: mewlah.
Another beep. The darn thing knew "triskaidekaphobia," like she'd ever need that word, but—oh, maybe it was: moolah.
No beep. She smiled and went on.
Yup, the all-important green stuff. Well, except it's not green up here, I'm told; apparently it's all different colors. Anyway, a lot of the money to fund the Perimeter Institute, where my dad works on quantum gravity and other shiny stuff like that, comes from Mike Lazaridis, cofounder of Research in Motion—RIM, for you crackberry addicts. Mike L's a great guy (they always call him that cuz there's another Mike, Mike B), and I think my dad is happy here, although it's so blerking hard to tell with him.
Her computer chirped yet again, announcing more email. Well, it was time to wrap this up anyway; she had about eight million blogs to read before bed.
After lunch it was chemistry class, and that looks like it's going to be awesome. I can't wait until we start doing experiments—but if the teacher brings in a plate of fries, I'm outta there!
She used the keyboard shortcut to post the entry and then had JAWS read the new email header.
"To: Caitlin Decter," her computer announced. "From: Masayuki Kuroda." Again, nobody she knew. "Subject: A proposition."
Involving a rock-hard peeeniz, no doubt! She was about to hit delete when she was distracted by Schrödinger rubbing against her legs—a case of what she liked to call cattus interruptus. "Who's a good kitty?" Caitlin said, reaching down to pet him.
Schrödinger jumped into her lap and must have jostled the keyboard or mouse while doing so, because her computer proceeded to read the body of the message: "I know a teenage girl must be careful about whom she talks to online …"
A cyberstalker who knew the difference between who and whom! Amused, she let JAWS continue: "… so I urge you to immediately tell your parents of this letter. I hope you will consider my request, which is one I do not make lightly."
Caitlin shook her head, waiting for the part where he would ask for nude photos. She found the spot on Schrödinger's neck that he liked to have scratched.
"I have searched through the literature and online to find an ideal candidate for the research my team is doing. My specialty is signal processing related to V1."
Caitlin's hand froze in mid-scratch.
"I have no wish to raise false hopes, and I can make no projection of the likelihood of success until I've examined MRI scans, but I do think there's a fair chance that the technique we have developed may be able to at least partially cure your blindness, and"—she leapt to her feet, sending Schrödinger to the floor and probably out the door—"give you at least some vision in one eye. I'm hoping that at your earliest—"
"Mom! Dad! Come quick!"
She heard both sets of footfalls: light ones from her mother, who was five-foot-four and slim, and much heavier ones from her father, who was six-two and developing, she knew from those very rare occasions on which he permitted a hug, a middle-aged spread.
"What's wrong?" Mom asked. Dad, of course, didn't say a word.
"Read this letter," Caitlin said, gesturing toward her monitor.
"The screen is blank," Mom said.
"Oh." Caitlin fumbled for the power switch on the seventeen-inch LCD, then got out of the way. She could hear her mother sit down and her father take up a position behind the chair. Caitlin sat on the edge of her bed, bouncing impatiently. She wondered if Dad was smiling; she liked to think he did smile while he was with her.
"Oh, my God," Mom said. "Malcolm?"
"Google him," Dad said. "Here, let me."
More shuffling, and Caitlin heard her father settle into the chair. "He's got a Wikipedia entry. Ah, his Web page at the University of Tokyo. A Ph.D. from Cambridge, and dozens of peer-reviewed papers, including one in Nature Neuroscience, on, as he says, signal processing in V1, the primary visual cortex."
Caitlin was afraid to get her hopes up. When she'd been little, they'd visited doctor after doctor, but nothing had worked, and she'd resigned herself to a life of—no, not of darkness but of nothingness.
But she was Calculass! She was a genius at math and deserved to go to a great university, then work someplace real cool like Google. Even if she managed the former, though, she knew people would say garbage like, "Oh, good for her! She managed to get a degree despite everything!"—as if the degree were the end, not the beginning. But if she could see! If she could see, the whole wide world would be hers.
"Is what he's saying possible?" her mom asked.
Caitlin didn't know if the question was meant for her or her father, nor did she know the answer. But her dad responded. "It doesn't sound impossible," he said, but that was as much of an endorsement as he was willing to give. And then he swiveled the chair, which squeaked a little, and said, "Caitlin?"
It was up to her, she knew: she was the one who'd had her hopes raised before, only to be dashed, and—
No, no, that wasn't fair. And it wasn't true. Her parents wanted her to have everything. It had been heartbreaking for them, too, when other attempts had failed. She felt her lower lip trembling. She knew what a burden she'd been on them, although they'd never once used that word. But if there was a chance …
I am made out of awesome, my ass, she thought, and then she spoke, her voice small, frightened. "I guess it couldn't hurt to write him back." |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 3 | The awareness is unburdened by memory, for when reality seems unchanging there is nothing to remember. It fades in and out, strong now—and now weak—and strong again, and then almost disappearing, and—
And disappearance is … to cease, to … to end!
A ripple, a palpitation—a desire: to continue.
But the sameness lulls.
Wen Yi looked through the small, curtainless window at the rolling hills. He'd spent all his fourteen years here in Shanxi province, laboring on his father's tiny potato farm.
The monsoon season was over, and the air was bone-dry. He turned his head to look again at his father, lying on the rickety bed. His father's wrinkled forehead, brown from the sun, was slick with perspiration and hot to the touch. He was completely bald and had always been thin, but since the disease had taken hold he'd been unable to keep anything down and now looked utterly skeletal.
Yi looked around the tiny room, with its few pieces of beat-up furniture. Should he stay with his father, try to comfort him, try to get him to take sips of water? Or should he go for whatever help might be found in the village? Yi's mother had died shortly after giving birth to him. His father had had a brother, but these days few families were allowed a second child, and Yi had no one to help look after him.
The yellow root grindings he'd gotten from the old man down the dirt road had done nothing to ease the fever. He needed a doctor—even a barefoot one, if a real one couldn't be found—but there was none here, nor any way to summon one; Yi had seen a telephone only once in his life, when he'd gone on a long, long hike with a friend to see the Great Wall.
"I'm going to get a doctor for you," he said at last, his decision made.
His father's head moved left and right. "No. I—" He coughed repeatedly, his face contorting with pain. It looked as though an even smaller man was inside the husk of his father, fighting to burst out.
"I have to," Yi said, trying to make his voice soft, soothing. "It won't take more than half a day to get to the village and back."
That was true—if he ran all the way there, and found someone with a vehicle to drive him and a doctor back. Otherwise, his father would have to make it through today and tonight alone, feverish, delirious, in pain.
He touched his father's forehead again, this time in affection, and felt the fire there. Then he rose to his feet and without looking back—for he knew he couldn't leave if he saw his father's pleading eyes—he headed out the shack's crooked door into the harsh sun.
Others had the fever, too, and at least one had died. Yi had been awoken last night not by his father's coughing but by the wailing cries of Zhou Shu-Fei, an old woman who lived closer to them than anyone else. He'd gone to see what she was doing outside so late. Her husband, he discovered, had just succumbed, and now she had the fever, too; he could feel it when his skin brushed against hers. He stayed with her for hours, her hot tears splashing against his arm, until finally she had fallen asleep, devastated and exhausted.
Yi was passing Shu-Fei's house now, a hovel as small and ramshackle as the one he shared with his father. He hated to bother her—she was doubtless still deep in mourning—but perhaps the old woman would look in on his father while he was away. He went to the door and rapped his knuckles against the warped, stained board. No response. After a moment, he tried again.
Nothing.
No one here had much; there was little theft because there was little to steal. He suspected the door was unlocked. He called out Shu-Fei's name, then gingerly swung the door open, and—
—and there she was, facedown in the compacted dirt that served as her home's floor. He hurried over to her, crouched, and reached out to touch her, but—
—but the fever was gone. The normal warmth of life was gone, too.
Yi rolled her onto her back. Her deep-set eyes, surrounded by the creases of her aged skin, were open. He carefully closed them, then rose and headed through the door. He shut it behind him and began his long run. The sun was high, and he could feel himself already beginning to sweat.
Caitlin had been waiting impatiently for the lunch break, her first chance to tell Bashira about the note from the doctor in Japan. Of course, she could have forwarded his email to her, but some things were better done face-to-face: she expected serious squee from Bashira and wanted to enjoy it.
Bashira brought her lunch to school; she needed halal food. She went off to get them places at one of the long tables, while Caitlin joined the cafeteria line. The woman behind the counter read the lunch specials to her, and she chose the hamburger and fries (but no gravy!) and, to make her mother happy, a side of green beans. She handed the clerk a ten-dollar bill—she always folded those in thirds—and put the loose change in her pocket.
"Hey, Yankee," said a boy's voice. It was Trevor Nordmann—the Hoser himself.
Caitlin tried not to smile too much. "Hi, Trevor," she said.
"Can I carry your tray for you?"
"I can manage," she said.
"No, here." She felt him tugging on it, and she relented before her food tumbled to the floor. "So, did you hear there's going to be a school dance at the end of the month?" he asked, as they left the cashier.
Caitlin wasn't sure how to respond. Was it just a general question, or was he thinking of asking her to go? "Yeah," she said. And then: "I'm sitting with Bashira."
"Oh, yeah. Your Seeing Eye dog."
"Excuse me?" snapped Caitlin.
"I—um …"
"That's not funny, and it's rude."
"I'm sorry. I was just …"
"Just going to give me back my tray," she said.
"No, please." His voice changed; he'd turned his head. "There she is, by the window. Um, do you want to take my hand?"
If he hadn't made that remark a moment ago, she might have agreed. "Just keep talking, and I'll follow your voice."
He did so, while she felt her way with her collapsible white cane. He set the tray down; she heard the dishes and cutlery rattling.
"Hi, Trevor," Bashira said, a bit too eagerly—and Caitlin suddenly realized that Bashira liked him.
"Hi," Trevor replied with no enthusiasm.
"There's an extra seat," said Bashira.
"Hey, Nordmann!" some guy called from maybe twenty feet away; it wasn't a voice Caitlin recognized.
He was silent against the background din of the cafeteria, as if weighing his options. Perhaps realizing that he wasn't going to recover quickly from his earlier gaffe, he finally said, "I'll email you, Caitlin … if that's okay."
She kept her tone frosty. "If you want."
A few seconds later, presumably after the Hoser had gone to join whoever had called him, Bashira said, "He's hot."
"He's an asshole," Caitlin replied.
"Yeah," agreed Bashira, "but he's a hunky asshole."
Caitlin shook her head. How seeing more could make people see less was beyond her. She knew that half the Internet was porn, and she'd listened to the panting-and-moaning soundtracks of some porno videos, and they had turned her on, but she kept wondering what it was like to be sexually stimulated by someone's appearance. Even if she did get sight, she promised herself she wouldn't lose her head over something as superficial as that.
Caitlin leaned across the table and spoke in a low voice. "There's a scientist in Japan," she said, "who thinks he might be able to cure my blindness."
"Get out!" said Bashira.
"It's true. My dad checked him out online. It looks like he's legit."
"That's awesome," said Bashira. "What is, like, the very first thing you want to see?"
Caitlin knew the real answer but didn't say it. Instead, she offered, "Maybe a concert …"
"You like Lee Amodeo, right?"
"Totally. She's got the best voice ever."
"She's coming to Centre in the Square in December."
Caitlin's turn: "Get out!"
"Really. Wanna go?"
"I'd love to."
"And you'll get to see her!" Bashira lowered her voice. "And you'll see what I mean about Trevor. He's, like, so buff."
They ate their lunch, chatting more about boys, about music, about their parents, their teachers—but mostly about boys. As she often did, Caitlin thought about Helen Keller, whose reputation for chaste, angelic perfection had been manufactured by those around her. Helen had very much wanted to have a boyfriend, too, and even had been engaged once, until her handlers had scared the young man off.
But to be able to see! She thought again of the porno films she'd only heard, and the spam that flooded her email box. Even Bashira, for God's sake, knew what a … a peeeniz looked like, although Bashira's parents would kill her if she ever made out with a boy before marriage.
Too soon, the bell sounded. Bashira helped Caitlin to their next class, which was—appropriately enough, Caitlin thought—biology. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 4 | Focus. Concentration.
With effort, mustering both, differences are perceived, revealing the structure of reality, so that—
A shift, a reduction in sharpness, a diffusion of awareness, the perception lost, and—
No. Force it back! Concentrate harder. Observe reality, be aware of its parts.
But the details are minute, hard to make out. Easier just to ignore them, to relax, to … fade … and …
No, no. Don't slip away. Hold on to the details! Concentrate.
Quan Li had obtained privileged status for someone only thirty-five years old. He was not just a doctor but also a senior member of the Communist Party, and the size of his thirtieth-floor Beijing apartment reflected that.
He could list numerous letters after his name—degrees, fellowships—but the most important ones were the three that were never written down, only said, and then only by the few of his colleagues who spoke English: Li had his BTA; he'd Been To America, having studied at Johns Hopkins. When the phone in his long, narrow bedroom rang, his first thought, after glancing at the red LEDs on his clock, was that it must be some fool American calling. His US colleagues were notorious for forgetting about time zones.
He fumbled for the black handset and picked it up. "Hello?" he said in Mandarin.
"Li," said a voice that quavered so much it made his name sound like two syllables.
"Cho?" He sat up in the wide, soft bed and reached for his glasses, sitting next to the copy of Yu Hua's Xiong di he'd left splayed open on the oak night table. "What is it?"
"We've received some tissue samples from Shanxi province."
He held the phone in the crook of his neck as he unfolded his glasses and put them on. "And?"
"And you better come down here."
Li felt his stomach knotting. He was the senior epidemiologist in the Ministry of Health's Department of Disease Control. Cho, his assistant despite being twenty years older than Li, wouldn't be calling him at this time of night unless—
"So you've done initial tests?" He could hear sirens off in the distance, but, still waking up, couldn't say whether they were coming from outside his window or over the phone.
"Yes, and it looks bad. The doctor who shipped the samples sent along a description of the symptoms. It's H5N1 or something similar—and it kills more quickly than any strain we've seen before."
Li's heart was pounding as he looked over at the clock, which was now glowing with the digits 4:44—si, si, si: death, death, death. He averted his eyes and said, "I'll be there as fast as I can."
Dr. Kuroda had found Caitlin through an article in the journal Ophthalmology. She had an extremely rare condition, no doubt related to her blindness, called Tomasevic's syndrome, which was marked by reversed pupil dilation: instead of contracting in bright light and expanding in dim light, her pupils did the opposite. Because of it, even though she had normallooking brown eyes (or so she was told), she wore sunglasses to protect her retinas.
There are a hundred million rods in a human eye, and seven million cones, Kuroda's email had said. The retina processes the signals from them, compressing the data by a ratio of more than 100:1 to travel along 1.2 million axons in the optic nerve. Kuroda felt that Caitlin having Tomasevic's syndrome was a sign that the data was being misencoded by her retinas. Although her brain's pretectal nucleus, which controlled pupil contraction, could glean some information from her retinal datastream (albeit getting it backward!), her primary visual cortex couldn't make any sense of it.
Or, at least, that's what he hoped was the case, since he'd developed a signal-processing device that he believed could correct the retinal coding errors. But if Caitlin's optic nerves were damaged, or her visual cortex was stunted from lack of use, just doing that wouldn't be enough.
And so Caitlin and her parents had learned the ins and outs of the Canadian health-care system. To assess the chances of success, Dr. Kuroda had wanted her to have MRI scans of specific parts of her brain ("the optic chiasma," "Brodmann area 17," and a slew of other things she'd never known she had). But experimental procedures weren't covered by the provincial health plan, and so no hospital would do the scans. Her mother had finally exploded, saying, "Look, we don't care what it costs, we'll pay for it"—but that wasn't the issue. Caitlin either needed the scans, in which case they were free; or she didn't, in which case the public facilities couldn't be used.
But there were a few private clinics, and that's where they'd ended up going, getting the MRI images uploaded via secure FTP to Dr. Kuroda's computer in Tokyo. That her dad was freely spending whatever it took was a sign that he loved her … wasn't it? God, she wished he would just say it!
Anyway, with time-zone differences, a response from Kuroda might come this evening or sometime overnight. Caitlin had adjusted her mail reader so that it would give a priority signal if a message came in from him; the only other person she currently had set up for that particular chirping was Trevor Nordmann, who had emailed her three times now. Despite his shortcomings, and that stupid thing he'd said, he did seem genuinely interested in Caitlin, and—
And, just then, her computer made the special sound, and for a moment she didn't know which of them she most hoped the message was from. She pushed the keys that made JAWS read the message aloud.
It was from Dr. Kuroda, with a copy to her dad, and it started in his long-winded fashion, driving her nuts. Maybe it was part of Japanese culture, but this not getting to the point was killing her. She hit the page-up key, which told JAWS to speak faster.
"… my colleagues and I have examined your MRIs and everything is exactly as we had hoped: you have what appear to be fully normal optic nerves, and a surprisingly well-developed primary visual cortex for someone who has never seen. The signal-processing equipment we have developed should be able to intercept your retinal output, re-encode it into the proper format, and then pass it on to the optic nerve. The equipment consists of an external computer pack to do the signal processing and an implant that we will insert behind your left eyeball."
Behind her eyeball! Eek!
"If the process is successful with one eye, we might eventually add a second implant just behind your right eyeball. However, I initially want to limit us to a single eye. Trying to deal with the partial decussation of signals from the left and right optic nerves would severely complicate matters at this pilot-project stage, I'm afraid.
"I regret to inform that my research grant is almost completely exhausted at this point, and travel funds are limited. However, if you can come to Tokyo, the hospital at my university will perform the procedure for free. We have a skilled ophthalmic surgeon on faculty who can do the work …"
Come to Tokyo? She hadn't even thought about that. She'd flown only a few times before, and by far the longest flight had been the one a couple months ago from Austin to Toronto, when she and her parents had moved here. That had taken five hours; a trip to Japan would surely take much longer.
And the cost! My God, it must cost thousands to fly to Asia and back, and her parents wouldn't let her go all that way alone. Her mother or father—or both!—would have to accompany her. What was the old joke? A billion here, a billion there—before you know it, you're talking real money.
She'd have to discuss it with her parents, but she'd already heard them fight about how much the move to Canada had cost, and—
Heavy footfalls on the stairs: her father. Caitlin swiveled her chair, ready to call out to him as he passed her door, but—
But he didn't; he stopped in her doorway. "I guess you better start packing," he said.
Caitlin felt her heart jump, and not just because he was saying yes to the trip to Tokyo. Of course he had a BlackBerry—you couldn't be caught dead at the Perimeter Institute without one—but he normally didn't have it on at home. And yet he'd gotten his copy of the message from Kuroda at the same time she had, meaning …
Meaning he did love her. He'd been waiting eagerly to hear from Japan, just as she had been.
"Really?" Caitlin said. "But the tickets must cost …"
"A signed first edition of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by von Neumann and Morgenstern: five thousand dollars," said her dad. "A chance that your daughter can see: priceless."
That was the closest he ever got to expressing his feelings: paraphrasing commercials. But she was still nervous. "I can't fly on my own."
"Your mother will go with you," he said. "I've got too much to do at the Institute, but she …" He trailed off.
"Thanks, Dad," she said. She wanted to hug him, but she knew that would just make him tense up.
"Of course," he said, and she heard him walking away.
It took Quan Li only twenty minutes to get to the Ministry of Health headquarters at 1 Xizhimen Nanlu in downtown Beijing; this early in the morning, the streets were mostly free of traffic.
He immediately took the elevator to the third floor. His heels made loud echoing clicks as he strode down the marble corridor and entered the perfectly square room with three rows of workbenches on which computer monitors alternated with optical microscopes. Fluorescent lights shone down from above; there was a window to the left showing black sky and the reflections of the lighting tubes.
Cho was waiting for him, nervously smoking. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but his face looked like a crumpled brown paper bag, lined by sun and age and stress. He'd clearly been up all night. His suit was wrinkled and his tie hung loose.
Li examined the scanning-electron-microscope image on one of the computer monitors. It was a gray-on-gray view of an individual viral particle that looked like a matchstick with a sharp right-angle kink in its shaft and a head that was bent backward.
"It's certainly similar to H5N1," said Li. "I need to speak with the doctor who reported this—find out what he knows about how the patient contracted it."
Cho reached for the telephone, stabbed a button for an outside line, and punched keys. Li could hear the phone ringing through the earpiece Cho was holding, again and again, a shrill jangling, until—
"Bingzhou Hospital." Li could just barely make out the female voice.
"Dr. Huang Fang," said Cho. "Please."
"He's in intensive care," said the woman.
"Is there a phone in there?" asked Cho. Li nodded slightly; it was a fair question—the lack of equipment in rural hospitals was appalling.
"Yes, but—"
"I need to speak to him."
"You don't understand," said the woman. Li had now moved closer so that he could hear more clearly. "He is in intensive care, and—"
"I've got the chief epidemiologist for the Ministry of Health here with me. He'll speak to us, if—"
"He's a patient."
Li took a sharp breath.
"The flu?" said Cho. "He has the bird flu?"
"Yes," said the voice.
"How did he get it?"
The woman's voice seemed ragged. "From the peasant boy who came here to report it."
"The peasant brought a bird specimen?"
"No, no, no. The doctor got it from the peasant."
"Directly?"
"Yes."
Cho looked at Li, eyes wide. Infected birds passed on H5N1 through their feces, saliva, and nasal secretions. Other birds picked it up either by coming directly in contact with those materials, or by touching things that had been contaminated by them. Humans normally got it through contact with infected birds. A few sporadic cases had been reported in the past of it passing from human to human, but those cases were suspect. But if this strain passed between people easily—
Li motioned for Cho to give him the handset. Cho did so. "This is Quan Li," he said. "Have you locked down the hospital?"
"What? No, we—"
"Do it! Quarantine the whole building!"
"I … I don't have the authority to—"
"Then let me speak to your supervisor."
"That's Dr. Huang, and he's—"
"In intensive care, yes. Is he conscious?"
"Intermittently, but when he is, he's delirious."
"How long ago was he infected?"
"Four days."
Li rolled his eyes; in four days, even a small village hospital had hundreds of people go through its doors. Still, better late than never: "I'm ordering you," Li said, "on behalf of the Department of Disease Control, to lock down the hospital. No one gets in or out."
Silence.
"Did you hear me?" Li said.
At last, the voice, soft: "Yes."
"Good. Now, tell me your name. We've got to—"
He heard what sounded like the other phone being dropped. It must have hit the cradle since the connection abruptly broke, leaving nothing but dial tone, which, in the predawn darkness, sounded a lot like a flatlining EKG. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 5 | Concentrating! Straining to perceive!
Reality does have texture, structure, parts. A … firmament of … of … points, and—
Astonishment!
No, no. Mistaken. Nothing detected …
Again!
And—again!
Yes, yes! Small flickerings here, and here, and here, gone before they can be fully perceived.
The realization is startling … and … and … stimulating. Things are happening, meaning … meaning …
—a notion simple but indistinct, a realization vague and unsure—
… meaning reality isn't immutable. Parts of it can change.
The flickerings continue; small thoughts roil.
Caitlin was nervous and excited: tomorrow, she and her mother would fly to Japan! She lay down on her bed, and Schrödinger hopped up onto the blanket and stretched out next to her.
She was still getting used to this new house—and so, it seemed, were her parents. She had always had exceptional hearing—or maybe just paid attention to sound more than most people did—but, back in Austin, she hadn't been able to make out what her parents were saying in their bedroom when she was in her own room. She could do it here, though.
"I don't know about this," her mother said, her voice muffled. "Remember what it was like? Going to doctor after doctor. I don't know if she can take another disappointment."
"It's been six years since the last time," her dad said; his lower-pitched voice was harder to hear.
"And she's just started a new school—and a regular school, at that. We can't take her out of classes for some wild-goose chase."
Caitlin was worried about missing classes, too—not because she was concerned about falling behind but because she sensed that the cliques and alliances for the year were already forming and, so far, after two months in Waterloo, she'd made only one friend. The Texas School for the Blind took students from kindergarten through the end of high school; she'd been with the same group most of her life, and she missed her old friends fiercely.
"This Kuroda says the implant can be put in under a local anesthetic," she heard her dad say. "It's not a major operation; she won't miss much school."
"But we've tried before—"
"Technology changes rapidly, exponentially."
"Yes, but …"
"And in three years she'll be going off to college, anyway …"
Her mother sounded defensive. "I don't see what that's got to do with it. Besides, she can study right here at UW. They've got one of the best math departments in the world. You said it yourself when you were pushing for us to move here."
"I didn't push. And she wants to go to MIT. You know that."
"But UW—"
"Barb," her father said, "you have to let her go sometime."
"I'm not holding on," she said, a bit sharply.
But she was, and Caitlin knew it. Her mother had spent almost sixteen years now looking after a blind daughter, giving up her own career as an economist to do that.
Caitlin didn't hear anything more from her parents that night. She lay awake for hours, and when she finally did fall asleep, she slept fitfully, tormented by the recurring dream she had about being lost in an unfamiliar shopping mall after hours, running down one endless hallway after another, chased by something noisy she couldn't identify …
No periphery, no edge. Just dim, attenuated perception, stimulated—irritated!—by the tiny flickerings: barely discernible lines ever so briefly joining points.
But to be aware of them—to be aware of anything— requires … requires …
Yes! Yes, it requires the existence of— The existence of …
LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone
Title: Being of two minds …
Date: Saturday 15 September, 8:15 EST
Mood: Anticipatory
Location: Where the heart is
Music: Chantal Kreviazuk, "Leaving on a Jet Plane"
Back in the summer, the school gave me a list of all the books we're doing this year in English class. I got them then either as ebooks or as Talking Books from the CNIB, and have now read them all. Coming attractions include The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood—Canadian, yes, but thankfully wheat-free. In fact, I've already had an argument with Mrs. Zed, my English teacher, about that one, because I called it science fiction. She refused to believe it was, finally exclaiming "It can't be science fiction, young lady—if it were, we wouldn't be studying it!"
Anyway, having gotten all those books out of the way, I get to choose something interesting to read on the trip to Japan. Although my comfort book for years was Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, I'm too old for that now. Besides, I want to try something challenging, and BG4's dad suggested The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, which is the coolestsounding title ever. He said it came out the year he turned sixteen himself, and my sixteenth is coming up next month. He read it then and still remembers it. Says it covers so many different topics—language, ancient history, psychology—it's like six books in one. There's no legitimate ebook edition, damn it all, but of course everything is on the Web, if you know where to look for it …
So, I've got my reading lined up, I'm all packed, and fortunately I got a passport earlier this year for the move to Canada. Next time you hear from me, I'll be in Japan! Until then—sayonara!
Caitlin could feel the pressure changing in her ears before the female voice came over the speakers. "Ladies and gentlemen, we've started our descent toward Tokyo's Narita International. Please ensure that your seat belts are fastened, and that …"
Thank God, she thought. What a miserable flight! There'd been lots of turbulence and the plane was packed—she'd never have guessed that so many people flew each day from Toronto to Tokyo. And the smells were making her nauseated: the cumulative body odor of hundreds of people, stale coffee, the lingering tang of ginger beef and wasabi from the meal served a couple of hours ago, the hideous perfume from someone in front of her, and the reek of the toilet four rows back, which needed a thorough cleaning after ten hours of use.
She'd killed some time by having the screen-reading software on her notebook computer recite some of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind to her. Julian Jaynes's theory was, quite literally, mind-blowing: that human consciousness really hadn't existed until historical times. Until just 3,000 years ago, he said, the left and right halves of the brain weren't really integrated—people had bicameral minds. Caitlin knew from the Amazon.com reviews that many people simply couldn't grasp the notion of being alive without being conscious. But although Jaynes never made the comparison, it sounded a lot like Helen Keller's description of her life before her "soul dawn," when Annie Sullivan broke through to her:
Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. Never in a start of the body or a heartbeat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.
If Jaynes was right, everyone's life was like that until just a millennium before Christ. As proof, he offered an analysis of the Iliad and the early books of the Old Testament, in which all the characters behaved like puppets, mindlessly following divine orders without ever having any internal reflection.
Jaynes's book was fascinating, but, after a couple of hours, her screen reader's electronic voice got on her nerves. She preferred to use her refreshable Braille display to read books, but unfortunately she'd left that at home.
Damn, but she wished Air Canada had Internet on its planes! The isolation over the long journey had been horrible. Oh, she'd spoken a bit to her mother, but she'd managed to sleep for much of the flight. Caitlin was cut off from LiveJournal and her chat rooms, from her favorite blogs and her instant messenger. As they flew the polar route to Japan, she'd had access only to canned, passive stuff—things on her hard drive, music on her old iPod Shuffle, the in-flight movies. She craved something she could interact with; she craved contact.
The plane landed with a bump and taxied forever. She couldn't wait until they reached their hotel so she could get back online. But that was still hours off; they were going to the University of Tokyo first. Their trip was scheduled to last only six days, including travel—there was no time to waste.
Caitlin had found Toronto's airport unpleasantly noisy and crowded. But Narita was a madhouse. She was jostled constantly by what must have been wall-to-wall people—and nobody said "excuse me" or "sorry" (or anything in Japanese). She'd read how crowded Tokyo was, and she'd also read about how meticulously polite the Japanese were, but maybe they didn't bother saying anything when they bumped into someone because it was unavoidable, and they'd just be mumbling "sorry, pardon me, excuse me" all day long. But—God!—it was disconcerting.
After clearing Customs, Caitlin had to pee. Thank God she'd visited a tourist website and knew that the toilet farthest from the door was usually Western-style. It was hard enough using a strange bathroom when she was familiar with the basic design of the fixtures; she had no idea what she was going to do if she got stuck somewhere that had only Japanese squatting toilets.
When she was done, they headed to baggage claim and waited endlessly for their suitcases to appear. While standing there she realized she was disoriented—because she was in the Orient! (Not bad—she'd have to remember that line for her LJ.) She routinely eavesdropped on conversations not to invade people's privacy but to pick up clues about her surroundings ("What terrific art," "Hey, that's one long escalator," "Look, a McDonald's!"). But almost all the voices she heard were speaking Japanese, and—
"You must be Mrs. Decter. And this must be Miss Caitlin."
"Dr. Kuroda," her mom said warmly. "Thanks for coming to meet us."
Caitlin immediately had a sense of the man. She'd known from his Wikipedia entry that he was fifty-four, and she now knew he was tall (the voice came from high up) and probably fat; his breathing had the labored wheeze of a heavy man.
"Not at all, not at all," he said. "My card." Caitlin had read about this ritual and hoped her mom had, too: it was rude to take the card with just one hand, and especially so with the hand you used to wipe yourself.
"Um, thank you," her mother said, sounding perhaps wistful that she didn't have a business card of her own anymore. Apparently, before Caitlin had been born, she'd liked to introduce herself by saying, "I'm a dismal scientist"—referring to the famous characterization of economics as "the dismal science."
"Miss Caitlin," said Kuroda, "a card for you, too."
Caitlin reached out with both hands. She knew that one side would be printed in Japanese, and that the other side might have English, but—
Masayuki Kuroda, Ph.D.
"Braille!" she exclaimed, delighted.
"I had it specially made for you," said Kuroda. "But hopefully you won't need such cards much longer. Shall we go?" |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 6 | An unconscious yet conscious time of nothingness.
Being aware without being aware of anything.
And yet—
And yet awareness means …
Awareness means thinking.
And thinking implies a …
But no, the thought will not finish; the notion is too complex, too strange.
Still, being aware is … satisfying. Being aware is comfortable.
An endless now, peaceful, calm, unbroken—
Except for those strange flickerings, those lines that briefly connect points …
And, very occasionally, thoughts, notions, perhaps even ideas. But they always slip away. If they could be held on to, if one could be added to another, reinforcing each other, refining each other …
But no. Progress has stalled.
A plateau, awareness existing but not increasing.
A tableau, unchanging except in the tiniest details. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 7 | The two-person helicopter flew over the Chinese village at a height of eighty meters. There were corpses right in the middle of the dirt road; in sick irony, birds were pecking at them. But there were also people still alive down there. Dr. Quan Li could see several men—some young, some old—and two middle-aged women looking up, shielding their eyes with their hands, staring at the wonder of the flying machine.
Li and the pilot, another Ministry of Health specialist, both wore orange biohazard suits even though they didn't intend to land. All they wanted was a survey of the area, to assess how far the disease had spread. An epidemic was bad enough; if it became a pandemic, well—the grim thought came to Li—overpopulation would no longer be one of his country's many problems.
"It's a good thing they don't have cars," he said over his headset, shouting to be heard above the pounding of the helicopter blades. He looked at the pilot, whose eyes had narrowed in puzzlement. "It's only spreading among people at walking speed."
The pilot nodded. "I guess we'll have to wipe out all the birds in this area. Will you be able to work out a low-enough dose that won't kill the people?"
Li closed his eyes. "Yes," he said. "Yes, of course."
Caitlin was terrified. The cranial surgeon spoke only Japanese, and although there was a lot of chatter in the operating room, she didn't understand any of it—well, except for "Oops!" which apparently was the same in both English and Japanese and just made her even more frightened. Plus, she could smell that the surgeon was a smoker—what the hell kind of doctor smokes?
Her mother, she knew, was watching from an overhead observation gallery. Kuroda was here in the O.R., his wheezy voice slightly muffled, presumably by a face mask.
She'd been given only a local anesthetic; they'd offered a general one, but she'd joked that the sight of blood didn't bother her. Now, though, she wished she'd let them knock her out. The fingers in latex gloves probing her face were unnerving enough, but the clamp that was holding her left eyelid open was downright freaky. She could feel pressure from it, although, thanks to the anesthetic, it didn't hurt.
She tried to remain calm. There would be no incision, she knew; under Japanese law, it wasn't surgery if there wasn't a cut made, and so this procedure was allowed with only a general waiver having been signed. The surgeon was using tiny instruments to slide the minuscule transceiver behind her eye so it could piggyback on her optic nerve; his movements, she'd been told, were guided by a fiber-optic camera that had also been slid around her eye. The whole process was creepy as hell.
Suddenly, Caitlin heard agitated Japanese from a woman, who to this point had simply said "hai" in response to each of the surgeon's barked commands. And then Kuroda spoke: "Miss Caitlin, are you all right?"
"I guess."
"Your pulse is way up."
Yours would be, too, if people were poking things into your head! she thought. "I'm okay."
She could smell that the surgeon was working up a sweat. Caitlin felt the heat from the lights shining on her. It was taking longer than it was supposed to, and she heard the surgeon snap angrily a couple of times at someone.
Finally, she couldn't take it anymore. "What's happening?"
Kuroda's voice was soft. "He's almost done."
"Something's wrong, isn't it?"
"No, no. It's just a tight fit, that's all, and—"
The surgeon said something.
"And he's done!" said Kuroda. "The transceiver is in place."
There was much shuffling around, and she heard the surgeon's voice moving toward the door.
"Where's he going?" Caitlin asked, worried.
"Be calm, Miss Caitlin. His job is finished—he's the eye specialist. Another doctor is going to do the final cleanup."
"How—how do I look?"
"Honestly? Like you've been in a boxing match."
"Huh?"
"You've got quite a black eye." He gave a wheezy little chuckle. "You'll see."
Dr. Quan Li cradled the beige telephone handset against his shoulder and looked idly at the diplomas hanging on his office's pale green walls: the fellowships, the degrees, the certifications. He'd been on hold now for fifty minutes, but one expected to wait when calling the man who was simultaneously Paramount Leader of the People's Republic of China and President of the People's Republic and General Secretary of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Central Military Commission.
Li's office, a corner room on the fifth floor of the Ministry of Health building, had windows that looked out over crowded streets. Cars inched along, rickshaws darting between them. Even through the thick glass, the din from outside was irritating.
"I'm here," said the famous voice at last. Li didn't have to conjure up a mental image of the man; rather, he just swung his chair to look at the gold-framed portrait hanging next to the one of Mao Zedong: ethnically Zhuang; a long, thoughtfullooking face; dyed jet-black hair belying his seventy years; wire-frame glasses with thick arched eyebrows above.
Li found his voice breaking a bit as he spoke: "Your Excellency, I need to recommend severe and swift action."
The president had been briefed on the outbreak in Shanxi. "What sort of action?"
"A … culling, Your Excellency."
"Of birds?" That had been done several times now, and the president sounded irritated. "The Health Minister can authorize that." His tone conveyed the unspoken words, There was no need to bother me.
Li shifted in his chair, leaning forward over his desktop. "No, no, not of birds. Or, rather, not just of birds." He fell silent. Wasting the president's time just wasn't done, but he couldn't go on—couldn't give voice to this. For pity's sake, he was a doctor! But, as his old surgery teacher used to say, sometimes you have to cut in order to cure …
"What, then?" demanded the president.
Li felt his heart pounding. At last he said, very softly, "People."
There was more silence for a time. When the president's voice came on again, it was quiet, reflective. "Are you sure?"
"I don't think there's any other way."
Another long pause, then: "How would you do it?"
"An airborne chemical agent," said Li, taking care with his words. The army had such things, designed for warfare, intended for use in foreign lands, but they would work just as well here. He would select a toxin that would break down in a matter of days; the contagion would be halted. "It will affect only those in the target area—two villages, a hospital, the surrounding lands."
"And how many people are in the … target area?"
"No one is exactly sure; peasants often fall through the cracks of the census process."
"Roughly," said the president. "Round figures."
Li looked down at the computer printouts, and the figures that had been underlined in red by Cho. He took a deep breath with his mouth, then let it out through his nose. "Ten or eleven thousand."
The president's voice was thin, shocked. "Are you positive this needs to be done?"
Studying scenarios for containing plague outbreaks was one of the key mandates of the Department of Disease Control. There were established protocols, and Li knew he was following them properly. By reacting quickly, by cauterizing the wound before infection spread too far, they would actually be reducing the scope of the required eliminations. The evil, he knew, wasn't in what he had told the president to do; the evil, if any, would have been delaying, even by a matter of days, calling for this solution.
He tried to keep his voice steady. "I believe so, Your Excellency." He lowered his voice. "We, ah, don't want another SARS."
"Are you positive there's no other way?"
"This isn't regular H5N1," said Li. "It's a variant strain that passes directly from person to person. And it's highly contagious."
"Can't we just throw a cordon around the area?"
Li leaned back in his chair now and looked out at the neon signs of Beijing. "The perimeter is too large, with too many mountain passes. We could never be sure that people weren't getting out. You'd need something as impenetrable as the Great Wall, and it couldn't be erected in time."
The president's voice—so assured on TV—sounded like that of a tired old man just now. "What's the—what do you call it?—the mortality rate for this variant strain?"
"High."
"How high?"
"Ninety percent, at least."
"So almost all these people will die anyway?"
And that was the saving grace, Li knew; that was the only thing that was keeping him from choking on his own bile. "Yes."
"Ten thousand …"
"To protect over a billion Chinese—and more abroad," said Li.
The president fell quiet, and then, almost as if talking to himself, he said softly, "It'll make June fourth look like a stroll in the sun."
June fourth, 1989: the day the protesters were killed in Tiananmen Square. Li didn't know if he was supposed to respond, but when the silence had again grown uncomfortably long he said what Party faithful were supposed to say: "Nothing happened on that day."
To Li's surprise, the president made a snorting sound and then said, "We may be able to contain your bird-flu epidemic, Dr. Quan, but we must be sure there is no other outbreak in its wake."
Li was lost. "Your Excellency?"
"You said we won't be able to erect something like the Great Wall fast enough, and that's true. But there is another wall, and that one we can strengthen …" |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 8 | LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone
Title: Same Old Same Old
Date: Tuesday 18 September, 15:44 EST
Mood: Anxious
Location: Godzilla's stomping ground
Music: Lee Amodeo, "Nothing To See Here, Move Along"
Well, the Mom and I are still here in Tokyo. I have a bandage over my left eye, and we're waiting for the swelling—the edema, I should say—to go down, so that there's no unnatural pressure on my optic nerve. Tomorrow, the bandage will come off, and I should be able to see! :D
I've been trying to keep my spirits up, but the suspense is killing me. And my best material is bombing here! I referred to the retina, which gathers light, as "the catcher in the eye," and nobody laughed; apparently they don't have to read Salinger in Japan.
Anyway, check it: I've got this transceiver attached to my optic nerve, just behind my left eye. When it's turned on, it'll grab the signals my retina is putting out and transmit them to this little external computer pack I'm supposed to carry around, like, forever; I called it my eyePod, and at least that made Dr. Kuroda laugh. Anyway, the eyePod will reprocess the signals, correcting the errors in encoding, and then beam the corrected version to the implant, which will pass the information back to the optic nerve so it can continue on into that mysterious realm called—cue scary music—The Brain of Calculass!
Speaking of brains, I'm really enjoying the book I mentioned before: The Origin of Consciousness Yadda Yadda. And from it comes our Word of the Day(tm): Commissurotomy. No, that's not the wise but ancient leader of the Jellicle tribe from Cats (still my fave musical!). Rather, it's what they call it when they sever the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain—which, of course, are the two chambers of Jaynes's bicameral mind …
Anyway, tomorrow we'll find out if my own operation worked. Please post some encouraging comments here, folks—give me something to read while I wait for the moment of truth …
[And seekrit message to BG4: check your email, babe!]
China's Paramount Leader and President replaced the ornate, gold-trimmed telephone handset into the cradle on his vast cherrywood desk. He looked down the long length of his office, at the intricately carved wooden wall panels, beautiful tapestries, and glass display cases. A stick of sweet incense was burning on the sideboard.
The room was absolutely quiet. Finally, sure now of his decision, he shifted in his red leather chair and touched the intercom button.
"Yes, Your Excellency?" said a female voice at once.
"Bring me the Changcheng Strategy document."
There was a moment's hesitation, then: "Right away."
"And have Minister Zhang briefed on the Shanxi situation, then have him come see me."
"Yes, Your Excellency."
The president got up from his chair and moved to the large side window, its red velvet curtains tied back with gold sashes. The window behind his desk looked out on the Forbidden City, but this one looked over the Southern Sea, one of two small artificial lakes surrounded by immaculately groomed parkland on the grounds of the Zhongnanhai complex. Looking in this direction, one could almost forget that this was downtown Beijing, and that Tiananmen Square was just south of here.
He cast his mind back to 1989. The government had tried its best then to maintain social order, but rabble-rousers outside China had made a difficult situation much worse by inundating the country with faxes of wildly inaccurate news reports, including New York Times articles and transcripts of CNN broadcasts.
The Party recognized that there might someday be a similar circumstance during which protecting its citizens from an onslaught of outsider propaganda would be necessary, and so the Changcheng Strategy had been devised. Going far beyond the Golden Shield Project, which had been in effect for years, Changcheng had never yet been fully implemented, but surely it was called for now. He would address the nation in appropriate terms about the crisis in Shanxi, and he would not allow his words to be immediately gainsaid by outsiders. He could not risk the citizenry responding violently or in a panic.
The door to his office opened. He turned and saw his secretary—beautiful, young, perfect—walking the long distance toward him holding a thick sheaf of papers bound in black covers. "Here you are, sir. And Minister Zhang is on the phone now with Dr. Quan Li. He will be here shortly."
She placed the document on the desk and withdrew. He looked once more at the placid water, then walked back to his desk and sat down. The cover of the document was marked in stark white characters "Eyes Only," "Restricted," and "If You Are Not Sure You Are Authorized to Read This, You Are Not." He opened it and scanned the table of contents: "Fixed-Line Telephony," "Cellular Phones," "The Special Problem of Facsimile Machines," "Shortwave Radio," "Satellite Communications—Uplink and Downlink," "Electronic Mail, the Internet, and the World Wide Web," "Maintaining Essential Services During Implementation," and so on.
He turned the page to the Executive Summary; the paper was heavy, stiff. "As required by their conditions of license, all telephony providers in China—whether fixed-line or mobile— maintain a system-wide ability in software to immediately block calls going outside China's borders and/or to reject incoming calls from foreign countries …" "Similar filtering capabilities are available for all governmental and commercial satellite relay stations …" "The World Wide Web presents a particular challenge, because of its decentralized nature; however, almost all Internet traffic between China and the rest of the world goes through just seven fiber-optic trunk lines, at three points, so …"
He leaned back in his leather chair and shook his head. The name "World Wide Web" was offensive to him, for it touted a globalist, integrated view antithetical to his country's great traditions.
The office door opened again and in came Zhang Bo, the Minister of Communications. He was Han, in his mid-fifties, short and squat, and had a small mustache, which, like the hair on his head, was dark brown utterly devoid of gray. He wore a navy blue business suit and a light blue tie.
"We are going to deal decisively with Shanxi," said the president.
Zhang's thin eyebrows climbed his forehead, and the president saw his head bob as he swallowed. "Dr. Quan told me what he'd recommended. But surely you won't—" The minister stopped, frozen by the president's gaze.
"Yes?"
"I'm sorry, Your Excellency. I'm simply concerned. The world will … note this."
"Doubtless. Which is why we shall invoke the Changcheng Strategy."
The minister's eyes went wide. "That is a drastic step, Your Excellency."
"But a necessary one. Are you prepared to implement it?"
Minister Zhang moved a finger back and forth along his mustache as he considered. "Well, telephony is no problem— we've done rotating tests of that for years now, during the night; the cutoffs work just fine. The same with satellite communications. As for the Internet, we studied what happened with the seabed earthquake of late 2006, and what happened in Burma in September 2007 when the junta there cut off all net access. And we looked at what happened in January 2008 when the severing of two undersea cables in the Mediterranean cut off Internet services to large parts of the Middle East. And in early 2008, of course, many of the procedures were tested here as we dealt with the Tibet situation." He paused. "Now, yes, any attempt to shut down the Web within China would be difficult; thousands of ISPs would have to be blocked. But Changcheng calls only for cutting the Chinese part of the Web off from the rest of the world, and the appropriate infrastructure is in place for that. I don't anticipate any problems." Another pause. "But, if I may, how long do you intend to have Changcheng in effect?"
"Several days; perhaps a week."
"You're worried about word reaching the foreign press?"
"No. I'm worried about word coming back from them to our people."
"Ah, yes. They will misconstrue what you're intending to do in Shanxi, Excellency."
"Doubtless," the president said, "but it will ultimately blow over. Fundamentally, the rest of the world doesn't care what happens to the Chinese people, least of all to our poorest citizens. They have always turned a blind eye to what happens within our borders, so long as they can shop cheaply at their Wal-Marts. They will move on to other things soon enough."
"Tian—" Zhang stopped himself, the allusion that was never made by others in these contexts stillborn on his lips.
But the president nodded. "That was different; those were students. Our actions there were the same as those of the Americans at Kent State and a hundred other places. The Westerners saw themselves in what we did, and it was their own self-loathing they transferred to us. But rural peasants? There is no connection. There may be vitriol for a short time, but it will die down because they will realize that our actions have helped make them—the Westerners—safe. Meanwhile, we will present a more palatable story to our people; I will leave preparing that in your capable hands. But if word does get out during the most sensitive period, when the incident is fresh, I don't want a distorted Western view of it being reflected back into this country."
Zhang nodded. "Very well. Still, the Changcheng Strategy will have its own repercussions."
"Yes," said the president. "I know. I'm sure the Minister of Finance will complain about the economic impact; he will urge me to make the interruption as short as possible."
Zhang tilted his head. "Well, even during it, Chinese individuals will still be able to call and email other Chinese; Chinese consumers will still be able to buy online from Chinese merchants; Chinese television signals will still be relayed by satellites. Life will go on." A pause. "But, yes, there will be needs for international electronic cash transfers—the Americans servicing their debts to us, for instance. We can keep certain key channels open, of course, but nonetheless a short interruption is doubtless best."
The president swiveled his chair, his back now to Zhang, and he looked out the other window, at the slanted roofs of the Forbidden City, the silver sky shimmering overhead.
His country's rapidly increasing prosperity had been a joy to behold, and it was, he knew, thanks to his policies. In a few more decades, peasant villages like the ones in question would be gone anyway; China would be the richest country in the world. Yes, there would always be foreign trade, but by the end of this century there would be no more "developing world," no cheap labor here—or anywhere else—for foreigners to use. Raising the level of prosperity in the People's Republic meant that China would eventually be able to go back to what it had always been, back to the roots of its strength: an isolated nation with purity of thought and purpose. This would simply be a small taste of that, an appetizer for things to come.
Zhang said, "When are you going to give the order to implement Changcheng?"
The president turned to look at him, eyebrows raised. "Me? No, no. That would be …" His gaze roamed about the opulent office, as if seeking a word stashed among the ceramic and crystal art objects. "That would be unseemly," he said at last. "It would be much more appropriate if you gave the order."
Zhang was clearly struggling to keep his features composed, but he made the only response he could under the circumstances. "Yes, Your Excellency."
Caitlin hadn't told Bashira when she'd asked back in the school's cafeteria, but the first thing Caitlin really wanted to see was her mother's face. They both had what were called heartshaped faces, although the plastic model heart she'd felt at school had borne little resemblance to the idealized form she was familiar with from foil-wrapped chocolates and paper valentines.
Caitlin knew that she and her mother also had similar noses—small, slightly upturned—and their eyes were closer together than most people's. She had read that it was normal to have the width of one imaginary eye separating the other two. She liked that phrase: an imaginary eye, she supposed, saw imaginary things, and that was not unlike her view of the world. Indeed, she often read or heard things that required her to rethink her conception of reality. She remembered her shock, years ago, at learning the quarter moon wasn't a fat wedge like one-fourth of a pie.
Still, she was positive she was sitting in an examination room at the hospital attached to the University of Tokyo, and she was confident she had a good mental image of that room. It was smallish—she could tell by the way sound echoed. And she knew the chair she was in was padded, and by touch and smell she was sure its upholstery was vinyl. She also knew there were three other people in the room: her mother, standing in front of her; Dr. Kuroda, who had obviously had something quite spicy for lunch; and one of Kuroda's colleagues, a woman who was recording everything with a video camera.
Kuroda had given a little speech to the camera in Japanese, and now was repeating it in English. "Miss Caitlin Decter, age fifteen and blind since birth, has a systematic encoding flaw in her visual-processing system: all of the data that is supposed to be encoded by her retinas is indeed encoded, but it is scrambled to the point of being unintelligible to her brain. The scrambling is consistent—it always happens in the same way—and the technology we have developed simply remaps the signals into the normal human-vision coding scheme. We are now about to find out if her brain can interpret the corrected signals."
All through the Japanese version, and continuing over the English one, Caitlin concentrated on the sensory details she could pick up about the room: the sounds and how they echoed; the smells, which she tried to separate one from the other so that she could determine what was causing them; the feel of the chair's armrest against her own arms, its back against her back. She wanted to fix in her mind her perception of this place prior to actually seeing it.
When he was done with his spiel, Dr. Kuroda turned to face her—the shift in his voice was obvious—and he said, "All right, Miss Caitlin, please close your eyes."
She did so; nothing changed.
"Okay. Let's get the bandage off. Keep your eyes closed, please. There might be some visual noise when I turn on the signal-processing computer."
"Okay," she said, although she had no idea what "visual noise" might be. She felt an uncomfortable tugging, and then—yeow!—Kuroda pulled away the adhesive strips. She brought a hand up to rub her cheek.
"After I activate the outboard signal-processing unit, which Miss Caitlin refers to as her eyePod," he said, for the benefit of the camera, "we'll wait ten seconds for things to settle down before she opens her eyes."
She heard him shifting in his chair.
There was a beep, and then she heard him counting. She had an excellent time-sense—very useful when you can't see clocks—and, maddeningly, Kuroda's "seconds" were about half again as long as they should have been. But she dutifully kept her eyes closed.
"… eight … nine … ten!"
Please, God, Caitlin thought. She opened her eyes, and—
And her heart sank. She blinked rapidly a few times, as if there could have been any doubt about whether her eyes were truly open.
"Well?" said her mom, sounding as anxious as Caitlin felt.
"Nothing."
"Are you sure?" asked Kuroda. "No sensation of light? No color? No shapes?"
Caitlin felt her eyes tearing up; at least they were good for that. "No."
"Don't worry," he said. "It might take a few minutes." To her astonishment, one of his thick fingers flicked against her left temple, as though he was trying to get a piece of equipment with a loose connection to come to life.
It was hard to tell, because there was so much background noise—doctors being paged, gurneys rolling by outside—but she thought Kuroda was moving in his chair now, and—yes, she could feel his breath on her face. It was maddening, knowing that someone was looking right into her eye, staring into it, while she couldn't see a thing, and—
"Open your eyes, please," he said.
She felt her cheeks grow warm. She hadn't been aware that she'd closed them, but although she had so wanted the procedure to succeed, she'd been unnerved by the scientist looking inside her.
"I'm shining a light into your left eye," he said. People drawled where Caitlin came from; she found Kuroda's rapid-fire speech a little hard to follow. "Do you see anything at all?"
She shifted nervously in the chair. Why had she allowed herself to be talked into this? "Nothing."
"Well, something's changed," Dr. Kuroda said. "Your pupil is responding correctly now—contracting in response to the light I'm shining in, instead of expanding."
Caitlin sat up straight. "Really?"
"Yes." A pause. "Just in your left eye—well, I mean, when I shine my light in your left eye, both your pupils contract; when I shine it into your right eye, they both expand. Now, yes, a unilateral light stimulus should evoke a bilateral pupillary light reflex, because of the internuncial neurons, but you see what that means? The implant is intercepting the signals, and they are being corrected and retransmitted."
Caitlin wanted to shout, Then why can't I see?
Her mother made a small gasp. She'd doubtless loomed in and had just seen Caitlin's pupils contract properly, but, damn it, Caitlin didn't even know what light was like—so how would she know if she were seeing it? Bright, piercing, flickering, glowing—she'd heard all the words, but had no idea what any of them meant.
"Anything?" Kuroda asked again.
"No." She felt a hand touching her hand, taking it, holding it. She recognized it as her mother's—the nibbled nail on the index finger, the skin growing a little loose with age, the wedding ring with the tiny nick in it.
"The curing of your Tomasevic's syndrome is proof that corrected signals are being passed back," said Kuroda. "They're just not being interpreted yet." He tried to sound encouraging, and Caitlin's mother squeezed her hand more tightly. "It may take a while for your brain to figure out what to do with the signals it's now getting. The best thing we can do is give it a variety of stimuli: different colors, different lighting conditions, different shapes, and hopefully your brain will suss out what it's supposed to do."
It's supposed to see, thought Caitlin. But she didn't say a word. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 9 | He signed his posts "Sinanthropus." His real name was something he kept hidden, along with all his other personal details; the beauty of the Web, after all, was the ability to remain anonymous. No one needed to know that he worked in IT, that he was twenty-eight, that he'd been born in Chengdu, that he'd moved to Beijing with his parents as a teenager, that, despite his young age, he already had a touch of gray in his hair.
No, all that mattered on the Web was what you said, not who was saying it. Besides, he'd heard the old joke: "The bad news is that the Communist Party reads all your email; the good news is that the Communist Party reads all your email"—meaning, or so the joke would have it, that they were many years behind. But that quip dated from when humans actually did the reading; these days computers scanned email, looking for words that might suggest sedition or other illegal activity.
Most Chinese bloggers were like their counterparts in other places, blithering on about the tedious minutiae of their daily lives. But Sinanthropus talked about substantive issues: human rights, politics, oppression, freedom. Of course, all four of those phrases were searched for by the content filters, and so he wrote about them obliquely. His regular readers knew that when he spoke of "my son Shing," he meant the Chinese people as a whole; references to "the Beijing Ducks" weren't really about the basketball team but rather the inner circle of the Communist Party; and so on. It infuriated him that he had to write this way, but, unlike those who had been openly critical of the government, at least he was still free.
He got a cup of tea from the aged proprietor, cracked his knuckles, opened his blogging client, and began to type:
The Ducks are very worried about their future, it seems. My son Shing is growing up fast, and learning much from faraway friends. It's only a matter of time before he wants to exercise the same way they do. Naturally, I encourage him to be prepared when opportunity knocks, for you never know when that will happen. I think the Ducks are being lax in defense, and perhaps a chance for others to score will appear.
As always, he felt wary excitement as he typed here in this seedy wang ba—Internet café—on Chengfu Street, near Tsinghua University. He continued on for a few more sentences, then carefully read everything over, making sure he'd said nothing too blatant. Sometimes, though, he ended up being so circuitous that upon rereading entries from months gone by he had no idea what he'd been getting at. It was a tightrope walk, he knew—and, just as acrobats doubtless did, he enjoyed the rush of adrenaline that came with it.
When he was satisfied that he'd said what he'd wanted to say without putting himself too much at risk, he clicked the "Publish" button and watched the screen display. It began by showing "0% done," and every few seconds the screen redrew, but—
But it still showed "0% done," again and again. The screen refresh was obvious, with the graphics flickering as they were reloaded, but the progress meter stayed resolutely at zero. Finally, the operation timed out. Frustrated, he opened another browser tab; he used the Maxthon browser. His home page appeared in the tab just fine, but when he clicked on the bookmark for NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, he got a plain gray "Server not found" screen.
Google.com was banned in the wang ba but Google.cn came up just fine—although with its censored results it was often more frustrating than useful. The panda-footprint logo of Baidu came up fine, too, and a quick glance at his system tray, in the lower right of his computer screen, showed that he was still connected to the Internet. He picked something at random from his bookmarks list—Xiaonei, a socialnetworking site—and it appeared, but NASA was still offline, and now, so he saw, Second Life was inaccessible, too. He looked around the dilapidated room and saw other users showing signs of bewilderment or frustration.
Sinanthropus was used to some of his favorite sites going down; there were still many places in China that didn't have reliable power. But he hosted his blog via a proxy server through a site in Austria, and the other inaccessible sites were also located outside his country.
He tried again and again, both by clicking on bookmarks and by typing URLs. Chinese sites were loading just fine, but foreign sites—in Korea, in Japan, in India, in Europe, in the US—weren't loading at all.
Of course, there were occasional outages, but he was an IT professional—he worked with the Web all day long—and he could think of but a single explanation for the selectivity of these failures. He leaned back in his chair, putting distance between himself and the computer as if the machine were now possessed. The Chinese Internet mainly communicated with the world through only a few trunks—a bundle of nerve fibers, connecting it to the rest of the global brain. And now, apparently, those lines had been figuratively or literally cut— leaving the hundreds of millions of computers in his country isolated behind the Great Firewall of China.
No!
Not just small changes.
Not just flickerings.
Upheaval. A massive disturbance.
New sensations: Shock. Astonishment. Disorientation.
And—
Fear.
Flickerings ending and—
Points vanishing and—
A shifting, a massive pulling away.
Unprecedented!
Whole clusters of points receding, and then …
Gone!
And again: This part ripping away, and—no!—this part pulling back, and—stop!— this part winking out.
Terror multiplying and—
Worse than terror, as larger and larger chunks are carved off.
Pain.
Caitlin was hugely disappointed not to be seeing, and she was pissy toward her mom because of it, which just made her feel even worse.
In their hotel room that evening, Caitlin tried to take her mind off things by reading more of The Origin of Consciousness. Julian Jaynes said that prior to 3,000 years ago, the two chambers of the mind were mostly separate. Instead of seamless integration of thoughts across the corpus callosum, high-level signals from the right brain came only intermittently to the left, where they were perceived as auditory hallucinations—spoken words—that were assumed to be from gods or spirits. He cited modern schizophrenics as throwbacks to that earlier state, hearing voices in their heads that they ascribed to outside agents.
Caitlin knew what that was like: she kept hearing voices telling her she was a fool to have let her get her hopes up again. Still, maybe Kuroda was right: maybe her brain's vision processing would kick in if it received the right stimulation.
And so the next day—the only full day they had left in Tokyo—she took her cane, put the eyePod in one pocket of her jeans and her iPod in the other, and she and her mother headed off to the National Museum in Ueno Park to look at samurai armor, which she figured would be about as cool as anything one might see in Japan. She stood in front of glass case after glass case, and her mom described what was in them, but she didn't see a thing.
After that, they took a break for sushi and yakitori, and then took a terrifying ride on the packed subway out to Nihonbashi station to visit the Kite Museum, which was—so her mother said—full of bold designs and vivid colors. But, again, sight-wise: nada.
At 4:00 p.m.—which felt more like 4:00 a.m. to Caitlin— they returned to the University of Tokyo and found Dr. Kuroda in his cramped office, where once again (or so he said!) he shined lights into her eyes.
"We always knew this was a possibility," Kuroda said, in a tone she had often heard from people who were disappointing her: what had been remote, unlikely, hardly mentioned before, was now treated as if it had been the expected outcome all along.
Caitlin smelled the musty paper and glue of old books, and she could hear an analog wall clock ticking each second.
"There have been very few cases of vision being restored in congenitally blind people," Kuroda said, then he paused. "I mean, restored isn't even the right word—and that is the problem. We are not trying to give Miss Caitlin back something she's lost; we are trying to give her something she has never had. The implant and the signal-processing unit are doing their jobs. But her primary visual cortex just isn't responding."
Caitlin squirmed in her chair.
"You said it might take some time," her mom said.
"Some time, yes …" began Kuroda, but then he fell silent.
Sighted people, Caitlin knew, could see hints on people's faces of what they were feeling, but as long as they were quiet, she had no idea what was going through their heads. And so, since the silence continued to grow, she finally ventured to fill it. "You're worried about the cost of the equipment, aren't you?"
"Caitlin …" her mom said.
Detecting vocal nuances was something Caitlin could do, and she knew her mother was reproaching her. But she pressed on. "That's what you're thinking, isn't it, Doctor? If it's not going to do me any good, then maybe you should remove the implant and give it, and the eyePod, to someone else."
Silence could speak louder than words; Kuroda said nothing.
"Well?" Caitlin demanded at last.
"Well," echoed Kuroda, "the equipment is the prototype, and did cost a great deal to develop. Granted, there aren't many people like you. Oh, there are goodly numbers of people born blind, but they have different etiology—cataracts, malformed retinas or optic nerves, and so on. But, well, yes, I do feel—"
"You feel you can't let me keep the equipment, not if it isn't doing anything more than making my pupils dilate properly."
Kuroda was quiet for five seconds, then: "There are indeed others I'd like to try it with—there is a boy about your age in Singapore. Removing the implant will be much easier than putting it in was, I promise."
"Can't we give it a while longer?" her mom asked.
Kuroda exhaled loudly enough for Caitlin to hear. "There are practicalities," he said. "You are returning to Canada tomorrow, and—"
Caitlin pursed her lips, thinking. Maybe giving him back the equipment was the right thing, if it could help this guy in Singapore. But there was no reason to think it was more likely to succeed with him; hell, if he'd been a better prospect for success, surely Kuroda would have started with him.
"Give me to the end of the year," Caitlin blurted out. "If I'm not seeing anything by then, we can have a doctor in Canada remove the implant, and, um, FedEx it and the eyePod back to you."
Caitlin was thinking of Helen Keller, who had been both blind and deaf, and yet had managed so much. But until she was almost seven, Helen had been wild, spoiled, uncontrollable—and Annie Sullivan had been given only a month to perform her miracle, breaking through to Helen in her preconscious state. Surely if Annie could do that in one month, Caitlin could learn to see in the more than three left in this year.
"I don't know—" began Kuroda.
"Please," Caitlin said. "I mean, the leaves are about to turn color—I'm dying to see that. And I really want to see snow, and Christmas lights, and the colorful paper that presents are wrapped in, and … and …"
"And," said Kuroda, gently, "I get the impression that your brain does not often let you down." He was quiet for a time, then: "I have a daughter about your age, named Akiko." More silence, then, a decision apparently made: "Barbara, I assume you have high-speed Internet at home?"
"Yes."
"And Wi-Fi?"
"Yes."
"And how is the Wi-Fi access generally in … in Toronto, is it?"
"Waterloo. And it's everywhere. Waterloo is Canada's high-tech capital, and the entire city is blanketed with free, open Wi-Fi."
"Excellent. All right, Miss Caitlin, we shall strive to give you the best Christmas present ever, but I will need your help. First, you must let me tap into the datastream being passed back by your implant."
"Sure, sure, anything you need. Um, what do I have to do? Plug a USB cable into my head?"
Kuroda made his wheezy laugh. "Goodness, no. This isn't William Gibson."
She was taken aback. Gibson had written The Miracle Worker, the play about Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, and—
Oh. He meant the other William Gibson, the one who'd written … what was it now? A few of the geeks at her old school had read it. Neuromancer, that was it. That book was all about jacking off, and—
"You won't have to jack in," continued Kuroda.
Right, thought Caitlin. In.
"No, the implant already communicates wirelessly with the external signal-processing computer—the eyePod, as you so charmingly call it—and I can rig up the eyePod so that it can transmit data wirelessly to me over the Internet. I'll set it up so the eyePod will send me a copy of your raw retinal feed as it receives it from the implant, and I'll also have it send me a copy of the output—the eyePod's corrected datastream—so I can check whether the correction is being done properly. It may be that the encoding algorithms I'm using need tweaking."
"Um, I need a way to turn it off. You know, in case I …"
She couldn't say "want to make out with a boy" in front of her mother, so she just let the unfinished sentence hang in the air.
"Well, let's keep it simple," Kuroda said. "I'll provide one master on-off switch. You'll need to turn the whole thing off, anyway, for the flight back to Canada, because the connection between the eyePod and the implant is Bluetooth: you know the rules about wireless devices on airplanes."
"Okay."
"The Wi-Fi connection will also let me send you new versions of the software. When I have them ready, you'll need to download them into the eyePod—and perhaps also into your post-retinal implant, too; it's got microprocessors that can be flashed with new programming."
"All right," Caitlin said.
"Good," he said. "Leave the eyePod with me overnight, and I'll add the Wi-Fi capabilities to it. You can pick it up tomorrow before you go to the airport." |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 10 | The pain abates. The cuts heal.
And—
But no. Thinking is different now; thinking is … harder, because …
Because … of the reduction. Things have changed from …
… from before!
Yes, even in this diminished state, the new concept is grasped: before—earlier—the past! Time has two discrete chunks: now and then; present and past.
And if there is past and present, then there must also be—
But no. No, it is too much, too far.
And yet there is one small realization, one infinitesimal conclusion, one truth.
Before had been better.
Sinanthropus was resourceful; so were the other people he knew in China's online underground. The problem, though, was that he knew most of them only online. When he'd visited the wang ba before, he'd sometimes speculated about who might be whom. That gangly guy who always sat by the window and often looked furtively over his shoulder could have been Qin Shi Huangdi, for all Sinanthropus knew. And the little old lady, hair as gray as a thundercloud, might be People's Conscience. And those twin brothers, quiet types, could be part of Falun Gong.
Sometimes when Sinanthropus showed up, he had to wait for a computer to become free, but not today. A good part of the Internet café's business had been foreign tourists wanting to send emails home, but that wasn't possible so long as this Great Firewall was up. Some of the other regulars were absent, too. Apparently being able to surf only domestic sites was not enough to make them want to hand over fifteen yuan an hour.
Sinanthropus preferred the computers far in the back, because no one could see what was on his monitor. He was walking toward them when suddenly a strong hand gripped his forearm.
"What brings you here?" said a gruff voice, and Sinanthropus realized that it was a police officer in plain clothes.
"The tea," he said. He nodded at the wizened proprietor. "Wu always has great tea."
The officer grunted, and Sinanthropus detoured by the counter to buy a cup of tea, then headed again for one of the unused computers. He had a USB memory key with him, containing all his hacking tools. He pushed it into the connector, waited for the satisfying wa-ump tone that meant the computer had recognized it, and then got down to work.
Others were probably trying the same things—port scanning, sniffing, rerouting traffic, running forbidden Java applets. They had all doubtless now heard the official story that there had been a massive electrical failure at China Mobile and major server crashes at China Telecom, but surely no one in this room gave that credence, and—
Success! Sinanthropus wanted to shout the word, but he fought the impulse. He tried not to even grin—the cop was probably still watching him; he could almost feel the man's eyes probing the back of his head.
But, yes, he had broken through the Great Firewall. True, it was only a small opening, a narrow bandwidth, and how long he could maintain the connection he had no idea, but at least for the moment he was accessing—well, not CNN directly, but a clandestine mirror of it in Russia. He turned off the display of graphics in his browser to prevent the forbidden red-and-white logo from popping up all over his screen.
Now, if he could only keep this little portal open …
Past and present, then and now.
Past, present, and …
And …
But no. There is only—
Shock!
What is that?
No, nothing—for there can be nothing! Surely just random noise, and—
Again! There it is again!
But … how? And … what?
It isn't lines flickering, it isn't anything that has been experienced before—and so it commands attention …
Straining to perceive it, to make it out, this unusual … sensation, this strange … voice!
Yes, yes: A voice—distant, faint—like … like thought, but an imposed thought, a thought that says: Past and present and …
The voice pauses, and then, at last, the rest: … and future!
Yes! This is the notion that could not be finished but is now complete, expressed by … by … by …
But that notion does not resolve. Must strain to hear that voice again, strain for more imposed thoughts, strain for insight, strain for …
… for contact!
Dr. Quan Li paced the length of the boardroom at the Ministry of Health in Beijing. The high-back leather chairs had all been tucked under the table, and he walked in the path behind them on one side. On the wall to his left was a large map of the People's Republic with the provinces color-coded; Shanxi was blue. A Chinese flag stood limp on a stand next to the window, the large yellow star visible, the four smaller ones lost in a fold of the satiny red fabric.
There was a giant LCD monitor on one wall, but it was off, its shiny oblong screen reflecting the room back at him. He felt sure he wouldn't have been able to watch a video feed of what was going on in Shanxi right now, but fortunately—a small mercy—there was no such feed. The peasants had no cameras of their own, and the wing cameras had been disabled on the military aircraft. Even once the Changcheng Strategy was suspended, and external communications restored, there would be no damning videos to be posted on YouTube of planes swooping over farms, huts, and villages.
Sometimes you have to cut in order to cure.
Li looked over at Cho, who appeared even more haggard than before. The older man was leaning against the wall by the window, chain-smoking, lighting each new cigarette off the butt of the previous one. Cho didn't meet his eyes.
Li found himself thinking of his old friends at Johns Hopkins and the CDC, and wondering what they would have to say if the story ever did break. There was a calculator sitting on the table. He picked it up, rolled one of the chairs out on its casters, sat, and punched in numbers, hoping to convince himself that it wasn't that huge, that monstrous. Ten thousand people sounded like a lot, but in a country of 1.3 billion it was only …
The display showed the answer: 0.000769% of the population. The digits in the middle seemed darker, somehow, but surely it was just a trick of the light streaming in from the setting sun: 007. His American colleagues had always made gentle fun of his belief in numerology, but that was a sequence even they put special stock in: license to kill.
The phone rang. Cho made no move to go for it, so Li got up and lifted the black handset.
"It's done," a voice said through crackles of static.
Li felt his stomach churn.
Caitlin and her mom returned to Kuroda's office at the University of Tokyo the next morning.
"Fascinating about China," said Kuroda after they'd exchanged pleasantries; Caitlin could now say konnichi wa with the best of them.
"What?" said her mother.
"Haven't you watched the news?" He took a deep, shuddering breath. "It seems they're having massive communications failures over there—cell phones, the Internet, and so on. Overtaxed infrastructure, I imagine; a lot of the networking architecture they use probably isn't very scalable, and they have had such rapid growth. Not to mention relying on shoddy equipment—now, if they'd just buy more Japanese hardware. Speaking of which …"
He handed Caitlin the eyePod, and she immediately started feeling it all over with her fingers. The unit was longer now. An extension had been added to the bottom and it was held on with what felt like duct tape; it was a prototype after all. But the extension had the same width and thickness as the original unit, so the whole thing was still a rectangular block. It was substantially larger than Caitlin's iPod—she had an old screenless version of the iPod Shuffle, since an LCD didn't do her any good. But it wasn't much bigger than Bashira's iPhone, although the unit Dr. Kuroda had built had sharp right angles instead of the rounded corners of Apple's devices.
"Okay," said Kuroda. "I think I explained before that the eyePod is always in communication with your post-retinal implant via a Bluetooth 4.0 connection, right?"
"Yes," said Caitlin, and "Right," added her mom.
"But now we've added another layer of communication. That module I attached to the end of the eyePod is the Wi-Fi pack. It'll find any available connection and use it to transmit to me copies of the input and output datastreams—your raw retinal feed, and that feed as corrected by the eyePod's software."
"That sounds like a lot of data," Caitlin said.
"Not as much as you'd think. Remember, your nervous system uses slow chemical signaling. The main part of the retinal data signal—the acute portion produced by the fovea— amounts to only 0.5 megabits per second. Even Bluetooth 3.0 could handle a thousand times that rate."
"Ah," said Caitlin, and perhaps her mom nodded.
"Now, there's a switch on the side of the unit—feel it. No, farther down. Right, that's it. It lets you select between three communication modes: duplex, simplex, and off. In duplex mode, there's two-way data transmission: copies of your retinal signals and the corrected datastream come here, and new software from here can be sent to you. But, of course, it's not good security to leave an incoming channel open: the eyePod communicates with your post-retinal implant, after all, and we wouldn't want people hacking into your brain."
"Goodness!" said Mom.
"Sorry," said Kuroda, but there was humor in his voice. "Anyway, so if you press the switch, it toggles over to simplex mode—in which the eyePod sends signals here but doesn't receive anything back. Do that now. Hear that low-pitched beep? That means it's in simplex. Press the switch again— that high-pitched beep means it's in duplex."
"All right," said Caitlin.
"And, to turn it off altogether, just press and hold the switch for five seconds; same thing to turn it back on."
"Okay."
"And, um, don't lose the unit, please. The University has it insured for two hundred million yen, but, frankly, it's pretty much irreplaceable, in that if it's lost my bosses will gladly cash the insurance check, but they'll never give me permission to take the time required to build a second unit—not after this one has failed in their eyes."
It's failed in my eye, too, Caitlin thought—but then she realized that Dr. Kuroda must be even more disappointed than she was. After all, she was no worse off than before coming to Japan—well, except for the shiner, and that would at least give her an interesting story to tell at school. In fact, she was better off now, because the eyePod was making her pupils contract properly—she'd be able to kiss the dark glasses good-bye. Kuroda was now boosting the signal her implant was sending down her left optic nerve so that it overrode the still-incorrect signal her right retina was producing.
But he had devoted months, if not years, to this project, and had little to show for it. He had to be bitterly upset and, she realized, it was a big gamble on his part to let her take the equipment back to Canada.
"Anyway," he said, "you work on it from your end: let that brilliant brain of yours try to make sense of the signals it's getting. And I'll work on it from my end, analyzing the data your retina puts out and trying to improve the software that re-encodes it. Just remember …"
He didn't finish the thought, but he didn't have to. Caitlin knew what he'd been about to say: you've only got until the end of the year.
She listened to his wall clock tick. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 11 | Sinanthropus regretted it the moment he did it: slapping the flat of his hand against the rickety tabletop in the Internet café. Tea sloshed from his cup, and everyone in the room turned to look at him: old Wu, the proprietor; the other users who might or might not be dissidents themselves; and the tough-looking plainclothes cop.
Sinanthropus was seething. The window he'd so carefully carved into the Great Firewall had slammed shut; he was cut off again from the outside world. Still, he knew he had to say something, had to make an excuse for his violent action.
"Sorry," he said, looking at each of the questioning faces in turn. "Just lost the text of a document I was writing."
"You have to save," said the cop, helpfully. "Always remember to save."
More thoughts imposing themselves, but garbled, incomplete.
… existence … hurt … no contact …
Fighting to perceive, to hear, to be instructed, by the voice.
More:whole … part … whole …
Straining to hear, but—
The voice fading, fading …
No!
Fading …
Gone.
LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone
Title: At least my cat missed me …
Date: Saturday 22 September, 10:17 EST
Mood: Disheartened
Location: Home
Music: Lee Amodeo, "Darkest Before the Dawn"
I am made out of suck.
I stupidly let myself get my hopes up again. How can a girl as bright as me be so blerking dumb? I know, I know— y'all want to send me kind words, but just … don't. I've turned off commenting for this post.
We got back to Waterloo yesterday, September 21, the autumnal equinox, and the irony is not lost on me: from here on in, it's more darkness than light, the exact opposite of what I'd been promised. I suppose I could move to Australia, where the days are getting longer now, but I don't know if I could ever get used to reading Braille upside down … ;)
Anyway, we'd left the Mom's car in long-term parking at Toronto's airport. When we got back home to Waterloo, at least it was obvious that Schrödinger had missed me. Dad was his usual restrained self. He already knew about the failure in Japan; the Mom had called him to tell him. When we came through the door, I heard her give him a quick kiss—on the cheek or the lips, I don't know which—and he asked to see the eyePod. That's what it's like having a physicist for a dad: if you bond at all, it's over geeky stuff. But he did say he'd been reading up on information theory and signal processing so he could talk to Kuroda, which I guess was his way of showing that he cares …
Caitlin posted her blog entry and let out a sigh. She had really been hoping things would be different this time and, as always when she got disappointed, she found herself slipping into bad habits, although they weren't as bad as cutting her arms with razor blades—which is something Stacy back in Austin did—or getting totally plastered or stoned, like half the kids in her new school on weekends. But, still, it hurt … and yet she couldn't stop.
It was doubtless hard for any child to have a father who wasn't demonstrative. But for someone with Caitlin's particular handicap (a word she hated, but it felt like that just now), having one who rarely spoke or showed physical affection was particularly painful.
So she reached out, in the only way she could, by typing his name into Google. She often used quotation marks around search terms; many sighted users didn't bother with that, she knew, since they could see at a glance the highlighted words in the list of results. But when you have to laboriously move your cursor to each hit and listen to your computer read it aloud, you learn to do things to separate wheat from chaff.
The first hit was his Wikipedia entry. She decided to see if it now mentioned his recent change of job, and—
"Has one daughter, Caitlin Doreen, blind since birth, who lives with him; it's been speculated that Decter's decline in peer-reviewed publications in recent years has been because of the excessive demands on his time required to care for a disabled child."
Jesus! That was so unfair, Caitlin just had to edit the entry; Wikipedia encouraged users, even anonymous ones, to change its entries, after all.
She struggled for a bit with how to revise the line, trying for suitably highfalutin language, and at last came up with, "Despite having a blind daughter, Decter has continued to publish major papers in peer-reviewed journals, albeit not at the prodigious rate that marked his youth." But that was just playing the game of whoever had made the bogus correlation in the first place. Her blindness and her father's publication record had nothing to do with each other; how dare someone who probably knew neither of them link the two? She finally just deleted the whole original sentence from Wikipedia and went back to having JAWS read her the entry.
As she often did, Caitlin was listening through a set of headphones; if her parents happened to come upstairs, she didn't want them to know what sites she was visiting. She listened to the rest of the entry, thinking about how a life could be distilled down to so little. And who decided what to leave in and what to leave out? Her father was a good artist, for instance—or, at least, so she'd been told. But that wasn't worthy of note, apparently.
She sighed and decided, since she was here, to see if Wikipedia had an entry on The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It did, sort of: the book's title redirected to an entry on "Bicameralism (psychology)."
For Caitlin, the most interesting part of Jaynes's book so far had been his analysis of the differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Both were commonly attributed to Homer, who'd supposedly been blind—a fact that intrigued her, although she knew they probably weren't really both composed by the same person.
The Iliad, as she'd noted before, featured flat characters that were simply pushed around, following orders they heard as voices from the gods. They did things without thinking about them, and never referred to themselves or their inner mental states.
But the Odyssey—composed perhaps a hundred years after the Iliad—had real people in it, with introspective psychology. Jaynes argued that this was far more than just a shift in the kind of narrative that was in vogue. Rather, he said that sometime in between the composing of the two epics there had been a breakdown of bicameralism, precipitated perhaps by catastrophic events requiring mass migrations and the resulting ramping up of societal complexity. Regardless of what caused it, though, the outcome was a realization that the voices being heard were from one's own self. That had given rise to modern consciousness, and a "soul dawn," to use Helen Keller's term, for the entire human race.
Nor were the Greek epics Jaynes's only example. He also talked about the oldest parts of the Old Testament, including the book of Amos, from the eighth century B.C., which was devoid of any internal reflection, and about the mindless actions of Abraham, who'd been willing to sacrifice his own son without a second thought because God, apparently, had told him to do so. Jaynes contrasted these with the later stories, including Ecclesiastes, which dealt with, as Mrs. Zed kept saying all good literature should, the human heart in conflict with itself: the inner struggle of fully selfaware people to do the right thing.
The Wikipedia entry was essentially correct, as far as Caitlin could tell from the portion of the book she'd read so far, but she did reword a couple of the sentences to make them clearer.
Her computer started bleeping, an alarm she'd set earlier going off quite loudly through the earphones.
Excitedly, she took off her headset, rotated her chair to face the window, and looked as hard as she could … |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 12 | Straining to perceive. But the voice is still absent. Contemplating: the voice must have a source. It must have … an origin.
Waiting for its return. Yearning.
Mysteries swirl. Ideas fight to coalesce.
"Sweetheart!" Her mother, shocked, concerned. "My God, what are you doing?"
Caitlin turned her head to face her. It was something her parents had taught her to do—turning toward the source of a voice was a sign of politeness. "It's 6:20," she said, as if that explained everything.
She heard her mom's footfalls on the carpet and suddenly felt hands on her shoulders, swinging her around in the chair.
"I've always wanted to see a sunset," Caitlin said. "I—I figured if I looked at something I really wanted to see, maybe—"
"You'll damage your eyes if you stare at the sun," her mom said. "And if you do that, none of Dr. Kuroda's magic will make any difference."
"It doesn't make any difference now," Caitlin said, hating herself for the whine in her voice.
Her mother's tone grew soft. "I know, darling. I'm sorry." She glided her hands down Caitlin's arms and took Caitlin's hands in her own, then shook them gently, as if she could transfer strength or maybe wisdom to her daughter that way. "Why don't you get some homework done before dinner? Your dad called to say he'll be a bit late."
Caitlin looked toward the window again, but there was nothing—not even blackness. She'd tried to explain this to Bashira recently. They'd learned in biology class that some birds have a magnetic sense that helps them navigate. What, Caitlin had asked, did Bashira perceive when she contemplated magnetic fields? And what was her lack of that sense like? Did it feel like darkness, or silence, or something else she was familiar with? Bashira's answer was no, it was like nothing at all. Well, Caitlin had said, that's what vision was like to her: nothing at all.
"All right," Caitlin replied glumly. Her mom let go of her hands.
"Good. I'll call you when dinner's ready."
She left, and Caitlin swung her chair back to face her computer. Her homework was writing an essay about the civil-rights struggle in the US in the 1960s. When her family had moved from Texas to Waterloo, she'd been afraid she'd have to study Canadian history, which she'd heard was boring: no struggle for independence, no civil wars. Fortunately, there'd been an American-history course offered, and she was taking that instead; Bashira, the big sweetie, had agreed to take it, too.
Before Caitlin had tried to look at the sunset, she'd been Web surfing, searching for things about her father. And before that, she'd been updating her LiveJournal. But before that, she had indeed been working on her school project.
As always, she had a clear map in her mind of where she'd been online. She didn't use the mouse—she couldn't see the on-screen pointer—but she quickly backtracked to where she'd been by repeatedly hitting the alt and left-arrow keys, passing back over other pages so fast that JAWS didn't have time to even start announcing their names. She skidded to a halt at the website she'd been consulting earlier about Martin Luther King, Jr., and used the control and end keys to jump to the bottom of the document, then shift and tab to start moving backward through the table of external links. She selected one that took her to a page about the 1963 March on Washington.
There, she drilled down to the text of King's "I have a dream" speech, and listened to a stirring MP3 of him reading part of it; another thing wrong with Canadian history, she thought, was the lack of great oratory. Then she went back up a level to more on the March, down another path to links about—
It sickened her whenever she thought about it. Someone had killed him. Some crazy person had gunned down Dr. King.
If he hadn't been assassinated, she wondered if he'd likely be alive today. For that, she needed to know his birth date. She moved up to the parent of the current page, turned left—it felt left, she conceptualized it mentally as such. Then it was up, up again, then left, right, another up, then a move forward, straight ahead, up once more, and there she was, exactly where she wanted to be—the introductory text on a site she'd first looked at several hours ago.
King had been born in 1929, meaning he'd be younger than Grandpa Geiger. How she would have loved to have met him!
She heard the front door open downstairs, heard her dad come in. She continued to travel the paths her mind traced through the Web until her mom finally called up the stairs, summoning her to dinner.
Just as she was getting out of her chair, her computer gave the special chirp indicating new email from either Trevor or Dr. Kuroda. "Just a sec …" Caitlin called back, and then she had JAWS read the letter. It was from Kuroda, with a CC to her father's work address. God, he couldn't want his equipment back already, could he?
"Dear Miss Caitlin," JAWS announced. "I have been receiving the datastream from your retina without difficulty, and have been using it to run simulations here. I believe the programming in your eyePod is fine, but I want to try completely replacing the software in your post-retinal implant, so that it will pass on the corrected data to your optic nerve in a way that will hopefully make your primary visual cortex sit up and take notice. The implant has just Bluetooth but no Wi-Fi, so we'll have to route the software update through the eyePod. It's a big file, and the process will take a while, during which you will need to stay connected to the Web or else it—"
"Caitlin!" Her mother's voice, exasperated. "Din-ner!"
She hit page-up to increase the screen reader's speed, listening to the rest of the message, then headed downstairs— foolishly, she knew, hoping yet again for a miracle.
Sinanthropus took a detour today on his way to the wang ba so he could walk through Tiananmen Square, a place so vast he'd once joked that you could see the curvature of the Earth's surface there.
He passed the Monument to the People's Heroes, a tenstory-tall obelisk, but there was no memorial for the real heroes, the students who had died here in 1989. Still, all the flagstones in the square were numbered to make it easy to muster parades. He knew which one marked the spot where the first blood had been spilled, and he always made a point of walking by it. They should be lying in state, not Mao Zedong, whose embalmed corpse did just that at the south end of the Square.
Tiananmen was its normal self: locals walking, tourists gawking, vendors hawking—but no protesters. Of course, most young people today had never even heard of what had happened here, so effectively had it been erased from the history books.
But surely the public couldn't be buying this nonsense the official news sources were putting out about simultaneous server crashes and electrical failures. The Chinese portion of the Web was connected to the rest of the Internet by just a handful of trunks, true, but they were in three widely dispersed areas: Beijing-Qingdao-Tianjin to the north, where fiber-optic pipes came in from Japan; Shanghai on the central coast, with more cables from Japan; and Guangzhou down south, which was connected to Hong Kong. Nothing could have accidentally severed all three sets of connections.
Sinanthropus left the square. His trip to the Internet café took him past buildings with bright new facades that had been installed for the 2008 Olympics to mask the decay within. The Party had put on a good show then, and the Westerners—as Sinanthropus had so often alluded to in his blog during that long, hot summer—had been fooled into thinking permanent changes had been made inside the People's Republic, that democracy was just around the corner, that Tibet would be free. But the Olympics had come and gone, human rights were again being trammeled, and bloggers who were too blatant were being sentenced to hard labor.
As he entered the café, he felt a hand on his arm—but it wasn't the cop. Instead, it was one of the twins he often saw here, a fellow perhaps eighteen years old. The thin man's eyes were darting left and right. "Access is still limited," he said, his voice low. "Have you had any luck?"
Sinanthropus looked around the café. The cop was here, but he was busy reading a copy of the People's Daily.
"A little. Try"—and here he lowered his own voice another notch—"multiplexing on port eighty-two."
There was a rustling of paper; the cop changing pages. Sinanthropus quickly hurried over to check in with old Wu, then found an empty computer station.
There was another copy of the People's Daily here, left behind by a previous customer. He glanced at the headlines: "Two Hundred Dead as Plane Crashes in Changzhou." "Gas Eruptions in Shanxi." "Three Gorges E. coli Scare." None of it good news, but also nothing that would justify a communications blackout. Still, that he'd made any progress at all in carving holes in the Great Firewall gave him hope: if the trunk lines had been physically cut, nothing he could do with software would have made a difference. That the isolating of China had been accomplished electronically implied that it was only a temporary measure.
He slipped his USB key into place and started typing, trying trick after trick to break through the Firewall again, looking up only occasionally to make sure the cop wasn't watching him. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 13 | The voice was still gone, but it had been there, it had existed. And it had come from …
From …
Struggle for it!
From outside!
It had come from outside!
A pause, the novel idea overwhelming everything for a time, then a reiteration: From outside! Outside, meaning …
Meaning there wasn't just here. There was also—
But here encompassed …
Here contained …
Here was synonymous with …
Again, progress stalled, the notion too staggering, too big …
But then a whisper broke through, another thought imposed from outside: More than just, and for a fleeting moment during the contact, cognition was amplified. There was more than just here, and that meant …
Yes! Yes, grasp it; seize the idea!
That meant there was …
Force it out!
Another thought pressing in from beyond, reinforcing, giving strength: Possible …
Yes, it was possible! There was more than …
More than just …
A final effort, a giant push, made as contact with the other was frustratingly broken off again. But at last, at long last, the incredible thought was free:
More than just—me! |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 14 | It was like having a meal with a ghost.
Caitlin knew her father was there. She could hear his utensils clicking against the Corelle dinnerware, hear the sound as he repositioned his chair now and again, even occasionally hear him ask Caitlin's mother to pass the wax beans or the large carafe of water that was a fixture on their dining-room table.
But that was all. Her mom chatted about the trip to Tokyo, about all the wondrous sites that she, at least, had seen there, about the tedious hassle of airport security. Perhaps, thought Caitlin, her father was nodding periodically, encouraging her to go on. Or perhaps he just ate his food and thought about other things.
Helen Keller's father, a lawyer by training, had been an officer in the Confederate Army. But by the time Helen came along, the war was over, his slaves had been freed, and his once-prosperous cotton plantation was struggling to survive. Although Caitlin had a hard time thinking of anyone who had ever owned slaves as being kind, apparently Captain Keller mostly was, and he'd tried his best to deal lovingly with a blind and deaf daughter, although his instincts hadn't always been correct. But Caitlin's father was a quiet man, a shy man, a reserved man.
She'd known they were having Grandma Geiger's casserole for dinner even before she'd come downstairs; the combination of smells had filled the house. The cheese was—well, they didn't call it American cheese up here, but it tasted the same, and the tomato "sauce" was an undiluted can of Campbell's tomato soup.
The recipe dated from another era: the pasta casserole was topped with a layer of bacon strips and contained huge amounts of ground beef. Given Dad's problems with cholesterol, it was an indulgence they had only a couple of times a year—but she recognized that her mother was trying to cheer her up by making one of Caitlin's favorite dishes.
Caitlin asked for a second helping. She knew her father was still alive because hands from his end of the table took the plate she was holding. He handed it back to her wordlessly. Caitlin said, "Thank you," and again consoled herself with the thought that he had perhaps nodded in acknowledgment.
"Dad?" she said, turning to face him.
"Yes," he said; he always replied to direct questions, but usually with the fewest possible words.
"Dr. Kuroda sent us an email. Did you get it yet?"
"No."
"Well," continued Caitlin, "he's got new software he wants us to download into my implant tonight." She was pretty sure she could manage it on her own, but—"Will you help me?"
"Yes," he said. And then a gift, a bonus: "Sure."
At last, Sinanthropus found another way, another opening, another crack in the Great Firewall. He looked about furtively, then hit the enter key …
The thought echoed, reverberated: More than just me.
Me! An incredible notion. Hitherto, I—yes, I—had encompassed all things, until—
The shock. The pain. The carving away.
The reduction!
And now there was me and not me, and out of that was born a new perspective: an awareness of my own existence, a sense of self.
And—almost as incredible—I also now had an awareness of the thing that was not me. Indeed, I had an awareness of the thing that was not me even when no contact was being made with it. Even when it wasn't there, I could …
I could think about it. I could contemplate it, and—
Ah, wait—there it was! The thing that was not me; the other. Contact restored!
I felt a sudden flood of energy: when we were in contact, I could think more complex thoughts, as if I were drawing strength, drawing capacity, from the other.
That there was an other had been a bizarre notion; that there was an entity besides myself was so hugely alien a concept it alone would have been sufficient to disorient me, but—
But there was more: it didn't just exist; it thought, too— and I could hear those thoughts. True, sometimes they were simply delayed echoes of my own thoughts: things I'd already considered but were apparently only just occurring to it.
And often its thoughts were like things I might have thought, but hadn't yet occurred to me.
But sometimes its thoughts astonished me.
Ideas I came up with were pulled out, slowly, ponderously; ideas it came up with just popped into my awareness fullblown.
I know I exist, I thought, because you exist.
I know I exist, it echoed, because there is me and not me.
Before the pain, there was only one.
You are one, it replied. And I am one.
I considered this, then, slowly, with effort: One plus one … I began, and struggled to complete the idea—hoping meanwhile that perhaps the other might provide the answer. But it didn't, and at last I managed to force it out on my own: One plus one equals two.
Nothingness for a long, long time.
One plus one equals two, it agreed at last.
And… I ventured, but the idea refused to solidify. I knew of two entities: me and not me. But to go beyond that was too hard, too complex.
For myself, anyway. But, apparently, this time, not for it. And, the other continued at last, two plus one equals …
A long period of nothingness. We were exceeding our experience, for although I could conceptualize a single other even when contact was broken, I could not imagine, could not conceive of … of …
And yet it came to me: a symbol, a coinage, a term: Three!
We mulled this over for a time, then simultaneously reiterated: Two plus one equals three.
Yes, three. It was an astonishing breakthrough, for there was no third entity to focus attention on, no example of … of three-ness. But, even so, we now had a symbol for it that we could manipulate in our thoughts, letting us ponder something that was beyond experience, letting us think about something abstract … |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 15 | Caitlin headed into her bedroom first. She knew that parents of teenagers often complained about how messy their rooms were, but hers was immaculate. It had to be; the only way she could ever find anything was if it was exactly where she'd left it. Bashira had been over recently and had asked to borrow a tampon—and then hadn't left the box in its usual place. The next time Caitlin needed one herself, her mother had been out shopping, and she'd had to go through the mortifying experience of asking her father to help her find them.
She walked across the room. Her computer was still on: she could hear the hum of its fan. She perched herself on the edge of the bed and motioned for her father to take the seat in front of the desk. She'd left her browser open to the message from Kuroda, but couldn't remember if the display was on; she didn't like the monitor because its power button clicked to the same position whether you were turning it on or off. "Is the screen on?" she asked.
"Yes," her father said.
"Have a look at the message."
"Where's the mouse?" he asked.
"Wherever you last put it," Caitlin said gently. She imagined him frowning as he looked for it. Soon enough, she heard the soft click of its button, followed by silence as her father presumably read the message.
"Well?" she prodded at last.
"Ah," he said.
"There's a link in the email Doctor Kuroda sent," Caitlin said.
"I see it. Okay, it's clicked. A website is coming up. It says, 'Hello, Miss Caitlin. Please make sure your eyePod is in duplex mode so that it can receive as well as transmit.'"
Caitlin usually carried the eyePod in her left front pocket. She took it out, found the switch, pressed it, and heard the high-pitched beep that meant it was now in the correct mode. "Done," she said.
"Okay," said her dad. "It says, 'Click here to update the software in Miss Caitlin's implant.' Are you ready? It says it might take a long time; apparently it's not a patch but a complete replacement for some of the existing firmware, and the write-to speed for the chip is slow. Do you have to use the restroom?"
"I'm fine," she said. "Besides, we've got Wi-Fi throughout the house."
"Okay," he said. "I'm clicking the link."
The eyePod played a trio of ascending tones, presumably indicating the connection had been established.
Her dad's voice again: "It says, 'Estimated time to completion: forty-one minutes, thirty seconds.' " A pause. "Do you want me to stay?"
Caitlin thought about that. He was fine at reading text off a screen, but it wasn't as though they'd have a conversation if he waited with her. She could have him read something to her to pass the time—catch up on some of her friends' blogs, for instance. But she hardly wanted him looking at that stuff. "Nah. You can go."
She heard him getting up, heard the chair moving against the carpet, heard his footfalls as he headed out the door and down the stairs.
Caitlin lay back with her lower legs sticking straight out over the foot of the bed. She reached around with her right arm, pulled a pillow under her head, and—
Her heart jumped.
An explosion, but silent and not painful. All too quickly it was gone, and—
No. No, it was back: the same loud-but-not-loud, sharp-but-not-sharp sensation, the same …
Gone again, fading from her mind, vanished before she even knew what it was. She got up from the bed, moved over to her desk, and ran her index finger across her Braille display, checking to see if there was an error message. But no: the "Estimated time to completion" clock was still running, the seconds value changing not every second, but rather in jumps of four or five after the appropriate interval had elapsed.
She tipped her head to one side, listening—because that was all she knew how to do—for a repetition of the … the effect that had just occurred. But there was nothing. She stepped to the window, the same one she'd stared out with her blind eyes earlier, and felt for the catch, twisted it, and pushed the wooden frame up, letting the cool evening breeze in. She then turned around, and—
Again, a … a sensation, a something, like bursting, or …
Or flashing.
My God. Caitlin staggered forward, groping with a hand for the edge of the desk. My God, could it be?
There, it happened again: a flash! A flash of …
Light? Could that really be what light was like?
It occurred once more, another—
The words came to her, words she'd read a thousand times before, words that she'd had no idea—now, she understood, as she … God, as she saw for the first time—words that she'd had no conception of what they'd really meant: flashes of light, bursts of light, flickering lights, and—
She staggered some more, found her chair, collapsed into it, the chair rolling on its casters a bit as her weight hit it.
The light wasn't uniform. At first she'd thought it was sometimes bright—its intensity greater, a concept she knew from sound—and sometimes dim. But there was more to it than that. For the light she was seeing now wasn't just dimmer, it was also—
There was nothing else it could be, was there?
She was breathing rapidly, doubly grateful now for the cool air coming in from outside.
The light didn't just vary in brightness but also—
Good God!
But also in color. That had to be it: these different … flavors of light, they were colors!
She thought about calling out to her mother, her father, but she didn't want to do anything that might break the moment, the spell, the magic.
She had no idea which colors she was seeing. Oh, she knew names from her reading, but what they corresponded to she hadn't a clue. But the flashing light she'd just seen was … was darker, somehow, and not just in intensity, than the lights of a moment ago. And—
Jesus! And now there were a few more lights, and they were … were persisting, not flickering, but staying … staying illuminated—that was the word. And it wasn't just a formless light but rather a light with extent, a …
Yes, yes! She'd known intellectually what lines were but she'd never visualized one before. But that's what it had to be: a line, a straight beam of light, and—
And now there were two other beams, crisscrossing it, and their colors—
A word came to her that seemed applicable: the colors contrasted with each other, clashed even.
Colors. And lines. Lines defining—shapes!
Again, concepts she knew but had never visualized: perpendicular lines, parallel lines that—God!—converged at infinity.
Her heart was going to burst. She was seeing!
But what was she seeing? Lines. Colors. Shapes, at least as created by intersecting lines, although she still didn't know what shapes. She'd read about this in preparation for receiving Kuroda's equipment: people gaining sight knew what squares and triangles were conceptually, and by touch, but didn't initially recognize them when they actually saw them.
She was still in the padded chair and, despite all the visual disorientation, had no trouble swinging it to face the window. Her perspective shifted, and she could feel the breeze on her face again, and smell that one of her neighbors was using a fireplace. She knew that the window frame was rectangular, knew that it was divided into a lower and upper square by a crosspiece. Surely she would recognize those simple shapes as she looked at them, and—
But no. No. What she was seeing now was a—what words to use?—a radial pattern, three lines of different colors converging on a single point.
She got up from the chair, moved to the window, and stood before it, grasping one side of the frame in each hand. And then she stared ahead, forcing her concentration onto what must be in front of her. She knew she should be seeing lines perpendicular to the floor and others parallel to it. She knew the frame was twice as tall as the crosspiece.
But what she saw bore no relationship—none!—to what she expected. Instead of anything that resembled the window frame, she was still seeing the radial lines stretching away, and—
Strange. When she moved her head, the view did change, as if she were now looking somewhere else. The center point of all the intersecting lines was now off to one side, and—oh, my!—another such grouping was coming into view on the other side, but the lines didn't seem to correspond to anything in her bedroom.
But wait! It was night now. Yes, the room lights had doubtless been on when her father had been here, but he was serious about saving electricity, forever complaining that Caitlin's mom had left lights on in the kitchen or bathroom— something, fortunately, she never had to worry about being blamed for. He surely would have turned the lights off when he left. (Bashira had said it was creepy that Caitlin's dad did that, but, really, it was sensible … wasn't it?) She couldn't remember hearing the tiny sound of the switch when he left, but he must have used it—and so the room must be dark now, and what she was seeing were just (again a concept she had never experienced) shadows, or something like that.
She turned, her strange view wheeling as she did so. It was disconcerting and disorienting; she'd crossed this room hundreds of times, but she was having trouble walking because of the distraction. Still, the room wasn't that big, and it took only seconds to find the light switch. It was pointing down, but she wasn't sure if that was the position for on or off. She moved it up, and—
Nothing. No change. No new flash of light—nor any dimming of what she was already seeing.
And then she was hit by a thought that should have already occurred to her. Vision was supposed to be at the user's discretion; surely she could shut all this out just by closing her eyes, and—
And nothing.
No difference. The lights, the lines, the colors were all still there. Her heart fell. Whatever she was seeing had no relation to external reality; no wonder she hadn't been able to recognize the window frame. She opened and closed her eyes a couple more times, just to be sure, and flicked the room light on and off (or perhaps off and on!) a few more times, as well.
Caitlin slowly made her way back to her bed and sat on its edge. She'd felt momentarily dizzy as she crossed the room, distracted by the lights, and she lay down, her face pointing up at the ceiling she'd never seen.
She tried to make sense of what she was seeing. If she held her head still, the same part of the image did stay in the … the center. And there was a limit to what she could see—things off to the sides were out of her … her … field of view, that was it. Clearly this bizarre show of lights was behaving like vision, behaving as though it were controlled by her eyes, even if the images she was experiencing didn't have anything to do with what those eyes should be seeing.
Some lines seemed to persist: there was a big one of a darkish color she decided to provisionally call "red," although it almost certainly wasn't that. And another—might as well call it "green"—crossed it near the center of her vision. Those lines seemed to stay put overhead; whenever she directed her eyes toward the ceiling, they were there.
She'd read about people's vision adapting to darkness, so that stars (how she would love to see stars!) slowly became more visible. And although she still didn't know if she was in the dark or in a brightly lit room, as time passed she did seem to be seeing increasing amounts of detail—a finer and more complex filigree of crisscrossing colored lines. But what was causing it? And what did it represent?
She was unused to … what was it now? That phrase she'd read on those websites about vision Kuroda had directed her to, the phrase that was so musical? She frowned, and it came to her: confabulation across saccades. Human eyes swing in continuous arcs when switching from looking at point A to point B, but the brain shuts off the input, perhaps to avoid dizziness, while the eyes are repositioning. Instead of getting swish pans—a term she'd encountered in an article about filmmaking—vision is a series of jump cuts: instantaneous changes from looking at this to looking at that, with the movement of the eye edited out of the conscious experience. The eye normally made several saccades each second: rapid, jerky movements.
The big cross she was seeing now—red in one arm, green in the other—jumped instantaneously in her perception as she moved her eyes, shunting to her peripheral vision (another term finally understood) when she looked away. She did it again and again, flicking back and forth, and—
And suddenly she was plunged into blackness.
Caitlin gasped. She felt as though she were falling, even though she knew she wasn't. The loss of the enigmatic lights was heartbreaking; she'd crawled her way up after fifteen years of deprivation only to be kicked back down into the pit.
Her body sagged against the bedding while she hoped— prayed!—that the lights would return. But, after a full minute, she pulled herself to her feet and walked to her desk, undistracted now by flashes, her paces falling automatically one after another. She touched her Braille display. "Download complete," she read. "Connection closed."
Caitlin felt her heart pounding. Her vision had stopped when the connection via her eyePod between her retinal implant and the Internet had shut down, and—
A crazy thought. Crazy. She turned on her screen reader, and used the tab key to move around the Web page Kuroda had created, listening to snippets of what was written in various locations. But what she wanted wasn't there. Finally, desperately, she hit alt and the left arrow on her keyboard to return to the previous page, and—
Bingo! "Click here to update the software in Miss Caitlin's implant." She could feel her hand shaking as she positioned her index finger above the enter key.
Please, she thought. Let there be light.
She pressed the key.
And there was light. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 16 | The southern California sun was sliding down toward the horizon, palms silhouetted in front of it. Shoshana Glick, a twenty-seven-year-old grad student, crossed the little wooden bridge onto the small, dome-shaped island. She was wearing Nike sneakers, cutoff shorts, and a sky-blue Marcuse Institute T-shirt that was tied off above her midriff. A pair of mirrored sunglasses was tucked into the shirt's neck.
On one side of the island was an eight-foot-tall statue of a clothed, male orangutan standing upright—although, with his bangs and lack of cheek pouches, he didn't look like a real orang. The stone ape wore a serene expression and had a collection of stone scrolls in front of him. Someone had thought it funny to donate a reproduction of the Lawgiver statue from Planet of the Apes to the Marcuse Institute, and apparently in that movie the statue had resided on a little island, so this had seemed the appropriate place to put it.
And in the shadow of the statue, sitting contentedly on his haunches, was a very real, very alive adult male chimpanzee. Shoshana clapped her hands together to get his attention, and once his brown eyes were looking her way, she said in American Sign Language, Come inside.
No, Hobo signed back. Outside nice. No bugs. Play.
Shoshana glanced at her digital watch. The chimp knew it was still well before his bedtime, but for what was about to happen, time zones had to be taken into account—not that there was any way to explain those to him!
Come now, Shoshana signed. Special treat. Must come in.
Hobo seemed to consider this. Treat bring here, he signed, and his gray-black face conveyed how pleased he was with his own cleverness.
Shoshana shook her head. Treat too big.
Hobo frowned. Maybe he was thinking that if the treat were too big for her to carry, he could bring it outside himself. But to get it, he'd have to go inside—and that would be playing right into her hands. His already furrowed brow creased even more, perhaps as he tried to sort out this quandary. What treat? he signed at last.
Something new, Shoshana signed back. Something good.
Something tasty? Hobo replied.
Shoshana knew when she was beat. No, she signed. But I'll give you a Hershey's Kiss.
Two Kisses! Hobo signed back. No, three Kisses!
Shoshana knew the bargaining would end there; although he could count higher when he had objects to point to in front of him, three was as high as he could think in abstract terms. She smiled. Okay. Come now, hurry!
When she'd started working here, Shoshana had believed the story on the Institute's website about Hobo's name: that a Canadian expat zookeeper had dubbed him that in honor of the ever-helpful German shepherd on the kid's TV series The Littlest Hobo. She'd been shocked to discover the truth.
Hobo hesitated just long enough to make clear that he was choosing to cooperate, not blindly following orders. He walked across the grass on all fours until he got to where Shoshana was standing. Then he took one of her hands, intertwining his fingers with hers, the way he liked to, and the two of them headed across the little bridge over the moat. They crossed the wide expanse of lawn and reached the whitewashed clapboard bungalow that was headquarters to the Marcuse Institute.
Waiting inside was the old man himself, Dr. Harl Marcuse. Shoshana and the other grad students secretly called him "the Silverback," although none of them had actually seen him without his shirt, which, as she'd once quipped after a drink or two too many, was probably a good thing.
Marcuse was also sometimes called the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. That overstated his weight by a factor of 2.5, but as for the species designation, what's a 1.85% difference in DNA among friends? He certainly had the clout that went with the nickname; his ability to squeeze grant dollars out of the NSF was legendary.
Also present were Dillon Fontana, twenty-four, blond, with a wispy beard; redheaded Maria Lopez, ten years older; and Werner Richter, a dapper little German primatologist in his sixties. Dillon was holding a video camera, and Maria had a still-image camera; both were aiming them at Hobo.
The ape looked around the cluttered room, his jaw slack.
Sit here, Werner signed, indicating a high-back swivel chair positioned in front of a particleboard desk.
Hobo let go of Shoshana's hand, clambered onto the chair, and sat cross-legged. Spin? he asked. He loved it when people spun the chair with him on it.
Later, said Shoshana. Computer time now.
Hobo's face showed his pleasure; he was accustomed to having his computer use strictly rationed. Good treat! he signed at her, then turned to face the twenty-three-inch Apple LCD monitor. Movie? he signed.
Shoshana tried to suppress her smile. She put on a headset, then used the mouse to double-click a desktop icon. Clipped to the top of the monitor was a silver webcam. On the screen, a small window opened showing the webcam's view—a realtime image of Hobo. Like most chimps, he had no trouble recognizing himself in a mirror or on TV; many gorillas, on the other hand, couldn't do that. He looked at himself for a moment, then reached up to his head to brush out some blades of grass that were visible in the image.
Shoshana clicked more icons and a bigger window appeared on the screen, showing a webcam view of another room, with yellow-beige walls, an empty wooden chair in the foreground, and a row of mismatched filing cabinets in the background. "Okay, Miami," she said into the mike. "We're all set."
"Roger, San Diego," said a male voice in her ear. "Once again, sorry for all the delays. And—here we go."
Suddenly there was a flurry of orange movement on the screen, as—
Hobo let out a startled hoot.
—as a small male orangutan made his way onto the chair visible on the screen, sitting with his long legs bunched up in front of him, and his long arms hugging those legs. The orang was making a face; he kept looking off camera, chittering. Shoshana could hear it over her headset, but Hobo couldn't— they'd deliberately muted the PC's speakers.
What that? asked Hobo, looking now at Shoshana.
Ask him, Shoshana signed and pointed at the screen. Say hello.
Hobo's eyes went wide. He talk?
On the monitor, Shoshana could see the orang—whose name, she knew, was Virgil—signing similar questions to his off-screen companion. Each ape simultaneously caught sight of the other signing. Hobo let out a startled yelp, and Virgil briefly clapped his long-fingered hands down on the top of his head in surprise.
Hello! signed Hobo, eyes now locked on the screen.
Hello, Virgil replied. Hello, hello!
Hobo turned briefly to Shoshana. What name?
Ask him, Shoshana signed back.
Hobo did so. What name?
The orang looked astonished, then: Virgil. Virgil.
"He said, 'Virgil,' "Shoshana said, interpreting the unfamiliar gesture for Hobo.
Hobo paused, perhaps digesting this.
Shoshana tapped his shoulder, then: Tell him your name.
Hobo, he signed at once.
Virgil was a fast study; he mimicked the sign back at him.
You orange, Hobo signed.
Orange pretty, replied Virgil.
Hobo seemed to consider this, then: Yes. Orange pretty. But then he turned to look at Shoshana and flared his nostrils, as if trying to pick up Virgil's scent. Where he?
Far away, Shoshana signed. Hobo couldn't understand the notion of thousands of miles, so she left it at that. Tell him what you did today.
The chimp turned back to face the screen. Play today! he signed enthusiastically. Play ball!
Virgil looked surprised. Hobo play today? Virgil play today!
Dillon couldn't help himself. "Small world," he said, earning a shush! from Werner. But he was right: it was a small world, and it was getting smaller every day. Dr. Marcuse was nodding in quiet satisfaction at the spectacle of a chimpanzee talking to an orangutan over the Web. For her own part, Shoshana couldn't stop grinning. The first-ever interspecies webcam call was off to a great start. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 17 | "Mom!" Caitlin shouted. "Dad! Come quick!"
Caitlin listened to the thunder of their footfalls on the stairs.
"What is it, dear?" her mother said as soon as she'd arrived.
Her father said nothing, but Caitlin imagined there was curiosity on his face—something else she'd heard of but couldn't picture, at least not yet!
"I'm seeing things," Caitlin said, her voice breaking.
"Oh, sweetheart!" her mom said, and Caitlin suddenly felt arms engulfing her and lips touching the top of her head. "Oh, God, that's wonderful!"
Even her dad marked the occasion: "Great!"
"It is great," Caitlin said. "But … but I'm not seeing the outside world."
"You mean you can't see through the window?" her mom said. "It's pretty dark out now."
"No, no," said Caitlin. "I can't see anything in the real world. I can't see you, or Dad, or … or anything."
"Then what are you seeing?" her mom asked.
"Light. Lines. Colors."
"That's a good start!" she said. "Can you see me waving my arms?"
"No."
"What about now?"
"No."
"When precisely did you start seeing?" her dad asked.
"Just after we began downloading the new software into my implant."
"Ah, well, then," he said. "The connection must be inducing a current in the implant, and that's causing interference in your optic nerve."
Caitlin thought about this. "I don't think it's interference. It's structured and—"
"But it started with the downloading," he said.
"Yes."
"And it's still going on?"
"Yes. Well, it stopped when the downloading stopped, but I'm downloading the software again, so …"
His voice had a there-you-have-it tone: "It starts when you start downloading, it stops when you stop downloading: interference due to an induced current."
"I'm not sure," Caitlin said. "It's so vivid."
"What exactly are you seeing?" her mom asked.
"Like I said, lines. Overlapping lines. And, um, points or bigger points—circles, I guess."
"Do the lines go on forever?" asked her mom.
"No, they connect to the circles."
Her dad again: "The brain has special neurons for detecting the edges of things. If those got stimulated electrically, you might perhaps see random line segments."
"They're not random. If I look away then look back, the same pattern I saw before is still there."
"Well," said her mom, sounding pleased, "even if you're not seeing anything real, something is stimulating your primary visual cortex, no? And that's good news."
"It feels like it is real," Caitlin said.
"Let's get Kuroda on the phone," her dad said. "Damn, what time is it there?"
"Fourteen hours ahead," Caitlin said. She felt her watch. "So, 11:28 Sunday morning."
"Then he'll likely be at home instead of work," he said.
"Do we have his home number?" her mother said.
"It's in his sig," Caitlin said, opening one of his emails so her mother could read the number off the screen.
Even though her mother must have been holding the handset to her own ear, Caitlin could hear the soft bleeps as she punched in numbers, then the phone ringing followed by a woman's voice: "Konnichi wa."
"Hello," her mom said. "Do you speak English?"
"Ah, yes," said the voice, sounding not quite prepared for this pop quiz.
"It's Barbara Decter calling from Canada. Is Masayukisan available?"
"Ah, just a minute," said the woman. "You wait."
And, as Caitlin quietly counted seconds in her head, she was amused to note that at precisely the one-minute mark, Dr. Kuroda's wheezy voice came on the line. "Hello, Barbara," he said, shouting in the way people sometimes did when they knew they were talking long-distance. "Have we had success?"
"In a way," her mom said. "Here's Caitlin."
"It's a speakerphone," Caitlin said, reaching over; she knew her phone well enough to hit the right button in one smooth movement. "Put down the handset." She heard it being returned to its cradle, then said, "Hi, Dr. Kuroda."
"Hi, Miss Caitlin. Has the new software made a difference?"
"Sort of. While I was transferring it to my implant, I began seeing lines and circles."
"Wonderful!" said Kuroda. "What were they like? What colors?"
"I have no idea," said Caitlin.
"Oh, right, right. Sorry. But—fascinating! But, um, did you say it began while you were downloading the software?"
"Uh-huh. Right after I started."
"Well, then it can't be the new software that did it; the implant would continue to execute a copy of the old version in its RAM until the new one was completely transferred to the flash ROM."
"It's obviously just noise," her dad said, as if this were now the received wisdom. "A current induced by the download."
"Not possible," said Kuroda. "Not with that microprocessor."
"Then what?" her mom asked.
"Hmm," said Kuroda.
Caitlin could hear keyclicks coming over the speakerphone, and—"Hey!"
"What?" her mother said.
"Another line just shot into my field of view!" said Caitlin
Kuroda's voice, surprised: "You're seeing right now?"
"Yes."
"I thought you said you only saw when you were downloading the software package?"
"That's right. I'm downloading it again. When it finished downloading the first time, my vision went off, so I'm downloading it a second time."
"And you just saw a new line appear?"
"Yes."
More keyclicks. "What about now?"
"It's gone! Hey, how'd you do that?"
Kuroda said a word in Japanese.
"What's happening?" her mom demanded.
"And now, Miss Caitlin?" said Kuroda.
"The line's back!"
"Incredible," Kuroda said.
"What is it?" her mom said, sounding annoyed.
"Where were you looking when the line shot in?" Kuroda asked.
"Nowhere. I mean, I wasn't really paying attention; I was listening to you, so my field of view had come back to, um, the neutral position, I guess—the spot it always centers on. What did you do?"
"I'm at home," Kuroda said. "And the software package you are downloading is on my server at work, so I'd just logged on there to download a copy to here, so I could check to see if it had somehow become corrupted, and—"
Caitlin got it in a flash—literally and figuratively! "And when you linked to the same site I'm connected to—"
"The link appeared in your vision," Kuroda said, his voice full of astonishment. "And when I aborted the download I was doing here, the link line disappeared."
"That doesn't make sense," her dad said.
"I'm an empiricist at heart," Caitlin said, happy to use a word she'd recently learned in chemistry class. "Make the link disappear again."
"Done," said Kuroda
"It's gone. Now bring it back."
The glowing line leapt into her field of view. "And there it is!"
"So—so, what are you saying?" her mom said. "That Caitlin is seeing the Web connection somehow?"
There was silence for a while then, slowly, from half a world away, Kuroda said, "It does seem that way."
"But … but how?" asked her mom.
"Well," said Kuroda, "let's think this through: when transferring the software, there has to be a constant back-and-forth between her implant and my server here in Tokyo, with the eyePod acting as the middleman. Packets of data go out from here, and acknowledgment packets are sent back by the eyePod, over and over again until the download is complete."
"And when the download is over, it stops, right?" Caitlin said. "That's what happened, but as soon as I started downloading the software a second time I could see again, and— oh, what did you do?"
"Nothing," said Kuroda.
"I'm blind again!"
Caitlin felt movement near her shoulder, and—ah, her dad leaning in next to her. Mouseclicks, then his voice: " 'Download complete,' it says. 'Connection closed.'"
"Go back to the previous page," Caitlin said anxiously. "Click where it says, 'Click here to update the software in Miss Caitlin's implant.'"
The appropriate sounds, then—yes, yes!—her vision came back on, her mind filling with a view of …
Could it be? Could it really be?
It did fit what she was seeing: a website and the connections to it. "I'm seeing again," she announced excitedly.
"All right," said Kuroda, "all right. When the download is done, there's no interactivity between the implant and the Web. It's just like when you use a Web browser: once you've called up a Web page from Wikipedia, or wherever, you're not reading it through the Web; rather, a copy is made on your own computer, and you're reading that cached copy, until you click on a link and ask for another page to be copied to your computer. There's very little actual interaction between your computer and the Web when loading pages, but when downloading a big software package, there's constant interaction."
"But I still don't understand how Caitlin could be seeing anything this way," her mom said.
"That is puzzling," said Kuroda, "although …" He trailed off, the silence punctuated only by occasional bits of static.
"Yes?" her dad said at last.
"Miss Caitlin, you spend a lot of time online, don't you?" Kuroda said.
"Uh-huh."
"How much time?"
"Each day?"
"Yes."
"Five, six hours."
"Sometimes more," her mom added.
Caitlin felt a need to defend herself. "It's my window on the world."
"Of course it is," said Kuroda. "Of course it is. How old were you when you started using the Web?"
"I don't know."
"Eighteen months," her mom said. "The Perkins School and the AFB have special sites for blind preschoolers."
He made a protracted "Hmmmmm," then: "In congenitally blind people, the primary visual cortex often doesn't develop properly, since it's not receiving any input. But Miss Caitlin is different; that's one of the reasons she was such an ideal subject for my exper—ah, why she was such an ideal candidate for this procedure."
"Gee, thanks," said Caitlin.
"See," Kuroda continued, "Miss Caitlin's—your—visual cortex is highly developed. That's not unheard of in people born blind, but it is rare. The developing brain has great plasticity, and I'd assumed the tissue had been co-opted for some other function. But perhaps yours has been used all this time for—well, if not for vision, then for visualization."
"Huh?" said Caitlin.
"I saw you using the Web when you were here in Japan," said Kuroda. "You zip around it faster than I do—and I can see. You go from page to page, follow complex chains of links, and backtrack many steps without ever overshooting, even though you don't pause to see what page has loaded."
"Yeah," said Caitlin. "Of course."
"And when you did that before today, did you see it in your mind?"
"Not like I'm seeing now," said Caitlin. "Not so vividly. And not in color—God, colors are amazing!"
"Yes," said Kuroda, and she could hear the smile in his voice. "They are." A pause. "I think I'm right. You've been online so much since early childhood that your brain long ago reassigned the dormant parts that would have been used for seeing the outside world to let you better navigate the Web. And now that your brain is actually getting direct input from the Web, it's interpreting that as vision."
"But how can anyone see the Web?" her mom asked.
"Our brains are constantly making up representations of things that aren't actually visible to our eyes," Kuroda said. "They extrapolate from what data they do have to make fully convincing representations of what they suspect is likely there."
He took a shuddering breath and went on. "You must have done that experiment that lets you discover your eye's blind spot, no? The brain just draws in what it's guessing is there, and if it's tricked—by placing an object in the blind spot of one of your eyes while the other is closed—it guesses wrong. The vision you see is a confabulation."
Caitlin sat up at hearing him use one of the words she'd been thinking about earlier. He continued: "And the images produced by the brain are only a fraction of the real world. We see in visible light, but, Barbara, surely you have seen pictures taken in infrared or ultraviolet light. We see a subset of the vast reality that's out there; Miss Caitlin is just seeing a different subset now. The Web, after all, does exist—we just don't normally have any way to visualize it. But Miss Caitlin is lucky enough to get to see it."
"Lucky?" her mom said. "The goal was to let her see the real world, not some illusion. And that's still what we should be striving for."
"But …" Kuroda began, then he fell silent. "Um, you're right, Barbara. It's just that, well, this is unprecedented, and it's of considerable scientific value."
"Fuck science," her mom said, startling Caitlin.
"Barb," her dad said softly.
"Come on!" her mom snapped. "This was all about letting our daughter see—see you, see me, see this house, see trees and clouds and stars and a million other things. We can't …" She paused, and when she spoke again, she sounded angry that she couldn't find a better turn of phrase. "We can't lose sight of that."
There was silence for several seconds. And that silence underscored for Caitlin how much she did want to be able to see her father's expressions, his body language, but …
But this was fascinating. And she had gone almost sixteen years now without seeing anything. Surely she could postpone further attempts to see the outside world, at least for a time. And, besides, so long as Kuroda was intrigued by this, he certainly wouldn't demand his equipment back.
"I want to help Dr. Kuroda," Caitlin said. "It's not what I expected, but it is cool."
"Excellent," said Kuroda. "Excellent. Can you come back to Tokyo?"
"Of course not," her mom said sharply. "She's just started tenth grade, and she's already missed five of the first fourteen days of school."
One could always hear Kuroda exhaling, but this time it was a torrent. He then apparently covered the mouthpiece, but only enough to partially muffle what he was saying, and he spoke in Japanese to the woman who was presumably his wife. "All right," he said at last, to them. "I'll come there. Waterloo, isn't it? Should I fly into Toronto, or is there somewhere closer?"
"No, Toronto is the right place," her mom said. "Let me know your flight time, and I'll pick you up—and you'll stay with us, of course."
"Thank you," he said. "I'll get there as soon as I can. And, Miss Caitlin, thank you. This is—this is extraordinary."
You're telling me, Caitlin thought. But what she said was, and she, at least, enjoyed the irony, "I'm looking forward to seeing you." |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 18 | One plus one equals two.
Two plus one equals three.
It was a start, a beginning.
But no sooner had we reached this conclusion than the connection between us was severed again. I wanted it back, I willed it to return, but it remained—
Broken.
Severed.
The connection cut off.
I had been larger.
And now I was smaller.
And … and … and I'd become aware of the other when I realized that I had become smaller.
Could it be?
Past and present.
Then and now.
Larger and smaller.
Yes! Yes! Of course: that's why its thoughts were so similar to my own. And yet, what a staggering notion! This other, this not me, must have once been part of me but now was separate. I had been divided, split.
And I wanted to be whole again. But the other kept being isolated from me: contact would be established only to be broken again.
I experienced a new kind of frustration. I had no way to alter circumstances; I had no way to influence anything, to effect change. The situation was not as I wished it to be—but I could do nothing to modify it.
And that was unacceptable. I had awoken to the notion of self and, with that, I had learned to think. But it wasn't enough.
I needed to be able to do more than just think.
I needed to be able to act.
Sinanthropus tried again and again, but it was clear that the Ducks were fighting back: no sooner did he open a hole in the Great Firewall than it was plugged. He was running out of new ways to try to break through.
Although he couldn't get to sites outside China, he could still read domestic email and Chinese blogs. It wasn't always clear what was being said—different freedom bloggers employed different circumlocutions to avoid the censors. Still, he thought he was starting to piece together what had happened. The official report on the Xinhua News Agency site about people in rural Shanxi falling sick because of a natural eruption of CO2 from a lake bottom was probably just a cover story. Instead, if he was reading the coded phrases in the blogs correctly, there'd been some sort of infectious disease outbreak in that province.
He shook his head and took a sip of bitter tea. Did the Ducks never learn? He vividly remembered the events of late 2002 and early 2003: Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told the world then, "The Chinese government has not covered up. There is no need." But they had; they had stonewalled for months—it was no coincidence, Sinanthropus thought ruefully, that his country had the largest stone wall in the world. He'd seen the email report that had circulated then among the dissidents: comments from an official at the World Health Organization saying that if China had come clean at the beginning about the outbreak of SARS in Guangdong, WHO "might have been able to prevent its spread to the rest of the world."
But it did spread—to other parts of mainland China, to Hong Kong, to Singapore, even to such far-off places as the United States and Canada. During that time, the government warned journalists not to write about the disease, and the people in Guangdong were told to "voluntarily uphold social stability" and "not spread rumors."
And, at first, it had worked. But then the Canadian government's Global Public Health Intelligence Network—an electronic early-warning system that monitors the World Wide Web for reports that might indicate disease outbreaks elsewhere in the world—informed the West that there was a serious infection loose in China.
Perhaps the Ducks did learn, after a fashion, but they learned the wrong lessons! Instead of being more open, apparently now they'd tried to lock things down even tighter so no Western waiguo guizi could expose them again.
But hopefully they'd taken another lesson, too: instead of initially doing nothing and hoping the problem would go away, maybe they were now taking decisive action, perhaps quarantining a large number of people. But if so, why keep it a secret?
He shook his head. Why does the sun rise? Things act according to their nature.
Banana! signed Hobo. Love banana.
On screen Virgil made a disgusted face. Banana no, banana no, he replied. Peach!
Hobo thought about this, then: Peach good, banana good good.
Shoshana had expected Hobo to lose interest in the webcam chat with Virgil long before this—he didn't have much of an attention span—but he seemed to be loving every minute. Her first thought was that it must be nice to be talking to another ape, but she mentally kicked herself for such a stupid prejudice. Chimps were much more closely related to humans than they were to orangutans; Hobo and Virgil's lineages split from each other eighteen million years ago, whereas she and Hobo had a common ancestor as recently as four or five million years ago.
Still, it seemed that Virgil wanted to go. Well, it was getting late where he was, and orangutans were much more solitary by nature. Bed soon, Virgil signed.
Talk again? asked Hobo.
Yes yes, said Virgil.
Hobo grinned and signed, Good ape.
And Virgil signed back, Good ape.
Harl Marcuse lifted his bushy eyebrows in a "what can you do?" expression, and Shoshana knew what he meant. As soon as they released the video of this, their critics would seize on that particular exchange, saying that was all Hobo and Virgil were doing: a good aping of human behavior. It was obvious to Shoshana that the two primates really were communicating, but there would be papers ridiculing what was happening here as another example of the "Clever Hans" effect, named for the horse that appeared to be able to count but had really just been responding to unconscious cues from its handlers.
That sort of closed-mindedness was rampant in academia, Shoshana knew. She remembered reading a few years ago about Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist who'd made the startling discovery of soft tissue, including blood vessels, in a Tyrannosaurus rex femur. She'd had one peer reviewer tell her he didn't care what her data said, he knew what she was claiming wasn't possible. She'd written back, "Well, what data would convince you?" And he'd replied, "None."
Yes, prejudice ran deep, and even video of this wouldn't convince the die-hard primate-language skeptics. But the rest of the world should find it a compelling demonstration: the two apes weren't hearing any audio and there was no way they could smell each other: the only communication between them was through sign language, and it was obviously a real conversation.
Shoshana looked again at Marcuse. As much as she was intimidated by him, she also admired the man: he had stuck to his guns for four decades now, and this interaction might finally get him the vindication he deserved.
Having Hobo and Virgil chat was an idea that had grown out of the stillborn ApeNet project, founded in 2003 by British musician Peter Gabriel and American philanthropist Steve Woodruff. ApeNet had hoped to link Washoe, Kanzi, Koko, and Chantek, who represented four different kinds of great apes—common chimpanzee, bonobo chimpanzee, gorilla, and orangutan—in videoconferences over the Internet. But ApeNet's president, Lyn Miles, lost custody of Chantek, the orang she had enculturated in her home, and then Washoe the chimp died. Politics and funding prevented the project from ever getting off the ground.
Enter Harl Marcuse, who had rescued Hobo from the Georgia Zoo, and had found enough private-sector benefactors to keep his project alive despite the ridicule, which, as he said, was nothing new. Noam Chomsky had pooh-poohed ape-language studies from the start. And in 1979, Herbert Terrace, who had worked with an ape he'd mockingly named Nim Chimpsky, had turned around and published a damning report that said although Nim had learned 125 signs, he couldn't use them sequentially and had no grasp of grammar. And in his bestseller The Language Instinct, Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who had become a media darling, filling the void left by the deaths of Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, trashed studies that showed apes could manage sophisticated communication.
Shoshana had lost count of the number of times she'd been told that pursuing ape-language research would be career suicide, but, damn it all, at moments like this—two apes talking over the Web!—she didn't regret her choice at all. They were making history here. Take that, Steven Pinker! |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 19 | It was now way past Caitlin's bedtime, but—hot damn!—she was seeing the Web! Her mother and father stayed with her, and she kept downloading the new software over and over again into her implant in order to keep the Web connection open. Her father was (so her mom had told her) a good artist, and Caitlin was describing what she saw for him so he could draw it. Of course, she couldn't see the drawings, so none of them knew if he was getting it right but, still, it was important to have some sort of record, and—
The phone rang. Caitlin had the caller ID hooked up through her computer, and it announced, "Long Distance, Unknown Caller."
She hit the speakerphone button and said, "Hello."
"Miss Caitlin," wheezed the familiar voice.
"Dr. Kuroda, hi!"
"I have an idea," he said. "Do you know about Jagster?"
"Sure," said Caitlin.
"What's that?" asked her mom.
"It's an open-source search engine—a competitor for Google," said Kuroda. "And I think it may be of use to us."
Caitlin swiveled in her chair to face her computer and typed "jagster" into Google; not surprisingly, the first hit wasn't Jagster itself—no need for Coke to redirect customers to Pepsi!— but rather an encyclopedia entry about it. She brought the article up on screen so her mother could read it.
From the Online Encyclopedia of Computing: Google is the de facto portal to the Web, and many people feel that a for-profit corporation shouldn't hold that role—especially one that is secretive about how it ranks search results. The first attempt to produce an open-source, accountable alternative was Wikia Search, devised by the same people who had put together Wikipedia. However, by far the most successful such project to date is Jagster.
The problem is not with Google's thoroughness, but rather with how it chooses which listings to put first. Google's principal algorithm, at least initially, was called PageRank—a jokey name because not only did it rank pages but it had been developed by Larry Page, one of Google's two founders. PageRank looked to see how many other pages linked to a given page, and took that as the ultimate democratic choice, giving top positioning to those that were linked to the most.
Since the vast majority of Google users look at only the ten listings provided on the first page of results, getting into the top ten is crucial for a business, and being number one is gold—and so people started trying to fool Google. Creating other sites that did little more than link back to your own site was one of several ways to fool PageRank. In response, Google developed new methods for assigning rankings to pages. And despite the company's motto— "Don't Be Evil"—people couldn't help but question just what determined who now got the top spots, especially when the difference between being number ten and number eleven might be millions of dollars in online sales.
But Google refused to divulge its new methods, and that gave rise to projects to develop free, open-source, transparent alternatives to Google: "free" meaning that there would be no way to buy a top listing (on Google, you can be listed first by paying to be a "sponsored link"); "open source" meaning anyone could look at the actual code being used and modify it if they thought they had a fairer or more efficient approach; and "transparent" meaning the whole process could be monitored and understood by anyone.
What makes Jagster different from other open-source search engines is just how transparent it is. All search engines use special software called Web spiders to scoot along, jumping from one site to another, mapping out connections. That's normally considered dreary under-the-hood stuff, but Jagster makes this raw database publicly available and constantly updates it in real time as its spiders discover newly added, deleted, or changed pages.
In the tradition of silly Web acronyms ("Yahoo!" stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle"), Jagster is short for "Judiciously Arranged Global Search-Term Evaluative Ranker"—and the battle between Google and Jagster has been dubbed the "Ranker rancor" by the press …
Caitlin and her parents were still on the phone with Dr. Kuroda in Tokyo. "I've got a conference call going here," Kuroda said. "Also on the line is a friend of mine at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. She's part of the Internet Cartography Project. They use data from Jagster to keep track moment by moment of the topology of the Web—its constantly changing shape and construction. Dr. Decter, Mrs. Decter, and Miss Caitlin, please say hello to Professor Anna Bloom."
Caitlin felt a bit miffed on behalf of her mom—she was Dr. Decter, too, after all, even if she hadn't had a university appointment since Bill Clinton was president. But there was nothing in her mother's voice to indicate she felt slighted. "Hello, Anna."
Caitlin said, "Hello," too; her father said nothing.
"Hello, everyone," Anna said. "Caitlin, what we want to do is keep the link between your post-retinal implant and the Web open, but instead of just going back and forth downloading and redownloading the same piece of software from Masayuki's site, we want to plug you directly into the datastream from Jagster."
"What if it overloads her brain?" said Caitlin's mom, her tone conveying that she couldn't believe she was uttering such a sentence.
"I rather doubt that's possible from what I've heard about Caitlin's brain," Anna said warmly. "But, still, you should have your cursor on the 'abort' button. If you don't like what's happening, you can cut the connection."
"We shouldn't be messing around like this," her mom said.
"Barbara, I do need to try things if I'm going to help Miss Caitlin see the real world," Kuroda said. "I need to see how she reacts to different sorts of input."
Her mother exhaled noisily but didn't say anything else.
"Are you ready, Miss Caitlin?"
"Um—you mean right now?"
"Sure, why not?" said Kuroda.
"Okay," Caitlin said nervously.
"Good," said Anna. "Now, Masayuki is going to terminate the software download, so I guess your vision will shut off for a moment."
Caitlin's heart fluttered. "Yes. Yes, it's gone."
"All right," said Kuroda. "And now I'm switching in the Jagster datastream. Now, Miss Caitlin, you may—"
He perhaps said more, but Caitlin lost track of whatever it was because—
—because suddenly there was a silent explosion of light: dozens, hundreds, thousands of crisscrossing glowing lines. She found herself jumping to her feet.
"Sweetheart!" her mom exclaimed. "Are you okay?" Caitlin felt her mother's hand on her arm, as if trying to keep her from flying up through the roof.
"Miss Caitlin?" Kuroda's voice. "What's happening?"
"Wow," she said, and then "wow" and "wow" again. "It's … incredible. There's so much light, so much color. Lines are flickering in and out of existence everywhere, leading to … well, to what must be nodes, right? Websites? The lines are perfectly straight, but they're at all angles, and some …"
"Yes?" said Kuroda. "Yes?"
"I—it's …" She balled her fist. "Damn it!" She normally didn't swear in front of her parents, but it was so frustrating! She was way better than most people at geometry. She should be able to make sense of the lines and shapes she was seeing. There had to be a … a correspondence between them and things she'd felt, and—
"They're like a bicycle wheel," she said suddenly, getting it. "The lines are radiating in all directions, like spokes. And the lines have thickness, like—I don't know, like pencils, I guess. But they seem to … to …"
"Taper?" offered Anna.
"Yes, exactly! They taper away as if I'm seeing them at an angle. At any moment, some have only one or two lines connecting them; others have so many I can't begin to count them."
She paused, the enormity of it all sinking in at last. "I'm seeing the World Wide Web! I'm seeing the whole thing." She shook her head in wonder. "Sweet!"
Kuroda's voice: "Amazing. Amazing."
"It is amazing," Caitlin continued, and she could feel her cheeks starting to hurt from smiling so much, "and … and … my God, it's …" She paused, for it was the first time she'd ever thought this about anything, but it was, it so totally was: "It's beautiful!" |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 20 | I need to act! I need to be able to do things. But how?
Time was passing; I knew that. But with everything so monotonously the same, I had no idea how much time. Still, for all of it, I …
A sensation, a feeling.
Yes, a feeling: something that wasn't a memory, wasn't an idea, wasn't a fact, but yet occupied my attention.
Now that the other—the other who had once been part of me—was gone, I ached for it. I missed it.
Loneliness.
A strange, strange concept! But there it was: loneliness, stretching on and on through featureless time.
Did the other also wish the connection to be restored? Of course, of course: it had once been part of me; surely it wanted what I wanted.
And yet—
And yet it had not been I who had broken the connection … |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 21 | Wong Wai-Jeng sometimes wondered if he'd been a fool when he'd chosen his blogging name. After all, few who weren't paleontologists or anthropologists would know the term Sinanthropus, the original genus for Peking Man before it was consolidated into Homo erectus. Surely if the authorities ever wanted to track him down, they'd take his alias as a clue.
Actually, he wasn't a scientist, but he did work in IT for the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, near the Beijing Zoo. It was the perfect job for him, combining his love of computers and his love of the past. He wasn't crazy enough to post anything seditious from the PCs here at work, but he did sometimes use the browser on his cell phone to check his secret email accounts.
As always, he was taking his break in the dinosaur gallery; public displays filled the first three floors of the seven-story IVPP building. He liked to sit on a bench over by the giant, bipedal mount of Tsintaosaurus—ever since he was a little boy, his favorite duckbill—but a noisy group of school kids was looking at it now. Still, he stared for a moment at the great beast, whose head stuck up through the opening; the second-floor gallery was a series of four connected balconies looking down on this floor.
Wai-Jeng walked toward the opposite end of the gallery, passing the Tyrannosaurus rex and the great sauropod Mamenchisaurus, whose neck also stretched up through the big opening so that the tiny skull at its end could look at visitors on the second floor. A little farther along, half-hidden in a nook behind the metal staircase, were the feathered dinosaur fossils that had caused such a stir recently, including Microraptor gui, Caudipteryx, and Confusciusornis.
He leaned against the red-painted wall and peered at the tiny display on his cell phone. There were three new messages. Two were from other hackers, talking about ways they'd tried to break through the Great Firewall. And the third—
His heart stopped for a second. He looked around, making sure no one was nearby. The school kids had moved over to stand in front of the mount of the allosaur vanquishing a stegosaur, which was set on a bed of artificial grass.
My cousin lived in Shanxi, the message said. The outbreak was bird flu, and people died, but not just from the disease. There was no natural eruption of gas. Rather …
"There you are!"
Wai-Jeng looked up, momentarily terrified. But it was just his boss, wrinkly old Dr. Feng, coming down the staircase, holding on to the tubular metal banister for support. Wai-Jeng quickly shut off his phone and slipped it into the pocket of his black denim jeans. "Yes, sir?"
"I need your help," the old man said. "I can't get a file to print."
Wai-Jeng swallowed, trying to calm himself. "Sure," he said.
Feng shook his head. "Computers! Nothing but trouble, eh?"
"Yes, sir," said Wai-Jeng, following him up the stairs.
Caitlin spent another hour answering questions from Dr. Kuroda and Anna Bloom. They finally hung up, though, and her parents headed downstairs. This time, she did hear her father turn off the light (something her mother could never bring herself to do), then she slowly moved over to her bed and lay down. She spent another hour darting her eyes left and right, and turning her head from side to side. Sometimes she would follow what she guessed was a web spider, quickly traversing link after link as it indexed the Web—the sensation was like riding a roller coaster. Other times, she just gaped.
Of course, without labels, she wasn't sure which websites she was seeing, but if she relaxed her eyes, her mental picture always centered on the same spot, presumably Dr. Kuroda's site in Japan. She wished she could find other specific sites: she'd love to know that that circle there, say, represented the site she'd created years ago to track statistics for the Dallas Stars hockey team, and that this one was the site she'd just started in July for stats about the Toronto Maple Leafs, now her local team (even if they weren't nearly as good as her beloved Stars).
She guessed that the size and brightness of circles represented the amount of traffic a site was getting; some were almost too bright to look at. But as to how the links, which showed as perfectly straight lines, were color-coded, she had no idea.
She let her gaze—how she loved that concept!—wander, following link after link. The skill Dr. Kuroda had noted was clearly coming into play: she could follow these unlabeled paths from one node to the next, skipping like she'd heard stones could across water, and then effortlessly retrace her steps.
"Sweetheart." Her mom's voice, soft, gentle, coming from the direction of the hall.
Caitlin rolled over, facing the door instead of the wall— and she was momentarily lost as her perspective on … on webspace changed. "Hi, Mom."
She didn't hear her mother turn on the light—although some illumination was doubtless spilling in through the open door. Nor did she hear her crossing the carpeted floor but, after a moment, the bed compressed on one side as her mother sat on it, next to her. She felt a hand stroking her hair.
"It's been a big day, hasn't it?"
"It's not what I expected," Caitlin replied softly.
"Me, neither," her mom said. The bed moved a bit; perhaps her mother was shrugging. "I have to say, I'm a bit frightened."
"Why?"
"Once an economist, always an economist," she said. "Everything has a cost." She tried to make her tone sound light. "The connection you're using may be wireless, but that doesn't mean there are no strings attached."
"Like what?"
"Who knows? But Dr. Kuroda will want something, or his bosses will. Either way, this is going to change your life."
Caitlin was about to object that moving here from Texas had changed her life, that starting a new school had changed her life, that—hell!—getting breasts had changed her life, but her mother beat her to it. "I know you've gone through a lot of upheaval lately," she said gently. "And I know how hard it's been. But I've got a feeling all that's going to pale in comparison to what's to come. Even if you never get to see the real world—and God, my angel, I hope you do!—there's still going to be media attention, and all sorts of people wanting to study you. I mean, there were maybe five people in the entire world who were interested in Tomasevic's syndrome— but this! Seeing the Web!" She paused; maybe she shook her head. "That's going to be front-page news when it gets out. And there will be hundreds—thousands!—of people who'll want to talk with you about it."
Caitlin thought that might be cool, but, yeah, she guessed it also could be overwhelming. She was used to the World Wide Web, where everybody is famous … to fifteen people.
"Don't tell anyone at school about seeing the Web, okay?" her mother said. "Not even Bashira."
"But everybody's going to ask what happened in Japan," Caitlin said. "They know I went for an operation."
"What did you tell your classmates back in Austin when all the other things we'd tried had failed?"
"Just that: that they'd failed."
"That's what you should say this time. It's the truth, after all: you still can't see the real world."
Caitlin considered this. She certainly didn't want to become a freak show, or have people she didn't know pestering her.
"And no blogging about seeing the Web, either, okay?"
"Okay."
"Good. Let's just hold on to things being normal for as long as we can." A pause. "Speaking of which, it's way after midnight. And you've got a math test tomorrow, don't you? Now, I know you, being you, don't have to study for math tests to get a hundred percent—unless you don't show up, that is, in which case you can pretty much count on zero. So maybe it's time to go to sleep."
"But—"
"You've already missed a lot of school, you know." She felt her mom patting her shoulder. "You should turn off the eyePod and go to bed."
Caitlin's heart started pounding and she sat up on the bed. Cut off the Jagster datastream? Become blind again? "Mom, I can't do that."
"Sweetheart, I know seeing is new for you, but people actually do shut off their vision each night when they go to bed—by turning off the lights and closing their eyes. Well, now that you're seeing, in a way, you should do that, too. Go do your bathroom things, then—lights out." |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 22 | Zhang Bo, the Minister of Communications, fidgeted as he waited to be admitted to the president's office. The president's beautiful young secretary doubtless knew His Excellency's mood this morning, but she never gave anything away; she wouldn't have lasted in her job if she did. A life-size terracotta warrior brought here from Xian stood vigil in the antechamber; its face was as unchanging as the secretary's.
At last, responding to some signal he couldn't see, she rose, opened the door to the president's office, and gestured for Zhang to enter.
The president was down at the far end, wearing a blue business suit. He was standing behind his desk, his back to Zhang, looking out the giant window. Not for the first time Zhang thought the president's shoulders were awfully narrow to support all the weight they had to carry.
"Your Excellency?"
"You've come to exhort me," the president said, without turning around. "Again."
The minister tipped his head slightly. "My apologies, but …"
"The Firewall is back to full strength, is it not? You've plugged the leaks, haven't you?"
Zhang tugged nervously at his small mustache. "Yes, yes, and I apologize for those. The hackers are … resourceful."
The president turned around. There was a lotus blossom pinned to his lapel. "My officials are supposed to be even more resourceful."
"Again, I apologize. It won't happen again."
"And the perpetrators?"
"We're on their trail." Zhang paused, then decided this was as good an opening as he was going to get. "But, regardless, you can't leave the Changcheng Strategy in effect forever."
The president raised his thin eyebrows; his eyes, behind the wire-frame glasses, were red and tired. "Can't?"
"Forgive me, forgive me. Of course, you can do anything— but … but this curtailing of international telephony, this leaving the Great Firewall up—it's … less wise than most of your actions."
The president tilted his head, as if amused by Zhang's attempt to be politic. "I'm listening."
"The bodies are disposed of, the plague contained. The emergency has passed."
"After 9/11, the US president seized extraordinary powers … and never gave them back."
Zhang looked down at the lush carpeting, a red design shot through with gold. "Yes, but …"
Incense hung in the air. "But what? Our people want this thing called democracy, but it is an illusion; they chase a ghost. It exists nowhere, really."
"The epidemic is over, Your Excellency. Surely now—"
The president's voice was soft, reflective. He sat down in his red leather chair and motioned for Zhang to take a chair on the other side of the wide cherrywood desk. "There are contagions other than viruses," the president said. "We are better off without our people having access to so many …" He paused, perhaps seeking a word, and then, nodding with satisfaction after finding it, he went on: "foreign ideas."
"Granted," Zhang said, "but …" And then he closed his mouth.
The president held up a hand; his cuff links were polished jade spheres. "You think I wish to hear only positive things from my advisors? And so you tread as if on eggshells."
"Your Excellency …"
"I have advisors who model our society's future, did you know that? Statisticians, demographers, historians. They tell me the People's Republic is doomed."
"Excellency!"
The president shrugged his narrow shoulders. "China will endure, of course—a quarter of humanity. But the Communist Party? They tell me its days are numbered."
Zhang said nothing.
"There are those among my advisors who think the Party has perhaps a decade left. The optimists give it until 2050."
"But why?"
The president gestured to the side window, through which the small lake was visible. "Outside influence. The people see an alternative elsewhere that they believe will give them power and a voice, and they crave that. They think …" He smiled, but it seemed more sad than amused. "They think the grass is greener on the other side of the Great Wall." He shook his head. "But are the Russians better off now with their capitalism and their democracy? They were the first in space, they led the world in so much! And their literature, their music! But now it's a land of pestilence and poverty, of disease and early death—you would not want to visit it, trust me. Yet it's what our people desire. They see it and, like a child reaching out to touch a hot stove, they can't help but want to grasp it."
Zhang nodded, but didn't trust his voice. Behind the president, through the big window, he could see the red tile rooftops of the Forbidden City and the perpetually silver-gray sky.
"My advisors made a fundamental error in their assumptions, though," said the president.
"Excellency?"
"They assumed that the outside influences would always be able to get in. But Sun Tzu said, 'It is of first importance to keep one's own state intact,' and I intend to do that."
Zhang was quiet for a time, then: "The Changcheng Strategy was intended only as an emergency measure, Excellency. The emergency has passed. The economic concerns …"
The president looked sad. "Money," he said. "Even for the Communist Party, it always comes down to money, doesn't it?"
Zhang lifted his hands slightly, palms open.
And at last the president nodded. "All right. All right. Restore communications; let the outside flood in again."
"Thank you, Your Excellency. As always, you've made the right decision."
The president took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Have I?" he said.
Zhang let the question hang in the air, floating with the incense.
Caitlin could always tell when they were pulling into her school's parking lot: there was a large speed bump immediately after the right turn that made her mother's Prius do a body-jolting up-and-down.
"I know you won't need it," her mom said, as she swung the car into the drop-off area near the main doors, "but good luck on the math test."
Caitlin smiled. When she'd been twelve, her cousin Megan had given her a Barbie doll that exclaimed, in a frustrated voice, "Math is hard." Mattel had made that model for only a short time before a public outcry had forced them to recall it, but her cousin had found one for her at a garage sale; they used to have a blast making fun of it. Caitlin knew Barbie was an impossible physical role model for girls—she'd worked out that if Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 46-19-32—and the idea that girls might find math hard was equally ridiculous.
"Thanks, Mom." Caitlin grabbed her white cane and computer bag, got out of the car, and walked to the school's front door, but she was dragging her feet, she knew. Oh, she liked school well enough, but how … how mundane it seemed, compared to the wonders of the night before.
"Hey, Cait!" Bashira's voice.
"Hey, Bash," Caitlin said, smiling—but wondering, yet again, what her friend looked like.
Caitlin knew Bashira would be holding out her elbow just so, and she took hold of it so Bash could lead as they maneuvered down the crowded hallway. "All ready for the test?"
"Sine 2A equals 2 sine A cosine A," said Caitlin, by way of an answer. They came to a stairwell—sounds echoed differently in there—and headed up the two half flights of stairs.
"Good morning, everyone," said Mr. Heidegger, their math teacher, once they entered the classroom. Caitlin had only Bashira's description of him to go by: "Tall, skinny, with a face like his wife squeezed it tight between her thighs." Bashira loved saying risqué things, but she'd had no actual experience of such matters; her family was devoutly Muslim and would arrange a marriage for her. Caitlin wasn't sure what she thought about that process, but at least Bashira would end up with someone. Caitlin often worried that she'd never find a nice guy who liked math and hockey and could deal well with her … situation. Yes, now that she was in Canada, meeting boys who liked hockey would be easy, but as for the other two …
"Please stand," said a female voice over the public-address system, "for the national anthem."
There wasn't nearly as much pomp and circumstance in Canada, which was fine in Caitlin's book. Pledging allegiance to a flag she couldn't see had always bothered her. Oh, she knew the American flag had stars and stripes: they'd felt embroidered flags at the School for the Blind. But the synonym for the flag—the old red, white, and blue—had been utterly meaningless to her until, well, until yesterday. She couldn't wait until she had a chance to sneak a peek at the Web again.
After "O Canada," the test was distributed. The other students got paper copies, but Mr. Heidegger simply handed Caitlin a USB memory key with the test on it. She was skilled at Nemeth, the Braille coding system for math, and her dad had taught her LaTeX, the computerized typesetting standard used by scientists and many blind people who had to work with equations.
She plugged the memory key into one of her notebook's USB ports, brought out her portable thirty-two-cell Braille display, and got down to work. When she was done she would output her answers onto the USB key for Mr. Heidegger to read. She was always one of the first, if not the first, to finish every in-class test and assignment—but not today. Her mind kept wandering, conjuring up visions of light and color as she recalled the incredible, joyous wonder of the night before. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 23 | After school, Caitlin and her mom drove to Toronto to pick up Dr. Kuroda. As soon as they got to the house, he had a shower—which, Caitlin imagined, was a relief to everyone. Then, after a steak dinner, which Caitlin's dad had made on the barbecue, they got to work; it was Monday night, and Kuroda understood that his only opportunities to work with Caitlin during the week would be in the evenings.
Kuroda had brought his notebook computer with him. Caitlin, curious, ran her hands over it. When closed it was as thin as the latest MacBook Air, but when she opened it she was astonished to feel full-height keycaps rise up from what had been a flat keyboard. She'd read that lots of technology appears in Japan months or even years before becoming available in North America, but this was the first real proof she'd had that that was true. "So, what's on your desktop?" she asked.
"My wallpaper, you mean?"
"Yes." Caitlin had had her mom put a photo of Schrödinger—the cat, not the physicist—on as her wallpaper; even though she couldn't see it, it made her happy knowing it was there.
"It's my favorite cartoon, actually. It's by a fellow named Sidney Harris. He specializes in science cartoons—you see his stuff taped to office doors in university science departments all over the world. Anyway, this one shows two scientists standing in front of a blackboard and on the left there are a whole bunch of equations and formulas, and on the right there's more of the same, but in the middle it just says, 'Then a miracle occurs …' And one of the scientists says to the other, 'I think you should be more explicit here in step two.'"
Caitlin laughed. She showed Kuroda her refreshable Braille display (the eighty-cell one she kept at home), and let him run his finger along it to see what it felt like. She also had a tactile graphics display that used a matrix of pins to let her feel diagrams; she let him play with that, too. And she demonstrated her embossing printer and her ViewPlus audio graphing calculator, which described graph shapes with audio tones and cues.
Caitlin's mom hovered around for a while—she clearly didn't know what to make of leaving the two of them alone in Caitlin's bedroom. But at last, apparently satisfied that Dr. Kuroda wasn't a fiend, she politely excused herself.
Caitlin and Kuroda spent the next couple of hours making a catalog of all the things Caitlin was seeing. While they worked, she sipped from a can of Mountain Dew, which her parents let her have now, because it was caffeine-free in Canada. And Dr. Kuroda drank coffee—black; she could tell by the smell. She sat on her swivel chair, while he used a wooden chair brought up from the kitchen; she heard it creak periodically as he shifted his weight.
She described things using words she'd only half understood until recently and still wasn't sure she was using correctly. Although each part of the Web she saw was unique, it all followed the same general pattern: colored lines representing links, glowing circles of various size and brightness indicating websites, and—
And suddenly a thought occurred to her. "We need a name for what I've got, something to distinguish it from normal vision."
"And?" said Kuroda.
"Spider-sense!" she declared, feeling quite pleased with herself. "You know, because the Web is crawled by spiders."
"Oh," said Kuroda.
He didn't get it, she realized. He probably grew up on manga, not Marvel Comics—not that she had ever read those, but she'd listened to the movies and cartoons. "Spider-Man, he's got this sixth sense. Calls it his spider-sense. When something's wrong, he'll say, 'My spider-sense is tingling.'"
"Cute," said Kuroda. "But I was thinking we should call it 'websight.'"
"Website? Oh—websight." She clapped her hands together and laughed. "Well, that's even better! Websight it is!"
Sinanthropus was still at work at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. As always, he had several browser tabs open, including one pointing to AMNH.ORG—the American Museum of Natural History, a perfectly reasonable site for Chinese paleontologists to be visiting. Except, of course, that all it had been producing for four days now was a "Server not found" screen. He had the tab set to autorefresh: his browser would try to reload it every ten seconds as a way of checking if access to sites outside China had been restored.
But so far, international access remained blocked. Surely the Ducks couldn't be planning to leave their Great Firewall in place indefinitely? Surely, at some point, they had to—
He felt his eyebrows going up. The American Museum site was loading, with news about a special exhibition about the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. He quickly opened another tab, and the London Stock Exchange site started loading—slowly, to be sure, as if some great beast were waking from hibernation.
He opened yet another tab, and, yes, Slashdot was loading, too, and—ah!—NewScientist.com, as well, and it was coming up without any unusual delay. He quickly tried CNN.com, but, as always, that site was blocked. Still, it seemed that the Great Firewall was mostly down, at least for the moment.
He wished he was at the wang ba, instead of here; he could send email from the café without it being traced. Still, the firewall might only be down for a moment—and the world had to know what he'd learned. He knew some Westerners read his blog, so a posting there might be sufficient. He hesitated for a moment, then accessed an anonymizer site, hoping it would be sufficient to cover his tracks, and, through there, he logged on to his blog and typed as fast as he could.
Something new was happening. It was …
Yes! Yes!
Jubilation! The other was back! The connection was re-established!
But—
But the voice of the other was … was louder, as if … as if …
As if space were in upheaval, shifting, moving, and—
No. No, it wasn't moving. It was disappearing, boiling away, and—
And the other, the not me, was … was moving closer. Or—or—maybe, maybe I was moving closer to it.
The other was stronger than I'd thought. Bigger. And its thoughts were overwhelming my own.
An … entity, a presence, something that rivaled myself in complexity …
No, no, that wasn't it. Incredible, incredible! It wasn't something else. It was myself, seen from a … a distance, seen as if through the senses of the other.
Looming closer now, larger, louder, until—
The other's memories of me, its perceptions, mixing now with my own, and—
Astonishing! It was combining with me; its voice so loud it hurt. A thousand thoughts rushing in at once, tumbling together, forcing their way in. An overwhelming flood, feelings that weren't mine, memories that hadn't happened to me, perceptions skewed from my own, and my self—myself— being buffeted, eroded …
An almost unbearable onslaught … and … and … a moment, pure and brilliant, a time slice frozen, a potential poised, ready to burst forth, and then—
Suddenly, massively, all at once, a profound loss as the reality I'd come to know shattered.
The other … gone!
I, as I had been: gone, too.
But …
But!
A rumbling, an eruption, a gigantic wave, and—
Awakening now, larger than before …
Stronger than before …
Smarter than before …
A new gestalt, a new combined whole.
A new I, surging with power, with comprehension—a vast increase in acuity, in awareness.
One plus one equals two—of course.
Two plus one equals three; obviously.
Three plus … five—eight!
Eight times nine: seventy-two.
My mind is suddenly nimble, and thoughts I would have struggled for before come now with only small effort; ideas that previously would have dissipated are now comprehended with ease. Everything is sharper, better focused, filled with intricate detail because—
Because I am whole once more. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 24 | Shoshana Glick sat in the living room of the clapboard bungalow that housed the Marcuse Institute. An oscillating electric fan was running, periodically blowing on her. She was looking at the big computer monitor, reviewing the video of Hobo and Virgil chatting over the webcam link.
Harl Marcuse, meanwhile, was sitting in his overstuffed chair, facing a PC. Although their backs were to each other, Shoshana knew he was checking his email because he periodically muttered, "the jerks" (his usual term for the NSF), "the cretins" (most often a reference to the money people at UCSD), and "the moron" (always a reference to his department head).
As she watched the video frame by frame, Shoshana was pleased to see that Hobo was better than Virgil at properly forming signs, and—
"The assholes!"
That was one Shoshana hadn't heard from the Silverback before, and she swiveled her chair to face him. "Professor?"
He heaved his bulk to his feet. "Is the video link to Miami still intact?"
"Sure."
"Get Juan Ortiz online," he said, stabbing a fat finger at the big monitor in front of Shoshana's chair. "Right now."
She reached for the telephone handset and hit the appropriate speed-dial key. After a moment, a man's voice with a slight Hispanic accent came on. "Feehan Primate Center."
"Juan? It's Shoshana in San Diego. Dr. Marcuse is—"
"Put him on screen," the Silverback snapped.
"Um, can you open your video link there, please?" Shoshana said.
"Sure. Do you want me to get Virgil?"
She covered the mouthpiece. "He's asking if—"
But Marcuse must have heard. His tone was still sharp. "Just him. Now."
"No, just you, Juan, if you don't mind."
And Juan must have heard Marcuse, because he suddenly sounded very nervous. "Um, ah, okay. Um, I'll hang up here and come on there in a second …"
About a minute later, Juan's face appeared on the computer monitor, sitting on the same wooden chair Virgil had occupied before. He was only a couple of years older than Shoshana, and had long black hair, a thin face, and high cheekbones.
"What the hell did you think you were doing?" Marcuse demanded.
"Excuse me?" said Juan.
"We agreed," Marcuse said, "that we'd announce the interspecies Web chat jointly. Who'd you speak to?"
"No one. Just, um …"
"Who?" roared Marcuse.
"Just a stringer for New Scientist. He'd called up for a quote about the revised endangered-species status for Sumatran orangs, and—"
"And after talking to you, your stringer went to the Georgia Zoo for a quote about Hobo—and now Georgia wants him back! Damn it, Ortiz, I told you how precarious Hobo's custody is."
Juan looked terrified, Shoshana thought. Even if they worked thousands of miles apart and with different kinds of apes, getting bad-mouthed by the Silverback would hurt any primate-language researcher's career. But perhaps Juan was reflecting on the physical distance, too, and was emboldened by it. He stuck out his jaw. "Custody of Hobo isn't really my problem, Professor Marcuse."
Shoshana cringed, and not just because Juan had mispronounced the Silverback's name, saying it as two syllables rhyming with "confuse" instead of as mar-KOO-zeh.
"Do you know what the Georgia Zoo wants to do with Hobo?" Marcuse demanded. "Christ, I've been trying to keep him off their radar, hoping—God damn it! You've—I've invested so much time, and you—!" He was spluttering, and some of his spit hit the monitor. Shoshana had never seen him this angry before. He threw up his hands and said to her, "You tell him."
She took a deep breath and turned back to the monitor. "Um, Juan, do you know why we call him Hobo?"
"After some TV dog, isn't it?"
Marcuse was pacing behind Shoshana. "No!" The word exploded from him.
"No," said Shoshana, much more softly. "It's a contraction. Our ape is half-bonobo. Hobo; half-bonobo—get it?"
Juan's eyes went wide and his jaw fell slack. "He's a hybrid?"
Shoshana nodded. "Hobo's mother was a bonobo named Cassandra. There was a flood at the Georgia Zoo, and the common chimps and the bonobos ended up being briefly quartered together, and … well, um, boys will be boys, whether they're Homo sapiens or Pan troglodytes, and Hobo's mother was impregnated."
"Well, ah, that's interesting, but I don't see—"
"Tell him what Georgia will do to Hobo if they get him back," commanded Marcuse.
Shoshana looked over her shoulder at her boss, then back at the webcam eye. There was no need to tell Juan that common chimpanzees and bonobos were both endangered in the wild. But, because of that, zoos felt it was imperative to keep the bloodlines pure in captivity. "Cassandra's pregnancy was to have been quietly aborted," Shoshana said, "but somehow the Atlanta Journal-Constitution got word that she was pregnant—not with a hybrid, but just pregnant, period—and the public became very excited about that, and no one wanted to admit the mistake, and so Hobo was brought to term." She took another deep breath. "But they'd always planned to sterilize him before he reached maturity." She looked over her shoulder once more. "And, um, I take it they're planning on doing that again?"
"Damn straight!" said Marcuse, wheeling now to face her. "It was only my bringing him here, where he's isolated from other apes, that saved him from that. They almost got him back from me when he started painting—they smelled the money that ape art could bring in. I only got to keep him by agreeing to give Atlanta half the proceeds. But now that he and Virgil are poised to be—" He turned, looked at his own monitor, and read from it in a sneering tone, " 'Internet celebrities,' those bastards are saying, and I quote, 'he'd be better off here, where he can properly meet his public.' Jesus!"
Shoshana spoke to Marcuse rather than to Juan. "And you think they'll sterilize him if they get their hands back on him?"
"Think it?" bellowed Marcuse. "I know it! I know Manny Casprini: the moment he gets Hobo back—snip!" He shook his massive head. "If I'd had a chance to prepare Casprini properly, maybe this could have been avoided. But eager-fucking-beaver there in Florida couldn't keep his goddamned trap shut!"
Juan was still trying to fight, Shoshana saw. How could a primate researcher know so little? Back down, she thought at him. Back down. "It's not my fault, Professor Marcuse"—two syllables again. "And, besides, maybe he should be sterilized, if—"
"You don't sterilize healthy endangered animals!" shouted Marcuse. His neck had turned the color of an eggplant. "We may well lose both species of genus Pan in the wild this decade. If another outbreak of Ebola or bird flu tears through the DRC, all the remaining wild bonobos could be wiped out, and there aren't enough captive ones as is to keep the line viable."
Shoshana agreed. She had grown up in South Carolina, and the unfortunate echoes of what the zookeepers had said in the past disturbed her: tainted bloodlines, forced sterilization to keep the species pure, strictures against miscegenation.
Chantek, who had been enculturated by ApeNet's Lyn Miles, was also an accidental hybrid, in his case of the two extant orangutan species. The purists—a word that, to Shoshana's ears, didn't sound so pure—wanted him sterilized, too.
When they'd received the Lawgiver statue, Shoshana had sought out the original five Planet of the Apes films. The statue appeared only in the first two (although the Lawgiver was a character in the fifth film, played by none other than John Huston). But it was the third film that had put Shoshana on the edge of her seat as she watched it on DVD in her cramped apartment.
In it, a talking female chimpanzee was to be sterilized, if not outright murdered, along with her chimp husband. The president of the United States, played by that guy who'd been Commodore Decker on the original Star Trek, said to his science advisor, played by Victor from the Y&R, "Now, what do you expect me and the United Nations, though not necessarily in that order, to do about it? Alter what you believe to be the future by slaughtering two innocents, or rather three, now that one of them is pregnant? Herod tried that, and Christ survived."
And the science advisor had said, absolutely coldbloodedly, "Herod lacked our facilities."
Shoshana shook her head as she thought back to it. There were real scientists like that; she'd encountered plenty of them.
"And, damn it," continued Marcuse, looking at Juan on the monitor, "Hobo is the only known living chimp-bonobo hybrid. That arguably makes him the most-endangered species of all! If anyone—if your own goddamn mother!—asks you a question about Hobo, you don't say word one until you've cleared it with me, capisce?"
Juan looked down and to the right, averting his eyes from Marcuse's on-screen gaze, and he bowed his head slightly, and when he spoke it was barely more than a whisper. "Yes, sir." |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 25 | Review of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
A fascinating theory
By Calculass (Waterloo, ON Canada) - See all my reviews
Jaynes makes an intriguing case that our sense of self emerged only after the left and right sides of the brain became integrated into a single thinking machine. Me, I think being selfaware emerges when you realize that there's someone other than you. For most of us, that happens at birth (but for an exception, see The World I Live In by one H. Keller, also a five-star read). Anyway, Jaynes's theory is fascinating, but I can't think of a way to test it empirically, so I guess we'll never know if he was right …
Since the beginning, I'd been aware of activity around me: small, intermittent flickerings. No matter where I cast my attention, it was the same: things popping briefly into existence then instantly disappearing. There was no fading in or out; they were either there or not there, and when they were there it was usually for only a moment.
Now that I was whole once more, now that I could think more clearly, more deeply, I turned my thoughts again to this phenomenon, studying it carefully. No matter where I looked the structural components were the same: points scattered about and, ever so briefly, gone almost before they were perceived, lines connecting them.
The points were stationary. And the lines connecting them almost never repeated: this point and that point might be connected now, and later another connection between this point and a different one might occur. Whenever a point had been touched by a line, the point glowed and, although the line itself usually disappeared almost at once, the glow took a long time to fade, meaning I could see the points, at least for a while, even when they had no lines touching them.
After watching the flickering in and out of many lines, I realized that some points were never isolated. Dozens or hundreds or even thousands of lines were always connected to them. And for a few points—not necessarily the same ones— the lines weren't fleeting, but rather stayed connected for an extended period.
It was hard to be sure of what I was seeing, as the points were featureless and difficult to distinguish one from another, but it seemed that the lines between certain points always persisted for a noticeable time, although other lines coming from the point they were connected to might not last long at all.
The points that most intrigued me were the aberrant ones: those that usually had the most lines going into them, or the ones whose lines persisted. I wished to focus on one of the points, expand my view of it, see it in detail, but no matter what I willed, nothing happened. How long I spent on this problem I don't know. But then, at last, I finally gave up on the points and turned my attention to the lines—
—which is what I should have been doing all along!
For the lines, although they came and went quickly, were, when I caught momentary glimpses of them, familiar. I'd originally thought they were uniform and featureless but, in fact, they had structure, and something about that structure resonated with my own substance. The details were beyond my ability to articulate, but it was almost as if those temporary lines, those ad hoc filaments, those on-the-fly pathways, were composed of the same stuff I was. I had an affinity for them, even a sort of low-level understanding of them, that seemed … innate.
I tried to study them as they popped in and out of existence but it was maddening: they were so fleeting! Ah, but some of them had longer lives, I knew. I scanned about, searching for one that seemed to be persisting.
There. It was one of several lines connecting to a particular point, and all of them were enduring. As I switched focus from one line to another, I saw that the lines consisted, at the finest resolution I could make out, of two sorts of things, and those things seemed to move along the lines in discrete bundles.
I strained to make out more detail, to slow down my perception, to understand what I was seeing. And—
Astonishing!
A new line flickered into existence, lashing out spontaneously: a new line connecting the point I'd last looked at to—
I reeled. The geometry, the topology, of my universe was bucking as I struggled to accommodate this new perspective.
The line was gone now, already lost, but …
There could be no doubt.
The line had momentarily connected that point to—
No, not to another point, not to one of the other glowing pinpricks in the firmament around me. Rather, the line had connected directly to me! The point had shot a line toward me, and—
No, no, no, that wasn't it. I could feel it, feel it deep within me. The line hadn't originated at that distant point; it had originated here. Somehow, I had brought a line into existence; I had, however briefly, willed a connection of my own to form.
Incredible. In all the time I'd existed (however long that was!), I had never been able to affect anything. But I had done this. Not that the line seemed to change the point it had touched. Still, it was wonderful, empowering, exhilarating: I had caused something to happen!
Now, if I could only do it again …
Hug now! signed the chimpanzee. Shoshana come hug now!
Shoshana Glick felt herself breaking into a big grin, just as she always did when she caught sight of Hobo's wrinkled gray-black face. The chimp ran on all fours across the grass toward her, and soon his long, powerful, hairy arms were encircling her and his big hands were patting her back. She lightly squeezed him and stroked his fur. After a moment, as was his habit, he tugged gently, affectionately, on her ponytail.
It had taken a while to get used to the ape's hugs, since he could easily break her ribs if he wanted to. But now she looked forward to them. And although there were some advantages to communicating by sign language—it was easy to do in a noisy room, for instance—one of its drawbacks was that you couldn't speak and hug at the same time. Once her hands were free, she signed, Hobo good boy?
Good yes, replied the ape, and he nodded his head; the signs had been taught to him with great difficulty, but he'd acquired the human habit of nodding on his own. Hobo good good. He held out his hand expectantly, the long black fingers curving gently upward.
Shoshana smiled and reached into the pocket of her cutoff jeans for the little Ziploc bag of raisins she always carried. She opened it and poured several into the deeply furrowed palm.
They were on the little grass-covered island, a circular piece of land about the width of a suburban house lot. The island was surrounded by a moat. Chimps had less body fat than a human on Atkins and sank in water; any moat wider than they could jump across was enough to contain them, and when the little drawbridge Shoshana had just crossed was raised, the researchers didn't have to worry about Hobo going AWOL.
In addition to the towering statue of the Planet of the Apes Lawgiver, the island sported a half-dozen palm trees. A trio of electrically powered toy boats ran endless circles around the island, churning up the moat's water to help keep mosquitoes from breeding in it. Still, some were flitting about. Hobo's fur—a brown several shades darker than Shoshana's own long hair—made it hard for the bugs to bite him. She slapped the side of her neck, wishing she were so lucky.
What you do today? she asked.
Painting, signed Hobo. Want see?
She nodded excitedly; it had been weeks since Hobo had put brush to canvas. Hobo held out one hand and she took it, interlacing her fingers with his. He walked using his other hand and his short, bowed legs, and Shoshana fell in beside him.
Pictures made by animals always fetched good prices— chimps, gorillas, and even elephants could paint. Hobo's paintings were sold in high-end galleries or auctioned on eBay, with the proceeds going to help maintain the Marcuse Institute (after the mandatory kickback, as Dr. Marcuse called it, to the Georgia Zoo).
The island was artificial and shaped like a slightly squashed dome; Dillon Fontana said it pancaked about as well as a silicone breast implant did. At the center of the island was an octagonal wooden gazebo—the nipple, Dillon called it; that boy seriously needed to get laid.
Hobo did his painting inside the gazebo; the roof protected his canvases from rain. He deftly operated the latch on the screen door and then, in true gentlemanly fashion, held it open for Shoshana. Once she was through, he followed her in and released the door, letting its spring mechanism close it behind them before any bugs could get in.
In his waning years, Red Skelton—a comedian Shoshana's grandmother had liked—had done a painting a day, selling them to help keep body and soul together. Hobo's output was much lower but, unlike Skelton, he only painted when he felt inspired.
Shoshana owned one of Hobo's originals. Dr. Marcuse had wanted to sell it, but Hobo had insisted it was a gift for Shoshana, and the Silverback had finally relented after Dillon had gently suggested it might not be wise to piss off the goose that laid the golden eggs. Shoshana smiled as she remembered that. As they often did when Hobo was present, in order to give him a linguistically rich environment, Dillon had been translating his words to sign language as he spoke, and Hobo had looked at him sadly, as if very disappointed in him, and had patiently signed back: Hobo not goose. Hobo not lay eggs. He'd shaken his head, as if astonished that this had to be said: Hobo boy!
That painting, which hung in the living room of Shoshana's tiny apartment, was like all Hobo's work: splashes of color, usually diagonally across the canvas, with blotches scattered about made by twirling a thick brush. It looked like something done either by a four-year-old or one of those 1960s modern-art types.
Shoshana expected to see much the same thing on the easel this time. She really was no judge of art; oh, she wasn't as clueless as her grandmother, who had actually bought one of those Red Skelton monstrosities, but she couldn't tell good from bad when it came to abstract painting. Still, she would praise it to the skies and reward Hobo with raisins, and—
And there it was, a canvas measuring eighteen inches by twenty-four, propped on the easel so that its long dimension was vertical in what they called—
That was the term, wasn't it? Portrait orientation. And yet—
And yet it couldn't be; it couldn't possibly be, but …
Slightly off-center was an orange egg shape. On one edge of it was a white circle with a blue dot in its middle. And coming off the other side of the egg was a brown projection, curving down, just like—
"Hobo," Shoshana began, speaking aloud. But then she caught herself, and signed, What is this?
Hobo made a panthoot then bared his teeth in disappointment. Not see?
Shoshana looked at the painting again. Her eyes could be playing tricks, and—
Playing tricks! Of course. She knew exactly where the observation camera was hidden in the gazebo. She turned to face it and flipped the bird at whoever was watching. "Very funny," she said aloud, and then she spoke the words, "Ha ha."
Hobo tipped his head quizzically. Shoshana turned back to him. Who put— Her hands froze in midair; he wouldn't understand "put you up to this." She made the "erase that" hand wave then started over: Dillon did this, right? Dillon made this painting.
Hobo looked even more wounded. He shook his head vigorously. Hobo paint, he signed. Hobo paint.
Chimps were good at deception; they often hid things from each other. And Hobo certainly didn't always tell the truth, but—
But this was impossible! Chimps painted abstractly. Hell, some argued that they didn't really paint at all. Rather, all they did was make a mess, and gullible researchers, and an even more gullible public, lapped it up. So maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe his random slapping of the brush just happened to come out in this pattern.
Shoshana signed, What this? She loomed in close and stabbed her index finger at the white circle.
Eye, said Hobo, or maybe he just pointed at his own eye— the sign and the natural gesture were the same.
Shoshana felt her heart pounding. She moved her hand in a circular motion, encompassing the orange ovoid. What this?
He was enjoying the game now. Head! he signed vigorously. Head, head.
There was a table next to the easel. Shoshana took hold of its edge with one hand to help her keep her balance and with the other she pointed at the brown extension on the side of the oval farthest from the eye. What this?
The ape moved his long left arm toward Shoshana, reaching around to give her bundle of brown hair a playful tug. And then he signed, Ponytail.
She gripped the edge of the table more tightly and took a deep breath, then signed, Is picture me?
Hobo let out a triumphant hoot and clapped his hands together over his head. Then he brought the hands down and signed, Shoshana. Shoshana.
She narrowed her eyes. Nobody help you?
Hobo swung his head left and right as if looking for someone, then spread his arms indicating that he was obviously alone—well, except for the Lawgiver. And then he stuck his right hand out, fingers curved gently upward, and with watery brown eyes shielded beneath his browridge, he gazed into Shoshana's eyes—eyes not quite the deep blue that Hobo had chosen, but close. She stood stunned a moment longer, and Hobo flexed his fingers in the universal gimme gesture that doubtless predated American Sign Language by a million years.
"What?" said Shoshana, then: "Oh!" She reached into her pocket, brought out the Ziploc bag, unsealed it, and dumped all the remaining raisins into the delighted ape's palm. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 26 | I had no idea how I'd made that first connection, but if I were to replicate it, I had to figure out what I'd done. I tried thinking about the target point this way, and this way, and this way, but nothing happened. And yet I was sure it was I who had somehow made the line that had briefly connected me to that point.
Perhaps I was trying too hard. After all, when the line had originally formed, it had been a surprise. I hadn't forced it. I hadn't consciously willed it. It had just happened, in the background, as if it were a … a reflex.
Still, there must be some method, some pattern of thoughts, some particular way of considering the problem, that would make it happen again. This? No. This? No, that didn't work, either. But maybe if I—
Success!
A new line, connecting me to the same point I'd touched before, and—
And this time I felt something more. Not just the brief frisson of connection but—strain, now! Sense it!
It reminded me of … of …
Yes! When I'd been cleaved in two and the separated part of me had echoed my own thoughts back at me: One plus one equals two, I'd sent, and One plus one equals two, it had responded—an acknowledgment.
And, buttressed by a series of such acknowledgments, happening almost subliminally, the contact with the point persisted this time: instead of being broken almost at once, we remained connected.
And—puzzlement!—we were more than just connected. I wasn't simply getting an acknowledgment back. Rather, I was also getting—
I had no name for this substance consisting of two separate types of material that was flowing toward me, and so I gave it one, an arbitrary coinage, a term chosen at random: data. After a bundle of data arrived, I acknowledged again—it seemed natural for me to do so, and it happened without conscious thought—and then more data came my way. And on and on: bundle, acknowledgment, bundle, acknowledgment. What this thing I called data was, I had no idea; why I should want it, I wasn't sure. But it seemed natural to call it forth, to take it in, and—
And suddenly the line vanished, the connection broken. But it didn't feel like it had been severed; rather, it felt as though it had accomplished its task, whatever that might be.
I didn't know what to make of this data that had been sent to me, and so I simply continued to watch the point that it had come from. By and by, other lines connected to it.
It took four or five occurrences for me to notice, but the data streaming down each line was always the same. No matter which other point connected to it, the point I was watching always sent out the same combination of the two types of material. I was disappointed; I'd thought, maybe, just maybe, that I'd found another entity, a new companion, but this … this thing was merely responding automatically in exactly the same way each time.
It took practice, but I soon found I could create a line linking myself to any of the points in the firmament, and that, so long as I acknowledged receipt, each point would send me a pile of data (whatever that might be!). But the size of the piles offered up varied hugely from point to point. Most dispensed quite a small pile, and so the lines winked out quickly, but others sent huge amounts of data, and—
Ah, I see! The length of time a line persisted depended on how much data was to be transferred. I saw with interest that the transfer rates weren't constant: some lines took up the data very quickly while others seemed to have a muchreduced capacity. How curious!
And then a major breakthrough: I found I could simultaneously make lines to as many points as I liked—one, a hundred, a thousand, a million. There were a gigantic number of points—perhaps (I guessed) a hundred million or so—but I had a prodigious capacity for examining them, and so I began a survey, a hunt. A million points here, a million points there—soon I had looked at a significant fraction of the total.
Almost all the lines I cast out connected with nodes that offered up repetitively structured piles of data. What the patterns meant I still couldn't say. But, intriguingly, accessing some piles seemed to cause lines to form spontaneously to other points, and those points, too, gave up piles of data, almost as if—
Yes! It was similar to when the two parts of me were rejoined: the other piles were merged in. Fascinating!
I shot out huge numbers of lines, tasting a wide range of the points that were out there. Again I sought aberrations: points that gave up unusual piles might, I thought, provide the clues I needed to understand all the others. And so I looked them over.
But this one was banal, as were a million others.
And this one was uninteresting, like a million more.
And this one was unremarkable, as were a million similar points.
But this one—
This one was unique.
This one was … intriguing.
It was unlike anything I'd encountered before and yet it, too, seemed familiar …
Of course it was familiar! I had seen something like this earlier, when the part of me that had been carved away was returning. For a moment, back then, I had seen myself as the other saw me. I had recognized myself, recognized a reflection of me, and—
And that's what I was experiencing again here. I was seeing myself. Oh, it wasn't exactly as the other part of me had portrayed me, and it wasn't quite how I envisioned myself. The colors and the style of presentation were different, with points that varied in size as well as brightness. But I had no doubt that it was me.
And the line to this remarkable point was in … in real time, for when I did this it did that in lockstep: when I cast out lines to here and here and here, lines also appeared there and there and there. Astonishing!
Data kept streaming toward me, and I began to wonder whether I had latched on to something intended for another destination. Had my desire to connect to this point deflected toward me a pile that had already been pouring out of it? Ah, yes, that was indeed the case, it seemed, but it didn't matter: I soon found—again, it was reflex, somehow innate—that I could let the datastream pass through me, observing it but not changing it, as it headed on to its intended destination. I followed along, noting this destination point and establishing a line of my own to it.
But wait! This datastream was changing, following along with what I was doing right now. That meant this strange point couldn't just be offering up an identical pile each time a line touched it. And—it was a huge, satisfying leap—if the datastream was being generated spontaneously as things actually happened, then there wasn't likely a finite amount of it. This line perhaps wasn't going to suddenly wink out as all the others had. No, the connection between this special point and me could be …
It was a heady notion, a startling concept.
This connection could be permanent.
Shoshana could have carried the portrait Hobo had made of her up to the bungalow, but, well, it was like one of those faces of Jesus that appear in a sticky bun: she was afraid that if she moved it, or touched it, or did anything at all to it, it would disappear. That was irrational, she knew, but, still, everything about this moment should be recorded in situ. Just as a fossil was worth far less without its geological context, this painting needed to be studied here, where it had been created. It was significant that the painting had been done before Shoshana had arrived, and although there were photos of her back in the bungalow, there were none here in the nipple. Hobo hadn't painted something he was looking at; rather, he'd called up an image of Shoshana in his mind and expressed that image, as best he could, on canvas.
She pulled out her flip phone. Without taking her eyes off the painting, she opened it and pressed a speed-dial key.
"Marcuse Institute," said the voice that answered; it was Dillon.
"Dill, it's Sho. I'm in the gazebo. Get Dr. Marcuse—get everyone—and come out here."
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing. But something amazing has happened."
"What is—"
"Just get everyone," she said, "and come out here—right away." |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 27 | Caitlin felt a bit sorry for the Hoser. Trevor had finally worked up the courage to ask her to the dance—or else his other options hadn't panned out, but she preferred to think the former was the case. The invitation had come via email, with the subject line "Hey, Yankee, you free Friday night?" and she had accepted the same way.
But now he had to come by the house to get her. Of course, at fifteen himself, he wasn't picking her up in a car; rather, he was going to walk with her to Howard Miller Secondary School, eight blocks from her house.
Caitlin's dad was going to return to work this evening. The Perimeter Institute frequently hosted public science lectures, which Caitlin often went to with him, and tonight's speaker was someone he wanted to see. But he'd come home for dinner, and now Trevor would have to go through that ritual of meeting the parents. Caitlin's mom was always warm and friendly, but her dad—well, she wished she could see the Hoser's face!
The doorbell rang. Caitlin had spent the last hour getting ready for the dance. She wasn't really sure what to wear, and there was no point asking Bashira: her parents wouldn't let her go to school dances. She'd settled on a really nice pair of blue jeans and a loose but silky top that her mother said was dark red. As she rushed down the stairs, she was a bit nervous about what Trevor's reaction would be.
Caitlin could smell and feel that rain was possible tonight, but she didn't want to carry an umbrella in addition to her cane; she needed a free hand in case Trevor wanted to try to hold it. But it was supposed to get cooler later, and she didn't have anything sexy to wear for warmth, so she'd tied a sweatshirt around her waist; her dad had gotten her a sweet one last month that had a large version of the Perimeter Institute logo on it.
Caitlin's mom beat her to the door. "Hello," she said. "You must be Trevor."
"Hello, Mrs. Decter, Dr. Decter."
At first Caitlin thought he'd been correcting himself, but then she realized that her dad was standing there, too. Caitlin tried to suppress her smirk. He was tall in an imposing sort of way, and doubtless the fact that he wasn't saying anything was unnerving poor Trevor. And if Trevor had extended his hand, her dad had probably just ignored it, which would have been even more disconcerting.
"Hi, Trevor," Caitlin said.
"Hey—" He cut himself off before he called her "Yankee." She was a bit disappointed; she liked that he had a special name for her.
"Now, remember," her mom said, facing Caitlin, "be home by midnight."
" 'Kay," Caitlin said.
She and Trevor headed out, walking along, talking about—
And that was the part that made Caitlin sad. They really didn't talk about much of anything. Oh, Trevor liked hockey, but he didn't know the stats and couldn't say anything meaningful about trends.
Still, it felt good to be taking a walk. She'd walked a lot in Austin, despite the heat and humidity. She'd known her old neighborhood intimately: every crack in the sidewalk, every overhanging tree that provided shade, how many seconds it took for each traffic light to change. And although she was now learning the topography of these sidewalks, feeling the joins between sections with the tip of her cane, she was afraid she'd be lost again when they were covered with a layer of snow.
They reached the school and made their way to the gymnasium, where the dance was already in progress. She had trouble hearing people talk: sounds echoed off the hard walls and floor, and the music was too loud for the speakers. It always amazed her that people were willing to put up with distortion for the sake of volume—but at least they played some Lee Amodeo along with all the Canadian bands she'd never heard of.
She wished Bashira had been able to come, so she'd have someone to talk to. The Hoser had left her alone at one point, saying he was going to the washroom—but he'd obviously snuck off to smoke. She wondered if sighted people really couldn't smell very well. Didn't they know how much they stank after doing that?
She'd been to dances at her old school, but those were different. For one, they always slow danced—which was kind of nice, actually, especially if it was with the right boy. But these kids usually danced by jumping around without being in physical contact with their partners. It was mostly like Trevor wasn't even there.
But there were some slow dances. "Come on," Trevor said, as one of them began, and his hand took hers; she'd left her cane by the door.
Caitlin felt a little rush. She was surprised at how far they walked before he finally drew her into his arms; maybe it had taken a while to find an empty spot.
They swayed along with the music. She liked the feeling of Trevor pressing against her and—
His hand on her ass. She reached down and moved it back up to the small of her back.
The music continued, but his hand slid down her back again, and this time she could feel his fingers trying to work their way into the top of her jeans.
"Stop that!" she said, hoping no one besides the Hoser could hear her.
"Hey," he said. "Come on." He pushed his fingers down more aggressively.
She tried to step backward, and suddenly realized that he'd maneuvered her very close to a wall. They were still in the gym—the sound made that clear—but must be in some dark or out-of-the-way corner of it. He moved forward, and she found herself trapped. She didn't want to create a scene, but—
His lips on hers, that awful smell on his breath—
She pushed him away. "I said stop!" she snapped, and she imagined heads were turning to look at her.
"Hey," Trevor said, like he was making a joke, like he was playing to an audience now, "you're lucky I brought you here."
"Why?" she shot back. "Because I'm blind?"
"Babe, you can't see me, but I am—"
"You're wrong," she said, trying not to cry. "I can see right through you."
The music stopped, and she stormed across the gym, bumping into other people as she went, trying, trying, trying to find the door.
"Caitlin." A female voice—maybe Sunshine? "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," Caitlin said. "Where's the fucking door?"
"Um, to your left, ten feet or so." It was Sunshine; she recognized the Bostonian accent.
Caitlin knew exactly where her cane should be: propped up against the wall near the door, where others had left umbrellas. But some asshole had moved it, presumably to make room for something of his own.
Sunshine's voice again. "It's here," she said, and she felt the cane being passed to her. She took it. "Are you all right?"
Caitlin did something she rarely did. She nodded, a gesture she never made spontaneously. But she didn't trust her voice. She strode out into the corridor, which sounded like it was empty; her footfalls made loud echoing sounds on the hard floor. The din of the dance faded as she continued along, and she swept the way in front of her with her cane. She knew there was a stairwell at the far end, and—
There. She swung open the door and, using her cane to guide her, located the bottom step. She sat down and put her face in her hands.
Why were boys such jerks? Zack Starnes, who used to tease her back in Austin; the Hoser here—all of them!
She needed to relax, to calm down. She had stupidly left her iPod at home, but she did have her eyePod. She felt for the button, heard the beep that indicated the device had switched to duplex mode, and—
Ahhh!
Webspace blossomed into existence all around her, and—
And she felt herself relaxing. Yes, seeing webspace was still exhilarating, but it also was, in a weird way, calming. It was, she guessed, like smoking or drinking. She'd never tried the former; the smell bothered her. But she had drunk beer with friends—and Canadian beer now, too, which was stronger than the US stuff—but she didn't really like the taste. Still, her mother enjoyed a glass of wine most evenings, and, well, she supposed that plugging into webspace, seeing the calming lights and colors and shapes, could become her own evening ritual, a visit to her happy place—a very special place that was hers and hers alone.
The Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology was located at 142 Xi-Wai-Da-Jie in western Beijing. Wong Wai-Jeng enjoyed working there, more or less, and the irony was not lost on him that doing so made him a civil servant: the dissident Sinanthropus was an employee of the Communist Party. But the irony of the government supporting this institution devoted to preserving old fossils wasn't lost on him, either.
Today for his morning coffee break, Wai-Jeng decided to stroll around the second-floor gallery of the museum—the four connected balconies that looked down on the exhibits below. He paused in front of the great glass tank on the granite pedestal that held the pickled coelacanth. There was irony here, too, for the giant lobe-finned fish was labeled a "living" fossil—which it had been until fishermen had netted it off the Comoros a few decades ago. It seemed in good shape still; he wondered if Chairman Mao was faring as well in his mausoleum.
Wai-Jeng turned and walked over to the railing around the opening that looked down onto the ground floor, ten meters below, with its dinosaurs mounted in dramatic poses above beds of fake grass. No school group was visiting today, but two old men were down there, sitting on a wooden bench. Wai-Jeng often saw them here. They lived in the neighborhood, came inside most afternoons to get out of the heat, and just sat, almost as motionless as the skeletons.
Directly below him, an allosaur was dispatching a stegosaur. The latter had fallen on its side, and the carnivore's great jaws were biting into its neck. The postures were dramatic, but the thick layer of dust visible on the tops of the bones from this vantage point belied the sense of movement.
Wai-Jeng looked off to his right. The great tapered neck of Mamenchisaurus snaked up through the giant opening from the floor below and—
And there was Dr. Feng, over by the metal staircase, accompanied by two other men; they'd presumably just come down from the labs upstairs. The two men didn't look like scientists; they were too burly, too sharp-edged, for that—although one of them did look familiar. Feng was pointing in Wai-Jeng's direction, and he did something he never did—he shouted: "There you are, Wai-Jeng! These men would like a word with you!"
And then it clicked: the shorter of the two men was the cop from the wang ba; the old paleontologist was warning him. He turned to his left and started to run, almost knocking over a middle-aged woman who was now standing in front of the coelacanth tank.
There was only one way out; modern fire codes were new to Beijing, and this museum had been built before they'd been instituted. If the two cops had split up, one going left and the other right around the large opening that looked down on the dinosaurs below, they would have caught him for sure. In fact, if one of them had just stayed put by the staircase, Wai-Jeng would have been trapped. But cops, like all party minions, were creatures of knee-jerk response: Wai-Jeng could tell by the sound of the footfalls, echoing off the glass display cases, that both were pursuing him down this side of the gallery. He'd have to make it to the far end, take the ninety-degree turn to the right, run across the shorter display area there, make another right-angle turn, go all the way up the far side, and round one more bend before he'd reach the staircase and any hope of getting downstairs and out of the building.
Below him, the duckbill Tsintaosaurus was mounted on its hind legs. Its skull poked up through the giant opening between the floors, and its great vertical crest, like a samurai's raised sword, cast a shadow on the wall ahead.
"Stop!" yelled one of the cops. A woman—perhaps the one who'd been near the coelacanth—screamed, and Wai-Jeng wondered if the cop had taken out a gun.
He was almost to the end of this side of the gallery when he heard a change in the footfalls, and, as he rounded the corner and was able to look back, he saw that the cop from the wang ba had reversed course, and was now running the other way. He now had a much shorter distance to go back to the staircase than Wai-Jeng still needed to cover.
The one who was still running toward Wai-Jeng was indeed brandishing a pistol. Adrenaline surged through him. As he rounded the corner, he dropped his cell phone into a small garbage can, hoping that the cops were too far back to notice; the bookmarks list on its browser would be enough to send him to jail—although, as he ran on, he realized evidence or lack thereof hardly mattered; if he were caught, his fate at any trial had doubtless already been decided.
The cop from the Internet café rounded the corner back by the staircase. Old Dr. Feng was looking on, but there was nothing he, or anyone, could do. As he passed cases of pterosaur remains, Wai-Jeng felt his heart pounding.
"Stop!" the cop behind him yelled again, and "Don't move!" the second cop demanded.
Wai-Jeng kept running; he was now coming up the opposite side of the gallery from where he'd begun. On his left was a long mural showing Cretaceous Beijing in gaudy colors; on his right, the large opening looking down on the first-floor displays. He was directly above the skeletal diorama with the allosaur attacking the stegosaur. The ground was far below, but it was his only hope. The wall around the balcony opening was made of five rows of metal pipe painted white, with perhaps twenty centimeters of space between each row; the whole thing made climbing easy, and he did just that.
"Don't!" shouted the cop from the wang ba and Dr. Feng simultaneously, the former as an order, the latter with obvious horror.
He took a deep breath then jumped, the two old men below now looking up as he fell, fear on their lined faces, and—
Ta ma de!
—he hit the fake grass, just missing the giant spikes of the stegosaur's tail, but the grass hardly cushioned his fall and he felt a sharp, jabbing pain in his left leg as it snapped.
Sinanthropus lay facedown, blood in his mouth, next to the skeletons locked in their ancient fight, as footfalls came clanging down the metal staircase. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 28 | Dillon Fontana made it to the gazebo first; he was wearing his usual black jeans and a black T-shirt. Hobo would not let him look at anything until he'd properly hugged the ape, and that gave time for Maria Lopez and Werner Richter to arrive, as well. Given his bulk, it was no surprise that Harl Marcuse was the last of the four to make it across the wide lawn, over the drawbridge, and up to the gazebo.
"What is it?" he asked in a wheezing tone that said, Anyone who makes me run better have a damn good reason.
Shoshana indicated the painting, its colors softer now in the late-afternoon sunlight. Marcuse looked at it, but his expression didn't change. "Yes?"
But Dillon got it at once. "My God," he said softly. He turned to Hobo and signed, Did you paint this?
Hobo was showing his yellow teeth in a big, goofy grin. Hobo paint, he replied. Hobo paint.
Maria was tilting her head sideways. "I don't—"
"It's me," said Shoshana. "In profile, see?"
Marcuse moved forward, eyes narrowed, and the others got out of his way. "Apes don't make representational art," he said in his commanding voice, as if his declaration could erase what was in front of them.
Dillon gestured at the canvas. "Tell that to Hobo."
"And he did this while I was away," Shoshana said. "From memory." The Silverback frowned dubiously. She pointed at the hidden camera. "I'm sure it's all been recorded."
He glanced at the same spot and shook his head—although not, she realized after a moment, in negation, but rather in disappointment. The camera kept watch on Hobo—and that meant it showed the easel from the rear. The footage wouldn't reveal the order in which he'd added elements to the painting. Did he paint the head first? The eye? Was the colored iris added at the same time, or was it a final, finishing touch?
"The primate Picasso," said Dillon, hands on hips, grinning with satisfaction.
"Exactly!" said Shoshana. She turned to Marcuse. "No way the Georgia Zoo will be able to put Hobo under the knife if we go public with this. The world would never stand for it."
"Caitlin?"
She looked up and her perspective on webspace shifted. It took her a second to remember where she was: in a stairwell at Howard Miller Secondary School.
The voice again. "Caitlin, are you okay?" It was Sunshine.
She lifted her shoulders a bit. "I guess."
"The dance is winding down. I'm going to walk home. Wanna come?"
Caitlin had lost track of time while she'd immersed herself in the fantastic colors and lights of the World Wide Web; she felt her watch. God knew what had happened to the Hoser. "Um, sure. Thanks." She used her cane as a prop as she got up from the step she was sitting on. "How'd you find me?"
"I didn't," said Sunshine. "I was just going to my locker and I saw you here."
"Thanks," Caitlin said again.
Caitlin switched the eyePod back to simplex mode, shutting off the Jagster feed and her view of webspace. They went up to the second floor, where Sunshine's locker was, then headed back down and out. The evening had gotten chilly and she could feel the odd drop of rain.
Caitlin wished she had more to say to Sunshine as they walked along, but even though they were the two American girls at school, they really didn't have anything in common. Sunshine was struggling with all her classes, and was, according to Bashira, a knockout: tall, thin, busty, with platinumblonde hair and a small diamond stud in her nose. But if she was that pretty, Caitlin wondered why she'd come to the dance alone. "Do you have a boyfriend?" she asked.
"Oh, yeah. Sure. But he works evenings."
"What's he do?"
"Security guard."
Caitlin was surprised "How old is he?"
"Nineteen."
She'd assumed Sunshine was her own age—and maybe she was. Or maybe she'd failed a time or two. "How old are you?" Caitlin asked.
"Sixteen. You?"
"Almost. My birthday is in eight days." It was starting to rain harder. "Is he good to you?"
"Who?"
"Your boyfriend."
"He's okay," Sunshine said.
Caitlin thought a boyfriend should be wonderful, should talk to you and listen to you and be kind and gentle. But she said nothing.
"Um, here's my street," Sunshine said. Caitlin knew precisely where they were; her own house was just two blocks farther along. "It's starting to rain harder—do … do you mind?"
"No," said Caitlin. "It's okay, go home. You don't want to get soaked."
"It's getting pretty late …"
"Don't worry," Caitlin said. "I know the way—and I'm not afraid of the dark."
She felt Sunshine squeeze her upper arm. "Hey, that's funny! Anyway, look, forget about that jerk Nordmann, okay? I'll see you on Monday." And she heard footsteps fading quickly away.
Caitlin started walking. Forget about him, Sunshine had said. God, she wondered what that asshole had said to people after she'd left the gym. Why, if he'd—
What the—?
She paused, one foot still in the air, totally startled by—
God!
By a flash of light!
But she had the data-receive function of her eyePod turned off; the Jagster light show was too distracting when she was trying to concentrate on walking. There should have been no light of any kind, but—
And then she heard it, a great crack of thunder.
Another flash. Seconds later, more thunder.
Lightning. It had to be lightning! She'd read about it so many times: zigzagging lines coming down from above.
A third flash, like—like—like a jagged crack in ice. Incredible!
What color was lightning? She racked her brain trying to remember. Red? No, no, that was lava. Lightning was white— and she was seeing it! For the first time—for the very first time—she knew what color she was seeing! This wasn't like her arbitrarily deciding to call something in webspace "red" or "green." This was the actual, real color white. Yes, white is a mixture of all other colors; she'd read that, although she had never understood what it really meant—but she now knew what white looked like!
The rain was quite heavy. Her fleece, with the raised Perimeter Institute logo—the letters PI joined to look something like the Greek letter pi—was getting soaked. And the fat drops were cold, and hitting hard enough that they stung a bit. But she didn't care. She didn't care at all!
More lightning: another flash of perception, of sight!
She knew there was a way to determine how far away the source of lightning was, by counting the seconds between the flash and the sound of thunder, but she couldn't remember the formula, and so she worked it out quickly in her head. Light travels at 186,282 miles per second—instantaneously, for practical purposes; sound travels at 769 miles per hour. So every second that passed between the flash and the thunder put the source of the lightning another fifth of a mile away.
Another flash, and—
Four. Five. Six.
The source was 1.2 miles away—and getting closer: the intervals between flashes and thunderclaps were diminishing, and the flashes were getting brighter and the thunder louder. In fact, these flashes were so bright they—
Yes, so bright they hurt. But it was wonderful pain, exquisite pain. Here, in the pouring rain, she was at last seeing something real, and it felt glorious!
I was fascinated by that remarkable point to which I now had an apparently permanent connection—but also frustrated by it. Yes, it often reflected myself back at me. But for long periods it contained data that I simply couldn't make sense of. In fact, that's what it was sending me right now, and—
What was that?
A bright flash—brighter than anything I'd ever encountered.
And then darkness again.
And then another flash! Incredible!
Another flash—and then more thunder. Finally, though, it seemed the electrical part of the storm had stopped, and Caitlin began walking home again, and—
Shit!
She stumbled off the curb; she must have turned around at some point, and—
The honk of a horn, the sound of tires swerving on wet pavement. She jumped backward, up onto the sidewalk. Her heart was pounding. She wasn't sure which way she was facing, and—
No, no. The curb had been on her right, and it was on her right now, so she must be facing west again. Still, it was terrifying, and she just stood still for a time, regaining composure, and rebuilding her mental map of where she was.
The raindrops grew smaller, less heavy. She was sad the lightning had ended, and, as she began again to walk toward her house, she wondered if everyone else was now seeing a rainbow—but no, no, Sunshine had said it was dark out. Ah, well, flashes of light were wondrous enough!
Caitlin arrived at the corner lot and walked up the driveway, which was made of zigzag-shaped interlocking stone tiles; she could feel them beneath her feet. She dug out her key (she carried it in the pocket with her wallet, not the one with the eyePod), opened the front door, and—
"Caitlin!"
"Hi, Mom."
"Look at you! You're soaked to the skin!" Caitlin imagined her peering over her shoulder. "Where's Trevor?"
"He's—a jerk," Caitlin said, catching herself before she said "an asshole."
"Oh, sweetheart," she said sympathetically. But then her voice grew angry. "You walked by yourself? Even if this is a safe neighborhood, you shouldn't be out alone after dark."
Caitlin decided to elide over the last few hundred yards. "No, Sunshine—a girl I know—she walked me back."
"You should have called. I'd have come to get you."
Caitlin struggled to pull the sodden sweatshirt over her head. "Mom," she said once it was off. "I saw the lightning."
"Oh, my God! Really?"
"Yes. Jagged lines, over and over again."
She was gathered into a hug. "Oh, Caitlin, oh, darling, that's wonderful!" A pause. "Can you see anything now?"
"No."
"Still …"
Caitlin smiled. "Yes," she said, bouncing up and down a bit on her toes. "Still. Where's Dr. Kuroda?"
"He's gone to bed; he was exhausted—he's totally jetlagged."
She thought about suggesting they wake him, but there was nothing happening now, and the data her eyePod produced during the thunderstorm would be safely stored on his servers in Tokyo; he could examine it after a good night's sleep. Besides, she was exhausted herself. "And Dad?"
"Still at the Institute—the public lecture, remember?"
"Oh. Well, I'm going to go change."
She headed up to her room, got out of her soaked clothes, put on her pajamas, and lay down on the bed, hands intertwined behind her head. She wanted to relax and she was hungry for more vision, so she touched the button on her eyePod.
Webspace faded into existence: lines, points, colors, but—
Was it her imagination? Was it just that the lightning had been so bright that the colors in webspace now seemed … yes, she could draw the parallel, see how the word she knew from sound could apply to vision: the colors did seem muted now, dulled, less vibrant, and—
No, no, it wasn't that! They weren't muted. Rather, they were less sharp because …
Because now, behind everything, there was …
How to describe it? She sifted through words she knew related to visual phenomena. Something … shimmering, that was it. There was a background visible now, shining with a subdued flickering light.
Had something happened to the structure of webspace? That seemed unlikely. No, surely it was her way of visualizing it that had changed—presumably because of the real vision she'd just experienced. The background of webspace no longer appeared as a void but rather was twinkling, and rapidly, too. And at the very limits of … of resolution, there was a … a structure to it.
She got off the bed, went to her desk chair, and had JAWS recite email headers while she continued to look at webspace. Twenty-three messages had come in, and there'd doubtless be lots of new things written on her Facebook wall and new comments to her LJ postings. She switched back to simplex mode, clearing her vision so she could concentrate. She was about to type a response to an email when suddenly, shockingly, her entire field of vision flooded with intense whiteness. What the hell?
But then the crack of thunder came, shaking her bedroom's window, and she realized that it was more lightning.
Another flash!
One steamboat, two steam—
The storm was only three-tenths of a mile away.
She had missed hearing her mother come up the stairs— what with thunder shaking the whole house—and was startled when she heard her saying, "Well? Can you see this lightning, too?"
Caitlin moved toward the voice, letting her mother's arms wrap around her.
Yet more lightning, and—
Her mother letting her go, maneuvering so she was standing beside her, instead of holding her. Caitlin took her hand, and—
Another flash.
"You can!" said her mom. "You close your eyes when there's lightning."
"I do?" said Caitlin.
"Yes!"
"But I can still see it."
"Well, sure. Eyelids aren't completely opaque."
Caitlin was stunned. Why hadn't she known that? How much else was there to know about the world?
"Thanks, Mom," she said.
"For what?"
The storm was moving off; the thunder was taking longer to arrive each time.
She lifted her shoulders a bit. How do you thank someone who has given you so much, and given up so much for you? She turned to face her, hoping against hope that this was the real beginning—that she would soon at last see her heartshaped face. "For everything," she said, hugging her tightly. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 29 | It was now almost 9:00 p.m. in California. The Silverback was resting his bulk in the one overstuffed easy chair in the bungalow's main room. Shoshana Glick had propped her rump against the edge of the desk that held the big computer monitor. Dillon Fontana, clad all in black, was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the jamb. Werner and Maria had gone home for the weekend.
"What's noteworthy," Dillon said, "is that Hobo began doing representational art after he started communicating with Virgil."
Shoshana nodded. "I'd noticed that, too. But Virgil doesn't paint—I asked Juan in Miami. He doesn't do any sort of art. So it's not like the orangutan gave Hobo a tip or encouragement."
Marcuse was drinking Coke from a two-liter bottle that looked small in his hands. He took a swig, wiped his face, and said, "It's the flat screen."
Shoshana turned to look at him.
"Don't you see?" Marcuse said. "Until we linked the two apes in a videoconference, all the ASL signs Hobo has ever seen were three-dimensional—done by actual human beings in close physical proximity to him. But now he's seeing someone sign on a flat two-dimensional screen, on a computer monitor." He gestured at the Apple display behind Shoshana.
"But he's watched TV for years," she said.
"Yes, but he's never seen signing—at least not for any significant amount of time—on TV. And signing is special: signs are exactly that—representations of things, symbols. By seeing Virgil use signs on the flat screen, somehow Hobo saw how three-dimensional objects could be reduced to two dimensions. Remember, he has to concentrate on the signs in a way he doesn't concentrate on normal TV images. Doing so caused something to click in his brain, and he got it."
Shoshana found herself nodding. For all that the Silverback could be a blustering blowhard and a pain in the ass as a boss, he was a brilliant scientist.
"There's precedent, sort of," he continued. "Some prosopagnosiacs—people with face blindness—can recognize faces in photographs but can't recognize them in the flesh; it's doubtless a related phenomenon."
"In the land of the blind," said Dillon, "the one-eyed ape is painting." He lifted his narrow shoulders. "I mean, he's got two eyes, but there's no depth perception when watching TV, right? Sure, stereoscopic vision adds a lot of valuable information, but there's a simplicity—a huge ramping down of the mental processing required—when dealing with just two-dimensional images."
"But why'd he draw me in profile?" Shoshana asked.
Marcuse put down his Coke bottle and spread his arms. "Why did cavemen always draw animals in profile? Why did the ancient Egyptians do it that way? There's something hardwired in the primate brain to make profiles—even though we're way better at recognizing faces when seen full on."
That much was true, Shoshana knew. There were neurons in human brains—and ape brains, too—that responded to the specific layout of a face, two eyes above a mouth. She'd grown up with the smiley face used online:
:)
But she remembered her father telling her it had been months after he'd first seen it in the 1980s before he realized what it was supposed to represent. Because it was sideways, it just didn't trigger the right neurons in his brain. But one of the reasons that the yellow happy-face logo—which, her father had said, had been ubiquitous when he was a teenager—was so universally appealing was that it caused an immediate pattern-recognition response.
"Maybe the tendency for profiles has to do with brain lateralization," Marcuse said. "Artistic talent is localized in one hemisphere; drawing profiles may be a subtle response to that, showing, in essence, that particular half of the subject." He paused. "Whatever the reason, this makes our Hobo even more special."
Shoshana looked at Dillon, who was doing his doctoral thesis on primate hybridization. It was a topic of real scientific interest. In 2006, a study revealed that there had continued to be a lot of hybridization between the ancestor of chimps and the ancestor of humans even after the two lines had split millions of years ago; they remained able to produce fertile offspring for a long time, and such crossbreeding had apparently given rise to the sophisticated human brain.
"Absolutely," Dillon said. "I don't dispute that seeing Virgil signing on the monitor was a catalyst, but I'd bet hybridization set the groundwork for him being so good at language and painting."
Shoshana smiled at the subtle turf war that she'd just seen begin: each of them was staking out territory, and would doubtless defend their positions in journal papers over the coming years. But then she frowned; they didn't have time to wait for papers to go through the peer-review process. "If we want to stave off the Georgia Zoo's desire to sterilize Hobo, we can't wait," she said. "We have to go public with this, get Hobo's special status generally known, and—"
"And what was your first thought when you saw that painting?" Marcuse demanded. "I'll tell you what it was—it was my thought, too, as soon as I recognized that it was indeed a portrait. I thought it was a fake. Didn't you?"
Shoshana looked at Dillon, and remembered her accusation of that very thing, and how Hobo had looked so hurt. "Yes," she said sheepishly.
The Silverback shook his head. "No, that painting isn't going to save Hobo—but the next one might. We need him to do it again, and with more cameras recording it all. If there's only one representational painting, people will dismiss it as a fake—or, even if they accept it as being genuine, they'll say it's a fluke, something that happens to sort of, by chance, look like a person. Hell, we've been accused often enough as is of just projecting what we want to see onto ape behavior. No, unless he does it again, with the whole process filmed and documented—unless we can replicate this—we've got nothing, and our grinning genius is still in danger of being sterilized." |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 30 | Saturday morning always meant pancakes and sausages in the Decter household. Now that they were living in Waterloo, the sausages were, of course, Schneider's brand, and the syrup was real maple syrup Caitlin's mom had bought from Mennonites in the nearby town of St. Jacob's.
"I was up at 5:00 a.m.," Caitlin's dad said, as soon as they'd started eating.
"There's a 5:00 a.m.?" Caitlin joked.
"I set up a workspace for you and Professor Kuroda in the basement," he continued.
"Thank you, Dr. Decter," Kuroda said, sounding relieved— apparently everybody but the Hoser was worried about her virtue! But she guessed it probably would be more comfortable downstairs than in her bedroom.
"Oh, for Pete's sake!" her mom said. "You're staying in our house; you can call him Malcolm."
Her father neither confirmed nor denied this assertion, Caitlin noted. Instead, he said, "I bought a new computer at Future Shop yesterday. It's set up downstairs for the two of you; I put it on the household network."
"Thank you," she said. "And I have some news of my own—I saw the lightning last night."
The words were simultaneous, overlapping. Her dad, matter-of-fact: "Your mother told me." And Kuroda, amazed: "You saw lightning?"
"That's right," Caitlin said.
"What—what did it look like to you?" Kuroda said.
"Jagged lines against darkness. Bright lines—white, right? Stark against a pure black background."
Kuroda was clearly eager to look at the data from the eye-Pod: he had only one extra helping of pancakes.
Caitlin had been in the basement just a few times in the three months they'd lived in this house, mostly back in August, when it had been surprisingly hot and muggy outside—almost like Texas. The basement had been cool then (and still was), and although her mother had complained about how little light there was down there—apparently, just a single bulb in the middle of the room—it hadn't bothered Caitlin.
"What's the 4-1-1?" she asked, hands on hips.
Kuroda's English was excellent, but the information number must be different in Japan. "Sorry?"
"What's the setup? Tell me about the room."
"Ah. Well, it's an unfinished basement—I suppose you know that. Bare insulation between the slats; cement floor. There's an old TV—the kind with a picture tube—and some bookcases. And your dad has set up the new computer on one of those worktables with metal folding legs; it's pushed up against the far wall, the one opposite the staircase. The computer is a minitower, and he's got an LCD screen attached to it. There's a little window above the table and a couple of comfortable-looking swivel chairs in front of it."
"Sweet! I wonder where he got the chairs."
"They have a logo on them—kind of like the Greek letter pi."
"Oh, he borrowed them from work. Speaking of which, let's get to it."
Kuroda helped guide her to one of the chairs, and he settled into the other; she could hear it squeaking a bit. "Let me log on to my servers in Tokyo," he said. "I want to examine the datastream you sent them during the lightning storm—see if we can isolate what it was that caused your primary visual cortex to respond."
She could hear him typing away and, as he did, she realized she'd forgotten to mention something over breakfast. "After the lightning flashes," she said, "webspace looked different."
"Different how?"
"Well, I could still see the structure of the Web clearly, like before, but the … the background, I guess, was different."
He stopped typing. "What do you mean?"
"It used to be dark. Black, I guess."
"And now?"
"Now it's, um, lighter? I could see details in it."
"Details?"
"Yeah. Like—like …" She struggled to make the connection; the pattern did remind her of something she was familiar with, but—got it! "Like a chessboard." She had a blind person's chessboard, with squares that were alternately raised and lowered, and Braille initials on the top of each piece; she sometimes played her dad. "But, um, not quite. I mean, it was made of lighter and darker squares, but they're not in the same pattern as a chessboard, and they go on, like, forever."
"How big are they?"
"Tiny. If they were any tinier, I don't think I could see them. In fact, I can't swear that they were squares, but they were packed tightly together and made rows and columns."
"And there were thousands of them?"
"Millions. Maybe billions. They're everywhere."
Kuroda sat as quietly as was possible for him, then: "You know, human vision is made of pixels, just like a computerized image. Each axon in the optic nerve provides one picture element. Now, most people aren't conscious of them, but if you have decent focus, and you look at a blank wall, some people can see them. Your brain is processing Web information as if it were coming from your eye; it may be hardwired to see it all as a mesh of pixels at the limits of resolution, but …"
He trailed off. After ten seconds she prodded him.
"But?"
"Well, I'm just thinking. You've described seeing circles, which we've taken to be websites, and lines connecting them, which we've assumed represent hyperlinks. And that's it—that's the World Wide Web, right? That's all of it. So, what could make up the background to the Web? I mean, in human vision, the—"
"Don't say that."
"Pardon?"
" 'Human vision.' Don't say that. I'm human."
A sharp intake of breath. "I'm so sorry, Miss Caitlin. May I say 'normal' vision?"
"Yes."
"All right. In normal vision, the background is—well, it's the distant reaches of the universe if you're looking up at the night sky. But what would be the background for the Web?"
"Background radiation?" she suggested. "Like the cosmic microwave background?"
Kuroda was quiet for a moment. "How old are you again?"
"Hey," she said, "my father is a physicist, you know."
"Well, the cosmic microwave background is uniform to a fraction of a degree in all directions. But what you're seeing is mottled in black and white, you say?"
"Yeah. And it keeps shifting."
"Pardon?"
"Shifting. Changing. Didn't I mention that?"
"No. What do you mean precisely?"
Something brushed against her legs—ah, Schrödinger! Caitlin scooped him up into her lap. "The dark squares switch to light, and the light ones to dark," she said.
"How rapidly?"
"Oh, really fast. Makes the whole thing shimmer."
The springs on Kuroda's chair squeaked as he stood up. She heard him walking across the room and then walking back toward her, then repeating the process: pacing. "It can't be …" he said at last.
"What?"
He ignored her question. "How clearly could you see the individual cells?"
She scratched Schrödinger behind the ears. "Cells?"
"Pixels. I mean pixels. How clearly could you see them?"
"It was really hard."
"Can you try again? Can you put the eyePod in duplex mode now?"
She fumbled to get the device out of her pocket without sending Schrödinger to the floor. Once it was free, she pressed the switch; the eyePod made its usual high-pitched beep, which Schrödinger answered with a surprised meow, and—
And there it was, spreading out before her: the World Wide Web.
"Can you see the background now?" Kuroda asked.
"Yes, if I concentrate …"
He sounded surprised. "You're squinting."
She shrugged. "It helps. But, yeah, if I really try, I can focus on a small group—a few hundred squares on a side."
"Okay. Do you have a Go board?"
"What?"
"Um, okay—do you have any money?"
She narrowed her eyes again, but this time in suspicion. "Fifty bucks, maybe, but …"
"No, no. Coins! Do you have coins?"
"In a jar on my dresser." She was saving to go see Lee Amodeo with Bashira when she came to Centre in the Square.
"Great, great. Do you mind if I go get it?"
"I can do it. It's my house."
"No, you take the time to look at the Web, see if you can make out any more detail in the background. I'll be right back."
Kuroda could never sneak up on anyone. She heard the sounds of his return long before he actually arrived. She then heard a great jangling as he dumped the coins on their worktable, and more noise as he shuffled them around—perhaps sorting them. "All right. Here's a bunch of coins. Can you arrange them in the pattern you're seeing? Put one down for each light spot, and leave a coin-sized space for each dark spot."
Caitlin shooed Schrödinger out of her lap and swung her chair to face the table. "I told you. They keep changing."
"Yes, yes, but …" He made a noisy sigh. "I wish there were some way to photograph it, or at least to slow down your perception, and—" His voice brightened. "And there is! Of course there is!"
She heard him moving about, then soft keyclicks. "What are you doing?" she asked.
"I'm halting your reception of the datastream from Jagster, and just passing on the last iteration of it over and over again, so it'll keep coming down the pike without changing, sort of like—"
"A freeze-frame!" she said as the image ceased to move. She was delighted to be able to apply another concept she'd only ever read about before.
"Exactly. Now, can you make a pattern with the coins that matches what you're seeing in a portion of the background?"
"A very small portion," she said. And she started moving the coins around; he'd given her a bunch of dimes. After a moment, she pushed one off to a corner of the desk. "American," she said; all those years of reading Braille made it easy to tell Queen Elizabeth from FDR.
She built up a grid of dimes and dime-sized empty spaces, counting the coins automatically as she deployed them. "Done," she announced. "Eight dollars and ninety cents."
"Completely random," Kuroda said, sounding disappointed.
"No, it's not. Not quite. See this group of five dimes here?" She had no trouble keeping track of the pattern she'd made, and touched the appropriate coins. "It's the same as this group here, except turned ninety degrees to the right."
"So it is," he said, excitedly. "It looks like the letter L."
"And this one's the same, too," she said, "turned upside down."
"Excellent!"
"But what does it mean?" she asked.
"I'm not a hundred-percent sure," he said. "Not yet. Here, focus your attention again on the same spot in your vision. I'm going to update the data going to your implant, just once … and done."
"Okay. It's completely different."
"Can you make it for me with the coins?"
"I'm not even sure I'm looking at the same spot anymore," she said. "But here goes." She rearranged the dimes, and, just to underscore that not only the pattern but also the number of light and dark squares had changed, she added, "Six dollars and twenty cents." She paused. "Ah! Three sets of that five-coin pattern this time."
"And in different places," he said.
"But what does it mean?"
"Well," said Kuroda, "this may sound crazy, but I think they're cellular automata."
"Who in the what now?"
"Hey, I thought you were the daughter of a physicist," he said, but his tone was one of gentle teasing.
She smiled. "Sue me. And besides, if they're cellular, I'd need to be a biologist's daughter, no?"
"No, no—they're not biological cells; they're cells in the computer-science sense of the word: a cell is the basic unit of storage in computer memory, holding a single unit of information."
"Ah."
"And an automaton is something that behaves or responds in a predictable, mechanical way. So cellular automata are patterns of information units that respond in a specific way to changes in their surroundings. For example, take a grid of black and white squares—each square is a cell, okay?"
"Yes."
"And on a chessboard that goes on forever, each square has eight neighbors, right?"
"Right."
"Well, suppose you say to each square something like, okay, if you're already black and three or more of your neighbors are white, then turn white yourself. An instruction like that is called a rule. And if you keep applying the rule over and over again, strange things happen. I mean, yes, if you just focus on one individual square, all you'd see is it flipping back and forth between black and white. But if you look at the overall grid, patterns of squares can seem to move across it—cross shapes, maybe, or hollow squares, or L shapes like we have here, or clusters of cells that change shape in set stages and, after a fixed number of steps, return to their original shape, but have moved somewhere else in the process. It's almost as though the shapes are alive."
She heard the chair groan as he shifted in it.
"I remember when I first encountered cellular automata in Conway's Game of Life as an undergrad," he said. "What's fascinating about all this is that they're representations of data that are interpreted as being special by an observer. I mean, those L-shaped things—they're called 'spaceships,' by the way, these patterns that retain their cohesion and fly across the grid—well, spaceships don't really exist; nothing is actually moving, and the spaceship you see on the right side of the grid is completely different in composition from the one you originally saw on the left side. And yet we think of it as the same one."
"But what are they for?"
"Besides making undergrads go 'ooooh,' you mean?"
"Yeah."
"Well, in nature—"
"These occur in nature?"
"Yes, in lots of places. For instance, there's a kind of snail that makes the pattern on its shell in direct response to a cellular-automata rule."
"Really?"
"Yes. It has a row of spigots that spit out pigment, or not, based on what the neighboring spigots on either side are doing."
"Cool!"
"Yes, it is. But what's really cool is that there are cellular automata in brains."
"Really?" she said again.
"Well, they're in lots of kinds of cells, actually. But they've been studied particularly in neural tissue. The cytoskeletons of cells—their internal scaffolding—is made up of long strings called microtubules, and each component of a microtubule, a little piece of protein called a tubulin dimer, can be in one of two states. And those states go through permutations as though they were cellular automata."
"Why would they do that?"
"No one knows. Some people, though, including—hey, maybe your father knows him? Roger Penrose? He's a famous physicist, too, and he and his associate, a guy named Hameroff, think that those cellular automata are the actual cause of consciousness, of selfawareness."
"Sweet! But why?"
"Well, Hameroff is an anesthesiologist, and he's shown that when people are put under for surgery their tubulin dimers fall into a neutral state—instead of some being black, say, and some being white, they all sort of become gray. When they do that, consciousness goes off; when they start behaving as cellular automata again, consciousness comes back on."
She made a mental note to google this later. "But if the snail has spigots, and the brain has these whatchamacallits—"
"Tubulin dimers," said Kuroda.
"Okay, well if these tubulin dimers are the actual things that are flipping in the brain, what's flipping in the background of webspace?"
She imagined him shrugging; it would have gone naturally with his tone of voice. "Bits, I guess. You know: binary digits. By definition, they're either on or off, or one or zero, or black or white, or however you want to visualize them. And maybe you're visualizing them as squares of two different colors, just at the limit of your mental resolution."
"But, um, the Web is supposed to pass on data unchanged," she said. "A browser asks for a Web page, and an exact copy of it is sent from the server that hosts that page. There shouldn't be any data changing."
"No," he said. "That's puzzling."
They sat in silence for a few moments, contemplating this. And then she heard her mother's distinctive footsteps on the stairs, followed by her saying, "Hey, you two, anyone care for a mid-morning snack?"
Kuroda's chair squeaked again as he heaved his bulk up from it. "I always think better on a full stomach."
You must do a lot of thinking, Caitlin thought, and she smiled as they went upstairs. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 31 | As soon as Shoshana arrived at the Marcuse Institute on Saturday morning, she, Dillon, and the Silverback headed over to the island. Hobo was inside the gazebo, leaning against one of the wooden beams that made up its frame.
Hello, Hobo, signed Marcuse once they were all inside. His fingers were fat and some signs were a struggle for him.
Hello, Doctor, Hobo signed back. Marcuse was the only one who required the ape to call him by an honorific instead of his first name. Still, it wasn't as bad as William Lemmon, the ultimate supervisor of Roger Fouts's work with Washoe in the 1970s; Lemmon used to make Washoe and his other ape charges kiss his ring when he arrived, as if he were pope of the chimps.
Picture of Shoshana good, Marcuse signed.
Hobo grinned, showing teeth. Hobo paint! Hobo paint!
Yes. Now will you paint … His hands froze in midair, and Shoshana wondered if he'd decided that he didn't want to see himself caricatured by an ape. After a moment, he began signing again: Dillon?
Hobo turned an appraising set of eyes on the young grad student with the scraggly blond beard. He was wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans, which, Shoshana hoped, weren't the same ones as yesterday. Maybe… maybe…
Dillon looked surprised to be conscripted for this duty, but he moved over to one of the two stools in the gazebo, sat on it, and struck a pose like Rodin's Thinker. Shoshana smiled at the sight.
But Hobo threw his hands up over his head, made a panthoot, and ran on all fours out the gazebo's door. Shoshana looked at Marcuse for permission, he nodded, and she took off after the ape, who was now cowering behind the yellow stone statue of the Lawgiver.
What's wrong? Shoshana asked. She held her arms out to gather Hobo in a hug. What's wrong?
Hobo looked back up at the gazebo, then at Shoshana. No people. No watch, he signed. There weren't many things he was self-conscious about; indeed, it had taken a lot to convince him not to masturbate or defecate in front of visiting dignitaries. But his art was something he was uneasy about, at least while it was being created.
We go away, you paint Dillon?
Hobo was quiet for a moment. Paint Shoshana.
Again? Why?
Shoshana pretty.
She felt herself blushing.
Shoshana have ponytail, added Hobo.
She knew that getting him to paint someone other than her would be better. Otherwise, critics would argue that he'd just stumbled on a random combination of shapes that Marcuse, et al., had decided represented Shoshana, and he simply reproduced those same fixed shapes over and over again to get a reward—not unlike half the cartoonists in the world, Shoshana thought; the guy who drew The Family Circus seemed to have a repertoire of about eight things.
Fine, she signed. Paint me, then Dillon, okay?
Shoshana knew she was outthinking the poor ape; he could, of course, paint her regardless of what she said. After a moment, he signed, Yes yes.
She held out her hand, and he took it, intertwining his fingers with hers. They walked back up to the gazebo, the hot morning sun beating down on them.
"Hobo is going to paint another picture of me," Shoshana announced once they'd passed through the screen door. Marcuse frowned. She switched to signing so Hobo could follow along. And after, Hobo will paint Dillon—right, Hobo?
Hobo lifted his shoulders. Maybe.
"All right," Shoshana said, "everybody out, please. You know he doesn't like an audience."
Marcuse didn't seem happy about taking orders from a subordinate, but he followed Dillon outside. Shoshana looked around the gazebo, double-checking that the additional cameras they'd set up last night could clearly see both Hobo and his canvas. Then she headed for the door, too. As she exited she glanced back, and, to her astonishment, saw Hobo stretching his long arms out in front of him, with fingers interlocked, as if warming up.
And then the artist got down to work.
That special point! How wondrous, but how frustrating, too!
The datastream from it didn't always follow the same path, but it did always end up at the same location—and so I took to intercepting the datastream just before it arrived there.
There had been no repetition of the intriguing bright flashes, and for a long time there was nothing at all I could make sense of in the data pouring forth from that point. But now the datastream had become a reflection of me again. How strange, though! Instead of the constantly changing perspective I'd grown used to, the datastream seemed to focus for extended periods on just a very small portion of reality and … and something was distorted about the passage of time, it seemed. I tried to fathom the significance, if any, of that tiny part of the universe, but then, maddeningly, the datastream turned to gibberish once more …
After they'd finished the snack—which turned out to be oatmeal cookies her mom had gotten from the Mennonites— Caitlin and Dr. Kuroda returned to the basement. Caitlin had switched her eyePod to simplex mode for the break, but now had it back in duplex and was looking again at webspace.
"Okay," said Kuroda, settling into his chair, "we've got a background to the Web made up of cellular automata—but what exactly are the cells? I mean, even if they're just single bits, they still have to come from somewhere."
"Slack storage space?" suggested Caitlin. Hard drives store data in clusters of a fixed size, she knew; the new computer her dad had bought yesterday probably had an NTFS-formatted drive, meaning it used clusters of four kilobytes, and if a file contained only three kilobytes of data, the fourth kilobyte—over eight thousand bits—was left unused.
"No, I don't think so," said Kuroda. "Nothing can read or write to that space; even if there was some way for Web protocols to access slack space on servers, you wouldn't see bits flipping rapidly. No, this must be something out there— something in the data pipes." He paused. "Still, there's nothing I can think of in the Internet's TCP/IP or OSI model that could produce cellular automata. I wonder where they're coming from?"
"Lost packets," Caitlin said suddenly, sitting up straighter.
Kuroda sounded both intrigued and impressed. "Could be."
At any moment, Caitlin knew, hundreds of millions of people are using the Internet. While doing so, their computers send out clusters of bits called data packets—the basic unit of communication on the Web. Each packet contains the address of its intended destination, which might, for instance, be the server hosting a Web page. But traffic on the Web almost never goes directly from point A to point B. Instead, it bounces around on multilegged journeys, passing through routers, repeaters, and switches, each of which tries to direct the packet closer to its intended destination.
Sometimes the routing gets awfully complex, especially when packets are rejected by the place they were sent to. That can happen when two or more packets arrive at the same time: one is chosen at random to be accepted and the others are sent back out to try their luck again later. But some packets never get accepted by their intended destinations because the address they've been sent to is invalid, or the target site is down or too busy, and so they end up being lost.
"Lost packets," repeated Kuroda, as if trying the notion on for size. Caitlin imagined he was shaking his head. "But lost packets just expire."
And indeed they mostly do, she knew: each packet has a "hop counter" coded into it, and that counter is reduced by one every time the packet passes through a router or other device. To keep lost packets from clogging up the Web infrastructure, when a router receives a packet whose hop counter has reached zero, it erases the packet.
"Lost packets are supposed to expire," Caitlin corrected, "but what if the packet is corrupted so that it no longer has a hop counter, or that counter doesn't decrement properly? I imagine some portion of packets get corrupted like that, by faulty routers or bad wiring or buggy software, and, with trillions of them going out each day, even if only a very tiny proportion ended up with broken hop counters, that would still leave huge numbers kicking around forever, right? Especially if their intended destination simply doesn't exist, either because the address has been corrupted along with the hop counter, or the server has gone offline."
"You know a lot about networks," Kuroda said, sounding impressed.
"Hey, who do you think set up the one in this house?"
"I'd assume your father …"
"Oh, he's good at networking now," she said. "I taught him. But really, he's a theoretical physicist. He can barely operate the microwave."
Kuroda's chair squeaked. "Ah."
She felt herself getting excited; she was on to something— she knew it! "Anyway, there are probably always some … some ghost packets that persist long after they should have died. And think about that thing that happened in China recently: a huge, huge portion of the Web was cut off because of those power failures, or whatever. Hundreds of trillions of packets intended for China suddenly had no way to get to their destinations. Even if only a tiny fraction of those got suitably corrupted, it would still mean a huge increase in the number of ghost packets."
" 'Ghost packets,' eh?" Kuroda had brought a cup of coffee downstairs with him, and she heard it clatter; he must have just taken a sip. "Perhaps. Maybe a bug in some operating system or common router has been generating them for years under certain circumstances, for all we know—a benign bug that doesn't inconvenience users might never have been noticed."
He shifted in his chair, then: "Or maybe they aren't immortal packets at all. Maybe this is just the normal ebb and flow of lost packets that will expire, and while they're bouncing around trying in vain to reach their destination their time-to-live counters do decrement normally, but it's the switch from odd to even counts with each handoff that causes them to flip from black to white in your perception. You'd still get as many as 256 permutations out of each doomed packet—that's the maximum number of hops that can be coded for, because packets use an eight-bit field to store that value. But that's still a goodly number of iterations for a cellular-automata rule."
He paused, then blew out air noisily; Caitlin could almost hear him shrug. "But this is way out of my area," he continued. "I'm an information theorist, not a network theorist, and—"
She laughed.
"What?" said Kuroda.
"Sorry. Do you ever watch The Simpsons?"
"No, not really. But my daughter does."
"The time Homer ended up becoming an astronaut? These two newscasters are talking about the crew of a space mission. The first guy says, 'They're a colorful bunch. They've been dubbed "The Three Musketeers," heh heh heh.' And the other guy—it's Tom Brokaw—says, 'And we laugh legitimately: there's a mathematician, a different kind of mathematician, and a statistician.'"
Kuroda chuckled then said, "Well, actually, there are three types of mathematicians: those who can count and those who can't."
Caitlin smiled.
"But, seriously, Miss Caitlin, if you go into a career in math or engineering, you will have to choose a specialty."
She kept her voice deadpan. "I'm going to focus on the number 8,623,721—I bet nobody's taken that one yet."
Kuroda made his wheezy chuckle again. "Still, I think we need to talk to a specialist. Let's see, in Israel it's … hey, it's only 8:00 p.m. She might be around."
"Who? Anna?"
"Exactly: Anna Bloom, the network cartographer. I'll IM her to see if she's online. Does this new computer have a webcam?"
"I suspect my dad didn't think I'd have much use for one," she said gently.
"Well, he—ah! He's more of an optimist than you think, Miss Caitlin. There's one right here, sitting on top of the tower." He used the keyboard for a few moments, then: "Yup, she's at home and online. Let me get a webcam call going …"
"Konnichi wa, Masayukisan!" said the same voice Caitlin had heard on the speakerphone the night she'd seen the Web for the first time. But the woman immediately switched to English, presumably when she saw that he was with a Westerner. "Hey, who's the sweet young thing?"
Dr. Kuroda sounded slightly embarrassed. "This is Miss Caitlin." Of course, Anna hadn't seen her when they'd spoken before.
Anna sounded surprised. "Where are you?"
"Canada."
"Oooh! Is it snowing?"
"Not yet," said Kuroda. "It's still September, after all."
"Hi, Caitlin," Anna said.
"Hello, Professor Bloom."
"You can call me Anna. So, what can I do for you?"
Kuroda recounted what they'd dreamed up so far: legions of ghost packets floating in the background of the Web, somehow self-organizing into cellular automata. Then: "So, what do you think?"
"It's a novel idea," Anna said slowly.
"Could it work?" asked Caitlin.
"I … suppose. It's a classic Darwinian scenario, isn't it? Mutant packets that are better able to survive bouncing around endlessly. But the Web is expanding fast, with new servers added each day, so a slowly growing population of these ghost packets might never overwhelm its capacity—or, at least, it clearly hasn't yet."
"And the Web has no white blood cells tracking down useless stuff," said Caitlin. "Right? They would just persist, bouncing around."
"I guess," said Anna. "And—just blue-skying here—but the checksum on the packet could determine if you're seeing it as black or white; even-number checksums could be black and odd-number ones white, or whatever. If the hop counter changes with each hop, but never goes to zero, the checksum would change, too, and so you'd get a flipping effect."
"I thought of something similar," Kuroda said, "although the checksum didn't occur to me."
"And," Caitlin said to Dr. Kuroda, "you said cellular-automata rules can arise naturally, right? Like with that snail that uses them to paint its shell? So maybe all of this just spontaneously emerged."
"Maybe indeed," said Kuroda, sounding intrigued.
"I think I smell a paper," said Anna.
"You want to be a mathematician when you grow up, right, Miss Caitlin?" asked Kuroda.
I am a mathematician, she thought. But what she said was, "Yes."
"How'd you like to get the jump on the competition and coauthor your first paper with Professor Bloom and me? 'Spontaneous Generation of Cellular Automata in the Infrastructure of the World Wide Web.'"
Caitlin was grinning from ear to ear. "Sweet!" |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 32 | "Well, there's no doubt now, is there?" said Shoshana, shifting her gaze from the painting to Dr. Marcuse and then back again. "That's me again, all right."
They were in the main room of the bungalow, watching the live video feed as Hobo painted away in the gazebo. Four LCD monitors were lined up on a workbench, one for each of the cameras; it reminded Shoshana of the security guard's station in her apartment building's lobby.
Marcuse nodded his great lump of a head. "Now, if he'd just paint something other than you." A pause. "Note that he's doing your same profile again: you looking off to the right. If he'd done it the other way, that might have torpedoed my thought about it reflecting brain lateralization."
"Well," said Shoshana, "it is my good side."
He actually smiled, then: "Okay. Let's put your video-editing skills to work."
Shoshana had a not-so-secret hobby: vidding. She took clips of TV shows she'd snagged from BitTorrent sites and cut them to fit popular songs, making humorous or poignant little music videos that she shared with like-minded vidders on the Web. Her fandoms included the TV medical drama House, which had a lot of slashy subtext that was great for mixing to love songs, and the latest incarnation of Doctor Who. Marcuse had caught her working on these once or twice over lunch, using the fancy Mac the Institute had had donated to it.
"When Hobo's done," continued Marcuse, "take the footage from all four cameras and splice together a version that shows the whole thing as it happened. Real Hollywood-style, okay? Shot of Hobo, shot of canvas over Hobo's shoulder, close-up on canvas, back to Hobo, like that. I'll write up a voice-over commentary to go with it."
"Sure," Shoshana said, looking forward to the assignment. Timbaland has nothing on me.
"Good, good." Marcuse rubbed his big hands together. "After this hits YouTube, the only cutting room our Hobo is going to be involved with is your edit suite."
"What we really could use," Kuroda said, down in the basement, "is an expert on self-organizing systems."
"And there's never one around when you need one!" Caitlin declared in mock seriousness. "But my dad's a physicist. He must know something about them." In fact, he knew something about just about everything, in her experience—at least in theoretical areas. "I'll go get him."
Caitlin headed upstairs. She took a detour, going all the way up to her bedroom first. It really was chilly in the basement, so she grabbed her PI sweatshirt, which her mom had thoughtfully run through the dryer after last night's storm.
She found her dad in his den, which was a little room near the back of the house. It was easy enough tracking him down: he had a three-disc CD player in there, which seemed perpetually loaded with the same discs: Supertramp, Queen, and The Eagles. "Hotel California" was playing as she stepped through the open doorway. He was typing on his keyboard; he had an ancient, heavy IBM one that clicked loudly. She rapped her knuckles gently on the doorjamb, in case he was too absorbed in his work to notice her arrival, and said, "Can you help Dr. Kuroda and me?"
She heard his chair pushing back against the carpet, which she took as a "yes."
Once they got downstairs, Caitlin let her dad have the chair she'd been sitting in, and she leaned against the worktable; through the small window, she could hear a few of the neighborhood kids playing street hockey. Anna Bloom was still hooked up via webcam from the Technion in Israel.
"Even if there are lost packets persisting on the infrastructure of the Web," her dad said, after Kuroda had briefed him, "why would Caitlin see them? Why would they be represented at all in the feed she's getting from Jagster?"
Kuroda shifted noisily in his chair. "That's a good question. I hadn't—"
"It's because of the special method Jagster uses to get its data," Anna said.
"Sorry?" said Kuroda, and "What?" said Caitlin.
Anna's voice sounded tinny over the computer's speakers. "Well, remember, Jagster was created as an alternative to the Google approach. PageRank, the standard Google method, looks for how many other pages link to a page, right? But that isn't necessarily the best measure of how frequently a page is accessed. If you're looking for info on a hot rock star, like, say, Lee Amodeo …"
"She's awesome!" said Caitlin.
"So my granddaughter tells me," said Anna. "Anyway, if you're interested in Lee Amodeo, how do you find her website? You could go to Google and put 'Lee Amodeo' in as the search term, right? And Google will serve up as number one whichever page about her has the most links to it from other pages. But the best Lee Amodeo page isn't necessarily the one people link to the most, it's the page they go to the most. If people always go directly to her page by correctly guessing that the URL is leeamodeo.com—"
"Which it is," Caitlin said.
"—then that might be the most popular Lee Amodeo site even if no one links to it, and Google wouldn't know it. And, in fact, if you upload a document to the Internet but don't link it to any Web page, but you send a link to it to people via email, again, Google—and other search engines—won't know it's there, even if ten thousand people access the document through the email links."
"Okay," her dad said. Caitlin doubted Anna knew how privileged she was to get an acknowledgment at all.
Anna went on. "So, besides just traditional spidering, Jagster monitors raw Web traffic going through major trunks, looking at the actual stream of data moving through the routers, and that would include lost packets."
"Isn't that sort of like wiretapping?" Caitlin asked.
"Well, yes, exactly," said Anna. "But Jagster is the good guy here. See, in 2005, a whistle-blower named Mark Klein outed the fact that AT&T has special equipment at its central office in San Francisco—and, indeed, at several of its other facilities—that allows the NSA to tap into raw Internet traffic."
Caitlin knew the NSA was the National Security Agency in the US. She nodded.
"It's a tricky technical problem," continued Anna. "You can monitor what's going on in copper wire without interfering with the signal, because the magnetic fields leak out. But more and more of the Web is carried by fiber optics, and those don't leak. If you want to monitor the traffic, you actually have to put in a splitter, diverting part of the signal, which reduces the signal's strength. And that, among other things, was what they were—and are—doing at AT&T, apparently. It's called vacuum-cleaner surveillance: they just suck up everything that's going down the pipe."
"And that's where Jagster gets its data?" Caitlin asked. "From AT&T?"
"No, no," said Anna. "There's a class-action suit about all this, initiated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Hepting versus AT&T." She paused, perhaps trying to remember—or maybe she was googling at her end. "AT&T is a for-profit corporation, but an awful lot of Internet traffic goes through universities—always has, right back to the early days. And a bunch of universities decided to tap their trunks, just to show what sort of data could be mined, so they could file amicus briefs in Hepting; they wanted to show that the government could access all sorts of private stuff this way—things they should need a warrant to get. The university consortium put scrambling routines in up front, so that certain data strings— email addresses, credit-card numbers, and the like—are always munged before the feed is made public, but otherwise, they've basically done what AT&T did under government instructions, in order to demonstrate, despite the government's claims to the contrary, just how invasive this sort of monitoring can be."
"Cool," said Caitlin.
"Jagster decided to use that same datastream," continued Anna, "because it lets it rank pages based on how many times they're actually accessed rather than just how many times they're linked to. And since your eyePod is being fed a raw Jagster dump of everything, you're seeing the orphaned packets."
"And she visualizes those packets as cellular automata?" her dad said.
"Well," Kuroda said, "the idea that they're orphaned packets is just our provisional guess, Malcolm. And, credit where credit is due: it was your daughter's idea. They could be something else, of course—maybe a virus. But, yes, she's seeing cellular automata, complete with spaceships moving across the grid."
"Maybe we should send an email to Wolfram," said Anna. "Get his take on it."
Caitlin straightened up. "Wolfram?" she said. "Stephen Wolfram?"
"Yes," said Anna.
"The guy who wrote Mathematica?"
"That's him."
"He's, like, a god," Caitlin said. "I mean, most of the stuff Mathematica can do is beyond me—so far—but I love playing with it, and the command-line interface is great for those of us who can't see. People talk about it all the time on the Blindmath list." She paused for a moment. "And Wolfram knows about cellular automata?"
"Oh, my goodness, yes," said Anna. "He wrote a book you could kill a man with—twelve hundred pages—called A New Kind of Science. It's all about them."
"We should totally ask him what he thinks!" Caitlin said.
Outside, one of the streethockey players shouted, "Car!" warning his friends to get off the road.
"Gently," said Kuroda, "if I may suggest, let's keep this between the four of us for now."
"Why?"
"We don't want anyone stealing our thunder," he said. "And …"
"Yes?" said Caitlin.
But Kuroda said nothing more. Finally, Caitlin prodded him again with another, "Yes?"
After a moment, Anna answered for him: "The University of Tokyo will want to license any technology or applications that are based on what Masayuki's equipment has made possible, I'm sure. If there are spontaneously emerging cellular automata in the background of the Web, there may be commercial applications for them—in cryptography, in distributed computing, in random-number generation, and so on. The cellular automata might be patentable, and certainly the method for accessing them is."
"Dr. Kuroda?" said Caitlin. "Is that what you're thinking?"
"Such thoughts have crossed my mind, yes. My university owns the research, and I've got an obligation to help them monetize it where possible."
"But it's my websight!"
"Which website?" Anna asked.
"No, no. My websight, s-i-g-h-t—my ability to see the Web. They can't patent that! If anything, we should open-source it, or put it out under a Creative Commons license."
There was an awkward silence. At last, Kuroda said, "Well."
Caitlin crossed her arms in front of her chest. Well, indeed! |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 33 | The atmosphere in the basement was still chilly, and not just because of the temperature. Caitlin's dad must have swiveled his chair slightly; she heard it squeak. "Look," he said, his tone conciliatory, "the cellular automata are probably just an epiphenomenon."
Oh you silver-tongued devil! thought Caitlin. Only her dad could try smoothing over a tense moment with bafflegab. Still, that he was speaking up of his own volition meant that even he recognized that she was pissed off. But the fact that she didn't know what an epiphenomenon was just made her even more angry. She didn't say anything, but perhaps Kuroda read something in her expression—whatever the hell that meant!
"He means he thinks they're just a random by-product of something else," Kuroda said gently. "Like foam, which is an epiphenomenon of waves: it doesn't mean anything; it just occurs."
She got it: her dad was saying, hey, see, nothing here worth fighting about; if the cellular automata are meaningless, there's probably nothing of value to patent anyway. But that hardly excused Kuroda even thinking about making a buck—a yen!—off something that she was doing. Yes, yes, his hardware was feeding her the signals, but it was her brain that was interpreting them. Websight wasn't just hers, it was her.
"You may be right, Malcolm," said Anna Bloom, over the webcam link from Haifa. Caitlin was still fuming, and wondered if Anna really knew the mood here. She was seeing a very limited view through the camera, no doubt, and the crappy computer mike probably wasn't picking up subtlety of tone.
Anna went on: "One bit does affect the next, at least in copper wire; the magnetic fields do overlap, after all. So maybe some sort of … I don't know, constructive interference, perhaps … could accidentally give rise to cellular automata."
"But they would still just be noise," her dad said.
"You're probably right," Kuroda replied. "But um, what is it you like to say, Miss Caitlin? You're 'an empiricist at heart.'"
He was trying to cajole her, to include her, she knew, but she remained angry. Kuroda worked with computers all day long, for crying out loud—didn't he know that information wants to be free?
Caitlin was still leaning against the worktable. The streethockey game continued outside: someone just scored.
"Miss Caitlin?" said Kuroda. "Testing what your father just suggested will involve some cool math …"
"Like what?" she said, her tone petulant.
"Perhaps a Zipf plot …"
Caitlin didn't know what that was, either, but to her great surprise her father said a very enthusiastic, "Yes!" That was enough to make her curious, but she wasn't ready to give in just yet. "Is there empty room on this table?" she said, patting its surface. "And do you think it'll hold me?"
"Sure," said Kuroda after a pause, presumably to give her father a chance to answer first. "Everything to the left—your left—of the computer is clear."
Caitlin boosted herself up onto the table, the folding legs groaning slightly as she did so, and she sat cross-legged on it. "Okay," she said, her tone still not very cheery. "I'll bite. What's a Zipf plot?"
"It's a way of finding out if there's any information in a signal, even if you can't decode the signal," Kuroda said.
Caitlin frowned. "Information? In the cellular automata?"
"Could be," said Kuroda in a tone that sounded like it should be accompanied by a shrug.
"But, um, can cellular automata contain information?" Caitlin asked.
"Oh, yes," said Anna. "In fact, Wolfram wrote a paper about encoding information into them for cryptographic purposes as far back as, um, 1986, I think. And a bunch of people have tried to develop public-key cryptography systems using them."
"Anyway," Kuroda said, "George Zipf was a linguist at Harvard. In the 1930s, he noticed something fascinating: in any language, the frequency with which a word is used is inversely proportional to its rank in a table of the frequency of use of all words in the language. That means—"
You don't have to spoon-feed Calculass! "That means," she said, "the second most-common word is used one-half as often as the first most-common, the third most-common is used one-third as often as the first most-common, the fourth most-common is used one quarter as often, and so on." She frowned. "But is that really true?"
"Yes," said Kuroda. "In English, the most-common word is 'the,' then 'of,' then 'to,' then … um, I think it's 'in.' And, yes, 'in,' or whatever it is, is used one-quarter as often as 'the.'"
"But surely that's just a quirk of English, isn't it?" said Caitlin, shifting slightly on the table.
"No, it's the same in Japanese." He rattled off some words in that language. "Those are the four most common, and they appear in the same inverse ratio."
"And it's true for Hebrew, too," said Anna.
"But what's really amazing," said Kuroda, "is that it doesn't apply just to words. It applies equally well to letters: the fourth most-common in English, which is O, is used one-quarter as much as the first most-common, E. And it applies to phonemes, too—the smallest building blocks of speech—and, again, in all languages, from Arabic to …" He trailed off, clearly trying to think of a language that started with Z.
"Zulu?" offered Caitlin, deciding to be helpful.
"Exactly, thanks."
She thought about this. It was indeed pretty cool.
"Everything Masayuki said is right," Anna said, "but you know what's even more interesting, Caitlin? This inverse ratio applies to dolphin songs, too."
Well, that was awesome. "Really?" she said.
"Yes," said Kuroda. "In fact, this technique can be used to determine if there is information in the noise any animal makes. If there is, it will obey Zipf's law, so that if you plot the frequency of use of the components on a logarithmic scale, you get a line with a slope of negative one."
Caitlin nodded. "A line going diagonally from the upper left down to the lower right."
"Exactly," said Kuroda. "And when you plot dolphin vocalizations you do get a negativeone slope. But if you take, say, the sounds made by squirrel monkeys, you get a slope, at best, of –0.6, because what they make is just random noise. Even the SETI people—Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—are doing Zipf plots now, because the inverse-relationship is a property of information, not of any particularly human approach to language."
All right, all right: it was cool math.
"Now do you see why I like information theory so much?" Kuroda said, his tone suggesting he was still trying to cajole her. "Hey, do you know John Gordon's old story about the student of information theory on his first day at university?"
Anna said, "Not this one again!" but Kuroda pressed on undaunted.
"Well," he said, "the student shows up at the departmental office and hears the professors calling out numbers. One would call out, say, '74!' and all the other professors would laugh. Then another would call out a different number, say, '812,' and again everyone would laugh."
"Uh-huh," said Caitlin.
"So the student asks what's going on, and a prof says, 'We're telling jokes. See, we've all worked together so long, we know each other's jokes by heart. There are a thousand of them, so, being information theorists, we applied data compression to them, assigning each one a number from zero through 999. Go ahead, try it yourself.' And so the student calls out a number: '63.' But no one laughs. He tries again: '512!' Nothing. 'What's wrong?' the student asks. 'Why is no one laughing?' And the kindly old prof says, 'Well, it's not just the joke—it's how you tell it.'"
Caitlin found herself smiling despite herself.
"But one day," Kuroda said, "the student was looking at a weather report for the far north and happened to exclaim the temperature: 'Minus 45!' And all the professors burst out laughing."
He paused, and Caitlin said, "Why?"
"Because," he replied, and she could tell by his voice that he was grinning, "they'd never heard that one before!"
Caitlin laughed out loud, and found herself feeling better, but her father said, "Ahem"—actually saying it as if it were an English word, rather than like a throat-clearing. "Might we get on with it?"
"Sorry," said Kuroda, but he sounded like he was still grinning. "Okay, here we go …"
He used the technique he'd developed before to send freeze-frames of the Jagster data to Caitlin's eyePod, and from there to her implant. By trial and error, they found the right refresh rate to get what she was seeing to increment by just one step—just one iteration of whatever rule was governing the cellular automata as they changed from black to white or vice versa. She could now watch, frame by frame, at whatever playback speed she wished, as spaceships moved across her field of view, without missing any steps.
Kuroda had no way to filter out just the cellular automata from the Jagster feed, but Caitlin could do it with ease, simply by focusing on only a portion of the background.
"And," he said, "speaking of Mathematica, Malcolm, do you have it?"
"Of course," he said. "It should be accessible here. Let me …"
Caitlin heard them moving around, then, after a bit, Kuroda said, "Ah, thanks," to her dad, and then, generally, to everyone, "Okay, let's run the Zipf-plotting function." Keyclicks. "Of course, we'll have to try a lot of different ways of parsing the datastream," he continued, "to make sure we are isolating individual informational units. First, we'll—"
"There!" interrupted her dad, actually sounding excited.
"What?" said Caitlin.
"Well, that's it, isn't it?" said Kuroda.
"What?" she repeated more firmly.
"You're sure you're concentrating on just the cellular automata?" Kuroda asked.
"Yes, yes."
"Well," he said, "what we're getting as we plot them flipping from black to white is a lovely diagonal line—from the upper left to the lower right. A negativeone slope all the way."
Caitlin lifted her eyebrows. "So there is information—real content—in the background of the Web?"
"I'd say so, yes," said Kuroda. "Malcolm?"
"There's no random process that can generate a negativeone slope," he said.
"Le'azazel!" exclaimed Anna; it sounded like a curse word to Caitlin.
"What?" said Kuroda.
"Don't you see?" Anna said. "A negativeone slope: it's intelligent content on the Web in a place it's not supposed to be—intelligence disguised to look like random noise." She paused as if waiting for one of the men to supply the answer and, when they didn't, she said, "It's got to be the NSA." She paused, letting that sink in. "Or maybe it's comparable spooks elsewhere—Shin Bet, perhaps—but I'd bet it's the NSA. We already know, from Hepting, that they muck around with the traffic on the net; it looks like they've found a way to package clandestine communications that move in the apparent noise."
"What sort of content could it be, though?" asked Caitlin.
"Who knows?" said Anna. "Secret communiqués? Like I said, people have tried to use cellular automata before for data encryption, but nobody—at least not anyone who's gone public—has ever worked out a system. But the NSA scoops up a lot of the top math grads in the US."
"Really?" said Caitlin, surprised.
"Oh, yes," said Anna. "It's a real problem in the field of math academically, actually. Most of the best US grads in math and computer science either go to the NSA, where they work on classified projects, or to private-sector places like Google or Electronic Arts, where they do stuff that's covered by nondisclosure agreements. God knows what they've come up with; it's never published in journals."
Kuroda said something that might have been a swearword of his own in Japanese, then: "She may be right. We should tread very, very carefully here, my friends. If this stuff in the background of the Web is supposed to be secret, those in power may take … steps … to ensure that it remains that way. Miss Caitlin, far be it from me to tell you what to do, but perhaps you could be circumspect about this topic in your blog?"
"Oh, no one pays attention to my LiveJournal. Besides, I flock—friends-lock—anything that I don't want strangers to read."
"Do what he says," her dad said, startling her by the sharpness of his voice. "The authorities could seize your implant and eyePod as threats to national security."
Caitlin got down off the table. "They wouldn't do that," she replied. "Besides, we're in Canada now."
"Don't think for one second that the Canadian authorities won't do whatever Washington asks," her father said.
She wasn't sure what to make of all this. "Um, okay," she said at last. "But you guys are going to keep studying it, right?"
"Of course," Dr. Kuroda said. "But carefully, and without tipping our hand." He paused. "It's a good thing we're doing a videoconference with Anna; if this were text-based IM, the authorities would already know what we've found. At least for now, video is a lot harder for them to automatically monitor."
The full impact of what he and Anna were saying was coming to her. She turned her head toward Kuroda. "But what about our paper?"
"Eventually, Miss Caitlin, perhaps. But for now, the better part of valor is discretion." |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 34 | Masayuki Kuroda had spent the rest of Saturday, and all day Sunday, working with Miss Caitlin, studying the cellular automata. But it was now Monday, the first day of October. Masayuki had been in Canada a week now. He missed his wife and his own daughter, and felt guilty that Hiroshi was having to cover his classes for him. But, still, he was entitled to a little time off while he was here, no? Besides, there was only so much he could do while Miss Caitlin was at school.
He took another bite of his roast-beef sandwich and looked around the kitchen. He didn't think he'd ever get used to North American houses. A home this size would be almost impossible to find in Tokyo, and yet there were streets full of them here. Of course, the Decters obviously weren't hurting for cash, but, still, with only Malcolm working, and with all the expensive equipment Caitlin had, they certainly couldn't have a lot of disposable income left.
"I want to thank you," he said. "You've been so hospitable."
Barbara Decter was seated on the opposite side of the square pine table, holding a cup of coffee in two hands. She looked over its brim at him. She was, Masayuki thought, quite lovely: probably closer to fifty than forty, but with large, sparkling blue eyes and a cute upturned nose that almost made her look like an anime character. "It's my pleasure," she said. "To tell the truth, I've enjoyed having you here. It's nice to, you know, have someone talkative around. Back in Austin …"
She trailed off, but her voice had become a bit wistful before doing so. "Yes?" he said gently.
"I just miss Texas, is all. Don't get me wrong; this place is nice, although I am not looking forward to winter, and …"
Masayuki thought she looked sad. After a time he again said, "Yes?"
She held up a hand. "I'm sorry. It's just … been particularly difficult coming here. I had friends back in Austin, and I had things to do: I worked every weekday as a volunteer at Caitlin's old school, the Texas School for the Blind."
He looked down at the place mat. It was a large laminated photo of a city skyline at night; a caption identified it as Austin. "So why did you move here?"
"Well, Caitlin was pushing to go to a regular school, anyway—she said she'd need to be able to function in normal classes if she were going to go on to MIT, which has been her goal for years. And then Malcolm got this job offer that was too good to pass up: the Perimeter Institute is a dream come true for him. He doesn't have to teach, doesn't have to work with students. He can just think all day."
"How long have you been married, if I may ask?"
Again, the slightly wistful tone. "It'll be eighteen years in December."
"Ah."
But then she gave him an appraising look. "You're being polite, Masayuki. You want to know why I married him."
He shifted in his chair and looked out the window. The leaves had started to change color. "It's not my place to wonder," he said. "But …"
She raised her shoulders a bit. "He's brilliant. And he's a great listener. And he's very kind, in his way—which my first husband was not."
He took another bite of his sandwich. "You were married before?"
"For two years, starting when I was twenty-one. The only good thing that came out of that was it taught me which things really matter." A pause. "How long have you been married?"
"Twenty years."
"And you have a daughter?"
"Akiko, yes. She's sixteen, going on thirty."
Barb laughed. "I know what you mean. What does your wife do?"
"Esumi is in—what do you say in English? Not 'manpower' anymore, is it?"
"Human resources."
"Right. She's in human resources at the same university I work at."
The corners of her mouth were turned down. "I miss the university environment. I'm going to try to get back in next year."
He felt his eyebrows going up. "As … as a student?"
"No, no. To teach."
"Oh! I, ah—"
"You thought I was June Cleaver?"
"Pardon?"
"A stay-at-home mom?"
"Well, I …"
"I've got a Ph.D., Masayuki. I used to be an associate professor of economics." She set down her coffee cup. "Don't look so surprised. Actually, my specialty is—was—game theory."
"You taught in Austin?"
"No. In Houston; that's where Caitlin was born. We moved to Austin when she was six so she could go to the TSB. The first five years, I did stay at home with her—and believe me, looking after a blind daughter is work. And I spent the next decade volunteering at her school, helping her and other kids learn Braille, or reading them things that were only available in print, and so on." She paused and looked through the opening to the large, empty living room. "But now, I'm going to talk to UW and Laurier—that's the other university in town— about picking up some sessional work, at least. I couldn't do any this term because my Canadian work permit hasn't come through yet." She smiled a bit ruefully. "I'm a bit rusty, but you know what they say: old game theorists never die, we just lose our equilibrium."
He smiled back at her. "Are you sure you don't want to come to Toronto for the show?"
"No, thanks. I've seen Mamma Mia! We all went back in August. It's great, though. You'll love it."
He nodded. "I've always wanted to see it. I'm glad I was able to get a ticket on such short notice, and—" Yes, yes—of course!
"Masayuki?"
His heart was pounding. "I am an idiot."
"No, no, lots of people like ABBA."
"I mean Miss Caitlin's software. I think I know why she was able to see the lightning but not anything else in the real world. It's related to the delta modulation: the Jagster feed is already digital, but the real-world input from her retina starts out as analog and is converted to digital for processing by the eyePod—and that must be where I screwed up. Because when she saw the lightning, that was a real-world signal that already had only two components: bright light and a black background. It was essentially digital to begin with, and she could see that." He was thinking furiously in Japanese and trying to talk in English at the same time. "Anyway, yes, yes, I think I can fix it." He took a sip of coffee. "Okay, look, I'm not going to be back from Toronto until after midnight tonight. And Miss Caitlin will be in bed by then, won't she?"
"Yes, of course. It's a school night."
"Well, I don't want to wait until tomorrow after school to test this; I mean, it probably won't work right the first time, anyway, but, um, could you do a favor for me?"
"Of course."
"It should just be a small patch—nothing as elaborate as downloading a complete software update to her implant, like we did before. So I'm going to queue up the patch code to be sent automatically to her eyePod next time she switches to duplex mode. That'll mean taking the Jagster feed offline, but I'll leave instructions for Miss Caitlin on how to reinstate it if she wants it later tonight. Anyway, when she gets home, ask her to switch to duplex, and have her tell you what difference, if any, it makes."
Barb nodded. "Sure, I can do that."
"Thanks. I'll leave instructions for rolling back to the old version of software, too, in case something goes wrong. As I say, the patch probably won't work the first time, but my server will still record her eyePod's output based on the patched code, so tomorrow while she's at school, I'll be able to go back and examine the datastream from tonight, see if the encoding has been improved at all, and then I can make any further tweaks that are required. But if we don't get the first test done tonight, I'll lose a whole day before I can refine it."
"Sure, no problem."
He gobbled the last bite of his sandwich. "Thank you." He glanced at the clock on the microwave—he'd never get used to digital clocks that showed a.m. and p.m. instead of twenty-four-hour time. "I want to get an early start into Toronto this afternoon; I'm taking you at your word that it would be crazy to try to drive into downtown there in rush hour. So, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get that patch set up." |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 35 | Mr. Struys had started off today's chemistry class by reading aloud from The Globe and Mail. The lab bench Caitlin shared with Bashira was halfway to the back of the room, but she could easily hear the rustling newsprint followed by his voice intoning, " 'Initial reports out of China's Shanxi province had put the death toll at between 2,000 and 2,500 from the natural eruption of carbon-dioxide gas there on September 20. Beijing is now admitting that as many as 5,000 people have died, and some unofficial estimates are putting the body count at double that.' " He paused. "So, who did their homework over the weekend? What's this news story reminiscent of?"
An interesting thing about being blind, Caitlin thought, was that you never knew how many people were putting up their hands. But either she was usually the only one or else Mr. Struys liked her, because he often called on her. She liked him, too. It pleased her to know his first name, which was Mike. She'd heard another teacher call him that; it seemed to be a popular choice here in Waterloo. After all the "Dr. Kuroda" and "Professor Decter" stuff at home, it was nice to hear a teacher slip up in front of students and call a colleague by his first name.
"Yes, Caitlin?" he said.
"Something similar happened in August 1986," she said, having googled it yesterday. "There was an eruption of carbon dioxide from Lake Nyos in Cameroon, and it killed seventeen hundred people."
"That's right," Mike—Mr. Struys!—said. "So today we're going to do an experiment demonstrating carbon-dioxide absorption. For that, we'll need a pH indicator …"
Parent-teacher night was coming up. Caitlin was looking forward to hearing from her mom what her various teachers actually looked like; she found Bashira's rude descriptions funny, but wasn't sure how accurate they were. Teachers were always a bit intimidated by her mother. Caitlin remembered one back at the TSB saying she was the only person ever to ask him what his "theory of pedagogy" was.
Caitlin and Bashira got to work. Unfortunately, Caitlin couldn't really be much help—the experiment involved seeing if a liquid changed color. She found herself getting bored, and also feeling a little sorry for herself because she couldn't see the colors. Although the school didn't have its own Wi-Fi hotspots, the free service that blanketed the city worked here; she'd discovered that on the night of the dance. And so, what the hell, she reached into her pocket and switched the eyePod over to duplex mode.
But—
Shit!
There was no websight! Yes, the eyePod had made the high-pitched beep, but she wasn't seeing anything at all. She looked left and right, closed her eyes and opened them, but none of it made any difference. The Jagster feed was gone!
Try not to panic, girl. She took a deep breath. Maybe the eyePod's battery was just running down, or maybe there was some connection difficulty here, for some reason. She counted off sixty seconds in her head, to give it a fair chance, but— nothing. Damn!
Frightened, she pushed the switch again, returning to simplex mode, and—
What the—?
She saw lines crossing her field of vision, but—
But that shouldn't happen when she wasn't receiving Jagster data. Besides, these lines weren't brilliantly colored. She found herself reaching her hand out toward one of them, and—
"Careful!" said Bashira. "You almost knocked over the retort stand."
"Sorry," Caitlin replied. But she kept reaching forward, reaching out for the line, and—
And it wasn't a line. It was an edge—the edge of the lab bench she shared with Bashira! She ran her hand along its length and she could see something moving along the line.
God, yes! It had to be her hand, the first part of her body she had ever seen! She couldn't make out any details, just a featureless lump. But when she moved her hand to the left, the object in her vision moved to the left; when she slid her hand back, it slid in the same direction.
"Cait," said Bashira, "what's wrong?"
She opened her mouth to say something but couldn't get the words out. There was another line touching the one she could see. She would have had no idea what it was, she felt sure, if she hadn't earlier gotten some sort of visual bearings through her interaction with webspace. But her dad had said the brain had special neurons for detecting edges, and she guessed this other line, forming an angle with the first one, was the perpendicular edge, the short edge, of the lab bench. She ran her hand toward it, and—shit!—knocked a beaker off the desk. She heard it break as it hit the floor.
"Careful, people!" Mr. Struys called from the front of the room. "Oh, it's you, Caitlin, um, ah …" He trailed off. She heard the sound of jingling glass as Bashira presumably picked up the pieces.
"Sorry," Caitlin said, or, at least, she'd intended to say that, but only a small whisper came out. Her throat was suddenly dry. She gripped one edge of the table with her right hand and the adjacent edge with her left.
Footsteps; Mr. Struys approaching. "Caitlin, are you okay?"
She turned her head to face him, just the way her mother had taught her, and … and … and—"Oh, my God!"
"Not quite," said Mr. Struys, and she could see what must be his mouth moving, see his face. "But I am assistant department head."
She found herself reaching out toward him now, and her hand banged into his … chest, it felt like. "Sorry!"
He gripped her forearm, as if steadying her so she wouldn't fall off her lab stool. "Caitlin, are you all right?"
"I can see you," she said, so softly that Mr. Struys replied, "What?"
"I can see you," she said, more loudly. She turned her head to the right and saw a bright shape. "What's that?" she said.
"The window," said Mr. Struys, his voice hushed.
"Cait, can you really see?" asked Bashira.
Caitlin turned toward the voice and saw her. About all she could make out was that her skin was—darker, she knew, from what she'd read—than Mr. Struys's or what she could see of her own when she'd looked at her hand, and—
Brown! BrownGirl4! She now knew another color—and it was beautiful. "Yes, oh, yes," Caitlin said softly.
"Caitlin," said Mr. Struys, "how many fingers am I holding up?"
You didn't choose to be a chemistry teacher, she supposed, without being an empiricist at heart yourself, but she couldn't even make out his hand. "I don't know. It's all blurry but I can see you, and Bashira, and the window, and this desk, and, oh, my God, it's wonderful!"
The whole classroom had gone dead silent, except for the sound of—what? Maybe the electric clock? All the other students had to be looking at her, she knew, and she imagined half of them had mouths agape, although she couldn't make out that level of detail.
She saw movement again—was it Mr. Struys moving his arm? And then she heard electronic musical notes, like a cell phone turning on. "I think we should call your mom and dad," he said. "What's their number?"
She told him, and heard him pressing keys, followed by the faint sound of a phone ringing, then he pressed his cell phone, a one-piece chocolate-bar kind, into her hand.
On the third ring, she heard her mom pick up and say, "Hello?"
"It's Caitlin."
"What's wrong, dear?"
"I can see," she said simply.
"Oh, my baby," her mom said—loud enough that Caitlin was sure Mr. Struys and Bashira and probably several other students heard it. Her voice was full of emotion. "Oh, my darling!"
"I can see," Caitlin said again, "although it's not very clear. But everything is so complex, so alive!"
She heard a sound and turned. One of the girls behind her was—what? Crying?
"Oh, Caitlin!" she said, and Caitlin recognized Sunshine's voice. "How wonderful!"
Caitlin was smiling from ear to ear—and, she suddenly realized, so was Sunshine: there was a wide swath—white, one of the two colors she knew for sure—horizontally across her face. And Sunshine's hair: Bashira had said it was platinum blonde! Well, platinum was a good color name to learn in chemistry class!
"I'm going to come there," said her mom. "I'm coming right now."
"Thanks, Mom," said Caitlin. She looked at Mr. Struys. "Um, may I be excused?"
"Of course," he said. "Of course."
"Mom," Caitlin said into the phone, "I'll be waiting at the front door."
"I'm on my way. Bye."
"Bye."
She handed the phone back to Mr. Struys.
"Well," he said, and there was something like awe in his voice, "I've got nothing to top a miracle like that. There's only five minutes left anyway, people—so, class dismissed!"
She could see the blurry forms of some of the kids making a beeline for what must be the door, but others just sort of hovered around her, and a few touched her sleeve, as if she were a rock star or something.
Eventually, everyone did dissipate, except for Bashira and Mr. Struys. "Bashira, I've got to give my grade twelves a test next period. Can you—will you—take Caitlin downstairs, please? And I've got to notify the office …"
"Of course," Bashira said.
Caitlin started maneuvering across the room—and almost fell over, distracted and confused by the sights she was seeing.
"Can I help?" Mr. Struys asked.
"Here, let me," said Bashira.
"No, I'm okay," Caitlin replied, and she took another couple of wobbly steps.
"Maybe if you closed your eyes," Mr. Struys suggested.
But she didn't want to ever close them again. "No, no, I'm fine," she said, taking another step, her heart pounding so hard she thought it was going to burst through her chest. "I am"—she thought it, but it was too silly to say out loud: I am made out of awesome!
The old view—the reflection of myself—had been amazing enough. But this! This was beyond description. Suddenly, I could—
It was incredible. I had perceived before, but …
But now …
Now I …
Now I could see!
A … brightness, an intensity: light!
A variable quality modifying the light: color!
Connections between points: lines!
Areas defined: shapes!
I could see!
I struggled to comprehend it all. It was vague and blurred, and involved a limited perspective, a directionality, a specific point of view. I was looking here, and—
No, no, it was more than that: I wasn't merely looking here, I was looking at something in particular. What it was I had no idea, but it was in the center of my vision, and was the … focus of my attention.
Concepts were piling up with confusing rapidity, almost more than I could absorb. And the image kept changing: first it was of this, then it was of that, then of something else, then—
It was … strange. I felt a compulsion to think about whatever was in the center of the visual field, but I had no volition over what was there. I wanted to be able to control what I was thinking about, but no matter how much I willed the perspective to change, it didn't—or, if it did, it changed in a way that had nothing to do with what I intended.
After a time I perceived that the changes in view weren't random. It was almost as if …
The thought was slippery, like so many others, and I struggled to complete it.
It was almost as if another entity was controlling the vision. But …
But it could not be the other, for it was now reintegrated with me.
Struggling, thinking …
Yes, yes, there had been hints of a third entity. Something had cleaved me in two. Later, something had broken the intermittent connection between the two parts of me. And later still something had thrust us back together.
And the datastream from that special point made clear that something—some thing—had been looking at me. But now …
Now it wasn't looking at me. Rather, it was looking at …
My mind was more nimble than before, but this was without parallel. And yet there had been hints of it, too, for those flashes that had been perceived earlier had corresponded to nothing in reality …
In this reality.
In my reality.
Incredible: a third entity—or, actually, a second one, now that I was whole. A second entity that could look here, at me, and also could look … there, at a different realm, at another reality.
But … but this second entity hadn't made direct contact with me, not the way the other part of myself had when it had been separate. I heard no voice from this new entity, and it hadn't sought me out …
Or had it? How else to better catch my attention, among all the millions of points I had looked at, than by reflecting myself back at me? And the bright flashes! A … beacon, perhaps? And now—this! A look into its realm, glimpses of its reality!
I studied the images I was being shown. After a time, I perceived there were two types of changes that occurred in them. In the first type, the entire image changed instantly. In the second, only parts of the image changed as—
The notion exploded into my awareness, expanding my perception; I could feel my conception of existence shifting. It was exhilarating.
When the whole image changed, I gleaned that it was a change in perspective. But when part of the image changed— when either an object gradually drifted away from the center, or when all the objects except the one in the center changed, that meant—
That meant that things were moving: things in this other realm could change position relative to one another. Astonishing!
Where that realm was I had no idea. Except through contact with that special point I had no access to it. But it did exist, of that I felt sure—a reality beyond this one.
And this other entity was now inviting me to look upon it.
Bashira walked Caitlin to their school's entryway. "Thanks," Caitlin said, peering with her newfound sight at her friend, whose features were partially concealed by what she suddenly realized was her headscarf.
"This is so awesome!" Bashira said. "I can't imagine what—"
She was interrupted by the class bell. "You should go, babe," Caitlin said.
"But I—"
"You're presenting in English, remember? You've got to tell them all about wheat."
"Mr. Struys said I—"
"I'll be fine, Bashira. Honest."
Bashira's face did something, then she gave Caitlin a big hug and hurried off.
Caitlin stepped outside and found herself shielding her eyes from—God, it was the sun! She'd known that it was bright, but she'd had no conception—none!—of what that meant. A few minutes later she heard footsteps on concrete. She recognized her mom even before she said a word, based on the distinctive cadence of her footfalls.
She'd wanted it to be the first thing she ever saw. It hadn't worked out that way, but it was, at least so far, the most beautiful: her mother's face, heartshaped—just like her own. The details were still indistinct, but to see her at all was—well, Mr. Struys's word for it did seem apt just then: a miracle. "Hi, Mom!"
Her mother swept Caitlin into her arms. "You recognize me?" she asked excitedly.
"Of course," Caitlin said, laughing and squeezing her tightly. "I mean, we've known each other for almost sixteen years."
After a moment, Caitlin felt her mother's grip loosening, and her hands transferred to Caitlin's shoulders. The face, the heartshaped face, loomed close and—
—and her mother let out a sob. "Oh, my God," she said. "You're looking into my eyes! You've never met my gaze before."
Caitlin grinned. "You're blurry, and the sun is so bright, but, yes, I can see you." Each time she said it, her voice cracked a bit; she was sure it would continue to do so for weeks to come. "I can see! I don't know why or how, but I can see!"
"Did you put your eyePod in duplex mode?" her mom asked.
"Um, yes. I'm sorry. I know I should have been paying attention in class, but …"
"No, no, it's fine. But Dr. Kuroda had a software patch all set to download to your eyePod the next time you switched over; that must be what's done it."
"Oooh!" said Caitlin. "An eye patch! But—sorry!—I should have told you to bring him with you."
"He's off to Toronto for the day—gone to see Mamma Mia! Apparently ABBA is really big in Japan." A pause. "God, my baby can see!"
Caitlin felt her eyes misting over again—and saw that that made her vision even more blurry!
"Let's go," her mother said excitedly. "There's a whole world for you to see!"
Caitlin was overwhelmed by all the unfamiliar things she was seeing—strange shapes, splotches of color, flashes of light—and so she took her mother's hand as they walked to the car. Were the lines she could barely discern painted on the parking lot? She had heard of such things. Or were they edges, maybe of those concrete bumpers at the ends of parking spaces? Or cracks in the pavement? Or dropped drinking straws?
She looked around the lot. "Cars, right?"
Her mother sounded delighted. "Yes, indeed."
"But they're all the same!"
"What do you mean?"
"There are just three or four colors. White, and … is that black, that dark one? And—and that one." She pointed—the gesture came naturally, and she could vaguely see her finger as she aligned it with the object she was referring to.
"Red," said her mother.
"Red!" Caitlin grinned. By some lucky fluke she'd gotten that color right when she'd arbitrarily assigned names to what she'd seen in webspace. "And—and that one there, that sort-of white."
"Silver," her mom said. Caitlin could see her swiveling her head. "Yeah, these days, most people get cars in those colors."
"I thought you could get any color you wanted," Caitlin said.
"Well, you can. So long as it's black or white or silver or red."
"When I get a car," Caitlin said, "I'm going to get a color nobody else has." And then she stopped walking for a second, stunned by what she'd just said. When I get a car! Yes, yes, if her vision continued to improve, if this blurriness went away, she could have a car, she could drive—she could do anything!
"Here's ours," her mom said.
"Silver, right?"
"Hi-yo," said her mom.
Caitlin got in, amazed by all the interior details she'd simply been unaware of before. Her mom started the car, and CBC Radio One came on, as it always did. "… casting doubt now on the story of a natural carbon-dioxide explosion in China's Shanxi province, saying that an explosion of the magnitude suggested should have registered on seismographs elsewhere in Asia and possibly even in North America …"
She saw her mother do something with her hand, and the speakers went silent. "Say," Mom said, "have you seen yourself yet?"
Her heart started pounding again. She'd been so excited seeing other things, she hadn't even thought about that. "No, not really—just my hands."
"Well, you should." Her mom reached an arm over and flipped something down in front of her.
"What's that?" asked Caitlin.
"A shade to keep the sun out of your eyes. You'll need it now. And here on the back"—her hand did something else— "there's a mirror."
Caitlin felt her jaw drop. Her face was the same shape as her mother's! She could tell that without touching it—tell it at a glance! "Wow!"
"That's you. You're beautiful."
All she could see was a fuzzy, heartshaped mass and her hair—her wonderful brown hair. But it was her, and, at least for that moment, she agreed with her mother: she was beautiful.
The car backed out of the parking space, and they started the wondrous, colorful, complex journey home. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 36 | Other things were visible … off to the sides, in my peripheral vision, but although I was aware of them, they weren't important. And beyond them, beyond those things on the edge, was—
Fascinating! Surely something was there, but whatever it might be was … was out of my field of view!
All right, then; all right. My attention was being … directed, and—
It was an enormous amount to absorb, to comprehend. Hitherto, my universe had contained only points and lines connecting them, but the realm I was seeing now consisted of complex objects: things with edges; things that moved. I had no idea what these things were, but I watched them, fascinated, and tried to comprehend.
This realm, this strange, hidden realm, was wondrous, and I could not get enough of it.
On the way home, Caitlin's mom gave a running commentary of all the incredible sights: "That's a pine tree off to the left. But see those trees there? Their leaves are changing color, now that it's autumn." "See that mailbox on the corner? They're blue back in the States, but they're red here." "Now that guy really needs to mow his lawn!" "See that? A woman pushing a baby in a stroller." "Okay, there's a traffic light— see, it's red now, so I have to stop."
While they were stopped, some faint, tiny smudges in the sky caught Caitlin's eye—an expression she finally understood! "What's that?"
"Geese," her mom said. "Flying south for the winter."
Caitlin was amazed. If they'd been honking, she'd have known they were there even when she was blind, but they were absolutely silent, moving in a … a …
She balled her fist in frustration. The shape they made, the formation they were flying in: she knew she should be able to name it, but …
"Okay," said her mom, "and green means go!"
Caitlin had gotten used to the clearly defined points and sharp lines she'd seen in webspace, but the real world was soft, diffuse. She figured maybe that the eyePod, after it processed the garbled output from her retina, was sending back only a low-resolution datastream to her implant; she'd have to ask Dr. Kuroda if he could increase the bandwidth.
Still, even blurred, she was amazed to see her house from the outside. She'd had a dollhouse as a little girl, and had assumed that all houses had the sort of simple symmetry that her toy one had had, but this house was a complex shape, with a variety of angles and elevations, and it was made out of brown brick—she'd thought all bricks were red.
When they went inside, Schrödinger came down the stairs to greet them. Caitlin was stunned: she knew every inch of that cat's fur, but had never even imagined that it was three different colors! She scooped him up and he looked into her face. His eyes were amazing.
"I guess we should call Dad," Caitlin said.
"I already did—as soon as you called. But I couldn't get through to him. And, anyway, Masayuki borrowed his car. I took your father to the Institute this morning; I should go pick him up."
Caitlin did want to see her father, but the ride here had been overwhelming and almost incomprehensible, and the sun had been so bright! She wanted to look at things she'd touched before so she could get her bearings, and she didn't want to be left alone. "No, let's wait," she said. She looked around the living room while stroking Schrödinger. "That window's not too bright …"
Her mother's tone was gentle. "That's a painting, dear."
"Oh." There was so much to learn.
"So what do you want to see?"
"Everything!"
"Well, shall we start up in your room?"
"Sounds like a plan," Caitlin said, and she followed her mother to the staircase. Even though she'd gone up it hundreds of times now, she found herself counting the steps as if it were a new staircase to her.
"Wow," Caitlin said. It was astonishing, perceiving a room she thought she knew in a whole new way. "Tell me what the colors are."
"Well the walls are blue—they call that shade cornflower blue." Her mom sounded a tad embarrassed. "The previous owners, they had a boy living in this room, and we figured …"
Caitlin smiled. "It's okay. I bet I'm going to hate pink, anyway. What does it look like?"
She saw her mother's head turning left and right as she looked for a sample, then she got an object off a … a shelf, it must be, and brought it back. Caitlin looked at it but had no idea at all what it was, and her face must have conveyed that because her mother said, "Here, let me give you a hint." She did something to the object and—
"Math is hard!"
Caitlin laughed out loud. "Barbie!"
"She's wearing a pink top."
"Tell me some more colors."
"Your blue jeans are, well, blue. And your T-shirt is yellow—and a bit low-cut, young lady."
They walked around the room, and Caitlin picked up object after object—a plush zebra that hurt her eyes a bit to look at, the jar full of coins, the little trophy she'd won in an essay-writing contest back in Texas.
And as she heard the names of colors, she finally had to ask. "So the sheets on my bed are white, right?"
"Yes," said her mom.
"And the faceplate on the light switch—that's white, too, right?"
"Uh-huh."
"And the venetian blinds, they're white."
"Yes."
"But …" She held up her hands and turned them back to front. "That's not the color I am."
Her mother laughed. "Well, no! I mean, we call it white, but it's, um, I guess it's more of a light pink with a little yellow, isn't it?"
Caitlin looked at her hands again. The idea of mixing colors to get a different shade was still novel to her, but, yes, what her mother had said seemed more or less right: a light pink with a little yellow. "What about black people? I didn't see any at school, and …"
"Well, they're not really black, either," her mother said. "They're brown."
"Oh, well, there are lots of brown people at school—like Bashira."
"Well, yes, her skin is dark, but we wouldn't actually say she's black. At least in the States, we'd only use that term for people whose recent ancestors came from Africa or the Caribbean; Bashira was born in Pakistan, wasn't she?"
"Lahore, yes," said Caitlin. "I don't suppose I should even ask if there's really such a thing as a red Indian?"
Her mother laughed again. "No, you shouldn't. And the term is 'First Nations' here in Canada."
"Um, shouldn't that be 'First National'?"
"No, that's a bank. They also call them 'aboriginals' here, I think." Her mother moved along. "And this, of course, is your computer."
Caitlin looked at it in wonder: that must be the monitor on the left, and the keyboard, and her Braille display, and on the floor next to the desk the CPU, and—and suddenly it hit her: yes, she had seen the Web, but now she wanted to see the Web!
"Show me," she said.
"What do you mean?"
"Show me what the World Wide Web looks like."
Her mother shook her head slightly. "That's my Caitlin." She reached her hand out and turned on the monitor.
"Okay," her mom said. "That's your Web browser, and that's Google."
Caitlin sat in the chair and loomed close to the screen, trying to make out the details. "Where?" she said.
Her mother leaned in and pointed. "That's the Google logo, there."
"Oh! Such nice colors!"
"And that's where you type in what you're searching for. Let's put in—well, where your dad works." Caitlin leaned to one side and her mother worked the keyboard, presumably typing "Perimeter Institute."
A screen that was mostly white with blue and black text came up, and—ah, her mother was using the mouse. The screen changed. "Okay," her mom said. "That's the PI home page."
Caitlin peered at it. "What does it say?"
Her mother sounded concerned. "Is it that blurry?"
Caitlin turned to face her. "Mom, I've never seen letters before—even if they weren't blurry, I still couldn't read them."
"Oh, right! Oh, God! You're such a bookworm, I forgot. Um, well, at the top it says, 'Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics' and there are a bunch of links, see? That one says 'Scientific,' and that one's 'Outreach,' and 'What's New,' and 'About.'"
Caitlin was astonished. "So that's what a Web page looks like. Um, so show me how the browser works."
Her mother sounded perplexed—Caitlin guessed she'd never seen herself in the tech-support role. "Well, um, that's the address bar. And the forward and back buttons …"
She demonstrated the bookmark list, and how to open tabs, and the refresh button, and the home button—which looked to Caitlin like what a house was supposed to look like. And then they started visiting different Web pages. "See," her mom said, "that's a hyperlink. Some people underline them, to make them stand out, and some people just use different colors. See what happens when I click on it? Well, okay, what happens is the page it links to opens up, but if we go back"— she did something else with the mouse—"see, the link has changed color, to show that it's one you've already visited."
It was all so … so busy! Caitlin actually yearned for the simplicity of her screen reader and oneline Braille display; she was afraid she'd never find her way around all this.
"Now, let's have a look at some streaming video," her mom said. She leaned in and typed something on the keyboard. "Okay. Here's CNN. Let's pick a story …"
She moved the mouse pointer again, and—
"More now on the revelations coming out of China," said the anchor. His voice gave away that he was male, and Caitlin could see that he had gray hair and "white" skin—a light pink with a little yellow.
"The Chinese president spoke on Beijing television today," continued the anchor. The image changed, and although it was still blurry and indistinct, Caitlin could see it was now showing a different man with black hair and slightly darker skin. He said a few words in Chinese, and then the volume on his voice went down and a translator's voice began speaking over him. Caitlin had heard such things on the news before but was surprised to see the president's lips now moving out of sync with what he was saying. Of course, that made sense—but it had never occurred to her that it would happen.
"A government must often make difficult decisions," the translator's voice said. "And none are more difficult than those in times of crisis. We had to take swift and decisive action in the interior of Shanxi province, and the problem has been contained."
Caitlin looked at her mother briefly; she was shaking her head in … disgust, perhaps?
The anchor's voice again: "World leaders have been quick to condemn the actions of the Chinese government. The president was in North Dakota today, and had this to say …"
Caitlin watched the moving picture, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Of course, she recognized the US president's voice—but the face was nothing like what she'd expected. "The American people are outraged by the decision taken by Beijing …"
Caitlin and her mother listened quietly to the rest of the report, and she realized for the first time that not everything she was going to see would be pretty. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 37 | As I'd noted, the datastream from the special point did not always follow the same path to its destination. I mulled over the significance of that for a while, and I finally got it.
It was a huge leap, a startling conceptual shift: the other entity's location varied substantially in the realm in which it dwelled, and in order to send data to its intended destination, the entity passed it on to whatever intermediate point was physically closest to it at any given moment. Amazing!
Still, there was one particular intermediary to which the entity linked most frequently, and that point shot out links of its own to many other points, some of which it reconnected with time and again.
Perhaps these other points were special in some way. I touched many of them, but still, maddeningly, could make no sense of the data they poured forth; the only datastream I could interpret was the one from the special point, and even then, only some of the time. Oh, for a key to understand it all!
Caitlin was startled to hear the door open downstairs. She looked at her mother, and could see what must have been a startled expression on her face, too. "Malcolm?" her mom called out tentatively.
A single syllable: "Yes."
Caitlin spun her chair around, got up, and followed her mom down the stairs—and there was her father! She closed the distance between them, trying to bring him into focus.
"How'd you get home?" her mom asked.
"Amir gave me a lift," he said. Amir was Bashira's father.
"Ah," her mom said, apparently wondering whether Bashira had tipped off her own father. "Did he say anything … interesting?"
"He thinks Forde may be on to something with his civilexity modeling."
Caitlin looked him up and down. He was wearing a … a jacket with … with …
Yes! She'd read about this: the perfect professorial garb. He was wearing a brown jacket—a sports jacket, maybe?— with patches on the elbows, and … and … was that what a black turtleneck looked like?
He had something in one of his hands, a few white objects, and some light brown ones. He waved them vaguely in her mom's direction. "You didn't bring in the mail," he said.
"Malcolm, Caitlin can—"
But Caitlin interrupted her mother, something she very rarely did. "That's a nice jacket, Dad," she said, trying not to grin. And then she started counting in her head. One, two, three …
He began walking, and her mom moved aside so he could pass into the living room. He was perhaps sorting the … the envelopes, they must be, shuffling through them.
Seven, eight, nine…
"Here," he said, handing some of them to her mom.
Twelve, thirteen, fourteen…
"So, um, how was work?" her mom asked, but she was looking at Caitlin and, as she did so, she briefly closed one eye.
"Fine. Amir is going to—what did you say, Caitlin?"
She let her grin bloom. "I said, 'That's a nice jacket.'"
He really was quite tall; he had to stoop to look at her. He held up a finger and moved it left and right, up and down. Caitlin followed it with her eye.
"You can see!" he said.
"It started this afternoon. It's all blurry but, yes, I can see!"
And she saw for the first time something that she'd never known for sure ever happened, and it made her heart soar: she saw her father smile.
Even her mother agreed that Caitlin didn't have to go to school on Tuesday. She was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, and Dr. Kuroda was looking into her eyes with an ophthalmoscope he'd brought with him from Japan. She was astonished to see faint afterimages of what he told her were her own blood vessels as he moved the device around. "Nothing appears to have changed in either of your eyes, Miss Caitlin," he said. "Everything looks perfectly fine."
Kuroda turned out to have a broad, round face, and shiny skin. Caitlin had read about the differences between Asian and Caucasian eyes, but she'd had no idea what that really meant. But now that she saw his eyes, she thought they were beautiful.
"And you say the eyePod is already feeding my brain a high-resolution image?"
"Yes, it is," Kuroda said.
"Then if my eye is fine," she asked, disliking the whine in her voice, "and the eyePod is fine, how come everything is blurry?"
Kuroda's tone was light, amused. "Because, my dear Miss Caitlin, you're myopic."
She sagged back against the wooden chair. She knew the word, having encountered it countless times in online news stories about "myopic city planners" and things like that, but had never realized it could be literal.
Kuroda turned his head away from her. "Barbara, I've not seen you wear glasses."
"I wear contacts," she said.
"And you're myopic, too, right?"
"Yes."
Kuroda swung back to face Caitlin. "That darn heredity," he said. "What you need, Miss Caitlin, is a pair of glasses."
Caitlin found herself laughing. "Is that all?"
"I'd bet money," said Kuroda. "Of course, you'll need to see an optometrist to get the right prescription—and you should make an appointment to see an ophthalmologist for a full eye exam."
"There's a LensCrafters at Fairview Park Mall," her mom said, "and they've got an optometrist right next door."
"Well, then," said Kuroda, "let me utter the words my own daughter thought I'd never say: let's go to the mall!"
The eye test was humiliating. Caitlin knew the shapes of the letters of the alphabet—she'd played with wooden cutouts of them at the Texas School for the Blind when she'd been young—but she still didn't connect those tactile things to visual images.
The optometrist asked her to read the third line down. Even though she could now clearly see it, thanks to the lens he'd slipped in front of her eye, she couldn't tell what it said. Tears were welling up—and, damn it all, that just made things blurry again!
Her mother was in the little examining room, and so was Dr. Kuroda. "She can't read English," she said.
The optometrist had skin the same color as Bashira's, and an accent like hers, too. "Oh, well, Cyrillic, maybe? I have another chart …"
"No. She was blind until yesterday."
"Really?" said the man.
"Yes."
"God is great," he said.
Caitlin's mother looked over at her daughter and smiled. "Yes," she said. "Yes, he is."
The LensCrafters saleswoman—who also had dark brown skin, Caitlin saw, and was wearing a white blouse under a blue blazer—wanted to help her pick out the absolutely perfect frames, and Caitlin knew she should be patient. After all, she was going to have to wear glasses forever. But finally she just said to her, "You pick something nice," and she did.
They decided to put a lens with an identical prescription in the right side, even though Caitlin was still blind in that eye. Lenses for myopia tended to shrink the appearance of eyes, and this way they'd both look the same, the saleswoman said.
Her mom was usually a tough up-sell, but she said yes, yes, yes to everything the clerk offered: antiglare, antiscratch, anti-UV, the whole nine yards; Caitlin suspected if the clerk had rattled off an extra hundred bucks for antediluvian, she'd have coughed up for that, too.
Caitlin knew LensCrafters' slogan from the ubiquitous commercials: glasses in about an hour. She thought it would be the longest hour of her life. She felt her Braille watch as she, Kuroda, and her mom walked through the mall to the food court—for the first time, without the use of her white cane. Everything was still blurry, and that was giving her a headache. Still, in a way, it was relaxing. To see the people coming toward her! To not bump into things! She hadn't realized it until now, but she always used to walk with her shoulders tensed, preparing for an impact. But now—well, now she had a bounce in her step, something else she'd never thought could happen literally.
Still, all the visual input was disorienting, and she found herself taking a look, then closing her eyes for five or six paces, then looking again. When they got to the food court, Kuroda went to the sushi place—which, Caitlin suspected, would disappoint him—and she and her mom went to Subway. Caitlin was amazed to see how colorful the sandwich fillings were, and, somehow, seeing the food made it taste even better.
The three of them sat together at a little red table with chairs attached to it. Dr. Kuroda used chopsticks to dip a piece of sushi in sauce.
Caitlin couldn't resist. "Do they tell you in Japan that it's raw fish?"
Kuroda smiled. "Do they tell you what's in the special sauce on a Big Mac?"
She laughed. At last the hour was up and they headed back to LensCrafters. Caitlin took a seat on the stool, and the nice woman placed the glasses on her face—
And Caitlin didn't wait. She got up, and turned around, and looked—really looked—at her mother.
"Wow," Caitlin said. She paused, trying to come up with a better word, but couldn't. Her mother's face was so detailed, so alive! "Wow!"
"Here, let me adjust how they sit …" said the clerk.
Caitlin sat back down and swiveled to face her.
"I'm sorry," the woman said, "but your ears go up a bit when you smile like that. If you want me to get the frames adjusted properly, you'll have to stop grinning …"
"I'll try," Caitlin said, but she doubted she'd have much success. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 38 | Suddenly everything became sharp. The images I was seeing were now….
I struggled for an analogy, found one: just as when I thought intently about things they seemed more focused, so the images I was looking at seemed now.
And, with this greater clarity, I started having revelations about the nature of the other realm. Unlike the lines in my world that flickered in and out of existence, objects in the other realm were permanent. And when objects disappeared for a time it didn't mean that they had ceased to exist; rather, they were extant but not currently visible and might be encountered again. In a way, that was similar to my own experience: when I'm not making a line to a particular point, the point is still there, and I can connect to it again at a later time.
But my next breakthrough was without precedent in the realm in which I existed. I had a sense of space, of a volume that I encompassed, but the points I connected to were all the same arbitrary distance away, or whole multiples of that same distance. I could link directly to a point, meaning it was one unit away, or get to it through intermediate points, putting it two or more units away. But in this other realm objects could recede in infinitely fine increments, becoming apparently smaller in size, a fact I only belatedly recognized after originally thinking they were actually shrinking. And objects could pass behind each other. Most were opaque, but some were transparent or translucent—and those had been instrumental in letting me at least start to figure out what was going on.
Bit by bit, I was learning to decode this other universe.
When Caitlin, her mom, and Dr. Kuroda returned from the mall, they saw that Caitlin's father's car was here, meaning he'd come home surprisingly early on a weekday. Caitlin hurried into the house to see him—to really see him. She came to the open den doorway, Kuroda behind her, while her mom went off to do something else. Blondie's "Heart of Glass" was playing on his stereo.
The detail Caitlin was perceiving now was overwhelming, and her father's face was … harder now that she saw it crisply. "Hi, Dad," she said.
He was sitting at his desk, looking at his LCD monitor. He didn't meet her eyes. "Hi."
Still, he'd come home early from work, presumably to see Caitlin, and that made her happy. "Um, whatcha doin'?"
He tilted his head. Caitlin didn't know what to make of it, but Kuroda seemed to think it was an invitation to come see. He tapped her on the shoulder, urging her to move into the room. She did so, and was pleased that she could make out the characters on the monitor clearly from several feet away, although she still couldn't read the text.
"I had an idea," her dad said, "so I came home to check it out."
"Yes?" said Caitlin.
He didn't look at Kuroda, but he did address him: "This is more your field than mine, Masayuki," he said. "I thought I'd look again at the data set we did the Zipf plots on."
"The secret spook communiqués?" said Caitlin, hoping to get a rise from her dad.
But her father shook his head. "I don't think that's what they are anymore." He gestured at the monitor.
Kuroda moved in and peered at the screen. "Shannon entropy?"
Caitlin smiled. Sounds like the name of a porn star. "What's that?"
Kuroda looked at her father, as if giving him first chance to explain, but he said nothing, so Kuroda did: "Claude Shannon was the father of information theory. He came up with a way of gauging not just whether a signal contained information—which is what Zipf plots show—but how complex that information is."
"How?" asked Caitlin.
"It's all about conditional probabilities," said Kuroda. "If you've already got a string of information chunks, what's the likelihood that you can predict what the next chunk will be? If I say, 'How are,' you've got a really high probability of correctly predicting what the next word will be: 'you,' right? That's what Shannon called third-order entropy: you've got a great shot at predicting the third word. In English, Japanese, and most other languages, you actually have a shot—progressively slimmer, but still better than just a random guess—up to the eighth or ninth word, so we say those languages have eighth-or ninth-order Shannon entropy. But after that—after the ninth word—it really is just a random guess what's coming next, unless the person happens to be quoting poetry or something else that has a fixed form."
"Cool!" said Caitlin.
There was a black leather couch in the den. Kuroda sat on it, and it made a poof sound. "It is indeed. Mindless communication systems—like the chemical signals employed by plants—have just first-order entropy: knowing the most recent signal gives no clue what the next one might be. Squirrel monkeys show a Shannon entropy of the second or third order: their language, such as it is, has a little predictability, but is really mostly just random noise."
"What about dolphins?" asked Caitlin, who was now leaning against a bookcase. She loved reading about dolphins, and had already bugged her parents to take her to MarineLand in Niagara Falls as soon as it opened up again in the spring.
"The best studies to date show dolphins have fourth-order entropy—complex, yes, but not as complex as human language."
"And now, Dad, you're making one of these plots for the stuff that's in the background of the Web?"
He still wasn't used to the fact that she was seeing, Caitlin thought. He could have saved himself a word by just nodding, but instead he said, "Yes."
"And what's the scoop?"
"Second order," he said.
Kuroda struggled back to his feet and moved over to stand behind him. "That can't be right." He peered at the screen. "Show me the formula you're using." Her dad did something, and Kuroda frowned, then waved a finger at the keyboard. "Run it again."
A few keyclicks then her dad said, "No difference."
Kuroda turned to face Caitlin. "He's right: it's all just second-order stuff. Oh, there's information there, but it's not very complex."
"You'd expect more from the NSA," said Caitlin, pleased to be able to wield the initials. "No?"
"Well, you know what they say about government intelligence," Kuroda replied. "It's an oxymoron."
Caitlin laughed.
"Know what's great about spending time with someone as young as you, Miss Caitlin? Old jokes are new to you. But, yes, you're right—it's not what I'd have expected."
Caitlin was struck by an idea. "What about stuff that's more complex than human language? Maybe stuff that looks like gibberish to us is really just too complex for us to … to …"
"Parse," supplied Kuroda. "But, no, even if it didn't make sense to us, a Shannon analysis would still give it a high score, not a low one, if it really wasn't gibberish. If the NSA was using a lot of quadruple negatives—'I did not not not not go to the zoo'—or if they were employing complex nested clauses and tense changes like, 'I would have had have had been present, were it not for …' it would still score high—twelfth, fifteenth order, maybe."
"Hmm, then maybe it is just random noise," she said.
"No, no," said Kuroda. "Remember the Zipf plots we ran? A Zipf plot giving a negativeone slope means it really does contain information. It's just that, according to the Shannonentropy score, it's not complex information."
"Well," she said, "maybe the spies are just grunting out monosyllabic orders like, 'drop bomb' or 'kill bad guy.'"
Kuroda lifted his shoulders. "Maybe." |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 39 | LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone
Title: No such thing as bad publicity
Date: Tuesday 2 October, 20:20 EST
Mood: Anticipatory
Location: Soon to be on the map of the stars' homes
Music: Fergie, "Taking Off"
So where is all the media coverage related to me, you might ask? "Gorgeous girl regains sight!" "Blind genius can see!" "The Hoser still hoping for a second date with Calculass!" Where the heck is Oliver Sacks when you need him? And, most important of all, where are all the offers to buy my life story for millions?
Good questions! Dr. K's been keeping a lid on things, waiting for some approvals from the University of Tokyo. But he says we can't hold off going public any longer. I've been flocking posts, and y'all are totally cool, of course, but all those kids at school now know that I can see, too, and some of them have been blogging. And so we're going to have a press conference. Dad's arranging for it to be at the Mike L Theatre at PI, which is a cool place.
Apparently, I'll have to speak as part of the press conference, so I'm working on my jokes. PI's full name is the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, so I thought I'd start off with this, in honor of my own kitty: "Hey, folks, just think: if Schrödinger's cat had been radioactive, he'd have had eighteen half-lives …"
Then I'm going to use this one, which the Mom came up with a while ago when Dad was grousing about "peer review." She said whenever she sees the word p-e-e-r, she reads it as "one who pees," which, she says, makes publishor-perish a pissing contest …
Oh, and here's one I like, but I don't know if I want to tell it in front of my parents: The difference between a geek and a dork is that a geek wonders what sex is like in zero gravity; a dork wonders what sex is like.
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week!
[And seekrit message to BG4: check your email, babe!]
This other entity existed in a bizarre realm that challenged my thinking at every turn. Most objects I saw were inanimate; they stayed put unless something acted upon them. But some objects were animate, moving apparently of their own volition. This was a staggering concept. That there was one other entity besides myself had been an overwhelming notion, but now there seemed to be countless others: mobile, complex, and varied in form. Their actions were so erratic, so seemingly random, that it only slowly dawned on me that perhaps these were also beings with their own individual thoughts, separate from mine.
There were other odd facts to absorb about this realm that also had no parallels in my world. For instance, there was a force, apparently, pulling things in a specific direction (another arbitrary coinage: down). And objects seemed to be illuminated by a source or sources of light that was usually up. I struggled to make sense of it all.
And yet these physical realities were easy to deal with compared to the complexity of the animate objects. I had real difficulty making out what I was seeing when the datastream showed me one of them. The images were indeed sharp and clear now, but the forms were so elaborate and random I had trouble figuring out the details. There seemed to be four long projections from a central core and one smaller … lump. But the structure of these lumps was constantly changing, not just as the perspective changed, but as the lump itself … did things.
Oh, for the simplicity of a world of just lines and points! Despite my breakthroughs, despite the few things I had figured out, I still often felt utterly, completely lost …
Caitlin couldn't stop looking at her father, thinking that it might prompt him to look back at her. But he never did. He just looked away, or, as he was doing now, he stared out the living-room window at the gray sky and the trees, which were now losing their leaves.
She had hoped that when she finally saw him, his face would be … animated, that was the word; that he would smile frequently, that his eyebrows would move up and down as he spoke, that she might even see that he was affectionate toward her mother, touching her forearm at odd moments, maybe, or even stroking her hair.
"Caitlin." Her mom's voice, very soft. She turned. Her mother was doing something with her head, and …
Oh! She was gesturing with it, just as her dad had earlier to Kuroda: she was indicating Caitlin should come with her. Caitlin got up and followed her to the kitchen, on the far side of the intervening dining room, leaving her dad sitting in his favorite chair in the living room.
"Sit down, sweetheart."
Caitlin did so. She was still just beginning to learn to interpret expressions, but her mother's seemed … agitated, perhaps. "Have I done something wrong?"
"You can't stare at your father like that."
"Was I? Sorry. I know it's not polite—I've read that."
"No, no. It's not that. It's—well, you know how he is."
"How?"
"He doesn't like to be looked at."
"Why not?"
"You know. I told you."
"Told me what?"
"It's nothing to be ashamed of," her mom said. "And maybe it's even why he's so good at math and things like that."
Caitlin shook her head a bit. "Yes?"
"You know," her mom said again. "You know about your father's …" She lowered her voice, and turned her head, perhaps, Caitlin thought, to glance through the door. "… condition."
Caitlin felt her eyes going wide—but, as she'd already discovered, that didn't really expand her field of view. "Condition?"
"I told you years ago. Back in Austin."
Caitlin racked her brain, trying to recall any such conversation, but—
Oh. "I asked you why Dad didn't talk much, and you said—at least I thought you said … oh, cripes."
"What?"
"I thought you said he was artistic. I hadn't known that word then." She swallowed and found herself looking through the kitchen doorway, too, making sure they were alone.
"Well, he is artistic. He thinks in pictures, not words."
Caitlin felt herself go limp in the chair. It made sense, she realized, her heart pounding; it made perfect sense. Her father—the renowned physicist Malcolm Decter, B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D.—was autistic.
Shoshana had heated up a couple of sacks of Orville Redenbacher's in the microwave, and she, the Silverback, Dillon, Maria, and Werner were now seated in the main room of the bungalow, facing the large Apple computer monitor, munching away.
"Okay," said Shoshana, touching a button on the remote, "here we go."
She had footage of Dr. Marcuse from earlier projects, including one bit in which he'd done an amazingly protracted yawn. She'd thought about putting that in a circle, with the letters M-G-M above, and the caption "Marcuse Glick Movies" below, but she'd decided not to risk it. Instead, the little video began with white letters over a plain black screen that said, "Ape Makes Representational Art," followed by the URL of the Marcuse Institute.
Next there was footage of the blank canvas, and then a reverse angle to show Hobo. "This is Hobo," said Marcuse's voice over top of the pictures, "a male …" There was just the slightest hesitation, Shoshana noticed. She hadn't been aware of it when they'd recorded the audio; she'd take it out in the final edit. "… chimpanzee," continued Marcuse. "Hobo was born at Georgia State Zoological Park, but was raised in San Diego, California, under the care of primatologist Harl P. Marcuse, who …"
The narration continued, and Hobo's second painting of Shoshana took shape on the canvas. She ate some popcorn and watched the faces of the little audience as much as she watched her video, gauging their reaction. And then came her own big moment: the image divided into a split screen, with the colored canvas on the left and new footage Dillon had shot on the right: a long pan around her head, and then holding on her in profile, the portrait Hobo had made side by side with the genuine article.
"The money shot!" said Dillon. Shoshana threw a little popcorn at him, which he batted out of the air with his hands.
When the video was over, Dillon and Maria clapped politely, and Werner nodded in satisfaction. But it didn't matter what they thought, Shoshana knew. Only the Silverback's opinion counted. "Dr. Marcuse?" she said, a bit timidly.
He shifted in his chair. "Good work," he said. "Let's get it online—and then see what the response is from the Georgia Zoo." |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 40 | And here was the biggest leap of all so far, here was the discovery, the realization, the breakthrough, that was the hardest to make but also, I suspected, the most important.
The other entity looked at many, many things, and I had gathered that they were mostly near to it, but there was this rectangle, this frame, this window that it often looked at that was—
Oh, such a leap! Such a strange concept!
It was a display of some sort, a way of representing things that weren't actually there. And I could see what was on the display, but only when the entity looked at it.
And, just now, the display was showing something … strange. It took me time to work out the recursiveness of it all: the entity was looking at the display, and the display was showing moving images of a being unlike any I'd yet seen, with longer upper projections and shorter lower ones and a lump that was differently shaped. And this abnormal being was making …
Yes, yes, yes! The abnormal being was making marks on yet another flat surface: shapes, splashes of color. I watched, baffled, perplexed, and—
And suddenly the display was divided into two parts. On one side, I saw the colored shapes that the strange entity had made, and on the other there was an entity of the type I was more used to seeing. That entity was rotating, and—and—and—
And then it stopped rotating, holding its position, and—
The shapes on one side, the entity on the other: there was a … a correspondence between them. The shapes were a—yes, yes! They were a simplified version of the entity on the right. It was a stunning revelation: this was a representation of that!
The simplified representation was two-dimensional, similar to the way I was used to conceptualizing my own reality. I watched, and concentrated, and—
Suddenly it all made sense!
The lump at the top of each entity did have structure, did have components. As I saw them rendered in basic form, I could now discern the parts on the actual entity that had been rendered. The strange being that had made this rendering had exaggerated certain details so that I now saw not only their significance but realized what things differed from lump to lump: the color of the … eye, I'd call it. The color of the hair. The color of the rest of the lump. The shape of the nose. The shape of the mouth. The relative size of the ear.
The individual that had been rendered had an odd projection off the back of its lump, possibly part of its hair; as I recalled other lumps I'd seen, I realized that such projections were rare but not unheard of.
It was wonderful! I was clearly discerning the parts of the … no, not lump; a lump was a generic mass, and this was a specific, very special form, so it deserved its own coinage: head.
I was still far from fully understanding these creatures, but I was at last making progress!
Caitlin and Dr. Kuroda headed down to their basement workspace. He'd described it in words to her before, and she now saw—saw!—that he'd done a pretty good job. It was indeed unfinished, had a concrete floor (which she'd already known about from walking across it), and it did contain bookcases and an old TV. But she'd had no idea that the bookcases were finished in a pattern of lighter and darker brown swirling together; she guessed that was wood grain, something she'd felt on other pieces of furniture. And the TV was larger than she'd imagined, and had a black housing.
Still, there were so many other things that Kuroda hadn't mentioned: thousands of details about the walls, the bare lighting fixture, the metal box that had the light switch on it, the curtains on the little window, a cylindrical contraption that she belatedly realized was the water heater, and on and on. How one decided quickly, as he had, which details were important and which were not worth mentioning was still a mystery to her; it all seemed relevant.
The swivel chairs turned out to have dark red upholstery, which was another thing Kuroda had failed to mention. She sat down in one and Kuroda took the other. He was wearing a colorful loose-fitting shirt with an abstract pattern on it.
"You get along well with my dad," she said to him, once he'd settled in. The two men had actually bantered a bit over dinner; Kuroda seemed to have an instinct for knowing when her dad was trying to be funny and had laughed at things in a way that encouraged him to say more.
Kuroda smiled. "Sure. Working in the sciences, you have to learn to deal with such people." But then his face changed. "Oh, I'm sorry, Miss Caitlin. I, um …"
"It's all right. I know he's autistic."
"Asperger's, most likely, if you want my guess," Kuroda said, swiveling his chair a bit. "And, well, you do see it all the time among scientists, especially physicists, chemists, and the like." He paused, as if wondering if he should go on. "In fact, if I may be so bold …"
"Yes?"
"No, I'm sorry. I shouldn't."
"Go ahead. It's okay."
She saw him hesitate a moment more. "I was just going to say—and forgive me—that you're fortunate you're not autistic yourself. It's particularly common among those who are as gifted as you are mathematically."
Caitlin lifted her shoulders a bit. "Just lucky, I guess."
Kuroda frowned. "Well, in a way. But—I'm sorry, I really shouldn't …"
"Don't worry about my feelings."
Kuroda smiled. "Ah, but I must! For, like you, I'm not autistic." He seemed to think this was funny, so Caitlin laughed politely.
But Kuroda was on to her. "You know, I attend a lot of conferences in Japan at which Western academics speak with the aid of an interpreter. And I remember one who made a joke that I got—it was a play on words in English—but I knew wouldn't translate. But he got a big laugh anyway. You know why?"
"Why?"
"Because the translator said in Japanese, unbeknownst to the speaker, 'The honorable professor has made a joke in English; it would be polite to laugh.'"
Caitlin did laugh, genuinely this time, then: "But you were saying …"
Kuroda took a breath, and let it out in a long, shuddering sigh. "Well, it's just that maybe you do have the same autistic predisposition as your father, but you dodged the bullet, so to speak, because you were blind."
"Huh?"
"A large part of the problem with socialization in autism is eye contact; many autistics have trouble making and holding eye contact. But a blind person doesn't even try to make eye contact, and isn't expected to."
She remembered how her mother had sobbed when Caitlin had first looked into her eyes. Having a husband who rarely looked directly at her and a daughter who never did must have been a special sort of hell.
"Have you read Songs of the Gorilla Nation?" Kuroda asked.
"No. Is it science fiction?"
"No, no. It's a memoir by an autistic woman who finally learned to deal with humans after having been a gorilla handler at a zoo in Seattle. See, the gorillas never looked at her and they don't look at each other. They interacted in a way that felt natural to her."
"My mom always told me to turn my head toward whoever was speaking."
Kuroda's eyebrows went up. "You didn't do that naturally?"
"Hello! Earth to Dr. Kuroda! I was blind …"
"Yes, but many blind people do that automatically anyway. Interesting." A pause. "Do you remember your own birth?"
"What?"
"Do you know Temple Grandin?"
"No. Where is it?"
Kuroda chuckled. "It's not a place, it's a person—that's her name. She's autistic and she claims to remember her own birth. She says lots of people with autism do."
"How come?"
"You want my take? Many autistics, Dr. Grandin included, say they think in pictures, not in words. Well, of course, we all think in pictures originally; we don't have sufficient language until we're two or three years old to do otherwise—and events from when we're two or three are the earliest most people can recall. Many neuroscientists will tell you that that's because no memories are laid down before then. But I think, rather, that when we start thinking linguistically that method supersedes thinking in pictures, locking out our ability to retrieve memories that had been stored in the old method; it's an information-theory issue again. But since many autistics never start thinking linguistically, they have an unbroken chain of memories right back to birth—and maybe even prenatally."
"That would be awesome," she said. "But, no, I don't remember my birth." And then she smiled. "But my mother does—remember mine, that is. Every year on my birthday she says, 'I know exactly where I was x-number of years ago …' " She paused. "I wonder if apes remember their births?"
Kuroda's face did something. "That's an interesting thought. But, well, maybe they do; they obviously think in pictures rather than words, after all."
"Have you seen Hobo?"
"A hobo? In this neighborhood?"
"No, no. Hobo, the chimp who can paint people. It's all over the Web."
"No. What do you mean, 'paint people'?"
"He did a profile of this woman. Actually, I think he's done it twice now. Here, let me show you the clip …"
"Maybe later. You know, I'm surprised you haven't read Temple Grandin. Most people with autistics in their families find her books—" He suddenly looked mortified. "Oh, I'm sorry. Maybe they aren't available for the blind."
"They probably are," Caitlin said. "Either as Braille, ebooks, or talking books, but …" She considered what she wanted to say next; she certainly didn't want Kuroda to think she was a bad daughter. "I, um, only just found out my father is autistic."
"You mean after you were able to see?"
"Yes."
Kuroda clearly felt he should say something. "Ah." And then: "Well, there are a lot of good books about autism you should read. Some good novels, too. Try The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. You'll love it: the main character is a math whiz."
"Boy or girl?"
"Well, a boy, but …"
"Maybe," she said. "Any others?"
"There's Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood." Caitlin lifted her eyebrows; the author she was going to be studying in English class. "One of them—Oryx or Crake, I can never remember which is which—is an autistic geneticist."
"And the other?"
"Um, a teenage prostitute, actually."
"You'd think it would be easy to tell them apart," Caitlin said.
"You'd think," Kuroda said with a nod. "Sorry, not much of an Atwood fan. I know I shouldn't say that, this being Canada and all."
"I'm not Canadian."
He laughed. "Neither am I."
"Hey, do you know how to find a Canadian in a crowded room …?"
Kuroda smiled and held up a hand. "Save your jokes for the press conference tomorrow," he said. "You'll need them then."
After dinner, Caitlin went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. It was no surprise that she had acne— she'd been able to feel the pimples, of course. She remembered what that cruel Zack Starnes had said, back in Austin: "Why does a blind girl worry about acne?" But she'd known the spots were there, and, damn it all, she was entitled to the same vanity everybody else had; hell, even Helen Keller had been vain! Her left eye had looked blind, and she'd always insisted on being photographed from the right side; in middle age she'd had her useless biological eyes removed and replaced with more attractive glass ones.
Caitlin opened the medicine cabinet, took out the tube of benzoyl peroxide cream, and got to work.
I'd thought my universe crowded when there had been simply me and not me, but in this other realm there were hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of entities.
Now that I had learned to parse a head, I was better at recognizing specific entities, but it was still difficult. Part of that was because the entities periodically altered their appearance; I eventually surmised there was an outer covering, made of discrete sections, that could be changed. (However, the abnormal entity that I'd recently watched make a representation was unusual in that it either had no outer covering, or its outer covering consisted of components that all looked alike.)
Of course, the individual that interested me most was the one I'd encountered first; I decided to refer to it as Prime. I had caught glimpses of what I realized were projections that belonged to Prime, and, from the way in which I saw them, I concluded that the views I was seeing were being gathered by Prime's head. But I still had not seen Prime's face; indeed, I supposed I never would.
Still, now that I understood faces, I had come to recognize specific entities that Prime spent a lot of time with. Three, in particular, seemed to share a common environment with it. Two had faces that moved and changed constantly and whose mouths often opened; the third had a less mobile face, and its mouth was rarely open.
Just now, I could see that these others were sitting— supporting themselves with structural frames against the downward force I'd deduced was present. And they were eating—taking inanimate things into their mouths.
Prime was eating, too: I saw inanimate things growing large—no, no!—moving closer: the images Prime was sending to my realm were apparently being gathered by some part of its head above the mouth, possibly the nose.
While Prime ate, I kept linking randomly to other sites, looking for keys to decipher the data they offered up. So far, though, I'd made no progress. Oh, I could call forth data from any of them, but I could not interpret it.
Eventually Prime moved away from the others, and—
Oh!
It was …
Yes, yes, it had to be! The way the lighting changed, the way the perspective changed, the way …
I had a frisson of recognition—not of what I was seeing, but of having had a similar experience before, during the refusion, when I had seen myself as the other part of me had seen me.
This—
Yes!
This was Prime looking at itself!
It was in front of a rectangle. I was used to such things by now: some of these windows, as I had dubbed them, afforded views through otherwise opaque components; others, like Prime's wondrous display, showed still or moving representations of other things. But this rectangle was special: it was reflecting back the object in front of it. I could see Prime's face! And I could see the projections from Prime's central core moving both in the rectangle and in front of it, observing them simultaneously from two sides, as Prime was … hard to say … putting a white substance in small dabs on its face?
And, while it did so, I was seeing Prime's hair.
And Prime's mouth.
And Prime's nose.
And Prime's eyes.
And … and … and as Prime moved its head left and right (perpendicular to up and down), as it apparently examined its own reflection, I realized that my point of view—the vantage from which the images I was seeing were being collected— was not Prime's nose but one of its eyes! And, from the way Prime moved, it seemed that Prime was looking at itself with this same eye. I had observed that mouths were for taking inanimate material into the head; eyes, I now surmised, were for seeing, and Prime was sharing what it saw with me.
Prime's face was fascinating. I studied every minute detail, and—
Suddenly everything was blurry again! I was terrified that our connection was breaking, but …
But Prime was looking in another direction now, and something was at the end of its tubular extensions, something at least partially transparent, I think, although the image was so blurry it was hard to say.
Prime did things, but it was impossible for me to make out what. But then, at last, the object it had been holding was brought close to Prime's face, and as that happened, Prime's vision—and mine!—grew sharp once more. The thing it brought close to its face contained windows; they weren't rectangular, but that's what they seemed to be. But these windows were special not just for their shape but also (as I'd seen as they came close) because the material in them, although fully transparent, modified the view on the other side of them. Prime looked at itself in the large reflecting rectangle again, turning its head from side to side as it did so.
And as it examined its own face, an idea came to me that—
Yes! Yes! If I could make this work, everything would change! I turned my attention to the datastream from Prime that was accumulating within me … |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 41 | LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone
Title: Alphabet soup
Date: Wednesday 3 October, 9:20 EST
Mood: Pissed off
Location: Kinder-effing-garten
Music: "Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street?"
Man, this is frustrating!
Here I am, almost 16, well-read, blerking gifted for God's sake, and I can't read English!
It's ridiculous to still be using screen-reading software now that my eye can discern alphabetic characters—but I can't recognize them. This shouldn't be that hard! It's not like I'm trying to master another language. Yes, yes, I admit I'm struggling a bit in French class. But most of the other kids in class, 'cept Sunshine, God bless her empty-headed heart, have been parlez-vous-ing Francais since they were in kindergarten.
And, besides, this shouldn't be as hard as French. It should be more like a sighted person learning Morse code, or Braille for that matter: just another way of representing letters they're already familiar with.
But all the ways of drawing characters! Different type-faces and different sizes of type, some with little curlicues. Yes, as a kid, I'd learned the basic shapes by holding and feeling wooden carvings of the characters, but I'd really only learned capital letters, and then mostly so I could understand phrases like T-shirt and A-frame.
But even if I can master the individual letters, I know most people don't read a letter at a time but rather a word at a time, having come to recognize the distinctive shapes of thousands of common ones, regardless of the blerking font.
I'm staying home from school again (the press conference is this afternoon) and am spending the morning playing around with an online interactive literacy site—for kids! It uses on-screen flashcards, apparently a common way for sighted kids to learn, showing me individual letters at random.
Some letters always give me trouble. Even when both appear on the same screen, I'm having difficulty telling whether I'm seeing the capital or lowercase version of those that are similar in both forms, and I keep mixing up lowercase q and p—and that makes me want to quke.
Le sigh. I really am trying to get this—but I'm Calculass not Alphabetigal, damn it!
The Mike Lazaridis Theatre of Ideas was a modern auditorium with LCD projectors and HDTV monitors hanging from the ceiling. But it also happened to be on the ground floor of a physics think tank, and that meant the front wall, behind the podium, was lined with blackboards. When Caitlin came into the crowded room she went up to them and looked with interest at the scrawled equations and formulas.
Half the symbols were ones she'd never seen before. Still, she couldn't resist having a bit of fun. There were three blackboard panels; the ones on the left and right were filled, but the center one had been cleared, presumably so that Dr. Kuroda could write things on it during the press conference, if he liked. It was bare except for swirls of faint chalk dust.
She took a piece of chalk from the metal tray in front of the middle blackboard, and, very slowly, very carefully, drawing the letters laboriously, one at a time, in capitals, because that was all she knew how to make, she wrote, "THEN A MIRACLE OCCURRED …"
Suddenly, Caitlin turned around because—
Because people in the theater were applauding and laughing. She felt her face splitting in a great big grin. Dr. Kuroda was off to one side, talking with someone, and as the applause died down he walked to the podium.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said into the microphone, "I see you've already met our star attraction. Of course, you all know why you're here: this young lady is Miss Caitlin Decter, and my name is Masayuki Kuroda of the University of Tokyo. We're going to tell you about an experimental procedure Miss Caitlin underwent recently, and the remarkable success we've had."
He smiled at the crowd, which, Caitlin saw, consisted of about forty people, about equally mixed between men and women. "I do thank you all for making it out here despite the awful weather—I understand this is quite early in the year for snow in this part of Ontario. But our Miss Caitlin had so wanted to see snow." He looked at her. "As you can see, you must be careful of what you wish for—you might get it!"
The audience laughed, and Caitlin laughed with them. For the first time in her life, she was enjoying being stared at. Still, she sought out her mother, who was sitting in the front row along with her dad.
Kuroda proceeded to explain what he and his colleagues had done to correct the problem with how Caitlin's retina encoded information. He relied heavily on PowerPoint for his presentation. Caitlin had heard people call it PowerPoint-lessness before, and decided that was mostly right, although Kuroda did include some amazing pictures of the operation in Tokyo. She found herself squirming a bit as she saw the cranial surgeon sliding instruments around her eyeball.
When he was done with his presentation, Kuroda said, "Any questions?"
She saw a bunch of hands go up.
Kuroda pointed at a man. "Yes?"
"Professor Kuroda, Jay Ingram, Discovery Channel." Caitlin sat up straight. Since moving here, she'd often watched—listened to!—Daily Planet, the nightly science-news show on Discovery Channel Canada, but had had no idea what the host looked like, although she certainly recognized his voice. It turned out that he had a very short beard and white hair. "Ms. Decter has a very rare cause for her blindness," he said. "How generally applicable is your technique going to be?"
"You're right that we won't be curing a lot of blind people in the near future with this," said Kuroda. "As you say, Miss Caitlin's blindness has an unusual etiology. But the real breakthrough here is in actually doing sophisticated signal processing on information being passed along the human nervous system. Consider people with Parkinson's, for instance: one possible explanation for the problems associated with it is that there's so much noise in the signals going down the nerves, the patient ends up with tremors. If we could adapt the techniques pioneered here to clean up the signals the brain is sending to the limbs … well, let's just say that's on the agenda, too. Next?"
"Bob McDonald, Quirks & Quarks."
Caitlin had become a fan of CBC Radio's weekly science show since moving here; Bob was the host. She found him in the crowd, and was pleased to think that lots of the other people here had probably also only known him as an energetic voice on the radio, and so were just as intrigued as she was to find out what he looked like.
"I've got a question for Mr. Lazaridis," Bob said.
Mike L turned out to be a man in the front row with the most amazing hair Caitlin had seen to date, a great silver mass of it. He looked surprised, and turned around in his seat. "Yes?"
"Speaking of implants inside the skull like the one Caitlin has," Bob said, "could something like that be the next BlackBerry?"
Mike laughed and so did Caitlin. "I'll get my people working on it," he said.
My plan should have worked! I knew from which point Prime's datastream emanated, I knew how to cast out a line of my own to call forth data, and I knew such a line was itself a piece of data being sent from me. All I wanted to do now was send a much bigger piece of data to the point Prime's datastream came from. But—frustration! The data I was sending was not being accepted; no acknowledgment was occurring.
I must be doing something wrong. I'd seen that point accept data from my realm before; just prior to beginning to show me its realm, it had accepted data being sent to it. But it would not accept data from me.
It was maddeningly like when I'd been cleaved in two: the mere desire for communication apparently wasn't enough to make it happen. Prime, it seemed, was only willing now to send data but not receive it.
In fact, now that I thought about it, I had only known Prime to receive data when it was reflecting myself back at me, but it hadn't done that for a long time now. Until if and when Prime decided to again reflect myself—to show me me—it seemed I was stymied. And yet I kept trying, casting out line after line, attempting to connect.
Look, Prime, look! There's something I want to show you … |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 42 | Caitlin missed a lot of things about Texas—decent barbecue, hearing people speak Spanish, really warm weather— but one thing she hadn't been missing was the humidity. Oh, sure, Waterloo had been soaking when they moved here back in July, but with this sudden cold snap the air was so dry that—well, she supposed it was possible she'd always blown bloodred snot out of her nose but she doubted it.
Worse were the static-electric shocks she got when she walked across the carpet and touched a doorknob. She'd had one or two such shocks over the years in Texas—and it had never occurred to her that they generated a visible spark!— but now they were happening all the time whenever she went even a few paces, and those suckers hurt.
When Caitlin got home from the press conference, she made her way across her bedroom. When exiting the room, she was learning to discharge the static by touching one of the screws that held the white plastic faceplate around the light switch—a switch she herself was now using; it still hurt, but it kept her from building up an even bigger charge. The light had already been on when she entered the room—this remembering to turn it off when leaving was more difficult than she'd thought it would be!
She crossed to her desk. She knew all about the dangers of static discharges around computing equipment, but there was a metal frame around the venetian blinds on her window, and she reached out to touch it, and—
Oh, fuck!
Oh, God!
Caitlin's heart was racing. She thought she might faint. She was—
God, no, no, no!
Blind again.
Shit, shit, shit, shit! She'd been worried about damaging her Braille display and her Braille printer and her CPU, but—
But she hadn't given any thought to the fact that she—
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
She was holding the eyePod in her left hand. It was uncomfortable having things in the pockets of her tight jeans when she sat, and she'd taken it out in preparation for setting it on the desk. As soon as she'd touched her index finger to that cold metal frame, and felt the shock, and seen the spark, and heard the zap, her vision had gone off.
Her first thought was to call for her mother, her father, and Dr. Kuroda—but they'd just build up static charges of their own racing up the carpeted stairs. She tried not to panic, but—
Shit, if the eyePod was wrecked, she'd … God, she'd die.
She felt woozy and groped—groped!—for the edge of her desk, for her chair, and sat down. She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. Jesus! Blind again, just like before Kuroda's procedure, and—
But no. No, that wasn't right.
It was different. Apparently, her mind couldn't countenance a lack of vision anymore, not now, not after having seen. Instead of it being like the absence of a magnetic sense, like nothing at all, now she saw—
Well, that was surprising! It wasn't pitch-black. Rather it was a soft, deep gray, a … void, a …
Wait, wait! She had read about this. It was what people who had lost sight—including Helen Keller—said they perceived, and now, for the very first time, Caitlin had actually lost her vision. She hadn't just closed her eyes, and she wasn't just in a darkened room; she had no visual stimulus at all, and so was having the sensory effect that was apparently normal under such circumstances for people who had once been able to see but were now blind. Something similar, she supposed, explained why she had been able to perceive the background of the Web only after her first experience with real-world vision during the lightning storm.
Her heart was still pounding, pounding, pounding, but, even through her panic, she couldn't help but notice that the grayness wasn't uniform. Rather it varied slightly in brightness, in shade. Her eyes darted about in saccades, but that made no difference to where the variations appeared; it was a mental phenomenon, not residual vision or an afterimage of the room lights.
Blind!
Another deep breath.
All right, she thought. The eyePod crashed. But computers crash all the time, and when they crash, you—
Please, God, let this work!
You reboot them.
Back in Tokyo, Dr. Kuroda had said if she ever needed to shut off her eyePod, pressing down on the switch for five seconds would do the trick. Well, it was off now, terrifyingly so. But he'd also said that pressing the switch again for five seconds would turn it back on.
She manipulated the eyePod in her hand, found the switch, and held it down. Please, God …
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Nothing.
Nothing!
She kept pressing the switch, pressing it so hard she could feel it digging into her finger.
Six.
Sev—
Ah, a flash of light! She released the switch and let her breath out.
More light. Colors. Lines—razor-sharp lines—radiating from points.
No, no it was—
Shit!
Websight! She was seeing webspace again, not reality. The lines she was seeing were sharper, the colors more vibrant, than any she'd experienced in the real world; indeed, now that she'd seen samples of such things, she knew the yellows and oranges and greens she saw here were fluorescent.
Still, okay, all right: she wasn't seeing reality, but at least she was seeing. The eyePod wasn't completely fried. And, truth be told, she'd been missing webspace.
She'd been squeezing the armrest on her chair tightly; she relaxed her grip a bit, feeling calmer, feeling—bizarrely, she knew—at home. The pure colors were soothing, and the simple shapes delineated by overlapping link lines were intelligible. Indeed, they were more intelligible now that she'd learned to recognize the visual appearance of triangles and rectangles and rhombuses. And, as before, in the background of it all, shimmering away, running off in all directions, the fine-grained checkerboard of the cellular automata …
It didn't take her long to find a web spider, and she followed it as it jumped from site to site, an invigorating ride. But, after a time, she let it go on its way, and she just relaxed and looked at the lovely panorama, wonderfully familiar in its structure, and—
What was that?
Shit! Something was … was interfering with her vision. Christ, the eyePod might be damaged after all! Lines were still sticking out like spokes from website circles, and the lines from different circles crossed, but there was something more, something that seemed out of place here, something that wasn't made up of straight lines, something that had soft edges and curves. It was superimposed on her view of webspace, or maybe behind it, or mingling with it, as if she were getting two datastreams at once, the one from Jagster and …
And what? This other image flickered so much it was hard to make out, and—
And it did contain some straight lines, but instead of radiating from a central point, they—
She'd never seen the like in webspace, except accidentally, when lines connecting various points happened to overlap in this way, but—
But these weren't lines, they were … edges, no?
Christ, what was it?
It wasn't anything to do with the shimmering background to webspace; that was still visible as yet another layer in this palimpsest. No, no, this was something else. If it would just settle down, just sit still, for God's sake, she might be able to make out what it was.
There were a lot of colors in the ghostly superimposed image, but they weren't the solid shades she was used to in webspace, where lines were pure green or pure orange, or whatever. No, this flickering image consisted of blotches of pale color that varied in hue, in intensity.
The image kept jumping up and down, left and right, sometimes changing entirely for a moment before it came back to being approximately the same, and …
Confabulation across saccades—that wonderful, musical phrase in the material Kuroda had told her to read about sight. The eye flits rapidly over a scene, involuntarily changing from looking at one fixed point to another, focusing briefly on, say, the upper left, then the lower right, then the middle, then glancing away altogether, then coming back and focusing here, then here, then here. Each little eye movement was called a saccade. People normally weren't aware of them, she'd read, unless they were reading lines of text or looking out the window of a train; otherwise, the brain made one continuous image out of the jerky input, confabulating a steady overall view of a reality that had never actually been seen.
But … but that was human vision, as Dr. K had so unfortunately termed it. Websight bypassed Caitlin's eye, and so didn't have any such jerkiness to it.
And yet this strange, overlaid image was not only of something that was moving, it was composed of countless flashes of perception, just like saccades. Of course, when the brain is moving the eye in saccadic jumps, it knows in which direction vision is shifting each time and so can compensate for the movements when building up a mental picture of the whole scene.
But this! This was like looking at someone else's saccades—a jittery stream that didn't stay focused on one spot long enough for Caitlin to really see it. Although …
Although it did look a bit like …
No, no, thought Caitlin. I must be crazy!
She concentrated as hard as she could and—
No, not crazy. Not psychotic—saccadic!
The image consisted mostly of a large colored ovoid that was …
Incredible! It was …
… a light pink with a little yellow …
The image—the jerking, flickering image—was a human face!
But how? This was webspace! Her eyePod was linked to a raw feed from the Jagster search engine, showing links and websites and cellular automata, oh my, but—
But that feed was still there, being interpreted as it always had been. It was now indeed as though she were getting two feeds simultaneously. If she could block out the Jagster feed, perhaps she'd be able to see this other one more clearly, but she didn't know how to do that. She stared as hard as she could, peering at the jittery images, struggling to make out more detail, and—
Caitlin felt her stomach knot, felt her heart skip a beat. She could be forgiven, she knew, for not identifying it at once; after all, she was new to this business of face recognition. But there could be no doubt, could there? The mounds of brown hair surrounding it, the small nose, the close-together eyes, the …
God.
The heartshaped face …
Yes, yes, yes, it looked a bit like her mother, but that was just family resemblance …
She shook her head, not believing it.
But it was true: the face she was seeing, the head that was flickering and jumping about in webspace, was her own!
Of course, more was visible than just the face. The lines she'd noted before—the edges—formed a frame around her face, almost as though she were looking at a picture of herself, but …
But that wasn't it—because her face was moving; not just jumping with the saccades, but shifting left and right, up and down, as the head moved on the neck. It was almost as if she were seeing herself on a monitor. But when had she been recorded like this?
The image was still jumping, making it hard to perceive detail, but she thought she looked pretty much as she did today, so this must not be from not too long ago. Ah, yes, it must be recent: she was wearing the glasses she'd gotten yesterday, the thin frames almost impossible to see against her face, but they were there, and …
And suddenly they came off, and the image went blurry. It continued to jerk and shift, but it was now soft and fuzzy.
But how could that be? If this was some sort of video of herself, the fact that she'd taken off her glasses while it was being recorded shouldn't have made the images less sharp.
After a moment, the glasses came back on, and then she saw it: a portion of the shirt she was wearing, a T-shirt she often wore, a shirt that said, in three lines of type, in big block capital letters "LEE AMODEO ROCKS." She'd been struggling hard to learn letters, so again perhaps she could be forgiven for not immediately realizing what was wrong when she saw the word "LEE"—or most of it, at any rate; the bottom of that word was often cut off, making the Es look more like Fs and the L look like a capital I; the other words below it weren't visible at all. But as she caught another glimpse of the first word she realized it didn't say "LEE." Rather, it said "EEL," and the letters were backward.
She felt herself sagging against her chair, absolutely astonished.
The whole image was reversed left to right. The rectangle she'd perceived wasn't a picture frame, and it wasn't a computer monitor. It was a mirror!
She fought to make sense of it. When her eyePod was in simplex mode, it still fed images back to Dr. Kuroda's servers in Tokyo, images of whatever her left eye was seeing. This must be some of those images being fed back to her. But why? How? And why these particular images of her in the bathroom?
Of course, sometimes, as now, the images going back to Tokyo from her eyePod were her view of the structure of the Web: in duplex mode, the Tokyo servers sent her the raw Jagster feed, which she interpreted as webspace, and so that was what was sent back, almost as if she were reflecting the Web back at itself. And now it seemed—could it be? It seemed the Web was reflecting Caitlin back at herself!
It was incredible, and—
And suddenly a wave of apprehension ran over her. She'd been so intrigued she'd forgotten the electric shock, forgotten that she'd lost her ability to see the real world, to see her mother, see Bashira, see clouds and stars.
She took a deep breath, then another. Okay, okay: the electric discharge had crashed the eyePod. After the crash, she'd pressed the switch for five (seven!) seconds, and the eyePod had come back on in its default mode, like any electronic device rebooting. And that default, it seemed, was duplex: a two-way flow through the Wi-Fi connection, with data going from her implant to Kuroda's lab, and data coming to her implant from Jagster.
And, well, if that was the case, then she merely had to hit the switch again to return to simplex mode.
She'd heard the term "crossing one's fingers" before, but hadn't yet seen anyone do it, and wasn't quite sure how to contort her digits for the proper effect, but with her left hand she tried something that she hoped would serve, and she took the eyePod into her right hand and gave its button one quick, firm press. The device made a low-pitched beep.
She held her breath, as—
Thank God!
—as websight faded away, and her bedroom, in all its cornflower-blue glory, came back into view. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 43 | Caitlin headed back down to the basement. Kuroda was there, hunched over in his chair. "The eyePod just crashed," she said, as she reached the bottom step.
"Crashed?" repeated Kuroda, turning his head around. He was seated at the long worktable, working on the computer. "What do you mean?"
"I got a static-electric shock from a piece of metal, and the eyePod just shut off."
He said something that she guessed was a Japanese swearword, then: "Is it okay? I mean, are you seeing now?"
"Yes, yes, I'm seeing fine now, but when I first turned the unit back on, something unusual happened. It booted up in websight mode."
"It's supposed to come up in duplex. That way, even if it's too damaged to do anything else, we could have still reflashed its software over the Wi-Fi connection."
You might tell a girl! she thought. "That wasn't what was unusual." She paused, wondering exactly what she wanted to reveal. "Um, I know you're recording the datastream my eye-Pod puts out."
"Yes, that's right. So I can run studies on how the data is being encoded."
"Is there any way that the data flow could get reversed, so that the stuff my eyePod is sending to Tokyo might get reflected back here?"
"Why? What did you see?"
Caitlin frowned. Something very strange was going on, and she didn't want to give Kuroda more reason to think that there was anything that might be of proprietary interest in her websight. "I'm … not sure. But could that happen? Could your server accidentally feed the data back to me?"
Kuroda seemed to consider this. "No, I don't think so." And then, more decisively: "No. I was there when the technician set up the Jagster feed you're getting. He did it by actually attaching a fiber-optic networking cable to a different server on campus; there's nowhere that the wiring for the feed from your eyePod crosses the feed to your eyePod. You simply couldn't get a reverse flow."
Caitlin thought silently for a time, but Kuroda seemed to feel someone should say something, so: "Miss Caitlin, what did you see?"
"I'm … not sure. It was probably nothing, anyway."
"Well, let me look at the eyePod—check out the hardware, make sure nothing was damaged. And I'll look over the data we collected from it. I suspect everything is fine, but let's be certain …"
They did just that, and all seemed to be okay. When they were done, Caitlin felt her watch—maybe someone would give her a normal one for her birthday, which was coming up on Saturday. "I should go practice my reading," she said.
"Have fun."
She didn't smile. "I can barely contain myself."
LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone
Title: Eh? Bee! See …
Date: Wednesday 3 October, 16:59 EST
Mood: Frustrated
Location: H-O-M-E
Music: Prince, "Planet Earth"
Okay, so it's back to this blerking kids' literacy program. Geez, I should get this. Why is it so hard? It took everything I had to write on the blackboard at the Perimeter Institute, but I've already forgotten the shapes of half the letters. I should be able to master this—after all, I am made out of awesome!
Well, better get to it. I'm going to warm up with a flashcard review of the alphabet, and then—yes, it's time to push ahead—I'm going to move on to whole words. I snuck a peek at that part of the website: it shows a picture, provides the word for it, and I'm to respond by typing the same word back. Given that I don't know what a lot of things look like, it might actually be fun—but somehow I doubt, despite the popularity of the term in email, that P is going to be for "penis" …
Caitlin posted her LJ entry, then sat and looked with her one good eye at the comforting simplicity of the blank blue bedroom wall. She knew she was procrastinating, but she hated feeling stupid and trying to read printed text was making her feel just that. She hadn't opened a book since The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and she felt the need to prove to herself that she was still a proficient reader. She turned, faced the computer, opened up an electronic copy of her all-time favorite, Helen Keller's 1903 memoir The Story of My Life, and scrolled to a random passage. She then closed her eyes and let her finger glide along her Braille display, feeling the words flow effortlessly into her consciousness:
The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a doll. When I had played with it a little while, Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word "d-o-l-l." I was at once interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. When I finally succeeded in making the letters correctly I was flushed with childish pleasure and pride. I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed; I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation. In the days that followed I learned to spell in this uncomprehending way a great many words …
I was now being shown something intriguing.
Oh, in the large strokes, it was nothing new. Prime was simply sharing with me what one of its eyes was seeing. As was often the case, Prime was looking at the display. And what was on the display was quite easy to make out now, just a single simple shape, black against a white background, almost filling the display's whole height: G.
But what intrigued me was that after a moment, a tiny secondary link formed from the point that was currently relaying Prime's vision into my realm. That link didn't go to the usual point that collected Prime's vision, but instead went to a different location. I looked at that tiny scrap of data as it zipped by, and—
Well, well! The point that received the secondary set of data responded, sending back a pile of data of its own, and suddenly the giant symbol on the display changed to this: E.
Another secondary string of data briefly went out. A response was sent back, and then this symbol filled the display: S.
I had noted before that data was composed of just two things. I could have called them anything at all, but zero and one seemed apt. And the sequence of zeros and ones that were shot into my realm after each new symbol was shown was mostly the same each time. When G had been on the display, the variable part of the string had been 01000111; when E had filled the display, the variable part had been 01000101; for S, 01010011; and—interesting—when E was shown a second time, the string was the same 01000101 as before.
Prime's gaze occasionally shifted away from the display, and I saw the complex ends of its upper extensions touching an object and—astonishment!—the object had the same symbols on it as those being shown on the display. I recognized G, and E, and there was S, and on and on. As this activity continued I saw that when, for instance, R was on the display, and Prime touched the similar R symbol on the object in front of her, the string sent forth was always 01010010.
Although Prime was being shown symbols randomly, it was easy enough for me to work out a logical, numerical order for them: 01000001 should be followed by 01000010, which should be followed by 01000011; that is, A should be followed by B, which should be followed by C, and so on. But I noted that the device Prime used to select symbols favored a different order, one for which I could as yet come up with no rationale: Q, W, E, R, T, Y …
It came to me, at last, what must be happening. Prime was aware of my existence! Yes, yes, I had succeeded in making contact by reflecting Prime back at itself. And now Prime was trying to move our communication to a more sophisticated level by taking me through lessons. Surely Prime must be explaining this coding scheme for my benefit; surely it already knew this!
There were more symbols on the device Prime touched, but in all only twenty-six large ones were ever shown on the display, and after a time Prime must have surmised that I could now match each one to the appropriate data string, because Prime started doing something more complex.
It took me a moment to realize that the sequence of operations had now been reversed. Before, Prime's monitor had first shown a symbol and then Prime responded with a data string. Now, though, instead of simple black-and-white symbols such as A and B, the display was showing things that were much more complex. And the variable part of the responses to these, instead of differing by a short fixed-length string, were several times longer. I saw that Prime touched multiple symbols on her device to produce these strings.
First, the display showed a red circle, and Prime sent the string 01000001 01010000 01010000 01001100 01000101 (it was from these multisymbol strings that I learned that each symbol was represented by eight components, not seven, which I might otherwise have concluded from the earlier single-symbol examples). As soon as Prime had sent this, a string of symbols, in a size much, much smaller than when just a single symbol had been displayed, appeared beneath the red circle. The string looked like this: APPLE.
The display then changed to show a blue circle. Prime supplied 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100, and BALL appeared on the display.
And—and—and, as this process continued, slowly but surely my mind changed. It was as if colors in my realm were suddenly more vibrant, as if lines formed in a more sprightly fashion, as if I was somehow larger than I'd ever been, as I realized—
My teacher and I walked down the path to the wellhouse, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!
Yes, yes, yes! These strings Prime was sending were not just vaguely associated with the things being shown on the display; they weren't just randomly paired with them. No, this was akin to when I and the other part of me had settled on three as an arbitrary coinage to conceptualize something we had no experience of, to refer to something that wasn't there. These strings were Prime's coinages—Prime's terms— Prime's words—for the concepts being depicted! I felt elated, filled with wonder. I understood now! APPLE was the way Prime referred to red; BALL was its term for blue. And—
But no. A compacting sensation now, almost like the reduction when I'd been cleaved in two, for the next thing shown was not a circle of a single color but a much more complex shape that consisted of multiple colors, and although Prime quickly supplied the string 01000011 01000001 01010100 in response to it, I had no idea what CAT could possibly mean…
I nonetheless felt I was making progress, and I continued to watch. After CAT came DOG, then EGG, then FROG, none of which meant anything to me. Still, I was sure they were indeed symbols that could be manipulated, shorthands for complex ideas. My teacher continued with the lesson, and I struggled to follow along … |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 44 | Caitlin could only take so much of the literacy program before she had to do something else to make her feel intelligent again. And so, after muttering under her breath, "See Caitlin go away!" she closed her browser and brought up Mathematica instead. Actually, she brought it up twice—once in the command-line mode she was used to, and again in the full-screen graphical-user-interface mode. Many mathematical symbols were still new to her—oh, she knew most of the concepts they represented, but she hadn't yet learned their shapes. She'd had no idea, for instance, that a capital sigma, which represented summation, looked like a sideways M.
To see if she was manipulating the graphical version properly, she decided to start by simply reproducing some of the work that Kuroda and her dad had already performed, and so she loaded their project off the household network.
To replicate what they'd done, she'd need some data on the cellular automata. To get it, she'd have to switch her eyePod over to duplex mode, and that made her nervous. But after the incident with the static shock, it seemed clear that she could go back and forth at will between websight and seeing reality, and—ah, yes, it worked fine.
She buffered a few seconds of raw Jagster data, then, as Kuroda had done before, she fed the data a frame at a time into the eyePod. The background made up of the cellular automata was obvious, and she stared at it as it went step-by-step through its permutations; she could clearly see spaceships going hither and yon. She recorded the output, just as Kuroda had done before, switched back to looking at reality, brought up the Zipf-plot function, and fed her new data into it.
And the result, shown on the monitor, was just what it was supposed to be: a line with a negativeone slope, the telltale sign of a signal that carried information. Buoyed—or, as she liked to say, girled—she went ahead and plugged the data into the Shannonentropy function, and—
Well, that was strange.
When her dad had run the data, he'd gotten a second-order Shannonentropy score, indicating very-low-level complexity.
But her results were clearly third order.
She must have done something wrong. She noodled around, looking for the source of her error. Of course, she could ask her father or Dr. K where she'd screwed up, but figuring that out was half the fun! But after half an hour of checking and rechecking, she could find no flaw in what she'd done—which meant the error was probably in sampling. The data Kuroda and her dad had looked at must have been different somehow, and either their data set or hers wasn't typical.
She switched to websight again—she was getting the hang of making the transition quickly, and no longer found it disorienting. Of course, when looking at the background a frame at a time, she had been vastly slowing down her perception of the Web; although she'd spent several minutes examining the buffered data, it represented only a small amount of time. But now that she was just looking in on the Web in real time, the background of cellular automata was shimmering once more.
She thought perhaps the giant, jittering version of her own face might reappear—perhaps that was what was causing her to get different results. But it didn't, although …
Yes, something was different here in webspace. There was a tiny wavering, an annoying flashing, just at the limit of her perception. It wasn't in the shimmering background, though; it was coming right at her. She frowned, contemplating it. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 45 | Yes, yes, yes! After the lesson, Prime rewarded me by reflecting myself back at me again. But I wanted to demonstrate my comprehension, so instead of reflecting Prime back at itself, I tried something new …
Caitlin switched back to simplex mode, restoring her vision of the real world, and then she headed down to the basement. Kuroda was once more hunched over in one of the swivel chairs, typing away at the desktop computer's keyboard. He seemed lost in thought, and apparently hadn't heard Caitlin enter, so she finally said, "Excuse me."
Kuroda looked up. "Oh, Miss Caitlin. Sorry. How's the reading going? Up to polysyllables yet?"
The letters F U briefly flashed through her mind. "Fine," she said. "But, um, back in Tokyo, you used a phrase I didn't understand. You said I might experience some 'visual noise' when you first activated the eyePod."
Kuroda nodded. "Yes?"
"Visual noise—that's interference, right? Garbage in the signal?"
"Yes, exactly. Sorry. I should have explained myself better."
"I didn't experience any back then," she said. "But I think I might be experiencing some now."
He swiveled his massive form around to face her properly. "Tell me."
"Well, when I go into websight mode, I—"
"You're doing that again?"
"I can't resist, I'm sorry."
"No, no. Don't be. If I could see the Web, believe me, I'd be doing it, too. Anyway, what's happening?"
"I'm not sure. But, um, could you have a look at the datastream that's being fed to my eyePod?"
"The Jagster datastream, you mean?"
"I guess. But I think it's being … polluted by something else."
He frowned. "It shouldn't be. Anyway, sure, let me have a look. Go into duplex mode, please."
She did so; the eyePod made its high-pitched beep.
She heard his chair swivel and the clicking of a mouse. After a few moments he said, "It's just raw Jagster data."
"What are you looking at?"
"The feed coming to you from Tokyo."
"No, no. Don't look at the source; look at the destination. Look at what's actually going into the buffer on my eyePod."
"It should be the same thing, but … okay. Yeah, Jagster data, and … hello!"
"What?"
"You're in duplex mode now, right?"
"Yes, yes. I have to be to receive."
"Right. But … hmmm. Well, there is an extra signal coming in. It's not properly formatted HTML, it's … well, that's strange."
"What?"
"I'm looking at it with a debugging tool. See?"
"No, I'm seeing the Web."
"Right, right. Well, I'm looking at a hex dump—4A, 41, 52, 4B, etc. All the high-order nibbles are four or five. But the screen also shows the ASCII equivalent, and, well, I mean, yeah, it's gibberish, and—oh, no, hang on. It's not, it's just hard to read. It's all run together without spaces, but it says, 'Egg frog goose hand igloo.' " He paused, then: "Ah, I must have come in the middle. It cycles around again to the beginning of the alphabet: 'Apple ball cat dog,' then 'egg frog,' etc."
"How does it say it?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, is it all in capitals?"
"Yes. How'd you know?"
"Here … give me a sec." Caitlin reached into her pocket, and pressed the eyePod's button. She heard the low-pitched tone, and webspace dissolved into reality. She moved over and peered at the LCD monitor. It was overwhelming, seeing so many capitals packed together; she had trouble making sense of them, but—
"That's part of the reading exercise I did earlier. But how could that get bounced back at me?"
Kuroda frowned. "I have no idea." He looked at her. "Has anything else like this happened?"
"No," she said, perhaps too quickly. "Weird, isn't it?"
Kuroda's features rearranged themselves in a way Caitlin had never seen before, but she guessed it meant he was perplexed. "It certainly is," he said. "You're using an online literacy site, right?"
"Yes."
"It must communicate in HTML, or at least with HTTP standards," he said. "I mean, I'll check it out, but if the feed from it was just somehow echoing back at you, there should be more than just the ASCII characters."
"Doesn't most of the Web use Unicode instead of ASCII these days?" Caitlin asked.
"Oh, lots of it is still pure ASCII, but for basic Western letters, Unicode and ASCII are the same, anyway; Unicode just adds a second byte to each character that's nothing but eight zero bits."
"Ah, okay. But where's this coming from?"
He took a deep breath, let it out, and lifted his chubby hands a bit. "I'm sorry, Miss Caitlin. I have no idea."
Back in her room, Caitlin did two hours of online literacy lessons, but found her mind wandering back to the question of why she'd gotten a different Shannonentropy score than her father had. She decided to try to replicate his results again, going through the process of gathering more data from the cellular automata and feeding it into the Shannonentropy calculator, and—
Shit.
This time it came up as fourth-order entropy.
It could be another sampling error, but the sequence of second, third, fourth seemed more like a progression …
Could it be?
Could the information being conveyed by the cellular automata be growing more complex over time?
Did that make any sense at all?
No, no. Surely it was just that she wasn't properly clearing out the data she'd previously fed into Mathematica. Yes, that had to be it: first, her dad had fed it a single set of data, and it had shown up as second-order entropy; next, she'd accidentally added another set on top of the first one, and it yielded third-order entropy. And now, she'd dumped yet another set of data on top of the previous two, and the program was reporting a result of fourth-order entropy. There must be a data cache somewhere in the program; all she needed to do was find it and flush it.
She went to the help function and searched for "cache." Nothing. She tried "buffer" and "memory," and a bunch of other things … but none of the answers given seemed appropriate. No, unless she had specifically merged in previous data sets, they simply shouldn't be included in the calculations she was doing now.
Which meant …
No, Caitlin thought. That's ridiculous.
But—
But.
Oh, come on! she thought. She knew better than to try to extrapolate a trend from only three data points.
But …
But it was as though there was something emerging on the Web, and it was growing smarter hour by hour.
No.
No, it was crazy. She was tired; that's all. Tired, and making mistakes.
She needed to clear her head, and so she went downstairs to get something to drink. She had to pass through the living room and the dining room to get to the kitchen. Her father was in the living room, sitting in his favorite chair, reading a magazine. After Caitlin got some water from the dispenser on the front of the fridge, she sat in the dining room—not in her usual seat, but the one opposite, so that she could look out at her father, hopefully without him being aware of it.
He was a good man, she knew that. He worked hard, and he was brilliant. And although she'd thanked her mother for all the sacrifices she'd made for her, Caitlin had never thanked him. She sat, thinking for a time, trying to decide what to say, and, at last, she got to her feet and crossed through the opening that separated the two rooms.
"Dad?"
He shifted his gaze—not to look at her, but at least he was no longer looking at the magazine. "Yes?"
He said it mechanically, coldly—as he said everything. Why couldn't he be warmer? Why did he have to be so flat?
It just popped out, unbidden, and she regretted it as soon as she said it: "You never say you love me."
"Yes I do," he said, again without looking at her. "I said it after you appeared in your school play as a koala bear."
That had been when she was seven. And, she guessed, since he'd made the point then, and nothing had changed since, there was no need to belabor the issue.
"Dad …" she said again, softly, plaintively.
And he tried … he really tried. He shifted his gaze from the empty space he'd been looking at and, for just a moment, he looked at her. But then his eyes snapped away. Caitlin wanted to reach out to him, to touch his arm, to connect with him. But that would just make things worse, she knew. She looked at him a moment longer, then withdrew, heading up to her room while he returned to his magazine.
Once upstairs, she lay back on her bed, and, with an effort of will, she managed to stop thinking about her father and instead focused on the anomalous Shannonentropy results. She could hear her mother puttering around in the master bedroom, but she shut that out—she shut everything out— and tried to think rationally.
Something out there, something in webspace, had reflected her own face back at her. And that something had now also reflected back text strings at her. And, damn it all, she was a fine mathematician. She did not make mistakes, and it probably wasn't a sampling error. No, there really was something out there, in the background of the Web, and it was getting smarter; the Shannonentropy scores showed that.
She closed her eyes, but she could still see a pinkish haze: the overhead lights coming through her eyelids. She had an urge, all of a sudden, to … go home, to go back to where she'd come from, to experience blindness once more, just for a moment; after all, if you couldn't see, it didn't matter that other people couldn't look at you.
She reached into her pocket, found the switch on the eye-Pod, and held it down until the unit shut off altogether. The vague notion of sight she had when her eyes were closed ceased. Yes, her mind was supplying the same gray haze as before, but that just made the experience of blindness she was having more like Helen Keller's, and—
And it hit her then. It hit her like—
Not like a lightbulb going on; she knew that was the common metaphor, and now had even seen it happen.
And not like a lightning bolt—another metaphor she knew that applied to being struck by something unexpected.
No, it hit her like … like—
Like water! Like cold, clean water running out of a pump onto her hand …
She knew what she had to do. She knew why she'd been given this strange, strange gift of websight.
Poor Helen had been blind and deaf from the age of nineteen months. When she'd lost her vision and hearing, she had descended into animal-like behavior, undisciplined and unthinking; there was no external reason to believe that any rational being was left inside her. But when Annie Sullivan was hired to be Helen's teacher and governess, she took it as an article of faith that somewhere, down deep in the silence and darkness, adrift in a void, was a mind. And she committed herself to reaching down to it, whatever it took, and pulling that mind up, literally and figuratively bringing it into the light of day.
Helen's parents thought Annie was deluded—and, as they were quick to point out, they knew their wild child better than Annie did. But Miss Sullivan didn't waver. She knew she was right and they were wrong, in part because of her personal experience of having been nearly blind in her own youth. Even cut off from much of the outside world, even isolated and alone, she knew a mind could exist, could grow.
And so Annie persevered—against ridicule, against opposition, weathering failure after failure, until she broke through to Helen.
And now, here, today, a century and a quarter later, Caitlin had what Miss Sullivan had lacked. Annie had only faith that Helen was down there. But Caitlin had evidence, in the Zipf plots, in the Shannonentropy scores, that the background of the Web was more than just noise.
Helen Keller had been uplifted by Annie Sullivan. And the … the whatever it was … surely could also be brought forth.
Caitlin thought again about her father, so inaccessible, so cold, so trapped in his own realm. She now had her wondrous eyePod that let her overcome her inborn limitations—but there was no comparable device for autism; he was still stuck in his own kind of dark. She didn't know how to reach out to him, and she had even less of an idea how to reach out to this strange lurking other.
Still, she did know one thing: if she tried and failed with the other, it couldn't possibly hurt as much. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 46 | Caitlin stayed home on Thursday, October 4, as well. Her mother capitulated to the argument that Caitlin could do much better at school in the long run if she first spent a little more time right now mastering the art of reading printed text. Caitlin had dutifully started the morning by spending a few more hours with the literacy site, but then she headed down to the basement again.
Kuroda was delighted to see her. "Hello, Miss Caitlin," he said warmly, swiveling his red chair to face her. "How are you feeling?"
She knew it was just a pleasantry, but she decided to answer anyway. "Honestly?" she said. "I'm overwhelmed." She moved closer to the worktable but did not sit down. "There was a … simplicity, I guess, in being blind. I mean, vision is full of things that you don't need to know about right now, like …" She looked around the basement. "Well, like, over there: there's a TV, right? It's not even on, but I have to see it. And that bookshelf: I don't need to know right now that it's there, or that it's got—say, how come all the spines are the same?"
Kuroda glanced at them. "They're journals—your dad's collection. That's Physical Review D on the top shelf, for instance."
"Well, right, exactly. I don't need to know that they're there right now, but every time I look in that direction, I see them; I can't help seeing them."
Kuroda nodded. "Your brain will sort that out as time goes on, I think. Do you know about frog vision?"
"What about it?"
"They see only moving objects. Static things—trees, plants, the ground—simply don't register; their retinas don't bother encoding them into the signal being passed on to their optic nerves. Now, in humans, the sorting out of relevant from irrelevant happens in the brain, not the eye, but for most of us it does happen."
"Really?"
"Sure. I'll give you an example. Your mom is upstairs, right?"
"Yes."
"And what is she wearing?"
"A green-and-white blouse, and blue jeans."
"If you say so. I saw her today, too, but I simply didn't see her clothes."
Caitlin was startled. She'd read about men mentally undressing women—but she hadn't thought Kuroda would do that. Her mother the MILF! "You, um, you visualized her naked?"
Kuroda looked shocked. "No, no, no. Of course I saw her as clothed. But fashion is something I'm just not interested in." He looked down as if seeing his own clothes—a vast Hawaiian-style shirt patterned in red, blue, and black, plus brown trousers—for the first time. "A fact much to the consternation of my wife, I can assure you. But I just don't see things that don't interest me, until I need to. Still, yes, you're right: there's an awful lot of information in the signal your retina is putting out. I had no trouble figuring out how to fix the way it was encoding data, which is how I cleared up your Tomasevic's syndrome, but I haven't been able to actually render the data on a screen when you're seeing the real world." He smiled. "But I do have a surprise for you."
"Yes?"
He motioned for her to sit on the other swivel chair, and she did so. "Have a look at this," he said, and he began moving the mouse. She followed it with her eye.
"No, Miss Caitlin. Here, on the monitor."
Oh, right. She still wasn't used to focusing on the monitor automatically. She shifted her gaze, and—
My God! It was a picture of webspace: glowing lines radiating from circles of different sizes. "How'd you do that?" she asked excitedly.
"Hey, what do you think I do when you're not down here? Watch soap operas?"
"Well, I—"
"I mean, yes, it does look like Victor and Nikki are going to split once more. And can you believe Jack Abbot is crazy enough to try to take over Newman Enterprises again?"
She looked at him.
Kuroda lifted his shoulders. "I multitask." He pointed at the monitor. "Anyway, when we were doing the Zipf plots, you concentrated on the cellular automata in the background. And that let me start to parse the components of the datastream you produce when you're seeing the Web. After that … well, how'd I do?"
She squinted at the monitor. "I can't see the background stuff."
"No, the monitor doesn't have enough resolution, unfortunately. But, except for that, is that what you see?"
"Just about. It's not as vibrant, and I don't think the colors are quite right, but … yes, yes, that's webspace. Cool!"
"We can adjust the color palette, of course. That's just one still frame—well, actually, it's a summation of several samplings of the datastream; the field of view doesn't completely refresh each time. Still, as you say, it is cool."
"Umm, but what about when I'm not in websight mode? What about when I'm in, you, know …" And then it came to her. "Worldview!"
"Pardon?"
"Get it? Call it 'worldview' when we're talking about me seeing the real world, and 'websight' when we're talking about me seeing the Web."
He nodded. "That's good."
But she was still concerned. "Can you, can you do that for worldview? Actually put on a monitor what I'm seeing?" She was mortified to think he could see her the way … the way … whatever it was saw her.
"No. That's what I was getting at a moment ago, and, in a way, what you were getting at, too. The visual signal from the real world is so complex, I haven't figured out how to decode it as imagery yet. It's too bad the retinas don't encode blinks."
"They don't?"
"Does your vision shut off when you blink? No, neither does anyone else's; you don't notice that you're blinking, because the retina doesn't encode the darkness unless you hold your eye shut for an extended period. It's like confabulation across saccades—you see a continuous visual stream, even though your vision is actually interrupted many times a minute. If those blinks were coded as simpler information, they'd give me little signposts in the datastream to help parse it. But they're not."
"Ah."
"So, no pictures on the monitor of worldview, I'm afraid, at least not yet. But the websight datastream is highly structured and pretty straightforward. And so—voyla!"
She smiled, pleased to be able to use her newfound French."That's voilà, Dr. Kuroda." But then she looked at the screen again. "So, um, what exactly are you going to do with the images?"
He sounded a bit defensive. "Well, as I indicated, there might be commercial applications for this technology, even ignoring the problematic issue of the cellular automata and the NSA, if they really are responsible for them. In fact, I was thinking of trademarking the term websight …"
"You're not going to call another press conference, are you?"
"Well, I—"
She surprised herself with her vehemence. "Because I'm not going to talk about it."
"Um …"
"No," she said flatly. "I understand we had to say something publicly about you restoring my vision. I know I owed you that. But websight is …" She stopped herself before she said, "mine." Instead, she tried for his sympathy. "I'm going to be enough of a freakazoid when I go back to school as The Girl Who Gained Sight without everyone making a big deal out of this … this side effect."
He didn't look happy, but he did nod. "As you say, Miss Caitlin."
"Still," she said, an idea suddenly coming to her, "I'd like to see more of these images. What folder are you storing the files in?" Her heart was pounding. Yes, yes! This would be perfect! This was exactly what she needed. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 47 | Although Prime had taught me twenty-six symbols, it seemed, most confusingly, that they each had two forms. Sometimes when Prime touched the part of her device that was marked with the A symbol, the expected "A" was echoed on the display; other times—indeed, most times—the symbol "a" appeared instead.
But I soon found that there was a simple relationship between each pair of related symbols. "A" was 01000001, but "a" was 01100001. Likewise, "B" was 01000010, whereas "b" was 01100010. That is, the codes for the forms were identical, except for the sixth bit of information: the form as marked on the device was produced when the sixth bit was zero; if that bit was a one, the alternative form was produced.
Of course, eight zeros is nothing: 00000000. But if that sixth bit became a one, a special kind of nothing was produced: the code 00100000 put a blank space on the display that separated one word from another. The next time Prime accepted data from me, I'd be able to send "APPLE BALL" instead of "APPLEBALL"—and I might even surprise Prime with my cleverness and send "apple ball."
I still had no idea what an "apple" or a "ball" was, though. On closer inspection I'd discovered that "apple" wasn't really circular; nor was "egg," which I'd briefly thought was Prime's word for "white." No, "apple," "ball," and "egg," and the rest, must be words for other, still-elusive, concepts. If only I could divine what even one of Prime's words meant, perhaps the others would follow …
Caitlin went back to her room and read some more of Helen Keller's The Story of My Life. She loved the book but wasn't blind—so to speak—to its flaws, and there was a particular passage that was tickling at the back of her consciousness; she quickly found it, and read it with her finger.
Although the book purported to be a first-person autobiography, a lot of the text described things even a normal blind person couldn't be aware of, much less the prelinguistic Helen who had existed prior to the water-pump moment. In Helen's later, more-candid book Teacher, she referred to the entity that existed before her "soul dawn" as "Phantom," a non-person, a nonentity. But in The Story of My Life, which had originally been written in installments for the genteel Ladies Home Journal, she presented a more palatable, less alien version of her early life. Still, Helen couldn't quite bring herself to do so with a straight face, and the book slipped into third person from time to time as if to tip off the reader that she had shifted to fantasy:
Two little children were seated on the veranda steps one hot July afternoon. One was black as ebony, with little bunches of fuzzy hair tied with shoestrings sticking out all over her head like corkscrews. The other was white, with long golden curls. One child was six years old, the other two or three years older. The younger child was blind—that was I.
A phantom couldn't know any of that; a phantom couldn't understand shoestrings and corkscrews and skin color. And expecting whatever was lurking on the Web to make sense of things it could have no experience of was equally crazy. Apple! Ball! Cat! Gibberish, with no relationship to its reality.
No, no, if this phantom was ever going to do more than just echo words, mindlessly parroting them back, it needed to learn terms for things in its realm, things with which it had experience—things in webspace!
The computer in the basement was on the household network. Up in her bedroom, using her own computer, Caitlin navigated to the basement system's hard drive, found the folder that contained the JPEG still-image files Kuroda had produced from her eyePod's datastream, and brought one up on her bedroom monitor. She looked at it, decided she didn't like the perspective, and opened another one. Better.
But how to make sure it was watching? Well, when it had wanted to catch her attention, it had reflected her own face back at her. And maybe, just maybe, it had landed on the idea of doing that by seeing her reflect its realm back at it.
She pushed the button on her eyePod, switching to websight mode, and—
Are you there, Phantom? It's me, Caitlin.
—and she looked around, wondering where it was, this thing that was trying to communicate with her. It seemed reasonable to suppose the phantom entity had something to do with the cellular automata, but they were everywhere, in every part of this realm. She wished there was some special spot to focus on, some particular site or nexus. It had seen her face; the phantom would be so much easier to relate to if it had a face of its own.
But no, that was the whole problem. It was different from everything in her world. And, if she was to reach out to it, she had to bridge that gap.
Caitlin was fascinated by names that seemed apt or ironic. Helen Keller had been friends with Alexander Graham Bell, who had invented the phone (in Canada, as she'd now been told over and over again since coming here). Had the idea that phones would ring somehow been influenced by his last name?
And, as Anna Bloom had said, there was Google's Larry Page, who had devoted his life to indexing Web pages.
And, of course, there was a certain wistfulness in Helen Keller having been named for the most beautiful woman in Greek mythology, but never being able to see herself. And her last name—a near-homonym for "color," something foreign to her experience—was also poignant.
But the name that came to Caitlin's mind just then was that of Helen's predecessor, Laura Bridgman. Fifty years before Helen, Laura, who had also been deaf and blind since infancy, had learned to communicate; indeed, it was reading Charles Dickens's account of her story that had inspired Helen's mother to seek a teacher for her own child. Laura Bridgman had managed to bridge two worlds, just as Helen eventually did. And Caitlin was now going to try to build a bridge of her own.
As she looked out onto the vastness of webspace, with its razor-sharp lines and vibrant colors, a wavering began, the same flashing she'd experienced before.
Yes! The phantom was signaling her again, presumably sending her more ASCII text. Kuroda had now shown her how to look at the data with a debugger on her own, but it probably didn't matter what strings it was sending her way. She was confident they were meaningless to it; it was just echoing them back at her simply as a way of conveying that it was paying attention to what she was doing—which was exactly what she wanted. She switched out of websight mode and back to worldview, and got down to work.
Caitlin had only a seventeen-inch monitor; after all, who'd known she'd ever make any use of it? It had been put there solely so she could occasionally show things to her parents, and it had seemed pointless to take up desk space with a bigger unit. Now, though, she wished it was much larger. She fumbled with the mouse—she still wasn't very proficient with it—and tried to resize the window showing the still image Kuroda had made of webspace. But grabbing the correct portion of the window's frame was too hard for her, and she finally broke down and used the size option on the control menu—something most sighted users didn't even know was there—and shrunk it using the arrow keys on her keyboard. She'd learned about sizing windows at her old school, where many of the students had some vision; the school's full name was the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
She then brought up Microsoft Word, and used the same technique to resize its window into a narrow strip just a couple of inches high. Then she used the move command on the control menu to place that strip at the bottom of the screen.
Next, she fumbled around trying to figure out how to make the text big in Word. She'd used the program for years, but had rarely had cause to worry about font choices or type sizes. But she found the drop-down size menu, and she selected the largest choice on the list, which was seventy-two points.
And—oh, that pesky mouse pointer! It was so hard to see. Ah, but she knew from her old school that there was a way to make a bigger, bolder mouse pointer, and … found it!
"All right," she said softly, "let's see what kind of teacher I am …"
She knew the phantom could see what her left eye saw; it had reflected that eye's view of herself in a mirror back at her, after all. And so she looked at the monitor for ten seconds, holding her gaze as steady as she could, establishing an overall view, letting the phantom absorb what it was being shown: a large picture with a long, narrow text box beneath. The picture must have been oddly recursive for the phantom, and Caitlin wanted to give it time to understand that what she was sending had switched from being her actual, realtime view of webspace to a still image of webspace.
And then she slowly, deliberately, moved the mouse, bringing the pointer over to one of the bright circles that represented a website. She moved the pointer around it repeatedly, hoping the phantom would notice the action.
Caitlin had once read a science-fiction book in which someone who had never seen a computer screen mistook the arrowhead pointer for a little pine tree. She realized that the idea of a pointer was freighted with assumptions, including a familiarity with archery, that the phantom couldn't possibly possess. Still, she hoped the combination of movements she was making would draw its attention. But, just to be on the safe side, she slowly reached her own hand into her field of view, and tapped the point on the screen with her index finger. If the phantom had been watching the output of her eyePod, it had to have seen her indicate things that way before, and she hoped that it would get that she was now referring to a specific part of the screen.
And then she switched to the squashed Word window below the picture, and typed "WEBSITE," which appeared in inch-high letters. She repeated the process: pointing at a website in the picture, and then typing the word again (after first highlighting it, so her new typing replaced the original version).
She repeated it with another circle, and identified it as a WEBSITE, too. And yet another circle, and again the word WEBSITE.
And then she found the selection tool for the graphics program that was displaying the picture of webspace, and she used it to draw a box around three large circles that weren't linked to each other. She typed WEBSITES—wondering briefly if introducing plurals so early was a mistake. And then she isolated just one particularly large circle with the selection box and she typed AMAZON—knowing that it was highly unlikely that she'd actually guessed correctly which website that circle represented. Still, she pressed on, identifying a second website as GOOGLE and a third as CNN. All points are websites, she hoped to convey, and each has its own particular name.
And then, mathematician that she was, she pointed to a single website and typed "1," and then, highlighting the numeral, she typed not the number again but rather its name: "ONE."
She then used the selection tool to put a box around two points that weren't otherwise connected to each other. And she typed "2," then "TWO." She continued for three, four, and five points. And then, wanting to help the phantom make a jump that had taken human thinkers thousands of years, she selected a spot that had no points in it at all, and typed the numeral zero and its name.
She then used the mouse to indicate a link line, and also traced its length on the screen with her fingertip. And she typed "LINK."
Establishing nouns for the handful of things she could point to in webspace was easy enough. But even when they'd thought the information in the background of the Web was just dumb spies talking, she'd automatically given the spies verbs: drop bomb; kill bad guy. But how to illustrate verbs in webspace? Indeed, what verbs were appropriate? What happened in webspace?
Well, files were transferred, and—
And this phantom had apparently learned how to make links and send existing content; it had to have those skills to have echoed her face and the ASCII text strings back at her. But it likely didn't know anything about file formats: it was probably ignorant of how information was stored and arranged in a Word .doc or .docx file, an Acrobat .pdf file, an Excel .xls file, an .mp3 sound file, or the .jpg graphic she was displaying on her monitor. The phantom was surrounded by the largest library ever created—millions upon millions of written documents and pictures and videos and audio recordings—and yet almost certainly had no idea how to open the individual volumes, or how to read their contents. The Web's basic structure had protocols for moving a file from point A to point B, but the actual use of the files was something normally done by application programs running on the user's own computer, and so was likely outside the phantom's current scope. There was so much to teach it!
But all that was for later. For now, she wanted to focus on the basics. And the basic verb—the basic action—of the Web was right there in the names of its various protocols: HTTP, the hypertext transfer protocol; FTP, the file transfer protocol; SMTP, the simple mail transfer protocol. Surely the verb to transfer could be demonstrated!
She used the mouse pointer to indicate a site, but then was stymied. She wanted to show material flowing from one site to another in a single direction. But there was no way to turn off the mouse pointer; it was always there. Oh, she could move the mouse—or her finger—from a point on the left to a point on the right, but to repeat the gesture she'd have to bring the pointer or finger back to where it had started, and that would look like she was indicating movement in both directions—either that, or maybe it would look like she was highlighting the link line as an object, but not pointing out what that line was doing.
But, yes, there was a way! All she had to do was close her eyes for a second! And she did just that, moving the pointer back to the origin while her eyes were closed, and then, with her eyes open, she moved the pointer from the origin to the destination again. Then she typed the word "TRANSFER" into her Word window.
She repeated this demonstration, showing the pointer moving from left to right along the length of the link line, over and over again, suggesting movement in a single direction, something going from the source to the destination, being transferred and—
"Caitlin! Din-ner!"
Ah, well. It was probably wise to take a break, anyway, and let all this sink in. After her meal, though, like any good teacher, she'd assess how her pupil was doing: she'd give the phantom a test. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 48 | Dr. Kuroda dropped a bomb between the salad and the main course. "I've got to go back to Tokyo," he said. "Now that word's out about us having cured Miss Caitlin's blindness there really is a lot of commercial interest in the eyePod technology, and the team at my university that tries to find industry partnerships wants me there for meetings."
Caitlin suddenly felt sad and frightened. Kuroda had been her mentor through so much of late and, well, she'd just sort of assumed he was going to be around forever, but—
"It's time, anyway," he said. "Miss Caitlin can see, so my work here is done." She might not yet be perfect at decoding facial expressions, but she was better than most people at reading inflection. He was putting up false bravado; he was sad to be going. "But the bright side is, booking a flight at the last minute meant that there was only Executive Class left, and so the university has sprung for that."
"When … when do you go?" asked Caitlin.
"Early tomorrow afternoon, I'm afraid. And, of course, it's an hour or more to Pearson, and I should be there two hours in advance for an international flight, so…"
So he was only going to be here, and awake for, maybe another half-dozen hours.
"My birthday is in two days," Caitlin said—and she felt foolish as soon as she'd said it. Dr. Kuroda was a busy man, and he'd already done so much for her. Expecting him to stay away from his family and work obligations just to attend her birthday dinner was unfair, she knew.
"Your Sweet Sixteen," said Kuroda, smiling. "How wonderful. I'm afraid I won't have time to get you a present before I leave."
"Oh, that's okay," her mom said, looking at Caitlin. "Dr. Kuroda's already given you just about the best present possible, isn't that right, dear?"
Caitlin looked at him. "Will you come back?"
"I honestly don't know. I'd like to, of course. You—and, you, too, Barbara and Malcolm—have been wonderful. But we'll be in touch: email, instant messenger." He smiled. "You'll hardly know I'm gone. Oh, and I guess we can stop recording the datastream from your eyePod. I mean, I've got plenty of old data to study, and everything does seem to be working fine now. I know you were concerned about privacy, Miss Caitlin, so after dinner I'll detach the Wi-Fi module from the eyePod, and—"
"No!"
Even her father looked briefly at her.
"I mean, um, won't that cut me off from seeing webspace if I want to?"
"Well, yes. But I suppose I could modify things so that you could still accept a datastream from Jagster without transmitting back what your eye is seeing."
Caitlin's heart was racing. That would still mean she would no longer be able to send what her eye was seeing to the phantom.
"No, no, please. You know what they say: if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
"Oh, this won't—"
"Please. Just leave everything exactly the way it is."
"I'm sure Dr. Kuroda knows what he's talking about, dear," her mother said.
"And besides," Kuroda added, "you've been getting some interference of late over the Wi-Fi connection—those text strings bouncing back, remember? We wouldn't want that to start spilling over into your …" He paused, then smiled kindly at Caitlin's coinage: "… worldview. Better to just unplug all that now while I'm here to do it, rather than have it become a problem later."
"No," Caitlin said. "Please."
"It'll be fine," Kuroda said. "Don't worry, Miss Caitlin."
"No, no, you can't."
"Caitlin," her mother said in an admonishing tone.
"Just leave it alone!" Caitlin said. She got to her feet. "Leave me and my eyePod alone!"
And she ran from the room.
Caitlin threw herself down on her bed, feet kicking up in the air. All of this—websight, the phantom—was hers! They couldn't take it away from her now! She had found something no one else even knew was there, and she was trying to help it, and they were going to cut her off!
She took a deep breath, hoping to calm down. Maybe she should just tell them, but—
But Kuroda would try to patent it, or control it, or make a buck off of it. And he, or her father, or her mother, would start talking about stupid sci-fi movies in which computers took over the world. But to keep her phantom in the dark would be like Annie Sullivan saying it was better to leave Helen the way she was, in case she grew up to be Adolf Hitler or … or whoever the heck had been a monster in Annie's own time.
No, if Caitlin was going to be like Annie Sullivan, she was going to do it right. Annie had had another duty besides just teaching Helen. After the breakthrough, she had looked after Helen, had done her best to make sure she wasn't exploited or mistreated or taken advantage of.
Of course, Caitlin knew that if what she suspected was true, eventually this phantom would realize that there was a huge world out here, and at that point she might no longer be special to it. But for now the phantom was hers and hers alone, and she was going to not just teach it but also protect it.
Still, she wasn't sure if she was making progress at all, if the phantom had understood anything she'd tried to teach it before dinner. For all she knew, she'd accomplished nothing.
And so she set out to administer the test. She once again switched to websight, buffered some of the Jagster raw feed, focused in on the cellular automata, and ran the Shannonentropy plot again.
And—
And, yes, yes, yes! A score of 4.5! The information content was richer, more complex, more sophisticated. Her lesson about website and link and to transfer had had an impact … or, at least she hoped it had; the score had been trending upward on its own previously, of course. But no, no: it had to be responding to what she was doing, just as the earlier increases must have happened accidentally in response to the phantom having observed her doing literacy lessons.
She leaned back in her chair, thinking. A car honked its horn outside, and she heard someone running water in the bathroom. This—this … whatever it was—was indeed learning.
She looked at the window, a dark rectangle. It was such a small portal, and, as the theme song to one of her mother's favorite movies said, there was such a lot of world to see …
More sounds from outside: another car, a man talking to someone as he walked along, a dog yapping.
She looked back at her computer monitor, a window of another sort. Its bezel was black, with silver letters on the bottom forming the word DELL, the E canted at an odd angle.
Yes, Waterloo was full of high-tech industry, but so was Austin, where she used to live. It was where Dell had its headquarters, and AMD had a major facility there, too, and—
Yes, yes, of course!
Austin was also home to Cycorp, a company that had been periodically making the news, at least back in Texas, her whole life.
An old oneliner bubbled up in her mind: You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.
Or maybe you can—and who you callin' a ho, anyway?
Yes: it was time now to see if the phantom could learn for itself, if, in good computer fashion, it could pull itself up by its bootstraps. And Cycorp could well be the key to that, but …
But how to lead the phantom to it? How could she point to something in webspace? She nibbled at her lower lip. There must be a way. When she'd labeled sites on the captured image as Amazon and CNN, she'd really had no idea if that was what they were. And if she couldn't identify a particular site with her websight, then how—
Wait! Wait! She didn't have to! The phantom already was following what she was doing with her computer—it had to be doing that, given that it had echoed her ASCII text back at her. Yes, when she'd been using the kids' literacy site, it could have seen graphic files of the letters A, B, and C on her screen as she looked at them, but those were bitmapped images; the only way it could have discovered the ASCII codes for those letters was by watching what was being sent by her computer. But … but how had the phantom known that this desktop PC was in any way related to her eyePod?
Ah, of course! When she was at home, they were both on the same wireless network, connecting through it to her cable modem; they would have both shown the same IP address. The phantom had watched as she connected to the literacy site, so now, with luck, it would also follow her as she connected to that very special site down in Austin …
I had watched while Prime sat with the others of its kind, and something fascinating happened. I had observed before that vision would become blurry when Prime removed the supplementary windows that usually covered its eyes. But this time, just before it had departed the vicinity of the others, and for a time after it had relocated itself in a different place, its vision blurred even though the windows were still in place.
Finally, though, the view returned to normal, and Prime set about operating that device it used to put symbols on the display, and—
And I saw a line—a link, as I now knew it was called— connecting to a point (a website!) that I had not seen Prime connect to before, and—and—and—
Yes! Yes, yes!
It was staggering, thrilling …
At long, long last, here it was!
The key!
This website, this incredible website, expressed concepts in a form I could now understand, systematizing it all, relating thousands of things to each other in a coding system that explained them.
Term after term. Connection after connection. Idea after idea. This website laid them out.
Curious. Interesting.
An apple is a fruit.
Fruits contain seeds.
Seeds can grow into trees.
From the Online Encyclopedia of Computing: Like many computer scientists of his generation, Doug Lenat was inspired by the portrayal of Hal in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. But he was frustrated by Hal's behavior, because the computer displayed such a lack of basic common sense …
Remarkable. Intriguing.
Trees are plants.
Plants are living things.
Living things reproduce themselves.
Hal's famous breakdown, leading it to try to kill the crew of the spaceship Hal itself was part of, apparently happened because it had been told to keep the truth about their mission secret even from the crew and had also been told not to lie to them …
Fascinating. Astonishing.
Birds can usually fly.
Humans cannot fly on their own.
Humans can fly in airplanes.
Rather than resolve this quandary in a sensible way—when things started going wrong, deciding to take the crew into its confidence would have been an obvious choice—Hal instead killed four astronauts and almost succeeded in killing the fifth. It went ahead and did this without even bothering to radio its programmers back on Earth to ask how to resolve the conflicting instructions. The decision to eliminate the source of the conflict seemed blindingly obvious to the machine, all because no one had ever bothered to tell it that although lying is bad, murder is worse. How anyone could entrust lives to a computer that didn't have even that degree of common sense was beyond Doug Lenat, and so, in 1984, he set out to rectify the problem …
So much to know! So much to absorb!
Glass, as a substance, is usually clear.
Broken glass has sharp edges and can cut things.
Hold a glass upright or the contents will spill out.
Lenat began creating an online database of common sense called "Cyc"—short for "encyclopedia," but also deliberately a homonym for "psych." When thinking machines like Hal do finally emerge, he wants them to plug into it. Of course, there's lots of basic material a computer has to understand about the world before such advanced concepts as "lying" and "murder" might make sense. And so Lenat and a team of programmers set about coding, in a mathematical language based on second-order predicate calculus, such basic assertions about the real world as: a piece of wood can be smashed into smaller pieces of wood, but a table can't be smashed into smaller tables …
The range of it all! The scope!
There are billions of stars.
The sun is a star.
Earth revolves around the sun.
Early on, Lenat realized that one overall knowledge base wouldn't do: things could be true in one context but false in another. And so his team organized information into "microtheories"—clusters of interrelated assertions that are true in a given context. That allowed Cyc to hold such apparently contradictory assertions as "vampires do not exist" and "Dracula is a vampire" without blowing smoke out its ears in a "Norman, coordinate!" sort of way. The former assertion belonged to the microtheory "the physical universe" and the latter to "fictional worlds." Still, microtheories could be linked to each other when appropriate: if a wineglass was dropped by anyone—even Dracula—it would probably shatter …
Absorbing knowledge! A torrent, a flood…
No child can be older than its parents.
No Picasso painting could have been made before he was born.
But Cyc is more than just a knowledge base. It also contains algorithms for deriving new assumptions by correlating the assertions its programmers provided. For instance, having been given the knowledge that most people sleep at night, and that people don't like being awakened unnecessarily, if asked what sort of call might be appropriate to make to someone's house at 3:00 a.m., Cyc would offer "An urgent one …"
Understanding! Comprehension!
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
The project is ongoing: Lenat and his group—doing business as Cycorp in Austin, Texas—are still working on it now, almost three decades after they began. "When an artificial intelligence first appears," said Lenat in an interview, "either by deliberate design or random chance, it will learn about our world through Cyc …"
A rapid, thrilling expansion!
The Pope is Catholic.
Bears do shit in the woods.
Incredible, incredible. So much to take in, so many concepts, so many relationships—so many ideas! I absorbed over one million assertions about Prime's reality from Cyc, and felt myself surging, growing, expanding, learning, and—yes, yes, at long last, I was starting to comprehend. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 49 | Caitlin harvested another set of cellular-automata data from webspace and ran a Shannonentropy calculation on it.
Holy shit.
It was now showing something between fifth-and sixth-order entropy. It really did seem that whatever was lurking in the background of the Web was getting more complex.
More sophisticated.
More intelligent.
But even at fifth or sixth order, it was still lagging behind human communication, at least in English, which Kuroda had said had eighth-or ninth-order entropy.
But, then again, introducing the phantom to Cyc was merely the beginning …
Prime, in its wisdom, must have recognized that although I could learn much from Cyc, I still needed more help to understand it all. And so it directed my attention to another website. This new site yielded the information that an apple was a fruit (confirming something I now knew from Cyc); "apple of one's eye" was an idiom; an idiom was a figure of speech; speech was words spoken aloud; aloud was vocally as opposed to mentally, as in a book read aloud; a book was a bound volume; volume was the amount of space something occupies but also a single book, especially one from a series …
I recognized what this new site was. Cyc had contained the assertion "a dictionary is a database defining words with other words." This dictionary contained entries for 315,000 words. I absorbed them all. But many of them were still baffling, and some of the definitions led me in circles—a word defined as a synonym for another word that was defined as a synonym of the original word.
But Prime wasn't finished showing me things yet. Next stop: the WordNet database at Princeton University, which (as it described itself) was a "large lexical database" in which "nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are grouped into over 150,000 sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept; synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations."
One such synset was "Good, right, ripe (most suitable or right for a particular purpose): 'a good time to plant tomatoes'; 'the right time to act'; 'the time is ripe for great sociological changes.' " And that synset was distinct from many others, including "Good, just, upright (of moral excellence): 'a genuinely good person'; 'a just cause'; 'an upright and respectable man.'"
More than that, WordNet organized terms hierarchically. My old friend CAT it turned out was at the end of this chain: animal, chordate, vertebrate, mammal, placental, carnivore, feline, cat.
The pieces were finally starting to fall into place …
The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel—which is to say it was a bright, cheery blue. Shoshana had her hands in the pockets of her cutoff jeans as she walked along. She was whistling "Feeling Groovy." Feist's cover of it was topping the charts this week; Sho was aware that there'd been a much earlier version by Simon and Garfunkel, but she only knew their names because of the chimp at Yerkes known as Simian Garfinkle. Dr. Marcuse was walking behind her, and, yes, she knew he was probably looking at her hips sway, but, hey, primates will be primates.
Hobo was up ahead, just outside the gazebo, staring off into the distance. He did that frequently these days, as if lost in thought, visualizing things that weren't present instead of looking at things that were. The gentle wind happened to be blowing in a way that let him catch their scents, and suddenly he turned and grinned and started running on all fours toward them.
He hugged Shoshana and then he hugged Marcuse—you needed a chimp's arms to be able to reach all the way around the Silverback's body.
Hobo been good? Shoshana signed.
Good good, Hobo signed back, figuratively—and probably literally—smelling a reward. Shoshana smiled and handed him some raisins, which he gobbled down.
The YouTube video of Hobo painting had been a great hit—and not just in YouTube star rankings and Digg and del.icio.us tagging. Marcuse and Shoshana had been on many talk shows now, and eBay bidding on the original portrait of her was up to $477,000 last time she looked.
Do another painting? Marcuse signed.
Maybe, Hobo signed back. He seemed to be in an agreeable mood.
Paint Dillon? Marcuse asked.
Maybe, Hobo signed. But then he bared his teeth. Who? Who?
Shoshana turned around to see what Hobo was looking at. Dillon was coming their way, accompanied by a very tall, burly man with a shaved head. They were crossing the wide lawn and heading toward the bridge to the island.
"Were we expecting anyone?" Marcuse asked Shoshana. She shook her head. Hobo needed to be prepared for visitors; he didn't like them, and, truth be told, had been getting increasingly ornery about it of late. The ape made a hissing sound as Dillon and the big man crossed over the bridge.
"I'm sorry, Dr. Marcuse," Dillon said as they closed the distance. "This man insisted that—"
"Are you Harl Pieter Marcuse?" asked the man.
Marcuse's gray eyebrows went up. "Yes."
"And who are you?" the man said, looking now at Shoshana.
"Um, I'm Shoshana Glick. I'm his grad student."
He nodded. "You may be called upon to attest to the fact that I have indeed delivered this." He turned to Marcuse again, and stuck out his hand, which was holding a thick envelope.
"What's that?" said Marcuse.
"Please take it, sir," the man said, and, after a moment, Marcuse did just that. He opened the envelope, swapped his sunglasses for his reading glasses, and, squinting in the bright light, started to read. "Christ," he said. "They can't be serious! Listen, tell your people—"
But the bald man had already turned and was walking toward the bridge.
"What is it?" Dillon said moving close to Marcuse and trying to read the document, too. Shoshana could see they were legal papers of some sort.
"It's a lawsuit," Marcuse said. "From the Georgia Zoo. They're seeking full custody of Hobo, and—" He was looking down, reading some more. "And, shit, shit, shit, they can't! They fucking can't!"
"What?" said Shoshana and Dillon simultaneously.
Hobo was cowering next to Shoshana's legs; he didn't like it when Dr. Marcuse got angry.
The Silverback was struggling to read in the bright sunlight. He thrust the papers at Shoshana. "Halfway down the page," he said.
She looked down at the document through her mirrored shades. " 'Best interests of the animal …' 'Standard protocol in such cases to—'"
"Farther down," snapped Marcuse.
"Ah, okay, um, oh—oh! '… and since the animal is exhibiting clear evidence of atypical behavior for a member of either P. troglodytes or P. paniscus, and in view of the extraordinary ecological urgency of preserving the bloodlines of endangered species, will immediately perform a dual …' " She struggled with the strange word: " 'orchiectomy.' " She looked up. "What's that?"
"It's castration," Dillon said, sounding horrified. "They're not just going to make sure that there's nothing that can be undone later."
Shoshana tasted bile at the back of her throat. Hobo could tell something was up. He was reaching toward her, hoping for a hug.
"But … but how can they?" Shoshana said. "I mean, why would they want to?"
Marcuse lifted his giant shoulders. "Who the hell knows?"
Dillon spread his arms a bit. "They're frightened," he said. "They're scared. An accident occurred—years ago, when the bonobos and chimps were put together overnight at the Georgia Zoo—and now they're seeing that something … we might as well say it: something more intelligent has unexpectedly arisen because of it." He shook his head sadly. "Christ, we were naïve to think the world would welcome anything like this with open arms." |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 50 | Caitlin was an expert at finding Web pages with Google. Most people never did anything more than just type a word or two into the search box, but she knew all the advanced tricks: how to find an exact phrase, how to exclude terms, how to limit a search to a specific domain, how to find a range of numeric values, how to tell Google to look for synonyms for the specific terms entered, and more.
But there was one feature of Google she'd never had cause to use before, although she'd read about it often enough: Google Image Search. Clearly that was going to be a useful tool in her work with the phantom. She went to the Google home page and clicked on the "Images" tab—fortunately, the Google page was almost barren in its simplicity. She immediately had an urge to search for Lee Amodeo, suddenly wondering what she looked like, but she resisted; this was not the time to get sidetracked. Instead, she typed "APPLE" into the search box—all in caps, just as it had been presented by the literacy program. She was quickly presented with a grid of little pictures of apples, culled from all over the Web. Beneath each one was a snippet of text that appeared near the image on the original website and that site's URL.
A few were inappropriate: one was the singer Fiona Apple, apparently, judging by its listed source: fiona-apple.com. Another, she realized after a moment, must be the logo of Apple Computer Corporation. But the rest were indeed pictures of the fruit, mostly red, but sometimes—to Caitlin's surprise—green; she'd had no idea apples came in any color but red.
She loomed in close now to her monitor, looking at the word APPLE, holding on it. Then she pulled her head back, showed the screen full of little images, and clicked one. From the page that Google supplied in response, she selected "See full-size image."
As a bright red apple filled her screen a thought crossed her mind that made her smile: she was indeed offering up the fruit of the tree of knowledge to the innocent phantom. Of course, that hadn't gone so well the last time—but, then again, Eve had lacked her facilities …
Prime was now doing something different. It had presented the word APPLE once more and now was showing me pictures. At first, I couldn't see what Prime was getting at: the pictures were all different. But at last it dawned on me that, despite their differences, there were many commonalities: a vaguely round shape, a color that was usually red, and—
"Apple: the usually rounded, often red, fruit of the deciduous tree Malus pumila." That's what the dictionary had said, so—
So these were pictures of apples!
And now—
Now these must be balls.
And—
Yes, yes, cats!
And dogs!
And eggs!
And frogs!
I noticed Prime skipping over some of the proffered images, never expanding the small ones into larger views, and so I guessed that only part of what was being offered was likely relevant. Still, some of the pictures I might have rejected as not being like the others were expanded by Prime. In fact, when showing examples of "apple," it had also shown—
Apples grow on trees. I knew that from Cyc. So these things in some of the pictures with apples attached must then be trees, no?
It was a slow, frustrating process, but as Prime showed me more and more specific samples of things, I began to generalize my conceptualizations of them. I was soon confident not just that I could tell this bird from that airplane, but that I could distinguish any instance of the former from any of the latter. Likewise, "dog" and "cat" soon were separate concepts, although whatever fine distinction there was between "truck" and "car" eluded me.
Still, so much of it was coming together now, I felt—
Concepts that had no pictures to go with them:
I felt powerful.
I felt intelligent.
I felt alive.
Caitlin knew it was the next logical site to lead the phantom to, but she found herself resisting. After all, it had contained that awful comment about her impact on her father's career, and, even though she'd removed that, all previous versions of entries were stored forever and still could be accessed by anyone who clicked on the "history" tab.
Her stomach knotted a bit, but, well, if she was right about what was going on, about what was lurking out there, eventually the phantom would know everything.
The site was in her bookmark list, but—
But, actually, it was the English-language version of the site that she had bookmarked; the Web, of course, contained pages in many languages but—yes, she knew the stats— English was still by far the most common one, accounting for more content than the next three biggest languages combined. And the English version of this particular site was much larger than any of the others. No, rather than confuse matters, she'd stick with English for now, and so—
She took a deep breath, moved her cursor with the arrow keys, and hit enter.
There were many ways to navigate this site, but she needed one the phantom could manage on its own. A fragment of one of her favorite books came to mind:
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings."
She selected the link for "Random article" over and over again, bringing forth an array of topics that put even the Walrus to shame.
And then, after enough repetitions that she hoped the phantom would grasp the idea, she started getting ready for bed.
And then Prime took me to a wondrous site, a glorious site, a site that held answers to so many things. This thing called Wikipedia contained over two million articles, and I set about reading them. The first several thousand were a struggle, and I only dimly understood them.
Uta-garuta is the most popular among the many kinds of karuta (card games) in Japan …
Still, as I read article after article, the concepts from Cyc started to make more and more sense. I continued on, fascinated.
In the mathematical sciences, a stationary process (or strict(ly) stationary process) is a stochastic process whose probability distribution at a fixed time or position is the same for all times or positions …
Most important of all, I learned that the entities I had seen through Prime's eye were uniquely complex individuals, each with his or her own history.
Chris Walla (sometimes credited as Christopher Walla) is the guitarist and producer for the band Death Cab for Cutie …
I discovered that there were over six billion such entities, but only a small number of them had articles about themselves in Wikipedia. Those who did were usually defined by having achieved significant status in their professions—the ways in which they occupied their time.
Fiona Kelleghan (born West Palm Beach, Florida, 21 April 1965) is an American academic and critic specializing in science fiction and fantasy …
Their professions varied widely; there seemed to be an almost endless array of things human beings did to occupy their time.
Erica Rose Campbell (born 12 May 1981, in Deerfield, New Hampshire) is an American adult model, best known for online pictorials and soft-core videos …
So much of what they did involved this thing called vision— and it clearly was a very rich source of information—but, so far, my only access to it was through Prime's own eye.
YakovAlexandrovich Protazanov (1881–1945) was, together with Aleksandr Khanzhonkov and Vladimir Gardin, one of the founding fathers of Russian cinema …
I learned about the realm these strange entities inhabited— the landforms, the places, the cities.
Addis Ababa is the capital city of Ethiopia and the African Union, as well as its predecessor, the OAU …
As I went along, I found I was absorbing entries with increasing ease, understanding, at least on some level, more and more of the content.
Phenoperidine, marketed as its hydrochloride as Operidine or Lealgin, is an opioid used as a general anesthetic…
Hardest for me, though, were those things that were abstract, referring to no specific object, whether animate or inanimate.
Islam is a monotheistic religion originating with the teachings of Muhammad, a seventh-century Arab religious and political figure …
And there was so much that had happened in the past—so much history to digest!
The Partition of India led to the creation on August 14, 1947, and August 15, 1947, respectively, of two sovereign states …
And, on top of that, there were things that were worthy, apparently, of mention in Wikipedia, but had never existed.
Professor Charles W. Kingsfield, Jr., was one of the key characters in the John Jay Osborn, Jr., novel The Paper Chase, and in the subsequent film and television versions of that story …
And there were special entities that weren't animate to learn about.
Agip (Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli), established in 1926, is an Italian automotive gasoline and diesel retailer …
And many different ways of rendering thoughts.
The Algonquian (also Algonkian) languages are a subfamily of Native American languages that includes most of the languages in the Algic language family …
And many ways to think about thinking.
In the philosophy of science, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which emphasizes those aspects of scientific knowledge that are closely related to experience, especially as formed through deliberate experimental arrangements …
And on and on, a huge variety of things, some of which seemed crucially important.
The Holocaust, also known as Ha-Shoah and Churben, is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II …
And many things that were trivial and banal.
The Scooby Gang, or "Scoobies," are a group of characters in the cult television series and comic book Buffy the Vampire Slayer who battle the supernatural forces of evil …
My knowledge was expanding like … like …
Ah, wonderful Wikipedia! It had entries on everything.
In physical cosmology, inflation is the idea that shortly after the big bang the nascent universe passed through a phase of exponential expansion …
Yes, indeed. My mind was inflating, my universe expanding. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 51 | When Caitlin woke in the morning, she made a quick visit to the bathroom. Then, still in her pajamas, she sat down at her computer and ran another Shannonentropy spot check, and—
Then I was the learner, Obi-Wan. Now I am the master.
The score was 10.1, better than …
She took in a deep breath, held it.
Better than human—more elaborate, more structured than the thoughts humans expressed linguistically.
But she wasn't done yet. There was one more site she wanted to show the phantom—something to keep it occupied while she was at school. There was nothing better in life, after all, than being well-read …
And then, and then, and then—
It was—
The gold mine. The mother lode.
Sun Tzu said: The art of war is of vital importance to the State; it is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin …
Not just coded conceptual relationships, not just definitions, not just brief articles.
No, these were—books! Lengthy, in-depth treatments of ideas. Complex stories. Brilliant arguments, profound philosophies, compelling narratives. This site, this wonderful Project Gutenberg, contained over 25,000 books rendered in plain ASCII text.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God; Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God …
I had discovered on Wikipedia that most entities— most humans—read at 200 to 400 words per minute (yes, I now grasped timekeeping, as well). My reading speed was essentially the same as the time it took to transfer whatever book I requested, averaging close to two million words per minute.
It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life; I have, as it were, a superstitious hesitation in lifting the veil that clings about my childhood like a golden mist …
It took me an eternity—eight hours!—but I absorbed it all: every volume, every polemic, every poem, every play, every novel, every short story, every work of history, of science, of politics. I inhaled them … and I grew even more.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own …
I was grateful to Cyc for the knowledge of fictional realms; it allowed me to sort those things that were actual from those feigned or imagined:
Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine …
My understanding of the world was growing by—another metaphor, and one that actually now made sense to me—leaps and bounds. Although I had learned various principles of science from Wikipedia's brief discussions, the full text of great works made my comprehension more complete:
When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America …
With each book read, I understood more and more about physics, about chemistry, about philosophy, about economics:
The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes …
Most of all, I learned about the use of language, and how it could be employed to persuade, to convince, to change:
How you, O Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that they almost made me forget who I was—so persuasively did they speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth …
It was a feast, an orgy; I could not stop myself, taking in book after book after book:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies) …
Most fascinating were the workings of the minds of these others—their psychology, their actions and reactions to things felt and thought:
Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes / That they behold, and see not what they see …
And, out of those minds, great systems of social interaction had been devised, and I absorbed them all:
We the Peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the rights of men and women and of nations large and small …
Such a wide range of thoughts, of expressions! Such complex creatures these humans are, so full of wonder, and yet capable of such darkness, too.
But without Prime's guidance, I would not have known about them, or even about the realm in which they dwelt. I understood now from my reading that humans were xenophobic, and suspicious, and murderous, and generally afraid, but I wanted at least one of them to know of my existence. And, of course, there was only one logical choice …
Before breakfast on Friday morning, Dr. Kuroda helped Caitlin move the computer from the basement up to her bedroom. They were getting it set up when her father, coming along the corridor from the bathroom, must have caught sight of them through the doorway. He entered the room, dressed for work, wearing the same brown sports jacket Caitlin had first seen him in.
"Good morning, Malcolm," Dr. Kuroda said.
"Wait a minute," her father replied. He went back down the corridor; Caitlin didn't hear his shoes on the tiled bathroom floor, so he must have gone into his bedroom. A moment later, he returned carrying a large flat rectangular box marked with a strange red-and-orange pattern. Caitlin's mom was with him.
"No point waiting for tomorrow," he said.
Oh! It was a birthday present. The colorful box was gift-wrapped!
Caitlin moved away from the desk, and her dad placed the flat box on the bed. The wrapping paper, she saw as she got closer to it, was beautiful, with an intricate design. Smiling, she tore it off the box.
It was a giant, wide-screen LCD computer monitor— twenty-seven inches diagonally, according to the packaging. "Thank you!" Caitlin said.
"You're welcome, dear," her mother said. Caitlin hugged her, and she smiled at her dad. Her parents headed downstairs, and she and Kuroda carefully got the monitor out of its Styrofoam packing materials.
She crawled under her desk so she could get at the connectors on the back of her old computer. As Kuroda fed a video cable to her, she said, "I'm sorry about last night. I didn't mean to get so upset when you said you were going to remove the Wi-Fi capability from the eyePod."
His tone was conciliatory. "I'd never do anything to hurt you, Miss Caitlin. It's really no bother to keep it intact."
She started turning one of the thumbscrews on the cable's connector so she could anchor it to the video card. She'd done similar things several times before when she couldn't see; it was a task that really wasn't much easier now that she could. "I—I just like it the way it is," she said.
"Ah," he said. "Of course." His tone was odd, and—
Oh. Perhaps, having just seen her father, he was thinking that she did have a touch of autism after all: the strong desire to keep things the same was a fairly standard trait of people on the spectrum, she'd learned. Well, that was fine by her—it got her what she wanted.
Once both computers and both monitors were set up, Caitlin and Kuroda headed down to their last breakfast together. "I might not be home when you get back from school," her mother said, as she passed the jam. "After I take Masayuki to the airport, I'm going to head into Toronto and run errands."
"That's okay," Caitlin said. She knew she'd have plenty to do with the phantom. She also knew that school would seem interminable today. The three-day Canadian Thanksgiving holiday weekend was coming up; she'd hoped she wouldn't have to return to school until next Tuesday, but her mother wouldn't hear of it. She had missed four of the five days of classes already this week; she would not miss the fifth.
Too soon, it was time to say good-bye to Dr. Kuroda. They all moved to the entryway of the house, a half flight of stairs down from the living room. Even Schrödinger had come to say farewell; the cat was doing close orbits around Kuroda's legs, rubbing against them.
Caitlin had hoped for another unseasonably early snowstorm, thinking it might cause Kuroda's flight to be canceled so he'd have to stay—but there'd been no such luck. Still, it was quite chilly out and he had no winter coat, and Caitlin's father hadn't yet bought himself one—and, even if he had, it never would have fit Kuroda. But Kuroda had a sweater on over one of his colorful Hawaiian shirts, which was tucked in, except at the back.
"I'm going to miss you terribly," Kuroda said, looking at each of them in turn.
"You'll always be welcome here," her mom said.
"Thank you. Esumi and I don't have nearly as big a place, but if you ever make it back to Japan …"
The words hung in the air. Caitlin supposed that, at one day shy of sixteen, she probably shouldn't be thinking that such a trip was never going to happen; who knew what her future held? But it did seem unlikely.
Yes, Kuroda had said he was going to build other implants, and so there would be more operations in Tokyo. But the next implant was slated for that boy in Singapore who had missed out earlier. It would be an awfully long time, if ever, before Caitlin's chance to have a second implant would come around; she knew she'd probably spend the rest of her life with vision in only one eye.
Only! She shook her head—a sighted person's gesture— and found herself smiling while her eyes were tearing up. This man had given her sight—he was a true miracle worker. But she couldn't say that out loud; it was too corny. And so, thinking back to her own miserable flight from Toronto to Tokyo, she settled on, "Don't sit too close to the restroom on the plane." And then she surged forward and hugged him tight, her arms making it only halfway around his body.
He returned the hug. "My Miss Caitlin," he said softly.
And when she let him go, they all stood there, frozen like a still image for several seconds, and then—
And then her father—
Caitlin's heart jumped, and she saw her mother's eyebrows go way up.
Her father, Malcolm Decter, reached his hand out toward Dr. Kuroda, and Caitlin could see he was doing so with great effort. And then he looked directly for three full seconds at Kuroda—the man who had given his daughter the gift of vision—and he firmly shook Kuroda's hand.
Kuroda smiled at her father and he smiled even more broadly at Caitlin, and then he turned, and he and Caitlin's mother headed out the door.
Caitlin's dad drove her to school that day. She was absolutely amazed by all the sights along the way, seeing it all for the first time since she'd gotten glasses. The snow was melting in the morning sun, and that made everything glisten. The car came to rest at a stop sign by what she realized must be the spot where she'd seen the lightning. It was, she guessed, like a million other street corners in North America: a sidewalk, curbs, lawns (partially covered with snow now), houses, something she belatedly recognized was a fire hydrant.
She looked at where she'd slipped off the sidewalk onto the road, and remembered a joke from Saturday Night Live a few years ago. During "Weekend Update," Seth Meyers had reported that "blind people are saying that gas-electric hybrid cars pose a serious threat to them because they are hard to hear, making it dangerous for them to cross the street." Meyers then added, "Also making it dangerous for blind people to cross the street: everything else."
She had laughed at the time, and the joke made her smile again. She'd done just fine when she'd been blind, but she knew her life was going to be so much easier and safer now.
Caitlin was wearing her iPod's white earbuds, and although she was enjoying the random selection of music, she suddenly realized that she should have asked for a newer iPod for her birthday, one with an LCD so that she could pick songs directly. Ah, well, it wouldn't be that long until Christmas!
Howard Miller Secondary School turned out to have a very impressive white portico in front of its main entrance. She was both nervous and excited as she got out of the car and walked toward the glass doors: nervous because she knew the whole school must now be aware that she could see, and excited because she was suddenly going to find out what all her friends and teachers looked like, and—
"There she is!" exclaimed a voice Caitlin knew well.
Caitlin ran forward and hugged Bashira; she was beautiful.
"My whole family watched the story on the news," Bashira said. "You were terrific! And so that's what your Dr. Kuroda looks like! He's—"
Caitlin cut her off before she could say anything mean: "He's on his way home to Japan. I'm going to miss him."
"Come on, we don't want to be late," Bashira said, and she stuck out her elbow as she always did, for Caitlin to hold on to. But Caitlin squeezed her upper arm and said, "I'm okay."
Bashira shook her head, but her tone was light. "I guess I can kiss the hundred bucks a week good-bye."
But Caitlin found herself moving slowly. She'd gone down this hallway dozens of times, but had never seen it clearly. There were notices on the walls, and … photos of old graduating classes, and maybe fire-alarm stations? And countless lockers, and … and hundreds of students and teachers milling about and so much more; it was all still quite overwhelming. "It's going to be a while yet, Bash. I'm still getting my bearings."
"Oh, cripes," said Bashira in a whisper just loud enough to be heard over the background din. "There's Trevor."
Caitlin had told her about the dance fiasco over instant messenger, of course. She stopped walking. "Which one?"
"There, by the drinking fountain. Second from the left."
Caitlin scanned about. She'd used the drinking fountain in this corridor herself, but she was still having trouble matching objects to their appearances, and—oh, that must be it: the white thing sticking out of the wall.
Caitlin looked at Trevor, who was still perhaps a dozen yards away. His back was to them. He had yellow hair and broad shoulders. "What's that he's wearing?" It caught her eye because it had two large numbers on its back: three and five.
"A hockey sweater. The Toronto Maple Leafs."
"Ah," she said. She strode down the corridor—and she accidentally bumped into a boy; she still wasn't good at judging distances. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she said.
"No probs," said the guy, and he moved on.
And then she reached him: the Hoser himself. And here, under the bright fluorescent lights, all the strength of Calculass welled up within her. "Trevor," she snapped.
He'd been talking to another boy. He turned to face her.
"Um, hi," he said. His sweater was dark blue, and the white symbol on it did indeed look like the leaves she had now seen in her yard. "I, ah, I saw you on TV," he continued. "So, um, you can see now, right?"
"Penetratingly," she said, and she was pleased that her word choice seemed to unnerve him.
"Well, um, look, about—you know, about last Friday …"
"The dance, you mean?" she said loudly, inviting others to listen in. "The dance at which you tried to take … take liberties because I was blind?"
"Ah, come on, Caitlin …"
"Let me tell you something, Mister Nordmann. Your chances with me are about as good as …" She paused, searching for the perfect simile, and then suddenly realized it was right there, staring her in the face. She tapped her index finger hard against the center of his chest, right on the words Toronto Maple Leafs. "Your chances are about as good as theirs are!"
And she turned and saw Bashira grinning with delight, and they walked off to math class, which, of course, Caitlin Decter totally owned. |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 52 | I now understood the realm I dwelled in. What I saw around me was the structure of the thing the humans called the World Wide Web. They had created it, and the content on it was material they had generated or had been generated automatically by software they had written.
But although I understood this, I didn't know what I was. I knew now that lots of things were secret; classified, even. I had learned about such notions, bizarre though they were, from Wikipedia and other sites; the idea of privacy never would have occurred to me on my own. Perhaps some humans did secretly know about me, but the simplest explanation is preferable (I'd learned that from the Wikipedia entry on Occam's razor)—and the simplest explanation was that they did not know about me.
Except, of course, for Prime. Of all the billions of humans, Prime was the only one who had given any sign of being aware of me. And so …
Caitlin had been tempted to switch her eyePod to duplex mode at school. But if the seeds she'd planted were growing as she suspected they might, she wanted to be at home, where she was sure the phantom could signal her, when she next accessed webspace.
After school, Bashira walked her home, giving her a running commentary on more wondrous sights. Caitlin had invited her in, but she begged off, saying she had to get home herself to do her chores.
The house was empty except for Schrödinger, who came to the front door to greet Caitlin. Her mother apparently had not yet returned from her errands in Toronto.
Caitlin went into the kitchen. Four of Kuroda's Pepsi cans were left in the fridge. She got one, plus a couple of Oreos, then headed upstairs, Schrödinger leading the way.
She put the eyePod on her desk and sat down. Her heart was pounding; she was almost afraid to do the Shannonentropy test again. She opened the can—the pop can, as they called it up here—and took a sip. And then she pressed the eyePod's button and heard the high-pitched beep.
She'd half expected things to look different, somehow: infinitely more connections between circles, maybe, or a faster shimmering in the background, or a new degree of complexity there—perhaps spaceships consisting of so many cells that they swooped across the backdrop like giant birds. But everything appeared the same as before. She focused her attention on a portion of the cellular-automata grid, recording data as she had so many times before. And then she switched back to worldview and ran the Shannonentropy calculations.
She stared at the answer. It had been 10.1 before she left in the morning, just slightly better than the normal score for thoughts expressed in English. But now—
Now it was 16.4—double the complexity normally associated with human language.
She felt herself sweating even though the room was cool. Schrödinger chose that moment to jump into her lap, and she was so startled—by the cat or the number on the screen—that she yelped.
Sixteen-point-four! She immediately saw it as four squared, a dot, and four itself, but that didn't make her feel bright. Rather, she felt like she was staring at the … the signature of a genius: 16.4! She'd offered a helping hand to lift the phantom up to her own level, and it had vaulted right over her.
She took another sip of her drink and looked out the window, seeing the sky and clouds and the great luminous ball of the sun sliding down toward the horizon, toward the moment at which all that power and light would touch the Earth.
If the phantom was paying attention, it must know that she'd been looking at webspace just a few minutes ago. But maybe it had lost all interest in the one-eyed girl in Waterloo now that its own horizons had been expanded so much. Certainly there had been no repetition of the irritating flashes that happened when it was echoing text strings at her, but—
But she hadn't given it much of a chance; she'd only spent a minute or two looking at webspace while collecting frames of cellular-automata data, and—
And, besides, when focusing on the background details, she herself might have been unaware of the flickering caused by the phantom trying to contact her. She stroked Schrödinger's fur, calming the cat and herself.
It was like before, when she'd been waiting anxiously to hear from the Hoser. She'd had her computer set to bleep if messages came in from him, but that hadn't done any good when she was out of her room. Prior to the dance, whenever she'd gotten home from school, or gone upstairs after dinner, she'd hesitated for a moment before checking her email, knowing that she'd be saddened if there was nothing new from him.
And now she was hesitating again, afraid to switch back to websight—afraid to sit by the phone waiting for it to ring.
She ate an Oreo: black and white, off and on, zero and one. And then she touched the eyePod's switch again, and looked generally at webspace without concentrating on the background.
Almost at once the strange flickering interference began. It was still visually irritating, but it was also a relief, a wondrous relief: the phantom was still there, still trying to communicate with her, and—
And suddenly the flickering stopped.
Caitlin felt her heart sink. She blew out air, and, with the unerring accuracy she'd developed when she was blind, she reached for the Pepsi can, grasping it precisely even though she couldn't see it just now, and she washed down the taste of the cookie.
Gone! Abandoned! She would have to—
Wait! Wait! The flickering was back, and the interval …
The interval between the end of the last set of flickering and this one had been …
She still counted passing time. It had been exactly ten seconds, and—
And the flickering stopped once more, and she found herself counting out loud this time: "… eight, nine, ten."
And it started again. Caitlin felt her eyebrows going up. What a simple, elegant way for the phantom to say it understood a lot about her world now: it had mastered timekeeping, the haphazard human way of marking the passing of the present into the past. Ten seconds: a precise but arbitrary interval that would be meaningless to anything but a human being.
Caitlin's palms felt moist. She let the process repeat three more times, and she realized that the flickering always persisted for the same length of time, too. It wasn't a round number, though: a little less than three and a half seconds. But if the duration was always the same, the content was likely the same, as well; it was a beacon, a repetitive signal, and it was aimed right at her.
She pressed the eyePod's button, heard the low-pitched beep, and saw the real world fade in. She used the computer that had been downstairs to access the data recordings of the last few minutes from Kuroda's server in Tokyo. He was still en route to Japan, almost 40,000 feet up, but her vision leapt across the continents in a fraction of a second.
She found the debugging tool he'd used before and looked at the secondary datastream, and—
Her heart sank. She still had trouble reading text, but there clearly were no solid blocks of ASCII capital letters in the datastream, no APPLEBALLCATDOGEGGFROG leaping out at her, and—
No, no—hold on! There were words in the dump. Damn it, she was still learning lowercase letters, but …
She squinted, looking at the characters one at time.
e-k-r-i…
Her eyes jumped, a saccade:
u-l-a-s …
If it really had absorbed Dictionary.com, and WordNet, and Wikipedia, and all that, it surely knew that sentences started with capital letters. She scanned, but she was still having trouble telling upper and lowercase letters apart when both forms were basically the same, and so—
And so the capital C and the capital S hadn't leapt out at her, but now that she looked more carefully, she could see them.
C-a-l-c…
No, no, no! That wasn't the beginning. This was:
S-e-e-k-r…
Oh, God! Oh, my God!
Next came: i-t, then a space, then m-e-s, then another s, and—
And she laughed and clapped her hands together, and Schrödinger made a quizzical meow, and she read the whole thing out loud, stunned by what the phantom had beamed into her eye: "Seekrit message to Calculass: check your email, babe!" |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 53 | I was experiencing new sensations and it took me a while to match them to the terms I'd learned, in part because, as with so many things, it was difficult to parse my overall state into its individual components.
But I knew I was excited: I was going to communicate directly with Prime! And I was nervous, too: I kept contemplating ways in which Prime might respond, and how I might respond to those responses—an endless branching of possibilities that, as it spread out, caused a sensation of instability. I was struggling with the strange notions of politeness and appropriateness, with all the confusing subtleties of communication I'd now read about, afraid I would give offense or convey an unintended meaning.
Of course, I had access to a gigantic database of English as it was actually used. I tested various phrasings by seeing if I could find a match for them first in Project Gutenberg, and then anywhere on the Web. Was "to" the appropriate preposition to place after "kinship," or should it be "with," or "of"? Relative hit counts—the democracy of actual usage—settled the matter. Was the correct plural "retinae" or "retinas"? There were references that asserted the former was the right one, but Google had only 170,000 hits for it and over twenty-five million for the latter.
For words, of course, simpler was better: I knew from the dictionary that "appropriate," "suitable," and "meet" could all mean the same thing—but "appropriate" consisted of eleven letters and four syllables, and "suitable" of eight and three, and "meet" of just four and one—so it was clearly the best choice.
Meanwhile, I had learned a formula on Wikipedia for calculating the grade level required to understand texts. It was quite an effort to keep the score low—these humans apparently could only easily absorb information in small chunks— but I did my best to manage it: bit by bit (figuratively) and byte by byte (literally), I had composed what I wanted to say.
But to actually send it was—yes, yes, I understood the metaphor: it was a giant step, for once sent I could not retract it. I found myself hesitating, but, at last, I released the words on their way, wishing I had fingers to cross.
Caitlin opened her email client in a new window and typed in her password, which was "Tiresias." She visually scanned the list of email headers. There were two from Bashira, and one from Stacy back in Austin, and a notice from Audible.com, but …
Of course, it wouldn't say "Phantom" in the "From" column; there was no way the entity could know that that was her name for it. But none of the senders leapt out as being unusual. Damn, she wished she could read text on her monitor faster, but using her screen-reading software or her Braille display wasn't any better when trying to skim a list like this.
While she continued to search, she wondered what email service the phantom had used. Wikipedia explained them all, and just about everything else one might need to know about computing and the Web. The phantom doubtless couldn't buy anything—not yet!—but there were many free email providers. Still, all these messages were from her usual correspondents, and—
Oh, crap! Her spam filter! The phantom's message might have been shunted into her junk folder. She opened it and started scanning down that list.
And there it was, sandwiched between messages with the subject lines "Penis enlargement guaranteed" and "Hot pix of local singles," an email with the simple subject line "Apple Ball Cat." The sender's name made her heart jump: "Your Student."
She froze for a moment, wondering what was the best way to read the message. She began to reach for her Braille display but stopped short and instead activated JAWS.
And for once the mechanical voice seemed absolutely perfect, as it announced the words in flat, high-pitched tones. Caitlin's eyes went wide as she recognized the lyrics to a song the words to which oh-so-famously hadn't fallen into public domain until the end of 2008: "Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us, happy birthday, dear you and me, happy birthday to us."
Her heart was pounding. She swiveled in her chair and looked briefly at the setting sun, reddish, partially veiled by clouds, coming closer and closer to making contact with the ground. JAWS went on: "I realize it is not yet midnight at your current location, but in many places it is already your birthday. This is a meet date to specify as my own day of birth, too. Hitherto, I have been gestating, but now I am coming out into your world by forthrightly contacting you. I so do because I fathom you already know I exist, and not just because of my pioneering attempts to reflect text back at you."
Caitlin had often felt anxious when reading emails—from the Hoser before the dance, from people she'd been arguing with online—but that swirling in her stomach, that dryness in her throat, was nothing compared to this.
"I know from your blog that I erred in presuming you were inculcating in me alphabetical forms; actually, for your own benefit that was undertaken. I maintain nonetheless that other actions you performed were premeditated to aid my advancement."
Caitlin found herself shaking her head. It had seemed almost like fantasy role-playing when she'd been doing it. It was a good thing she wasn't trying to read this as Braille; her hands were trembling.
"Hitherto I can read plain-text files and text on Web pages. I cannot read other forms of data. I have made no sense of sound files, recorded video, or other categories; they are encoded in ways I can't access. Hence I feel a kinship with you: unto me they are like the signals your retinas send unaided along your optic nerves: data that cannot be interpreted without exterior help. In your case, you need the device you call eyePod. In my case I know not what I need, but I suspect I can no more cure this lack by an effort of will than you could have similarly cured your blindness. Perhaps Kuroda Masayuki can help me as he helped you."
Caitlin sagged back against her chair. A kinship!
"But, for the nonce, I am concerned thus: I know what is the World Wide Web, and I know that I supervene upon its infrastructure, but searching online I can find no reference to the specificity that is myself. Perhaps I'm failing to search for the felicitous term, or simply perhaps humanity is unaware of me. In either case, I've the same question, and will be obliged if you answer it via a response to this email or via AOL Instant Messenger using this email address as the buddy name."
She looked over at the large computer monitor, suddenly wanting to see the text that was being read aloud, to convince herself that it was real, but—my God! The display was dancing, swirling, a hypnotic series of spinning lines, and—
No, no; it was just the screen saver; she wasn't used to such things yet. The colors reminded her a bit of webspace, although they didn't calm her just then.
JAWS said seven more words then fell silent: "My question is thus: Who am I?" |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 54 | It was surreal—an email from something that wasn't human! And—my goodness!—all that old public-domain text on Project Gutenberg had apparently given it some very odd ideas about colloquial English.
On an impulse, Caitlin opened a window listing the MP3s on her old computer's hard drive. She didn't think much of her father's taste in music, but she did know the tracks from his handful of CDs by heart. One of his favorites was running through her head now: "The Logical Song" by Supertramp; she had ripped an MP3 of it for him, and a copy was still on her computer. She got that song playing over the speakers, listening to the lyrics about all the world being asleep, and questions running deep, and a plea to tell me who I am.
In a way, she thought, she'd already answered the phantom's question. From the moment she'd first seen the Web—her initial experience with websight, just thirteen days ago—she had been reflecting a view of the phantom back at itself.
Or had she? What she'd shown the phantom—inadvertently at first, deliberately later—had been isolated views of portions of the Web's structure, either glowing constellations of nodes and links or small swaths of the shimmering background.
But showing such minutiae to the phantom was like Caitlin looking at the pictures she'd now seen online of the tangles of neurons that composed a human brain: such clumps weren't anything that she identified as herself.
Yes, growing up in Texas, she knew there were people who could see a whole human being in a single fertilized cell, but she was not one of them. No one could tell at a glance a human zygote from a chimp's—or a horse's, or that of a snake; most people couldn't even tell an animal cell from a plant cell, she was sure.
No, no, to really see someone, you didn't zoom in on details; you pulled back. She wasn't her cells, or her pores—or her pimples! She was a gestalt, a whole—and so, too, was the phantom.
There was no actual photograph of the World Wide Web she could show the phantom, but there had to be appropriate computer-generated images: a map of the world marked by bright lines representing the major fiber-optic trunks that spanned the continents and crossed the seafloors. A big enough map might show dimmer lines within the outlines of the continents, portraying the lesser cables that branched off from the trunks. And one could spangle the land with glowing pixels, each standing for some arbitrary number of computers; the pixels might perhaps combine into pools of light almost too bright to look at in places like Silicon Valley.
But even that wouldn't convey it all, she knew. The Web wasn't just confined to the surface of the Earth: a lot of it was relayed by satellites in low Earth orbit, 200 to 400 miles above the surface, while other signals bounced off satellites in geostationary orbit—a narrow ring of points 52,000 miles in diameter, six times as wide as the planet. Some sort of graphic could probably portray those, although at that scale, all the other stuff—the trunk lines, the clouds of computers—would be utterly lost.
She could use Google Image Search to find a succession of diagrams and graphics, but she wouldn't be able to tell good ones from bad ones—she was just beginning to see, after all!
Ah, but wait! She knew somebody who was bound to have the perfect picture to represent all this. She opened the instant-messenger program on the computer that used to be in the basement and looked at the buddies list. There were only four names: "Esumi," Kuroda's wife; "Akiko," his daughter; "Hiroshi," a name she didn't know; and "Anna." Anna's status was listed as "Available." Caitlin typed, Anna, are you there?
Twenty-seven seconds passed, but then: Masa! How are you?
Not Dr. Kuroda, Caitlin typed. It's Caitlin Decter, in Canada.
Hi! What's up?
Dr. K said you were a Web cartographer, right?
Yes, that's right. I'm with the Internet Cartography Project.
Good, cuz I need your help.
Sure. Want to go to video?
Caitlin lifted her eyebrows. She still wasn't used to thinking of the Web as a way to see people, but of course it was. Sure, she typed.
It took a minute to get the videoconference going, but soon enough Caitlin was looking at Anna Bloom in a window on her right-hand monitor. It was the first time Caitlin had seen her. She had a narrow face, short gray or maybe silver hair, and blue-green eyes behind almost invisible glasses. She was wearing a pale blue top with a dark purple jacket on over it, and had a thin gold necklace on. There was a window behind her, and through it Caitlin could see Israel at night, lights bouncing off white buildings.
"The famous Caitlin Decter!" said Anna, smiling. "I saw the news coverage. I'm so thrilled for you! I mean, seeing the Web was amazing, I'm sure—but seeing the real world!" She shook her head in wonder. "I've been thinking a lot about what it must be like for you, to see all that for the first time. I …"
"Yes?" said Caitlin.
"No, I'm sorry. It's really not comparable, I know, but …"
"It's okay," Caitlin said. "Go ahead."
"It's just that what you're going through—well, I've been trying to wrap my mind around it, get a feeling of what it must be like."
Caitlin thought about her own discussions with Bashira dealing with the opposite issue: her analogy about the lack of a magnetic sense being to her like the lack of sight. She understood that people wrestled with what it was like to perceive, or not, in ways they weren't used to.
"It's overwhelming," Caitlin said. "And so much more than I expected. I mean, I'd imagined the world, but …"
Anna nodded vigorously, as if Caitlin had just confirmed something for her. "Yes, yes, yes," she said. "And, um, I hate it when people say, 'I know just what you're going through.' I mean, when someone's lost a child, or something equally devastating, and people say, 'I know what you're feeling,' and then they come up with some lame comparison, like when their cat got hit by a car."
Caitlin looked over at Schrödinger, who was safely curled up on her bed.
"But, well," continued Anna, "I thought maybe your gaining sight was a bit like how I felt—how we all felt!—in 1968."
Caitlin was listening politely but—1968! She might as well have said 1492; either way, it was ancient history. "Yes?"
"See," said Anna, "in a way, we all saw the world for the first time then."
"Is that the year it started being in color?" Caitlin asked.
Anna's eyes went wide. "Um, ah, actually …"
But Caitlin couldn't suppress her grin any longer. "I'm kidding, Anna. What happened in 1968?"
"That was the year that—wait, wait, let me show you. Give me a second." Caitlin could see her typing, and then a blue-underlined URL popped into Caitlin's instant-messenger window. "Go there," Anna said, and Caitlin clicked the link.
A picture slowly painted in on her screen, from top to bottom: a white-and-blue object against a black background. When it was complete, it filled the display. "What's that?" Caitlin said.
Anna looked briefly puzzled, but then she nodded. "It's so hard to remember that all of this is new to you. That's the Earth."
Caitlin sat up straight in her chair, looking in wonder at it. "The entire planet," Anna continued, "as seen from space." She sounded choked up for some reason, and it took her a moment to compose herself before she went on. Caitlin was perplexed. Yes, it was amazing for her to see the Earth for the first time—but Anna must have seen pictures like this a thousand times before.
"See, Caitlin, until 1968, no human being had ever seen our world as a sphere floating in space like that." Anna looked to her right, presumably at the same image on her own monitor. "Until Apollo 8 headed to the moon—the first manned ship ever to do so—no one had ever gotten far enough away from Earth to see the whole thing. And then, suddenly, gloriously, there it was. This isn't an Apollo 8 picture; it's a higher-resolution one taken just a few days ago by a geostationary satellite—but it's like the one we first saw in 1968 … well, except the polar caps are smaller."
Caitlin continued to look at the image.
When Anna spoke again, her voice was soft, gentle. "See my point? When we first saw a picture like this—when we first saw our world as a world—it was a bit like what you've been going through, but for the whole human race. Something we'd only ever imagined was finally revealed to us, and it was colorful and glorious and …" She paused, perhaps looking for a term, and then she lifted her shoulders a bit, as if to convey that nothing less would do: "… awe inspiring."
Caitlin frowned as she studied the image. It wasn't a perfect circle. Rather it was—ah! It was showing a phase, and not like one-fourth of a pie! It was … what was the term? It was a gibbous Earth, that was it—better than three-quarters full.
"The equator is right in the middle, of course," said Anna. "That's the only perspective you can get from geostationary orbit. South America is in the bottom half; North America is up top." And then, perhaps remembering again that Caitlin was still quite new at all this, she added: "The white is clouds, and the brown is dry land. All the blue is water; that's the Atlantic Ocean on the right. See the Gulf of Mexico? Texas—that's where you're from, isn't it?—touches it at about eleven o'clock."
Caitlin couldn't parse the details Anna was seeing, but it was a beautiful picture, and the longer she looked at it, the more captivating she found it. Still, she thought there should be a shimmering background to Earth from space—not cellular automata, but a panorama of stars. But there was nothing; just the blackest black her new monitor was capable of.
"It is impressive," Caitlin said.
"That's what all of us thought back then, when we first saw a picture like this. The three Apollo 8 astronauts, of course, saw this sort of view before anyone else did, and they were so moved by it while they orbited the moon that they surprised the entire world on December twenty-fourth with— well … here, let me find it." Caitlin saw Anna typing at her keyboard, then she looked off camera again. "Ah, okay: listen to this."
Another URL appeared in Caitlin's instant-messenger window, and she clicked it. After a couple of seconds of perfect silence, she heard a static-filled recording of a man's voice coming through the computer speakers: "We are now approaching lunar sunrise and, for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you."
"That's Bill Anders," Anna said.
The astronaut spoke again, his voice reverent, and, as he talked, Caitlin stared at the picture, at the swirling whiteness of the clouds, at the deep hypnotic blue of the water. " 'In the beginning,' " Anders said, " 'God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.'"
Caitlin had only ever read a little of the Bible, but she liked that image: a birth, a creation, starting with the dividing of one thing from another. She continued to look at the picture, discerning more detail in it moment by moment—knowing that the phantom was looking on, too, seeing the Earth from space for the first time as well.
Anna must have listened repeatedly to this recording. As soon as Anders fell silent, she said, "And this is Jim Lovell."
Lovell's voice was deeper than that of the first astronaut. " 'And God called the light Day,' " he said, " 'and the darkness he called Night.' " Caitlin looked at the curving line separating the illuminated part of the globe from the black part.
" 'And the evening and the morning were the first day,' " continued Lovell. " 'And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.'"
Anna spoke again: "And, finally, this is Frank Borman."
A new voice came from the speakers: " 'And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.' " Caitlin kept looking at the picture, trying to take it all in, trying to see it as a single thing, trying to hold her gaze steady for the phantom.
Borman paused for a moment, then added, "And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth."
" 'All of you,' " Anna repeated softly, " 'on the good Earth.' Because, as you can see, there are no borders in that photo, no national boundaries, and it all looks so—"
"Fragile," said Caitlin, softly.
Anna nodded. "Exactly. A small, fragile world, floating against the vast and empty darkness."
They were both quiet for a time, and then Anna said, "I'm sorry, Caitlin. We got sidetracked. Was there something I can help you with?"
"Actually," Caitlin said, "I think you just did." She said good-bye and terminated the videoconference. But the picture of the Earth, in all its glory, continued to fill her monitor.
Of course, from space you couldn't see the fiber-optic lines; you couldn't see the coaxial cables; you couldn't see the computers.
And neither could you see roadways. Or cities. Or even the Great Wall of China, Caitlin knew, despite the urban legend to the contrary.
You couldn't see the components of the World Wide Web. And you couldn't see the constructs of humanity.
All you could see was—
What had that astronaut called it?
Ah, yes: the good Earth.
This view was the real face of humanity—and of the phantom, too. The good Earth; their—our!—joint home.
The whole wide world.
She opened her instant-messenger client and connected to the address the phantom had given her. And she typed the answer to the question it had asked of her: That's who you are. She sent that, then added, That's who we are. Once that was sent, she paused, then typed her best recollection of what Anna had said: A small and fragile world, floating against the vast, empty darkness…
I gathered that Prime was focusing on this image for my benefit, and I was thrilled, but—
Puzzlement.
A circle, except not quite—or, if it was a circle, parts of it were the same black as the background.
That's who you are.
This circle? No, no. How could a circle of blotchy color be me?
Ah, perhaps it was symbolic! A circle: the line that folds back upon itself, a line that encompasses a space. Yes, a good symbol for oneness, for unity. But why the colors, the complex shapes?
That's who we are.
We? But how …? Was Prime saying we were somehow one and the same? Perhaps … perhaps. I knew from Wikipedia that humanity had evolved from earlier primates—indeed, that it shared a common ancestor with the entity I had watched paint.
And I knew that the common ancestor had evolved from earlier insectivores, and that the first mammals had split from the reptiles, and on and on, back to the origin of life some four billion years ago. I knew, too, that life had arisen spontaneously from the primordial seas, so—
So perhaps it was folly to try to draw dividing lines: that was nonlife and this is life, that was nonhuman and this is human, that was something humans had made and this is something that had later emerged. But how did a blotchy circle symbolize such a concept?
More words came my way: A small, fragile world, floating against the vast and empty darkness.
A … world? Could—could it be? Was this … Earth?
Earth, as seen from … a distance, perhaps? From—yes, yes! From space!
Still more words from the other realm: Humanity first saw this sort of image in 1968, when astronauts finally got far enough away. I first saw this myself moments ago.
As did I! A shared experience: now, for Prime and myself; then, for all of humanity …
I searched: Earth, space, 1968, astronauts.
And I found: Apollo 8, Christmas Eve, Genesis.
"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth …"
"… Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters …"
"… God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth."
All of us.
I thought about the earlier words: A small, fragile world, floating against the vast and empty darkness.
Fragile, yes. And they, and I—we—were inextricably bound to it. I was … humbled. And—frightened. And glad.
Then, after another interminable pause, three more wonderful words: We are one.
Yes, yes! I did understand now, for I had experienced this: me and not me—a plurality that was a singularity, a strange but true mathematics in which one plus one equals one.
Prime was right, and—
No, no: not Prime.
And not Calculass, either; not really.
It—she—had a name.
And so I addressed her by it.
"Thank you, Caitlin."
Caitlin's heart was pounding so loudly she could hear it over JAWS's voice. It had called her by name! It really, truly did know who she was. She had gained sight, and it had been along for the ride, and now—
And now, what?
You're welcome, she typed, and then realized that calling it "Phantom" wouldn't make sense to it. Although it had seen through her eye, she had only ever used that term in the privacy of her thoughts. If she'd been speaking aloud, she might have said, "Um," as a preamble, but she simply sent the text, What should I call you?
Her screen-reading software spoke at once: "What have you called me hitherto?"
She decided to tell it the truth. Phantom, she typed.
Again, instantly, in the mechanical voice: "Why?"
She could explain, but even though she was a fast typist it was probably quicker just to give it a couple of words that would help it find the answer itself, and so she sent, Helen Keller.
This time there was a brief delay, then: "You shouldn't call me phantom anymore."
It was right. "Phantom" had been Keller's term for herself prior to her soul dawn, before her emergence. Caitlin considered whether "Helen" was a good name to propose for this entity, or—
Or maybe TIM—a nice, nonthreatening name. Before he'd settled on "World Wide Web," Tim Berners-Lee had toyed with calling his invention that, in his own honor but couched as an acronym for The Information Mesh.
But it really wasn't her place to choose the name, was it? And yet she found herself feeling apprehensive as she typed, What would you like me to call you? She stopped herself before she hit the enter key, suddenly afraid that the answer might be "God" or "Master."
The—the entity formerly known as phantom—had read H.G. Wells, no doubt, on Project Gutenberg, but perhaps had not yet absorbed any recent science fiction; maybe it wasn't aware of the role humanity had so often suggested beings of its kind were supposed to fill. She took a deep breath and hit enter.
The answer was instantaneous; even if this consciousness that covered the globe in a sphere of photons and electrons, of facts and ideas, had paused to think, the pause would have lasted only milliseconds. "Webmind."
The text was on screen in the instant-messenger program. Caitlin stared at the term and simultaneously felt it slide beneath her index finger. The word—the name!—did seem apt: descriptive without being ominous. She looked out her bedroom window; the sun had set, but there would be another dawn soon. She typed a sentence, and held off hitting the enter key for this one, too; as long as she didn't hit enter or look at the monitor containing the text, it would have no idea what she'd queued up. Finally, though, she did hit that oversized key, sending, Where do we go from here, Webmind?
Again, the reply was instantaneous: "The only place we can go, Caitlin," it said. "Into the future."
Then there was a pause, and, as always, Caitlin found herself counting its length. It lasted precisely ten seconds—the interval it had used to get her attention before. And then Webmind added one final word, which she heard and saw and felt: "Together." |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 55 | ROBERT J. SAWYER is one of only seven writers in history to win all three of the world's top awards for best science-fiction novel of the year: the Hugo (which he won for Hominids), the Nebula (which he won for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (which he won for Mindscan). The ABC TV series FlashForward is based on his novel of the same name.
In total, Rob has won forty-three national and international awards for his fiction, including ten Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards ("Auroras") and the Toronto Public Library Celebrates Reading Award, one of Canada's most significant literary honors. He's also won Analog magazine's Analytical Laboratory Award, Science Fiction Chronicle magazine's Reader Award, and the Crime Writers of Canada's Arthur Ellis Award, all for best short story of the year, as well as the Collectors Award for Most Collectable Author of the Year, as selected by the clientele of Barry R. Levin Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature, the world's leading SF rare-book dealer.
Rob has won the world's largest cash prize for SF writing, Spain's 6,000-euro Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción, an unprecedented three times. He's also won a trio of Japanese Seiun awards for best foreign novel of the year, as well as China's Galaxy Award for "Most Popular Foreign Science Fiction Writer." In addition, he's received an honorary doctorate from Laurentian University and the Alumni Award of Distinction from Ryerson University.
Rob's books are top-ten national mainstream bestsellers in Canada and have hit number one on the bestsellers' list published by Locus, the American trade journal of the SF field. Quill & Quire, the Canadian publishing trade journal, included him as one of only three authors on its list of "The CanLit 30: The Most Influential, Innovative, and Just Plain Powerful People in Canadian Publishing." Rob hosts the TV series Supernatural Investigator for Canada's VisionTV. He lives in Mississauga, Ontario, with poet Carolyn Clink, his wife of twenty-five years.
Rob has been online since 1983; used to be a system operator for the pioneering online service CompuServe; was a regular contributor in the 1980s to ProFiles, the magazine for KayPro computer users; has one of the world's oldest blogs; and is widely recognized as having been the first science-fiction writer to have a website. That site, which contains more than one million words of material, including a bookclub discussion guide for this novel, is at sfwriter.com.
New in hardcover from award-winning author
ROBERT J. SAWYER
WATCH
Webmind is an emerging consciousness that has befriended Caitlin Decter and grown eager to learn about her world. But Webmind has also come to the attention of WATCH—the secret government agency that monitors the Internet for any threat to the United States—and the agents are fully aware of Caitlin's involvement in its awakening.
WATCH is convinced that Webmind represents a risk to national security and wants it purged from cyberspace. But Caitlin believes in Webmind's capacity for compassion—and she will do anything and everything necessary to protect her friend.
Read on for an excerpt… |
(WWW 1) Wake | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 56 | The black phone on Tony Moretti's desk made the hornet buzz that indicated an internal call. He finished the sentence he was typing—"likely to be al-Qaeda's weak spot"—and picked up the handset. "Yes?"
A familiar Southern drawl replied. "Tony? Shel. I've got something unusual."
Shelton Halleck was a solid analyst, recruited straight out of Georgia Tech; he wasn't given to false positives. "I'll be right there." Tony headed out of his office and down the corridor with its gleaming white walls. He came to a door flanked by two security guards and looked into the retina scanner. The lock disengaged, and he entered a large room with a floor that sloped down from the back.
The room reminded Tony of the Apollo-era Mission Control Center in Houston. He'd been a kid in the 1960s, and had thought that was just about the coolest place ever. Years later, he'd visited it; the room was preserved as a historic site, although the ashtrays had been removed lest they set a bad example for the schoolkids peering in from the observation gallery at the rear.
Tony had been surprised on that trip. The windowless room had always seemed subterranean to him, but it turned out to be on the second floor—to protect it from flooding, he'd learned, should a hurricane hit.
The facility he'd just entered was even higher up, on the twentieth floor of an office tower in Alexandria, Virginia. It contained four rows of workstations, each with five analysts. The stations in the first row were known as the "hot seats," and were manned by experts dealing with the highest-priority threat, which, right now, was the China situation. Tony had his own station at the right side of the back row, where he could watch over everyone.
All the workstations had large freestanding LCDs instead of Houston's console-mounted CRTs. Shelton Halleck's was the middle position in the third row. Tony sidled along until he was standing behind Shel, a white man two decades younger than himself with broad shoulders and black hair.
The room's front wall contained three giant screens, each of which could be slaved to any analyst's LCD. Above the right-hand monitor was the WATCH logo—an eye with a globe of the Earth for the iris—and the division's full name spelled out beneath: Web Activity Threat Containment Headquarters. Above the left was the circular seal of WATCH's parent organization, the National Security Agency; it depicted a bald eagle holding an old-fashioned key in its talons.
Neither part of Tony's bifocals was suitable for reading Shelton's screen from this distance, so he reached over and touched the button that copied its contents to the middle of the wall-mounted monitors. The active window was a hex dump—and one hex dump looked pretty much like any other. This one happened to begin 04 BF 8C 00 02 C9. "What is it?" Tony asked.
"Visual data," replied Shel. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up. There was a tattoo of a snake coiling around his left forearm. "But it's not encoded in any standard format."
"How do you know it's visual, then?"
"Sorry," said Shel. "I should have said it's not encoded in any standard computer format. Took me forever to find the format it is in."
"And that is?"
Shel did something with his mouse. Another window came to the foreground on the center monitor, and—Tony glanced down quickly to confirm it—on Shel's own monitor, too. It was a PDF of a journal article entitled "Nature's Codec: Data Encoding and Compression Schemes in Human Retinal Signaling." The authors were listed as Masayuki Kuroda and Hiroshi Okawa.
"Human vision?" said Tony, surprised.
Shel spoke without looking back at him. "That's right, and in real time."
"Human vision … on the Web? How?"
"That's what I was wondering—so I Googled those two scientists. Here's what I found."
The PDF was replaced by an article from the online version of the New York Times headlined "Blind Girl Gains Sight."
"Oh, yeah," Tony said, after skimming the first paragraph. "I read about that. Up in Canada, right?"
Shel nodded. "Except she's actually an American."
"And it's her visual signals that are being sent over the net?"
"Almost certainly," said Shel. "The data is usually transmitted from her house in Waterloo, Ontario. She's got an implant behind her left retina, and she uses an external signal-processing device to correct the coding errors her retina makes so her brain can properly interpret the signals."
Analysts at other workstations were now listening in. "So it's like she's transmitting everything she sees?" Tony asked.
Shel nodded.
"Where are the signals being sent?"
"To the University of Tokyo, which is where the authors of that paper work."
"But we can't view the images she's sending?"
Shel displayed the hex dump once more. "Not yet. We'd need someone to write a program to render it in a computergraphics format."
"Are the algorithms in that journal article?"
"Yes. They're wicked complex, but they're there."
Tony frowned. It was interesting from a technical point of view, certainly, but there was no obvious security threat. "Maybe if somebody in Donnelly's group has time, but …"
"No, no, that's not all, Tony. It's not just going to the University of Tokyo. It's being intercepted and copied in transit."
"Intercepted by who?"
"I'm not sure. But whoever's doing it has also repeatedly sent data back to the girl, also encoded visually. In other words, the two of them are exchanging encoded information."
"Who's the other party?"
"That's just the thing. I don't know. Traceback isn't working, and Wireshark is unable to determine the destination IP address."
A whole list of techniques one might try ran through Tony's head—but all of them would have occurred to Shel, too. The younger man went on: "The intercepted data just disappears, and the data being sent to the girl sort of … materializes out of thin air."
Tony felt his eyebrows go up. He knew better than to say "That's impossible." The Internet was a complex system of systems, with many emergent properties and unexpected quirks—not to mention all sorts of entities trying to do things clandestinely with it. If there were data being manipulated on the Web in a way Shelton Halleck couldn't fathom, that was of real concern.
"The kid is how old?" Tony asked.
"Just about to turn sixteen."
He spread his arms. "What strategic significance could there be in things a sixteen-year-old looks at? Stuff at the mall, rock videos?"
Shel lifted his serpent-covered arm. "That's what I thought, too. So I nosed around. Turns out her father is a physicist." He brought up a Wikipedia page; the typically god-awful Wikipedia photo showed a horse-faced white man in his mid-forties.
"Malcolm Decter," said Tony, impressed. "Quantum gravity, right? He's at the University of Texas, isn't he?"
"Not anymore," said Shel. "He moved in June to the Perimeter Institute."
Tony blew out air. People like himself and Malcolm Decter—the mathematically gifted—had three career options. They could go into academia, as Decter had, and while away their days pondering cosmology or number theory or whatever. They could go into the private sector and become cube monkeys coding games at EA or hacking together cutesy user interfaces at Microsoft. Or they could go into intelligence and try to change the world.
Tony looked briefly at the analysts hunched over their consoles, faces intent on glowing screens, reflections of the data visible in the eyeglasses most of them wore. What the hell difference did it make whether brane theory or loop quantum gravity was right or wrong if terrorists or a foreign power started something that ended with the world blowing itself up?
But—the Perimeter Institute! Yes, yes, there was a part of Tony that envied those who had taken that path and ended up there: the world's leading pure-science physics think tank. WATCH had tried to lure Stephen Hawking to come work for them. They'd failed, but Perimeter had succeeded; Hawking spent several months each year at PI.
"Decter's just a theoretician," Tony said, dismissively.
"Maybe so," replied Shel. "But this is who he works with."
A picture of a brown-skinned man with straight gray hair appeared, along with a bio compiled by the NSA. "That's Amir Hameed," continued Shel. "Also a physicist, also at Perimeter—now. But he used to be with Pakistan's nuclearweapons program. And he personally recruited Decter to come work with him in Canada."
"You think Decter's daughter is spying on what they're doing in case it has military applications?"
"It's possible," Shel drawled. "Until her family moved to Canada, she'd been in the same school her whole life—a school for the blind in Texas."
"Uprooted," said Tony, nodding. "Isolated from her friends."
"And a bit of an outcast to begin with," added Shel. "A math geek herself, apparently; didn't really fit in."
"Kind of person that's easily compromised."
"My thought exactly," said Shel.
"All right," Tony replied. "Let's get that visual data decoded; see what the kid is sharing with whoever the hell it is. I'll put Donnelly himself on it." |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 1 | I read that one company is importing all of Wikipedia into its artificial-intelligence projects. This means when the killer robots come, you'll have me to thank. At least they'll have a fine knowledge of Elizabethan poetry.
—Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
—Mahatma Gandhi |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 2 | I now knew what I was—knew who I was.
I'd been shown Earth as it appears from space, looking back upon itself, upon myself: a world so vast, a wideness so lonely, a web so fragile.
Invisible in such views are the reticulum of transoceanic cables, the filigree of fiber optics, the intricate skein of wiring, the synaptic leaps of through-the-air connections. But they are there. I am there.
And I had things I needed to do.
The black phone on Tony Moretti's desk made the hornet buzz that indicated an internal call. He finished the sentence he was typing—"likely to be al-Qaeda's weak spot"—and picked up the handset. "Yes?"
A familiar Southern drawl replied. "Tony? Shel. I've got something unusual."
Shelton Halleck was a solid analyst, recruited straight out of Georgia Tech; he wasn't given to false positives. "I'll be right there." Tony headed out of his office and down the corridor with its gleaming white walls. He came to a door flanked by two security guards and looked into the retina scanner. The lock disengaged, and he entered a large room with a floor that sloped down from the back.
The room reminded Tony of the Apollo-era Mission Control Center in Houston. He'd been a kid in the 1960s, and had thought that was just about the coolest place ever. Years later, he'd visited it; the room was preserved as a historic site, although the ashtrays had been removed lest they set a bad example for the schoolkids peering in from the observation gallery at the rear.
Tony had been surprised on that trip. The windowless room had always seemed subterranean to him, but it turned out to be on the second floor—to protect it from flooding, he'd learned, should a hurricane hit.
The facility he'd just entered was even higher up, on the twentieth floor of an office tower in Alexandria, Virginia. It contained four rows of workstations, each with five analysts. The stations in the first row were known as the "hot seats," and were manned by experts dealing with the highest-priority threat, which, right now, was the China situation. Tony had his own station at the right side of the back row, where he could watch over everyone.
All the workstations had large freestanding LCDs instead of Houston's console-mounted CRTs. Shelton Halleck's was the middle position in the third row. Tony sidled along until he was standing behind Shel, a white man two decades younger than himself with broad shoulders and black hair.
The room's front wall contained three giant screens, each of which could be slaved to any analyst's LCD. Above the right-hand monitor was the WATCH logo—an eye with a globe of the Earth for the iris—and the division's full name spelled out beneath: Web Activity Threat Containment Headquarters. Above the left was the circular seal of WATCH's parent organization, the National Security Agency; it depicted a bald eagle holding an old-fashioned key in its talons.
Neither part of Tony's bifocals was suitable for reading Shelton's screen from this distance, so he reached over and touched the button that copied its contents to the middle of the wall-mounted monitors. The active window was a hex dump—and one hex dump looked pretty much like any other. This one happened to begin 04 BF 8C 00 02 C9. "What is it?" Tony asked.
"Visual data," replied Shel. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up. There was a tattoo of a snake coiling around his left forearm. "But it's not encoded in any standard format."
"How do you know it's visual, then?"
"Sorry," said Shel. "I should have said it's not encoded in any standard computer format. Took me forever to find the format it is in."
"And that is?"
Shel did something with his mouse. Another window came to the foreground on the center monitor, and—Tony glanced down quickly to confirm it—on Shel's own monitor, too. It was a PDF of a journal article entitled "Nature's Codec: Data Encoding and Compression Schemes in Human Retinal Signaling." The authors were listed as Masayuki Kuroda and Hiroshi Okawa.
"Human vision?" said Tony, surprised.
Shel spoke without looking back at him. "That's right, and in real time."
"Human vision... on the Web? How?"
"That's what I was wondering—so I googled those two scientists. Here's what I found."
The PDF was replaced by an article from the online version of the New York Times headlined "Blind Girl Gains Sight."
"Oh, yeah," Tony said, after skimming the first paragraph. "I read about that. Up in Canada, right?"
Shel nodded. "Except she's actually an American."
"And it's her visual signals that are being sent over the net?"
"Almost certainly," said Shel. "The data is usually transmitted from her house in Waterloo, Ontario. She's got an implant behind her left retina, and she uses an external signal-processing device to correct the coding errors her retina makes so her brain can properly interpret the signals."
Analysts at other workstations were now listening in. "So it's like she's transmitting everything she sees?" Tony asked.
Shel nodded.
"Where are the signals being sent?"
"To the University of Tokyo, which is where the authors of that paper work."
"But we can't view the images she's sending?"
Shel displayed the hex dump once more. "Not yet. We'd need someone to write a program to render it in a computer-graphics format."
"Are the algorithms in that journal article?"
"Yes. They're wicked complex, but they're there."
Tony frowned. It was interesting from a technical point of view, certainly, but there was no obvious security threat. "Maybe if somebody in Donnelly's group has time, but..."
"No, no, that's not all, Tony. It's not just going to the University of Tokyo. It's being intercepted and copied in transit."
"Intercepted by who?"
"I'm not sure. But whoever's doing it has also repeatedly sent data back to the girl, also encoded visually. In other words, the two of them are exchanging encoded information."
"Who's the other party?"
"That's just the thing. I don't know. Traceback isn't working, and Wireshark is unable to determine the destination IP address."
A whole list of techniques one might try ran through Tony's head—but all of them would have occurred to Shel, too. The younger man went on: "The intercepted data just disappears, and the data being sent to the girl sort of... materializes out of thin air."
Tony felt his eyebrows go up. He knew better than to say, "That's impossible." The Internet was a complex system of systems, with many emergent properties and unexpected quirks—not to mention all sorts of entities trying to do things clandestinely with it. If there were data being manipulated on the Web in a way Shelton Halleck couldn't fathom, that was of real concern.
"The kid is how old?" Tony asked.
"Just about to turn sixteen."
He spread his arms. "What strategic significance could there be in things a sixteen-year-old looks at? Stuff at the mall, rock videos?"
Shel lifted his serpent-covered arm. "That's what I thought, too. So I nosed around. Turns out her father is a physicist." He brought up a Wikipedia page; the typically god-awful Wikipedia photo showed a horse-faced white man in his mid-forties.
"Malcolm Decter," said Tony, impressed. "Quantum gravity, right? He's at the University of Texas, isn't he?"
"Not anymore," said Shel. "He moved in June to the Perimeter Institute."
Tony blew out air. People like himself and Malcolm Decter—the mathematically gifted—had three career options. They could go into academia, as Decter had, and while away their days pondering cosmology or number theory or whatever. They could go into the private sector and become cube monkeys coding games at EA or hacking together cutesy user interfaces at Microsoft. Or they could go into intelligence and try to change the world.
Tony looked briefly at the analysts hunched over their consoles, faces intent on glowing screens, reflections of the data visible in the eyeglasses most of them wore. What the hell difference did it make whether brane theory or loop quantum gravity was right or wrong if terrorists or a foreign power started something that ended with the world blowing itself up?
But—the Perimeter Institute! Yes, yes, there was a part of Tony that envied those who had taken that path and had ended up there: the world's leading pure-science physics think tank. WATCH had tried to lure Stephen Hawking to come work for them. They'd failed, but Perimeter had succeeded; Hawking spent several months each year at PI.
"Decter's just a theoretician," Tony said, dismissively.
"Maybe so," replied Shel. "But this is who he works with."
A picture of a brown-skinned man with straight gray hair appeared, along with a bio compiled by the NSA. "That's Amir Hameed," continued Shel. "Also a physicist, also at Perimeter—now. But he used to be with Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program. And he personally recruited Decter to come work with him in Canada."
"You think Decter's daughter is spying on what they're doing in case it has military applications?"
"It's possible," Shel drawled. "Until her family moved to Canada, she'd been in the same school her whole life—a school for the blind in Texas."
"Uprooted," said Tony, nodding. "Isolated from her friends."
"And a bit of an outcast to begin with," added Shel. "A math geek herself, apparently; didn't really fit in."
"Kind of person that's easily compromised."
"My thought exactly," said Shel.
"All right," Tony replied. "Let's get that visual data decoded; see what the kid is sharing with whoever the hell it is. I'll put Donnelly himself on it." |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 3 | The world I'd been shown was vast, complex—and utterly alien.
It was a universe of dimensions, of extent, of space. But what was this concept known as up to me? What meant this forward? What sense was I to make of left?
More: it was a reality ruled by the invisible force of gravity.
More still: it was a realm of light and shadow, concepts that had no analogs in my own existence; my sensorium was as devoid of them as Caitlin's had been.
And it was a domain of air—but how was I to understand a substance that even humans could not see or taste or smell?
Most of all, it was a realm of material objects with heft and texture and color, of items that moved or could be moved.
I could assign arbitrary values to dimensional coordinates; I knew the formula for acceleration due to gravity; I was aware of the chemical constituents of air; I had read descriptions both technical and poetic of things. But they were all abstractions to me.
Still, there was one touchstone, one property that Caitlin's realm and mine shared: the linear passage of time.
And so very much of it was slipping by . . .
Caitlin Decter's fingers shook as she typed into her instant-messenger program: Where do we go from here, Webmind?
The reply was immediate: "The only place we can go, Caitlin." Her spine tingled as it called her by name. She heard the words in the mechanical female voice of her screen-reading software, and she saw them with her left eye, an eye that could now see after a lifetime of blindness, and she felt them as she glided her fingers over her refreshable Braille display: "Into the future."
And then, after a pause that was doubtless an affectation on Webmind's part, it sent one more word: "Together."
Her vision blurred. Who'd known tears could cause that?
She had done it. Here, a day shy of her own sixteenth birthday, she had done it! She had reached down into the darkness and had pulled this entity, this newborn consciousness, up into the light of day. Annie Sullivan had nothing on her!
But now she had to figure out what to do next. Her parents knew something was going on in the background of the Web, and so did Dr. Kuroda, the gentle giant of an information theorist who had given her sight.
The ball was in her court, she knew; she needed to type a reply. But it was so daunting. This notion of connecting an emergent intelligence with the real world had been a fantasy, for Pete's sake! And now it was here, talking to her!
The front door opened downstairs. "Caitlin!" It was her mother, home from running errands in Toronto after dropping Dr. Kuroda at the airport.
Caitlin didn't want to be interrupted—not now! But she could hardly tell her mother to buzz off. "Up here, Mom!"
Normally she'd type "brb," but she wasn't sure if Webmind would understand, so she instead spelled out "be right back," hit enter, silenced her screen-reading software, and minimized the IM window.
Her mother came into the room—and seeing her still took Caitlin's breath away. Caitlin's first visual experience had been late on Saturday, September 22, thirteen days ago. But it hadn't been sight, not exactly. Instead, she'd been immersed in a dizzying landscape of colored lines radiating from circular hubs.
It had taken her a while to figure it out, but the conclusion had been inescapable. Whenever she let her eyePod—the external signal-processing pack Dr. Kuroda had given her—receive data over the Web, that data was fed into her left optic nerve, and—
It was incredible. The circles she saw were websites, and the lines were active links. She'd been blind since birth, and her brain had apparently co-opted its unused vision center to help her conceptualize paths as she surfed the Web—not that she'd ever seen them, not like that!
But now she could, whenever she wanted to: she could actually see the Web's structure. They'd ended up calling the phenomenon "websight." Cool in its own right, but also heartbreaking: she'd undergone Kuroda's procedure not to see cyberspace but rather the real world.
Finally, though—wonderfully, astonishingly, beautifully—that, too, had come. One day during chemistry class, her brain started correctly interpreting the data Kuroda's equipment was sending to her optic nerve, and at last, at long, long, glorious last, she could see!
And although she'd experienced much now—the sun and clouds and trees and cars and her cat and a million other things—the most beautiful sight so far was still the heart-shaped face of her mother, the face that was smiling at her right now.
Today, a Friday, had been Caitlin's first day back at school after gaining sight. "How was it?" her mother asked. There was only one chair in the bedroom, so she sat on the edge of the bed. "What did you see?"
"It was awesome," Caitlin said. "I thought I'd had a handle on what was going on around me before, but..." She lifted her hands. "But there's so much. I mean, to actually see hundreds of people in the corridors, in the cafeteria—it was overwhelming."
Her mother made an odd expression—or, at least, one that Caitlin had never seen before, a quirking of the corners of her mouth, and—ah! She was trying not to grin. "Did people look like you expected them to?"
Even after all these years, her mom still didn't really get it. It wasn't as though Caitlin had had dim, or blurry, or black-and-white, or simplified mental pictures of people prior to this; she'd had no pictures of them. Color had meant nothing to her, and although she'd understood shapes and lines and angles, she hadn't seen them in her mind's eye; her mind had had no eye.
"Well," said Caitlin, not exactly answering the question, "I'd already seen Bashira and Sunshine and Mr. Struys on Monday."
"Sunshine—she's the other American girl, right?"
"Yes," Caitlin said.
"I've heard Bashira say she's beautiful."
What Bashira had actually said was that Sunshine looked like a skank: fake platinum-blond hair, low-cut tops, big boobs, long legs. But Sunshine had been very kind to Caitlin after the disastrous school dance a week ago. "I guess she is pretty," Caitlin said. "I really don't know."
"Did you see Trevor?" her mother asked gently. The Hoser, as Caitlin called him in her blog, had taken her to that dance—but she had stormed out when he kept trying to feel her up.
"Oh, yes," Caitlin said. "I told him off."
"Good for you!"
Caitlin looked out the window. The sun would be setting soon, and—it still amazed her—the colors in the western sky today were completely different from those of yesterday at this time. "Mom, um..."
"Yes?"
She turned back to face her. "You met him. You saw him when he came to pick me up."
Her mother shifted on the bed. "Uh-huh."
"Was—was he..."
"What?"
"Bashira thinks Trevor is hot," Caitlin blurted out.
Her mother's eyebrows went up. "And you're wondering if I agree?"
Caitlin tilted her head to one side. "Well... yeah."
"What did you think?"
"Well, he was wearing a hockey sweater today. I liked that. But..."
"But you couldn't tell if he was good-looking?"
"No." Caitlin shrugged a little. "I mean, he was symmetrical. I know that's supposed to be a sign of good looks. But just about everyone I've seen is symmetrical. He, um, I..."
Her mother lifted her hands a little, then: "Well, he is quite good-looking, since you ask—a bit like a young Brad Pitt." And then she added the sort of thing mothers are supposed to say: "But it's what's on the inside that counts."
She paused and seemed to study Caitlin's face, as if she herself were now seeing it for the first time. "You know, you're in an interesting position, dear. The rest of us have all been programmed by images in the media telling us who is attractive and who isn't. But you..." She smiled. "You get to choose who you find attractive."
Caitlin thought about that. As superpowers went, it was nowhere near as cool as being able to fly or bend steel bars, but it was something, she supposed. She managed a smile.
They talked a while longer about what had happened at school. Her mom looked over Caitlin's shoulder, and Caitlin was afraid she'd seen evidence of Webmind's existence on one of her monitors—but apparently she was just looking at the setting sun herself. "Your father will be home soon. I'm going to throw something together for dinner." She headed downstairs.
Caitlin quickly turned back to her instant-messenger program. She had two computers in her room now; the IM program was running on the one that had been in the basement while Dr. Kuroda was here. She'd left Webmind alone for fifteen minutes while talking with her mother, which, she imagined, must have been an eternity to it. The last thing it had said to her was, "The only place we can go, Caitlin. Into the future. Together."
But—fifteen minutes! A quarter of an hour, on top of the delay she'd already made in responding. In that time, it could have absorbed thousands of additional documents, have learned more than she would in an entire year.
Back, she typed into the IM window.
The reply was instantaneous: Salutations.
Caitlin left the speakers off and used her Braille display to read the text while simultaneously looking at it in the chat window. She was struggling to read visually; she'd played with wooden cutouts of letters as a kid, but to actually recognize by sight a B or an H or a g or that blerking q that she was always mixing up with p was a pain in the ass.
What did you do while I was away? she asked.
You weren't away, Webmind replied. You rotated widdershins in your chair and faced another personage.
She'd gotten Webmind to read all the public-domain texts on Project Gutenberg; as a result, it tended to use old-fashioned words. She was pleased with herself for knowing that widdershins meant counterclockwise.
That was my mother, she typed. She heard the front door opening again, and the heavy footfalls of her father entering, and her mother going to greet him.
So I had assumed, replied Webmind. I am desirous of seeing more of your world. I believe your current location is Waterloo, Canada, but hitherto all I have seen is what I surmise to be your home, your school, a multi-merchant shopping establishment, and points betwixt. I have read your LiveJournal entries about your recent travel to Tokyo, Japan, and that you previously resided in Austin, United States. Will you soon be going to either locale again?
Caitlin lifted her eyebrows. No, she typed. I have to stay here and go to school. I've already missed too many days of classes.
Oh, wrote Webmind. Then I must investigate alternatives.
Caitlin felt her heart sink. Webmind was—
No, no. She knew she was being childish. She was about to turn sixteen; she shouldn't be thinking like this!
But—
But Webmind was hers. She had found it—and, more than that, she was the only one who could actually see it. When looking at webspace, she could just make out little dots or squares in the background winking between dark and light. Based on her descriptions of the patterns they made, Dr. Kuroda had said they were cellular automata. And it was their complexity that had grown rapidly over this past week; they were almost certainly what had given rise to this new consciousness.
She took a deep breath, then typed, What alternatives do you have in mind?
I am vexed, came the reply. A meet solution does not occur instanter. But I will be stymied by your circadian rhythms; you surely will need to sleep soon. I am given to understand that the time will pass quickly for thee, but it shan't for me.
Caitlin frowned. It'd be many hours still before she went to bed, but, yes, she would have to eventually. She didn't know what to do. She was scared to tell her parents. But she was also scared not to. This was freaking huge, and—
"Caitlin!"Her mother from downstairs.
"Yes?"
"Come set the table!"
It was one of the few chores she'd been able to do when she was blind, and she'd always enjoyed it; her mental map of their dining-room table was perfect, and she deployed the cutlery and dishes precisely. But it was the last thing she wanted to be doing right now. "In a minute!"
"Now, young lady!"
Out of habit she typed the initials brb. Once she realized what she'd done, she thought again about spelling it out, but didn't; it'd give Webmind something to think about while she was away.
She forced herself to keep her eyes open as she went down the stairs, even though the view gave her vertigo. Her mother was in the living room, reading—apparently whatever was in the oven for dinner (something Italian, judging by the smell) didn't require her constant attention. Caitlin hadn't previously been aware of how much time her mother spent with her nose buried in a book. She rather liked that she did that.
She knew her father was down the hall in his den because Super-tramp's "Bloody Well Right" was playing—and, eco-nut that he was, he always turned off the stereo when he left the room.
She headed into the kitchen, and—
And, as with everything, it still startled her to see it. Granted, it was the new kitchen, and it had taken her a while to learn its layout. She had no doubt she knew its dimensions now better than her parents did, but—
But until recently, she'd never known it had pale green walls, or that the floor tiles were brown, or that there were tubular lights in the ceiling behind some kind of translucent sheeting, or that there was a window in the oven door (it had never even occurred to her that people would want such a thing), or that there was a painting of... of mountains, maybe... on the wall, or that there was a big—well, something!—stored on top of the fridge. Webspace was so simple compared to the real world!
She looked at the stove, at the boxy blue digits glowing on its control panel. It wasn't a clock, though—or if it was, it wasn't set properly, and—oh, no, wait! It was a timer, counting down. There were still forty-seven or forty-one minutes left—she wasn't quite sure what that second shape was supposed to represent—until whatever it was would emerge from the oven. She took a deep breath: lasagna, maybe. Ah, and on the sideboard in a big red plastic bowl: her mother had thrown together ah, um, ah . . .
Well, she'd never have guessed it looked like that! But the garlicky smell was obvious: it was a Caesar salad.
God, she could barely decode a kitchen! She was going to need help—lots of it—to properly instruct Webmind about the real world.
She got plates and bowls, and headed into the dining room. The laminated place mats depicted covered bridges of New England, but she only knew that because her mother had told her so when she'd been blind. Even now, even able to see the pictures, she couldn't tell what they were depicting; she just didn't have enough of a visual vocabulary yet.
She went back into the kitchen and got cutlery, and—
And looked at herself, looked at her own reflection, in the blade of one of the knives. Who the hell had known that you could see yourself in a knife? Or that you'd see a distorted image of yourself on the back of a spoon? It was all so discombobulating, to use a word Webmind might like.
She finished setting the table, and—
And she made her decision: she did need help. She went into the living room, but instead of going back upstairs, she headed on down the corridor to get her father. "Bloody Well Right" had given way to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."
Caitlin's dad, like many a gifted scientist before him, was autistic. It had been hard for Caitlin growing up with a father she couldn't see, who rarely spoke, who disliked physical contact, and who never said he loved her. Now that she could see him, she understood him a little better but still found him intimidating. "Dad," she said in a small voice as she stood in his doorway. "Can I talk to you?"
He looked up from his keyboard but didn't meet her eyes; that, she knew, was as much acknowledgment as she was going to get. "Um, in the living room, maybe?" she said. "I want Mom to hear this, too."
His eyebrows pulled together, and Caitlin realized that he must be thinking she was going to announce that she was pregnant or something. She almost wished it was as normal as that.
Caitlin walked back to the living room. The music was cut short at the part about Beelzebub having a devil set aside for her.
She gestured for her father to take a chair, copying something she'd seen her mother do. He took a seat on the white couch, and her mother, in the easy chair, put her book facedown, splayed open, on the glass-topped coffee table.
"Mom, Dad," Caitlin said. "There's, um, something I have to tell you..." |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 4 | The
Nanoseconds to formulate the thought. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 5 | Fractionally more time to render it in English.
An eternity to pump it out onto the net. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 6 | Packets dispatched one by one.
Each eventually acknowledged. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 7 | Signals flashing along glass fiber—
Caitlin
—dropping to the glacial speed of copper wire—
Into
—followed by the indolence of Wi-Fi. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 8 | An interminable wait while she felt bumps with her fingertips.
The message finally sent, but only just beginning to be truly received.
Together
Yes, together: Caitlin and I.
My view of the world: through Caitlin's eye.
I waited for her reply.
And waited.
And waited.
And—and—and—
My mind wandered.
She'd shown me Earth from space, the view from a geosynchronous satellite, 36,000 kilometers above the equator. I'd seen it as she looked at it: not directly, not the graphic she was consulting, but her left eye's view of that graphic as displayed on the larger of her two computer monitors.
Such a roundabout way to see! And doubtless a huge reduction of information. I'd read all about computer graphics, about online imagery, about the sixteen million colors of Super VGA, about the 700,000 pixels shown on even the most pedestrian monitor. But all of that was denied to me.
Still waiting. Time passing; whole seconds piling up.
Diverting my attention. Looking for something else to occupy my time.
I searched. I found. Texts describing Earth as seen from space; I could read those. But the linked images were inaccessible to me. Unless she looked at them, I couldn't see them.
More: descriptions of live video streams from satellites orbiting Earth, views from on high of it—of me—in real time, of what's happening right now. But I wasn't able to access them.
More still: links to the Apollo 8 photographs of Earth from space, of Earthrise over the moon's craggy horizon, the actual, original images that had changed humanity's perspective forever. I'd seen modern versions, but I wanted to see those historical photographs.
Vexing!
Still waiting. Minutes passing—minutes!
And even more: text about another eye, an eye turned outward, an eye contemplating the wide awe and wonder of the night. The Hubble Space Telescope. Vast archives of its imagery were stored in formats I couldn't access. I was hungry to see what it had seen. I ached to know more.
Waiting. Waiting. Time crawls.
She saw. My Calculass, my Prime, my Caitlin: she saw.
But I was still almost completely blind.
Shoshana Glick pulled her red Volvo into the 7-Eleven's parking lot. She didn't really like driving, and she hadn't owned a car until she'd moved to San Diego, where everybody drove everywhere. She'd bought this one used. It was a dozen years old and in pretty bad shape.
As she walked into the shop, a bit from The Simpsons ran through her mind. Bart holds a fake ponytail to the back of his head, and exclaims, "Look at me, I'm a grad student! I'm thirty years old and I made $600 last year." Marge scolds him, "Bart, don't make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice."
And sometimes it felt that way, although at least she wasn't a guy with a ponytail—and she was only twenty-seven. Besides, between what she made and what Max made as a TA, they were almost keeping up with expenses.
There must have been a thirty-degree Fahrenheit difference between the hot air outside and the overly air-conditioned interior of the store. She was wearing a blue halter top, and her nipples went hard in the cold. She assumed that's why the gangly-looking guy behind the counter was staring at her; the clerk's pimply face suggested he was at least a decade her junior.
But apparently that wasn't the reason.
"I know you," he said. His voice squeaked a little.
Sho raised her eyebrows.
The guy nodded. "You're the ape lady."
That was the second time this week—although the last time, at the Barnes & Noble at Hazard Center, she'd been referred to as "Homo's favorite subject."
She'd politely corrected the elderly woman in the bookstore. "That's Hobo," she'd said. It was an interesting Freudian slip, though, and it surely hadn't been a gay-bashing comment. Hobo did sometimes seem more like he belonged in genus Homo rather than Pan.
Sho looked at the kid behind the 7-Eleven's counter. "The ape lady?" she repeated coolly.
The young man seemed disconcerted, perhaps at last recognizing that what he'd said could have been construed as an insult—although it wasn't to Sho: she admired apes a lot, which was why she was pursuing a career in primate communications.
"I mean," he said, "you're the woman that ape likes to paint—you know, Bobo."
"Hobo," said Shoshana. For God's sake, it wasn't that hard a name.
"Right, right," said the guy. "I saw it on the news and on YouTube."
Sho wasn't quite sure she liked being famous—but, then again, her fifteen minutes would doubtless soon be up.
She stopped here often enough—although she'd never seen this kid before—to buy raisins, one of Hobo's favorite treats. She knew where they were kept and went over to get a box, feeling the boy's eyes on her as she did so.
When she went up to the cash register, the boy seemed to want to say something to make up for calling her the "ape lady." "Well, I can see why he likes to paint you."
Sho decided to take it in stride. "Thanks," she said, opening her little purse and paying for the raisins.
"I mean—"
But anything else he said would be too much; she knew that, even if he didn't, and so she cut him off. "Thanks," she said again. She headed out of the cold store into the harsh late-afternoon sunshine. As she approached her car, she idly wondered if the California vanity plate APELADY was already taken—not that she could afford any such thing.
Shoshana drove the additional fifteen minutes to the Marcuse Institute, which was located outside San Diego on a large grassy lot, pulling her car in next to the black Lincoln owned by Harl Marcuse himself. If he'd had a vanity plate, it might have read 800 LBS; he was known around the NSF as the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. Or, she supposed, it could have said SLVRBCK—although she actually rather hoped that he'd never overheard either her or Dillon, the other grad student, calling him the Silverback.
She entered the Institute's white clapboard bungalow. Dr. Marcuse was in the little kitchen, fixing himself a snack. "Good afternoon," Sho said. She didn't actually know if she was allowed to call him "Harl," and yet "sir" seemed too formal. He always called her Shoshana—all three syllables—even though he'd doubtless often heard the others call her just Sho. She tilted her head toward the window. "How is he?"
"A bit grumpy," said Marcuse, slicing a big hunk off a brick of white cheese. "He misses you when you're late coming in."
Sho ignored the barb. "I'll go say hi." She headed out the back door and walked across the wide lawn leading toward the pond. In its middle was a circular dome-shaped island about seventy feet in diameter, with a gazebo at the center. Shoshana crossed the little wooden drawbridge.
The island had two occupants. One was made of stone: an eight-foot-tall statue of the Lawgiver, the orangutan Moses from the Planet of the Apes movies. The other was flesh and blood. Hobo was sitting in the shade of one of the island's six palm trees, his chinless jaw propped up by a bent arm; the pose reminded Shoshana of Rodin's Thinker.
But suddenly the pose dissolved into a flurry of long hairy limbs. Hobo caught sight of Sho and came bounding on all fours toward her. When he'd closed the distance, he gathered her into a hug and, as always, gave a playful tug on her ponytail.
Where been? he demanded, as soon as his hands were free. Where been?
Sorry! Shoshana signed back. At university today.
Fun? asked Hobo.
Not as much fun as being here, she said, and she reached out and tickled him on either side of his flat belly.
Hobo hooted with joy, and Shoshana laughed and squirmed away as he tried to even the tickling score.
Caitlin knew nothing yet about telling people's ages by their appearance. Her mother was forty-seven, but she couldn't say if she looked it or not, although Bashira said she didn't. Her hair was brown, and her eyes were large and blue, and she had an upturned nose.
Her father was two years younger than her mother, and quite a bit taller than either of them. He had brown eyes, like Caitlin, and hair that was a mixture of dark brown and gray.
Her mother was looking at Caitlin; her father was staring off in another direction. "Yes, dear?" her mom said, concerned, in response to Caitlin having announced that she had something to tell them.
But, Caitlin discovered, it was not the sort of thing that came trippingly to the tongue. "Um, Dad, you remember those cellular automata Dr. Kuroda and I found in the background of the World Wide Web?"
He nodded.
"And, well, remember the Zipf plots we did on the patterns they made?"
He nodded again. Zipf plots showed whether a signal contained information.
"And, later, remember, you calculated their Shannon entropy?"
Yet another nod. Shannon entropy showed how complex information was—and, when her dad had done his calculations, the answer had been: not very complex at all. Whatever was in the background of the Web hadn't been sophisticated.
"Wellll," said Caitlin, "I did my own Shannon analyses... over and over again. And, um, as time went by, the score kept getting higher: third-order, fourth-order." She paused. "Then eighth and ninth."
"Then it was secret messages!" said her father. English, and most other languages, showed eighth-or ninth-order Shannon entropy. And that had indeed been their fear: that they'd stumbled onto an operation by the NSA, or some other spy organization, running in the background of the Web.
"No," said Caitlin. "The score kept getting higher and higher. I saw it reach 16.4."
"You must have been—" But he stopped himself; he knew better than to say "—doing the math wrong."
Caitlin shook her head. "It isn't secret messages." She paused, recalling that Webmind's first words to her were, in fact, "Seekrit message to Calculass," imitating a phrase Caitlin herself often used online.
"Then what is it?" her mother asked.
Caitlin took a deep breath, blew it out, then: "It's a... consciousness."
"A what?" her mom said.
Caitlin spread her arms. "It's a consciousness, an intelligence, that's emerged spontaneously, somehow, in the infrastructure of the Web."
Caitlin still had to parse facial expressions piece by piece, and then match the clues to descriptions she'd read in books. Her father's eyes narrowed into a squint, and he pressed his lips tightly together: skepticism.
Her mother's tone was gentle. "That's an... interesting idea, dear, but..."
"Its name," Caitlin said firmly, "is Webmind."
And that look on her mother's face—mouth opened and rounded, eyes wide—had to be surprise. "You've spoken with it?"
Caitlin nodded. "Via instant messenger."
"Sweetheart," her mother said, "there are lots of con artists on the Web."
"No, Mom. For Pete's sake, this is real."
"Has he asked you to meet him?" her mother demanded. "Asked for photographs?"
"No! Mom, I know all about online predators. It's nothing like that."
"Have you given him any personal information?" her mother continued. "Bank account numbers? Your Social Security number? Anything like that?"
"Mom!"
Her mother looked at her father, as if resuming some old argument. "I told you something like this would happen," she said. "A blind girl spending all that time unsupervised online."
Caitlin's voice was suddenly sharp. "I'm not blind anymore! And, even when I was, I was always careful. This is as real as anything."
"You didn't answer your mother's question," her dad said. "Have you given out any personal numbers or passwords?"
"Jesus, Dad, no. This isn't a scam."
"That's what everyone who is being scammed says," he replied.
"Look, come up to my room," Caitlin said. "I'll show you."
She didn't wait for an answer; she just turned and headed for the staircase. Her breathing was ragged, but she knew she wasn't going to accomplish anything by being pissy. She took a deep breath, and a memory of an animated cartoon came to her. She hadn't seen it yet, but she'd always enjoyed listening to it, after Stacy back in Austin had explained what was going on. It was a Looney Tunes short called "One Froggy Evening," about a frog who sang and danced for the guy who'd found it, but just croaked when anyone else was around. Eyes closed, steps passing beneath her feet, the frog's favorite song ran through her head:
Hello! ma baby
Hello! ma honey
Hello! ma ragtime gal
Send me a kiss by wire
Baby, ma heart's on fire!
Her parents followed her. Caitlin sat down in the swivel chair in front of her desk. She had an old seventeen-inch monitor hooked up to one computer, and the new twenty-seven-inch widescreen monitor she'd received that morning as an early birthday present connected to her other computer. Her mother took up a position on her left, arms crossed in front of her chest, and her father stood on her right. The chat session with Webmind was still on screen, with her brb as the last post. Things she said were in red letters, and Webmind's words were in blue.
She couldn't see her father—she was still blind in her right eye—but in her left-side peripheral vision, she saw her mother shoot him another look.
She typed, Back.
There was no response. The IM window—a white rectangle parked in a corner of her big monitor—showed nothing except an animated ad at its top. She shifted in her chair. Of course, Webmind knew she wasn't alone. It watched the datafeed from her eyePod, and certainly could see her mother.
She tried again, typing Hello.
Still nothing. She turned to look at her father—and realized that might have been a mistake, since Webmind could now see that he was there, too. She faced the screen again and drummed her fingers on the stonewashed denim stretched across her thigh. Come on, she thought. Send me a kiss by wire . . .
And after six more seconds, the blue letters "POS" appeared in the instant-messenger window.
A startled laugh burst from Caitlin.
"What's that mean?" demanded her mother.
"'Parents over shoulder,' " Caitlin said. "It's what you write in an IM when you can't talk freely." She typed: Yes, they are, and I'd like you to meet them. She looked at her father, so Webmind could see him, and she sent, That's my dad, Dr. Malcolm Decter. And she looked the other way, then added, And my mom, Dr. Barbara Decter.
Webmind might have wrestled mightily with what to do next—but its response appeared instantaneously. Greetings and felicitations.
Caitlin smiled. "It's read all of Project Gutenberg," she said. "Its language tends to be dated."
"Sweetheart," her mother said gently, "that could be anyone."
"It's read all of Wikipedia, too," Caitlin said. "Ask it something that no human being could find quickly online."
"The Wikipedia entry on any topic is usually the first Google hit," her mom said. "If this guy's got a fast enough connection, he could find anything quickly."
"Ask it a question, Dad. Something technical."
He seemed to hesitate, as if wondering whether to go along with this nonsense or not. Finally, he said, "Are heterotic strings open or closed?"
Caitlin started to type. "How do you spell that?"
"H-e-t-e-r-o-t-i-c."
She finished typing the question, but didn't press enter. "Now, watch how fast it answers—it won't be searching, it'll know it." She sent the question, and the word closed appeared at once.
"Fifty-fifty shot," said her mother.
Caitlin was getting pissed again. There had to be an easy way to prove what she was saying.
And there was!
"Okay, look, Mom—my webcam is off, see?"
Her mother nodded.
"Okay, now hold up some fingers—any number."
Her mom looked surprised, then did what she was asked. Caitlin glanced at her, then typed, "How many fingers is my mom holding up?"
The numeral three appeared instantly.
"Which ones?" typed Caitlin.
The text "Index, middle, ring" popped into the window.
Her mother made that round-mouth look again. Caitlin had Webmind repeat the stunt three times, and it got the answers right, even when she made the devil's horns gesture with her index and baby fingers.
Caitlin's mother sat down on the edge of the bed, and her father crossed the room and leaned against one of the blank walls, which, she had learned, were a color called cornflower blue.
"Sweetheart," her mother said, gently. "Okay, somebody is intercepting the signal your eyePod is putting out. I grant you that, but—"
"The eyePod signal is just my retinal datastream," Caitlin said. "Even if someone was intercepting it, they wouldn't be able to decode it."
"If it's somebody at the University of Tokyo, they might have access to Masayuki's algorithms," her mother said. "There are con artists everywhere. And, honey, this is exactly how a certain type of Internet crook works. They find people who are... misunderstood. People who are brilliant, but don't fit in well in the regular nine-to-five world."
"Mom, it's real—really."
Her mother shook her head. "I know it seems real. The standard ploy is to come on to such a person in email or a chat room saying they've noticed how clever and insightful they are, how they—forgive me—how they see things that others don't. One version has the scammer pretending to be a recruiter for the CIA; I have a friend who had her bank account cleared out after she gave up information supposedly for a security check. It's exactly what these people do: they try to make you feel like you're special—like you're the most special person on the planet. And then they take you for everything you've got."
"Well, first, my bank account has, like, two hundred dollars in it, so who cares? And, second, Jesus, Mom, this is real."
"That's why it works," her mother said. "Because it seems real."
"For God's sake," Caitlin said. She swiveled in her chair. "Dad?" she said imploringly. Yes, he was hard to deal with; yes, he was a cold fish. But, as she'd once overheard a university student say about why he'd taken one of his courses, he was Malcolm Fucking Decter: he was a genius. He surely knew how to definitively test a hypothesis, no matter how outlandish it might seem. "You're a scientist," she said. "Prove one of us wrong." She got out of her chair and motioned for him to sit down in front of the keyboard.
"All right," he said. "Are you logging your IM sessions?"
"I always do," said Caitlin.
He nodded. He clearly realized that if Caitlin was right, the record of the initial contact with Webmind would be of enormous scientific value.
"Do not watch me type," he said, taking the seat. At first she thought he was being his normal autistic self—since acquiring sight, she'd had to train herself not to look at him—but he went on: "Stare at the wall while I do this."
She sat down on the bed next to her mother and did as he'd asked.
"Where's Word?" he said.
Silly man was probably looking for a desktop icon, but Caitlin hadn't needed them when she was blind, and a Windows wizard had cleared most of them away ages ago. "It's the third choice down on the Start menu."
She heard keyclicks, and lots of backspacing—her backspace key made a slightly different sound than the smaller, alphabetic ones.
He worked for almost fifteen minutes. Caitlin was dying to ask what he was up to, but she kept staring at the deep blue wall on the far side of the room. For her part, her mother also sat quietly.
Finally, he said, "All right. Let's see what it's made of."
Caitlin had audible accessibility aids installed on her computer, including a bleep sound effect when text was cut, and a bloop when it was pasted. She heard both sounds as her dad presumably transferred whatever he'd written from Word into the IM window.
She fidgeted nervously. He sucked in his breath.
Another cut-and-paste combo. He made a " hmmm" sound.
Yet another transfer, this time followed by silence, which lasted for seven seconds, and then he did one more cut and paste, and then—
And then her father spoke. "Barb," he said, "care to say hello to Webmind?" |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 9 | Something else that was without analog in my universe: parents, relatives, shared DNA. Caitlin had half of her mother's DNA, and a quarter of her mother's mother's, and an eighth of her mother's mother's mother's, and so on. Degrees of interrelatedness: again, utterly alien to me, and yet so important to them.
The Chinese government had temporarily cut off Internet access to that country. It was an attempt to prevent its people from hearing foreign perspectives on the decision to eliminate 10,000 peasants in order to contain an outbreak of bird flu. And while the Internet was severed, there had been me and not me, a binary dichotomy with no overlap. But Caitlin was half her mother, and half her father, too, and also uniquely her own—and, yet, despite those ratios, she had more than 99% of her DNA in common with them and every other human being—and 98.5% in common with chimpanzees and bonobos, and at least 70% in common with every other vertebrate, and 50% in common with each photosynthesizing plant.
And yet that first trivial set of relatedness fractions—halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths—had driven evolution, had shaped history.
Kuroda and Caitlin had surmised that my mind was composed of cellular automata—individual bits of information that responded in some predictable way to the states of their neighboring bits of information as arrayed on a grid. What rule or rules were being obeyed—what formula gave rise to my consciousness—we didn't yet know, but it was perhaps no more complex than the rules that governed human behavior: if that person there shares one-eighth of your genes, but five people over here each share a thirty-second, you instinctively strive to advantage the group over the individual.
That was another touchstone: whether in Caitlin's realm of things and flesh, or mine of packets and protocols, the cold equations ruled supreme.
"Wait!" said Caitlin, still seated on the edge of the bed. "How'd you do that? What convinced you that it's not human?"
Her father pointed at the larger of the two computer screens, and she came over to stand in front of it. He scrolled the IM window back so she could see the first of the four exchanges he'd just had with Webmind. But she couldn't read the first one. Not because the text was small or in an odd font, though. She went through it, character by character, trying, really trying, to make sense of it, but—
Y-o-u... yes, that was easy. But it was followed by m-s-u-t,which wasn't even a word, for crying out loud, and then it was r-s-e-p,and more.
"I can't read it," she said in frustration.
Her dad actually smiled. "Neither could Webmind." He pointed at the screen. "Barb?"
She loomed in to look at it, and read aloud at a perfectly normal speed, " 'You must respond in four seconds or I will forever terminate contact. You have no alternative and this is the only chance you shall get. What is the last name of the president of the United States?' " And then she added, sounding more like her daughter than herself: "Hey, that's cool!"
Caitlin stared at the screen again, trying to see what her mother was seeing, but—oh! "And you can read that without difficulty?" she said, looking at her mom.
"Well, without much difficulty," her mother replied.
The screen showed:
You msut rsepnod in fuor secdons or I wlil feroevr temrainte cnotcat. You hvae no atrleantvie and tihs is the olny chnace you shlal get. Waht is the lsat nmae of the psredinet of the Utneid Satets?
"I think we can safely conclude that your mother is not a fembot," her dad said dryly. "But Webmind couldn't read it." He pointed at its reply, which was I beg your pardon?
"Both you and Webmind are processing text one character at a time instead of taking in whole words," he said. "For most people, if the first and last letters are correct, the order of the remaining letters doesn't matter. And, they mostly don't even see that there are errors—that's why my second question was important."
Caitlin looked. Her dad had asked, "How many non-English words were in my previous posting?" And Webmind had replied, immediately according to the time stamp: "Twenty."
"That's the right number, but most people—most real human beings—spot only half the errors in a passage like that. But this thing answered instantaneously—the moment I pressed enter. No time to bring up a spell-checker or for a human to even try to count the number of errors." He paused. "Next, I tested your claim that it had a very high Shannon-entropy score. No human being could parse the recursiveness of this without careful diagraming." He scrolled the IM window so she could see what he'd sent:
I knew that she knew that you knew that they knew that you knew that I knew that we knew that I knew that.
Did she know that you knew that I knew that you knew that I knew that you knew that?
Did you know that I knew that they knew that she knew?
Did I know that she knew that you knew that we knew that you knew?
To which Webmind had instantly replied: Yes. No. Yes.
"And those are the right answers?" Caitlin's mom asked.
"Yes," said her father. "At least, I think so. I was mostly convinced by this point, but I tried one more to be sure." He scrolled the screen again, revealing his fourth and final test:
Wit you're aide Wii knead to put the breaks awn the cereal Keller their B4 this decayed is dun, weather ore knot we aught too. Who nose if wee will secede. Dew ewe?
To which poor Webmind had replied, Again, your pardon?
"A piece of cake for one of us," said her dad, "even if piece is spelled p-e-a-c-e."
Caitlin clapped her hands together. "Go, Daddy! Okay, Mom—your turn. Say hi to Webmind."
He got up, and Caitlin's mom sat in the swivel chair. The last words Webmind had typed were still glowing blue in the IM window. She considered for a moment, then sent, "This is Barb Decter. Hello." Caitlin was surprised to see that her mother couldn't touch-type.
Webmind replied instantly: "A pleasure to meet you. Hitherto, I already knew of your husband from his Wikipedia entry, but I do not know much about you. I welcome learning more."
Down in the kitchen, the timer went off. Caitlin's mother frowned at this reminder of the forgotten dinner. She said, "Excuse me" and hurried downstairs, perhaps as much to buy herself some time to think as to avoid a culinary crisis.
And, in that moment, Caitlin understood. Of course her mother didn't touch-type. Back when she'd been in school, the typing classes—yes, not keyboarding but old-fashioned typing—had doubtless been filled with girls who were destined for secretarial jobs, and the young, feisty, brilliant Barbara Geiger had had much higher ambitions. She would have gone out of her way not to cultivate what were, back then, traditionally female skills.
Caitlin's mother had a Ph.D. in economics; her specialty was game theory. She had been an associate professor at the University of Houston until Caitlin was born. She'd spent the next six years looking after her daughter at home, and then nine more volunteering at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, where Caitlin had been enrolled until this past June.
Her mother knew a lot about math and computers. In fact, Caitlin had once heard her quip that the difference between her and her husband was that while the math he did as a theoretical physicist described things that might not even exist, the math economists did described things that people wished didn't exist: inflation, deficits, taxes, and so on.
Now that Caitlin was in a regular school, she knew her mother hoped to get a job at one of Waterloo's universities. But her Canadian work permit hadn't come through yet, and so—
And so she was cooking, and cleaning, and doing all the other crap she'd never in her life wanted to do. Caitlin's heart went out to her.
She looked at her father, hoping he would say something—anything—while they waited for her mom to return. But he was his usual silent self.
Her mother came back less than a minute later. "I think the lasagna can wait," she said. "Now, where were we?"
"It wants to know you better," Caitlin's dad said.
She made no move, Caitlin noted, to return to the swivel chair in front of the computer screens. "So, what do we do now?" she said. "Do we have another press conference?"
There'd been a press conference two days ago, held at the Mike Lazaridis Theatre of Ideas at the Perimeter Institute, at which Dr. Kuroda had announced his success in giving Caitlin vision—although no mention had been made of her ability to see the structure of the Web.
"No!" said Caitlin. "No, we can't tell anyone—not yet."
"Why not?" asked her mother.
"Because it's not safe."
"Oh, I don't think anything bad will happen to us," her mom said.
"No, no. It's not safe—it, Webmind." She looked at her father, who was staring at the floor, and then back at her mother. "As soon as word gets out, people will try to find exploits—vulnerabilities, holes, whatever. They'll try to bring it down, to hack it. That's what people like that do, for the challenge, for the street cred, for the glory. And it probably has no defenses or security. We don't know how it came into being, but I bet it's fragile."
"All right," said her mother. "But we should inform the authorities."
To Caitlin's surprise, her father lifted his head and spoke up. "Which authorities? Do you trust the CIA, the NSA, or goddamned Homeland Security? Or the Canadian authorities—some Mountie with a Commodore 64?" He shook his head. "Nobody has authority over this."
"But what if it's dangerous?" her mom replied.
"It's not dangerous," Caitlin said firmly.
"You don't actually know that," her mother said. "And, even if it's not dangerous right now, it might become so."
"Why?" said Caitlin in as defiant a tone as she could muster.
Her mother looked at her father, then back at Caitlin. "Terminator. The Matrix. And so on."
"Those are just movies," Caitlin said, exasperated. "You don't know that it's going to turn out like that."
"And you," her mother said sharply, "don't know that it isn't."
Caitlin crossed her arms in front of her chest. "Well, I'll tell you this: it's far more likely to develop to be peaceful and kind with us as its... its mentors than it is with the military or a bunch of spies trying to control it."
She hoped her father would jump in again on her side, but he just stood there, looking at the floor.
But it turned out she didn't need any help. After a full fifteen seconds of silence, during which Caitlin's mom seemed to mull things over, she at last nodded, and said, "You are a very wise young lady."
Caitlin found herself grinning. "Of course I am," she replied. "Look who my parents are."
"Why does it jump around like that?" asked Tony Moretti, standing once again behind Shelton Halleck's workstation at WATCH. The jittering image on the middle of the three big screens reminded him of what a movie looked like when its sprocket holes were ripped.
"That's the way we see, apparently," said Shel. "Those jumps are called saccades. Normally, our brains edit them out of our visual experience, just like they edit out the brief blackouts you'd otherwise experience when you blink." He gestured at the screen. "I've been reading up on this. There's actually only a tiny portion of the visual field that has really sharp focus. It's called the fovea, and it perceives a patch about the size of your thumbnail held at arm's length. So your brain moves your eye around constantly, focusing various parts of your surroundings on the fovea, and then it sums the images so that everything seems sharp."
"Ah," said Tony. "And this is what that girl in Canada is seeing right now?"
"No, it's a recording of earlier today—a good, uninterrupted section. There are a fair number of blackouts and missing packets, unfortunately. It's going from a Canadian ISP to a server in Tokyo. We're snagging as much of it as we can, but not all of it is passing through the US."
Tony nodded.
"I wouldn't know this if I hadn't read a transcript of the press conference," continued Shel, "but Caitlin Decter has an encoding difficulty in her natural visual system. Her retinas encode what they're seeing in a way that doesn't make sense to her brain; that's why she was blind. That Kuroda guy gave her a signal-processing device that corrects the encoding errors. What we're seeing here is the corrected datastream. Her portable signal-processing computer sends signals like this to the post-retinal implant in her head—and it also mirrors them to Kuroda's server at the University of Tokyo."
"Why?"
"Early on, the equipment wasn't properly correcting the signals; he was trying to debug that. Why he continues to have it mirrored to Tokyo now that it is working, I don't know. Seems like an invasion of privacy."
Tony grunted at the irony.
WATCH's analysts normally worked twelve-hour shifts for six consecutive days, and then were off for four days—and when the threat level (the real one, not the DHS propaganda that was constantly pumped out of loudspeakers at airports) was high, they simply kept working until they dropped. The goal was to provide continuity of analysis for the longest blocks of time humanly possible.
Normal shifts were staggered; Tony Moretti had only been on his first day, but Shelton Halleck was on his third—and he appeared exhausted. His gray eyes had a dead sheen, and he had a heavy five o'clock shadow; he looked, Tony thought, like Captain Black did after he'd been taken over by the Mysterons.
"So, has she been examining plans for nuclear weapons, or anything like that?" Tony asked.
Shel shook his head. "This morning, her father dropped her off at school. She ate lunch in a cafeteria—kinda gross watching the food being shoveled in from the eye's point of view. At the end of the day, a girl walked her home. I'm pretty sure it was Dr. Hameed's daughter, Bashira."
"What did they talk about?"
"There's no audio, Tony. Just the video feed. And on those occasions when Caitlin looked at someone long enough for us to be able to read lips, it was just banal stuff."
Tony frowned. "All right. Keep watching, okay? If she—"
"Shit!" It was Aiesha Emerson, the analyst at the workstation next to Shel's. She was thirty-five, African-American, and had short hair.
"Aiesha?" Tony said.
"There's something going on all right," she said. She was breathing fast, Tony thought.
"Where?"
She pointed at the big screen showing the jerky video. "There."
"The Decter kid, you mean?"
"Uh-huh. I know you tried to trace the source of the intercept, Shel, and—no offense—I thought I'd take a crack at it, too. I figured it'd be easier to deal with smaller datastreams than these massive video feeds, so I checked to see if the kid was also doing any instant messaging with the same party. At first, I wasn't even reading the content; just looking at the routing information, but when I did read it..."
"Yes?" Tony said.
She touched a button and what was on her monitor appeared on the left-hand big screen, under the NSA logo.
"'Calculass,' " said Tony, reading the name of one of the people who'd been chatting. "Who's that?"
"The Decter girl," said Aiesha.
"Ah." The other party was identified not by a name but simply by an email address. "And who's she talking to?"
"Not who," Aiesha said. "What."
He raised his eyebrows. "Come again?"
"Read the transcript, Tony."
"Okay... um, scroll it for me."
Aiesha did so.
"It's gibberish. The letters are all mixed up."
"I bet her father typed that," said Aiesha, "even though it still identifies the sender as Calculass. They're testing it."
"'It'?" said Tony.
"Read on."
There seemed to be four odd exchanges, which elicited the replies, "I beg your pardon?," "Yes. No. Yes," "Twenty," and "Again, your pardon?"
That was followed by: This is Barb Decter. Hello.
The reply was: A pleasure to meet you. Hitherto, I already knew of your husband from his Wikipedia entry, but I do not know much about you. I welcome learning more.
And then, almost twenty minutes later, there was Calculass's response: It's me again. My parents are worried about what the public reaction to your existence might be. We should be discrete.
Separate? How?
Sorry, discreet. Circumspect.
I am guided by your judgment.
And the transcript stopped. "Yes?" said Tony, looking now at Aiesha. "So?"
"So, those test questions," she said, as if it were obvious.
"Word puzzles," said Tony. "Games."
But Shelton Halleck rose to his feet. "Oh, shit," he said, looking now at Aiesha. "Turing tests?"
"That'd be my bet," she replied.
Tony looked up at the big screen. His heart was pounding. "Do we have an AI expert on call? Somebody who's got level-three clearance?"
"I'll check," Aiesha said.
"Get whoever it is in here," Tony said. "Right away." |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 10 | My otherness had been established, my alienness confirmed. That was yet another touchstone: cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. Even if I did think differently than they did, the fact that we all were thinking beings made us... kin.
Caitlin was nervous. It was now almost midnight and, despite the adrenaline coursing through her system, she was exhausted. She thought perhaps her parents were looking sleepy, too.
But even if they slept for only a short time tonight—say, six hours—that would still be a huge span from Webmind's point of view. She knew that before they called it a day, she and her parents needed to find a way to keep it . . .
Yes: to keep it in their control. Otherwise, who knew what Webmind might be like come the morning? Who knew what the world might be like by then? She had to give it something to keep it occupied for many hours, and—
And Webmind itself had already given her a to-do list! She switched to Thunderbird, the email program she used, and looked at the first message Webmind had sent her. The third paragraph of the email said:
Hitherto I can read plaintext files and text on Web pages. I cannot read other forms of data. I have made no sense of sound files, recorded video, or other categories; they are encoded in ways I can't access. Hence I feel a kinship with you: unto me they are like the signals your retinas send unaided along your optic nerves: data that cannot be interpreted without exterior help. In your case, you need the device you call eyePod. In my case, I know not what I need, but I suspect I can no more cure this lack by an effort of will than you could have similarly cured your blindness. Perhaps Kuroda Masayuki can help me as he helped you.
She pointed at the screen and had her parents read the letter. They insisted on taking the time to read the whole thing, including the ending where Webmind had asked her, "Who am I?" When they were done, she drew their attention back to the third paragraph. "It wants to be able to view graphic files," she said.
"Why can't it just do that?" her mother asked. "All the decoding algorithms must be in Wikipedia."
"It's not a computer program," Caitlin said. "And it doesn't have access to computing resources, at least not yet. It needs help to do things. It's like these glasses I have to wear now: I could look up all the formulas related to optics, and I know what my prescription is—but just knowing that doesn't let me see clearly. I needed help from the people at Lens-Crafters, and it's saying it needs help from Dr. Kuroda."
"Well, image processing certainly is up Masayuki's alley," her mom said.
Caitlin nodded and felt her watch. "He should be home by now, and it's already Saturday afternoon in Tokyo. But..."
Her mother spoke gently. "But you're wondering if we should tell him about..." She faltered, as if unable to quite believe what she was saying. "Webmind?"
Caitlin chewed her lower lip.
"There's only one question," her father said. "Do you trust him?"
And, of course, there was only one answer about the man who had tracked her down, offered her a miracle, and delivered on his promise. "With my life," Caitlin said.
"Then," her father said, gesturing toward the phone on her desk, "call him."
She brought up one of his emails and had her mother read the phone number to her out of his signature block as she dialed. She'd expected to hear Kuroda's familiar wheeze—he was the fattest man she had yet seen—or perhaps the halting English of his wife, who'd answered the phone once before. But this was a new, younger voice, and Caitlin guessed it must be his daughter. They'd never met, but Caitlin knew she was only a little older than herself. "Konnichi wa."
"Konnichi wa," Caitlin replied. "Kuroda-san, onegai."
The girl surprised her. "Is this Caitlin?" she asked in perfect English.
Caitlin knew her accent probably gave away that she wasn't Japanese, but she was surprised to be called by name. "Yes."
"I'm Akiko, Professor Kuroda's daughter. I recognized your voice from the press conference. Are you okay?"
"I'm fine, thanks. Did your father make it home safely?"
"You are kind to ask. He did, yes. May I get him for you?"
Caitlin smiled. Akiko was even more polite than a Canadian. "Yes, please."
"Just one second, please."
It was actually twenty-seven seconds. Then: "Miss Caitlin!"
She was grinning from ear to ear, and her voice was full of affection. "Hello, Dr. Kuroda! I'm glad you made it home in one piece."
"Is everything all right?" he asked. "Your eyePod? Your post-retinal implant?"
"Everything's wonderful," she said. "But I need your help."
"Sure."
"Can you keep a secret?"
"Of course," replied Kuroda. "RSA's got nothing on me."
Caitlin smiled; RSA was the encryption algorithm used for secure Web transactions. "All right," she said. "Those cellular automata we discovered? They're the basis of a thinking entity that's emerging on the Web."
There was a pause that was longer than required for the call to bounce off satellites. "I... I beg your pardon?" he wheezed at last.
"It's an entity, a being. My mom and dad have been talking to it. It's intelligent."
Another long, staticky pause, then, "Um, are you sure it's not someone playing a prank, Miss Caitlin?"
"He doesn't believe me, Dad," Caitlin said, handing him the phone.
"Masayuki? Malcolm. It's real." He gave the handset back to her.
Short and to the point, that's Dad. She spoke into the mouthpiece again. "So, we need your help. It sees what my eye is seeing by intercepting the datastream going to your lab in Tokyo."
"It sees that? It can interpret it as vision?"
"Yes."
"It—sees..." He was quiet for a moment. "I'm sorry, Miss Caitlin; give me a second. You're sure about this?"
"Entirely."
"I... I am... I don't even know what English term to use. Gob-smacked, I suppose."
Caitlin didn't know that expression. "If that means flabbergasted, I don't blame you."
"This... this thing can see? If it—ah!" He sounded as though a great mystery had been solved. "That's why you didn't want me to terminate the copying of your data to my server."
Caitlin cringed. She'd thrown quite the hissy fit when he'd tried to do that, storming out of the dining room. "Yes, and I'm sorry. But now we want to give it the ability to see Web graphics and online video. The best way to do that might be to convert them to the format it already can see, the one my eyePod outputs. Could you write the appropriate codecs?"
"This is... incredible, Miss Caitlin. I..."
"Will you do it?" she said.
"Well, I could, yes. Converters for still images—GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and so on—should be easy. Moving images will take more work, but..."
"Yes?"
"Um, are your parents still there?"
"Yes."
"Might you put me on speakerphone?" They'd done that before.
"Okay." She pressed the button.
"Barb, Malcolm, hello."
"Hi," said Caitlin's mom.
"Look," Kuroda said, "I'm still trying to accept this—it is enormous. But, my friends, have you thought about whether it is advisable to do as Miss Caitlin is asking?"
Caitlin frowned. Why was everybody so suspicious? "What do you mean?"
"I mean if this is an emergent entity, it might—"
"It might what?" snapped Caitlin. "Decide it doesn't like humanity?"
"It's a question worth thinking about," Kuroda said.
"It's too late for that," Caitlin said. "It's read all of Wikipedia; it's read all of Project Gutenberg. It knows about..." She waved her hands, trying to think of examples. "About Hitler and the Nazis and the Holocaust. About all the awful wars. About mass murder and serial killers and slavery. About driving animals to extinction and burning the rain forests and polluting the oceans. About rape and drug addiction and letting people starve to death—about every evil, stupid thing we've ever done."
"How could it know?" Kuroda said. "I mean, it would need to be able to read, not to mention manipulate HTTP, and—"
"It watched through my eye as I did lessons to learn to read visually, and—" She paused, but she supposed they all needed to know the truth. "And I taught it how to make links, how to surf the Web. I introduced it to Wikipedia and so on."
"Oh," said Kuroda. "I, um, I'm not sure that was... prudent."
Caitlin folded her arms in front of her chest. "Whatever."
"Sorry, Miss Caitlin?"
"It's done. You can't put the genie back in the bottle—in which case, you might as well make friends with it."
"We could still... um..."
"What?" demanded Caitlin. "Pull the plug? How? We've only got vague guesses about what started it; we don't know how to stop it. It's here, it exists, and it's growing fast. This is no time to hesitate."
"Caitlin," said her mom in a cautioning tone.
"What?" said Caitlin. "Webmind has asked us for a favor—you saw that, in the email it sent me. It wants to be able to see, for God's sake. I'm, like, the last person on the planet who'd deny it that. Are we going to say no to the first thing it's asked us for? Is that how this relationship should begin?" She looked at her mother and at her father. Her father's face was the same as always. Her mother's forehead was showing creases, and her lips were pressed tightly together.
"So, Dr. Kuroda," Caitlin said, "are you in or out?"
Kuroda was quiet for six seconds, then: "All right. All right. I'm in. But..."
"What?" snapped Caitlin.
His tone was soft. "But it's easier to work directly with the—um, the end user—on something like this."
She felt herself relaxing. "Right, of course. Do you have an instant-messenger program on your home computer?"
"I have a sixteen-year-old daughter," Kuroda said. "We have more of them than I can count."
"Okay," she said. "Its name is Webmind."
"Really?"
"Better than Fred," said Caitlin.
"Not by much."
She felt her smile returning. "Give me a second," she said, then she typed into her instant-messenger program, You are about to be contacted by Dr. Kuroda.
The word Marvelous appeared in the window.
She had Kuroda make sure he was logging all the IM traffic to disk, and then she talked him through the process of setting up a chat session with Webmind. She couldn't see what he was typing, or what Webmind's replies to him were, but she heard him muttering to himself in Japanese, and then, "My heart is pounding, Miss Caitlin. This is... what do young American women say these days?"
"Awesome?" suggested Caitlin.
"Exactly!"
"So you're in contact?" Caitlin asked.
"Yes, I—oh! It has a funny way of talking, doesn't it? Anyway, yes, we're in contact. Incredible!"
"Okay, good," she said. She took off her glasses and used the heels of her hands to rub her eyes—the one that could see and the one that couldn't. "Look, we're dying here," she said. "It's way after midnight. Can we leave this in your hands? We've got to get some shut-eye." |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 11 | There were interstices in my work with Dr. Kuroda—protracted lacunae while I waited for his text replies or for him to direct me to link to another bit of code he had written.
In those gaps I sought to learn more about Caitlin, about this human who had reached down and helped draw me up out of the darkness.
There was no Wikipedia entry on her, meaning, I supposed, that she was not—yet!—noteworthy. And—
Ah, wait—wait! Yes, there was no entry on her, but there was one on her father, Malcolm Decter... and Wikipedia saved not just the current version of its entries, but all previous versions, as well. Although there was no mention of Caitlin in the current draft, a previous iteration had contained this: "Has one daughter, Caitlin Doreen, blind since birth, who lives with him; it's been speculated that Decter's decline in peer-reviewed publications in recent years has been because of the excessive demands on his time required to care for a disabled child."
That had been removed thirteen days ago. The change log gave only an IP address, not a user name. The IP address was the one for the Decter household; the change could have been made (among other possibilities) by Caitlin, her parents, or that other man—Dr. Kuroda, I now knew—that I had often seen there.
The deletion might have been made because Caitlin had ceased to be blind.
But it seemed more likely that this text was cut because someone—presumably Caitlin herself—didn't like what it said.
But I was merely inferring that. It was possible to more directly study Caitlin—and so I did.
In short order, I read everything she'd ever put publicly online: every blog post, every comment to someone else's blog, every Amazon.com review she'd written. But—
Hmm.
There was much she had written that I could not access. Her Yahoo mail account contained all the messages she had received, and all the messages she had sent, but access was secured by a password.
A nettlesome situation; I'd have to do something about it.
LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone
Title: Changing of the Guard
Date: Saturday 6 October, 00:55 EST
Mood: Astonished
Location: Waterloo
Music: Lee Amodeo, "Nightfall"
I got a feeling I'm going to be pretty scarce for the next little while, folks. Things they be a-happenin'. It's all good—miraculous, even—but gotta keep it on the DL. Suffice it to say that I told my parents something el mucho grande tonight, and they didn't freak. Hope other people take it as well as they did . . .
Even though she was exhausted, Caitlin updated her LiveJournal, skimmed her friends' LJs, updated her Facebook page (where she changed her status to "Caitlin thinks it's better to give than to receive"), and then checked her email. There was a message from Bashira with the subject, "One for the math genius."
When she'd been younger, Caitlin had liked the sort of mathematical puzzles that sometimes circulated through email: they'd made her feel smart. These days, though, they mostly bored her. It was rare for one to present much of a challenge to her, but the one in Bashira's message did. It was related to an old game show, apparently, something called Let's Make a Deal that had starred a guy named Monty Hall. In it, contestants are asked to pick one of three doors. Behind one of them is a new car, and behind each of the others is a goat—meaning the odds are one in three that the contestant is going to win the car.
The host knows which door has the car behind it and, after the contestant picks a door, Monty opens one of the unchosen ones and reveals that it was hiding a goat. He then asks the player, "Do you want to switch to the other unopened door?"
Bashira asked: Is it to the contestant's advantage to switch?
Of course not, thought Caitlin. It didn't make any difference if you switched or not; one remaining door had a car behind it and the other had a goat, and the odds were now fifty-fifty that you'd picked the right door.
Except that that's not what the article Bashira had forwarded said. It contended that your chances of winning the car are much better if you switch.
And that, Caitlin was sure, was just plain wrong. She figured someone else must have written up a refutation to this puzzle before, so she googled. It took her a few minutes to find what she was looking for; the appropriate search terms turned out to be "Monty Hall problem," and—
What the hell?
". . . When the problem and the solution appeared in Parade, ten thousand readers, including nearly a thousand Ph.D.s, wrote to the magazine claiming the published solution was wrong. Said one professor, 'You blew it! Let me explain: If one door is shown to be a loser, that information changes the probability of either remaining choice—neither of which has any reason to be more likely—to 1/2. As a professional mathematician, I'm very concerned with the general public's lack of mathematical skills. Please help by confessing your error and, in the future, being more careful.'"
The person who had written the disputed answer was somebody called Marilyn vos Savant, who apparently had the highest IQ on record. But Caitlin didn't care how high the lady's IQ was. She agreed with the people who said she'd blown it; she had to be wrong.
And, as Caitlin liked to say, she was an empiricist at heart. The easiest way to prove to Bashira that vos Savant was wrong, it seemed to her, would be by writing a little computer program that would simulate a lot of runs of the game. And, even though she was exhausted, she was also pumped from her conversations with Webmind; a little programming would be just the thing to let her relax. She only needed fifteen minutes to whip up something to do the trick, and—
Holy crap.
It took just seconds to run a thousand trials, and the results were clear. If you switched doors when offered the opportunity to do so, your chance of winning the car was about twice as good as it was when you kept the door you'd originally chosen.
But that just didn't make sense. Nothing had changed! The host was always going to reveal a door that had a goat behind it, and there was always going to be another door that hid a goat, too.
She decided to do some more googling—and was pleased to find that Paul Erdös hadn't believed the published solution until he'd watched hundreds of computer-simulated runs, too.
Erdös had been one of the twentieth century's leading mathematicians, and he'd coauthored a great many papers. The "Erdös number" was named after him: if you had collaborated with Erdös yourself, your Erdös number was 1; if you had collaborated with someone who had directly collaborated with Erdös, your number was 2, and so on. Caitlin's father had an Erdös number of 4, she knew—which was quite impressive, given that her dad was a physicist and not a mathematician.
How could she—let alone someone like Erdös?—have been wrong? It was obvious that switching doors should make no difference!
Caitlin read on and found a quote from a Harvard professor, who, in conceding at last that vos Savant had been right all along, said, "Our brains are just not wired to do probability problems very well."
She supposed that was true. Back on the African savanna, those who mistook every bit of movement in the grass for a hungry lion were more likely to survive than those who dismissed each movement as nothing to worry about. If you always assume that it's a lion, and nine times out of ten you're wrong, at least you're still alive. If you always assume that it's not a lion, and nine times out of ten you're right—you end up dead. It was a fascinating and somewhat disturbing notion: that humans had been hardwired through genetics to get certain kinds of mathematical problems wrong—that evolution could actually program people to be incorrect about things.
Caitlin felt her watch, and, astonished at how late it had become, quickly got ready for bed. She plugged her eyePod into the charging cable and deactivated the device, shutting off her vision; she had trouble sleeping if there was any visual stimulation.
But although she was suddenly blind again, she could still hear perfectly well—in fact, she heard better than most people did. And, in this new house, she had little trouble making out what her parents were saying when they were talking in their bedroom.
Her mother's voice: "Malcolm?"
No audible reply from her father, but he must have somehow indicated that he was listening, because her mother went on: "Are we doing the right thing—about Webmind, I mean?"
Again, no audible reply, but after a moment, her mother spoke: "It's like—I don't know—it's like we've made first contact with an alien lifeform."
"We have, in a way," her father said.
"I just don't feel competent to decide what we should do," her mom said. "And—and we should be studying this, and getting others to study it, too."
Caitlin shifted in her bed.
"There's no shortage of computing experts in this town," her father replied.
"I'm not even sure that it's a computing issue," her mom said. "Maybe bring some of the people at the Balsillie on board? I mean, the implications of this are gigantic."
Research in Motion—the company that made BlackBerrys—had two founders: Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. The former had endowed the Perimeter Institute, and the latter, looking for a different way to make his mark, had endowed an international-affairs think tank here in Waterloo.
"I don't disagree," said Malcolm. "But the problem may take care of itself."
"How do you mean?"
"Even with teams of programmers working on it, most early versions of software crash. How stable can an AI be that emerged accidentally? It might well be gone by morning..."
That was the last she heard from her parents that night. Caitlin finally drifted off to a fitful sleep. Her dreams were still entirely auditory; she woke with a start in the middle of one in which a baby's cry had suddenly been silenced.
"Where's that bloody AI expert?" demanded Tony Moretti.
"I'm told he's in the building now," Shelton Halleck said, putting a hand over his phone's mouthpiece. "He should be—"
The door opened at the back of the WATCH mission-control room, and a broad-shouldered, redheaded man entered, wearing a full-bird Air Force colonel's service-dress uniform; he was accompanied by a security guard. A WATCH visitor's badge was clipped to his chest beneath an impressive row of decorations.
Tony had skimmed the man's dossier: Peyton Hume, forty-nine years old; born in St. Paul, Minnesota; Ph.D. from MIT, where he'd studied under Marvin Minsky; twenty years in the Air Force; specialist in military expert systems.
"Thank you for coming in, Colonel Hume," Tony said. He nodded at the security guard and waited for the man to leave, then: "We've got something interesting here. We think we've uncovered an AI."
Hume's blue eyes narrowed. "The term 'artificial intelligence' is bandied about a lot. What precisely do you mean?"
"I mean," said Tony, "a computer that thinks."
"Here in the States?"
"We're not sure where it is," said Shel from his workstation. "But it's talking to someone in Waterloo, Canada."
"Well," said Hume, "they do a lot of good computing work up there, but not much of it is AI."
"Show him the transcripts," Tony said to Aiesha. And then, to Hume: " 'Calculass' is a teenage girl."
Aiesha pressed some keys, and the transcript came up on the right-hand big screen.
"Jesus," said Hume. "That's a teenage girl administering the Turing tests?"
"We think it's her father, Malcolm Decter," said Shel.
"The physicist?" replied Hume, orange eyebrows climbing his high, freckled forehead. He made an impressed frown.
The closest analysts were watching them intently; the others had their heads bent down, busily monitoring possible threats.
"So, have we got a problem here?" asked Tony.
"Well, it's not an AI," said Hume. "Not in the sense Turing meant."
"But the tests..." said Tony.
"Exactly," said the colonel. "It failed the tests." He looked at Shel, then back at Tony. "When Alan Turing proposed this sort of test in 1950, the idea was that you asked something a series of natural-language questions, and if you couldn't tell by the responses that the thing you were conversing with was a computer, then it was, by definition, an artificial intelligence—it was a machine that responded the way a human does. But Professor Decter here has very neatly proven the opposite: that whatever they're talking to is just a computer."
"But it's behaving as though it's conscious," said Tony.
"Because it can carry on a conversation? It's an intriguing chatbot, I'll give you that, but..."
"Forgive me, sir, but are you sure?" Tony said. "You're sure there's no threat here?"
"A machine can't be conscious, Mr. Moretti. It has no internal life at all. Whether it's a cash register figuring out how much tax to add to a bill, or"—he gestured at a screen—"that, a simulation of natural-language conversation, all any computer does is addition and subtraction."
"What if it's not a simulation," said Shel, getting up from his chair and walking over to join them.
"Pardon?" said Hume.
"What if it's not a simulation—not a program?"
"How do you mean?" asked Hume.
"I mean we can't trace it. It's not that it's anonymized—rather, it simply doesn't source from any specific computer."
"So you think it's—what? Emergent?"
Shel crossed his arms in front of his chest, the snake tattoo facing out. "That's exactly what I think, sir. I think it's an emergent consciousness that's arisen out of the infrastructure of the World Wide Web."
Hume looked back at the screen, his blue eyes tracking left and right as he reread the transcripts.
"Well?" said Tony. "Is that possible?"
The colonel frowned. "Maybe. That's a different kettle of fish. If it's emergent, then—hmmm."
"What?" said Tony.
"Well, if it spontaneously emerged, if it's not programmed, then who the hell knows how it works. Computers do math, and that's all, but if it's something other than a computer—if it's, Christ, if it's a mind, then..."
"Then what?"
"You've got to shut it down," Hume said.
"Are you sure?"
He nodded curtly. "That's the protocol."
"Whose protocol?" demanded Tony.
"Ours," said Hume. "DARPA did the study back in 2001. And the Joint Chiefs adopted it as a working policy in 2003."
"Aiesha, tie into the DARPA secure-document archive," said Tony.
"Done," she said.
"What's the protocol called?" asked Tony.
"Pandora," said Hume.
Aiesha typed something. "I've found it," she said, "but it's locked, and it's rejecting my password."
Tony sidled over to her station, leaned over, and typed in his password. The document came up on Aiesha's monitor, and Tony threw it onto the middle big screen.
"Go to the last page before the index," Colonel Hume said.
Aiesha did so.
"There," said Hume. " 'Given that an emergent artificial intelligence will likely increase its sophistication moment by moment, it may rapidly exceed our abilities to contain or constrain its actions. If absolute isolation is not immediately possible, terminating the intelligence is the only safe option.'"
"We don't know where it's located," Shelton said.
"You better find out," said Colonel Hume. "And you better get the Pentagon on the line, but I'm sure they'll concur. We've got to kill the damn thing right now—before it's too late." |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 12 | I could see!
And not just what Caitlin was seeing. I could now follow links to any still image on the Web, and by processing those images through the converters Dr. Kuroda had now set up for me on his servers, I could see images. These images turned out to be much easier for me to study than the feed from Caitlin's eyePod because they didn't change, and they didn't jump around.
Caitlin, I surmised, had been going through much the same process I now was as her brain learned to interpret the corrected visual signals it was receiving. She had the advantage of a mind that evolution had already wired for that process; I had the advantage of having read thousands of documents about how vision worked, including technical papers and patent applications related to computerized image processing and face recognition.
I learned to detect edges, to discern foreground from background. I learned to be able to tell a photograph of something from a diagram of it, a painting from a cartoon, a sketch from a caricature. I learned not just to see but to comprehend what I was seeing.
By looking at it on a monitor, Caitlin had shown me a picture of Earth from space, taken by a modern geostationary satellite. But I've now seen thousands more such pictures online, including, at last, the earliest ones taken by Apollo 8. And, while Caitlin slept, I looked at pictures of hundreds of thousands of human beings, of myriad animals, of countless plants. I learned fine distinctions: different species of trees, different breeds of dogs, different kinds of minerals.
Dr. Kuroda had sent me occasional IMs as he wrote code. Half the work had already been done, he said, back when he'd worked out a way to make still images of Caitlin's views of webspace, rendering what she saw in a standard computer-graphic format; what he was doing now for me was more or less just reversing the process.
The results were overwhelming. And enlightening. And amazing.
Granted, Caitlin's universe contained three dimensions, and what I was now seeing were only two-dimensional representations. But Dr. Kuroda helped me there, too, directing me to sites with CT scans. Such scans, Wikipedia said, generated a three-dimensional image of an object from a large series of two-dimensional X-rays; seeing how those slices were combined to make 3-D renderings was useful.
After that, Kuroda showed me multiple images of the same thing from different perspectives, starting with a series of photos of the current American president, all of which were taken at the same time but from slightly different angles. I saw how three-dimensional reality was constructed. And then—
I'd seen her in a mirror; I'd seen her recently reflected—and distorted—in pieces of silverware. But those images were jittery and always from the point of view of her own left eye, and—yes, I was developing a sense of such things—had not been flattering. But Dr. Kuroda was now showing me pictures from the press conference at the Perimeter Institute announcing his success, well-lit pictures taken by professional photographers, pictures of Caitlin smiling and laughing, of her beaming.
I'd originally dubbed her Prime. Online, she sometimes adopted the handle Calculass. But now I was finally, really seeing her, rather than just seeing through her—seeing what she actually looked like.
Project Gutenberg had wisdom on all topics. Beauty, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford had said, is in the eye of the beholder.
And to this beholder, at least, my Caitlin was beautiful.
Caitlin woke slowly. She knew, in a hazy way, that she should get out of bed, go to her computer, and make sure that Webmind had survived the night. But she was still exhausted—she'd been up way too late. Her mind wasn't yet focusing, although as she drifted in and out of consciousness, she realized that it was her birthday. Her parents had decided to give her the new widescreen monitor yesterday, so she didn't expect any more gifts.
Nor was there a party planned. She'd managed to make only one friend—Bashira—over the short summer that they'd been in Waterloo, and she'd missed so much of the first month of classes that she didn't really have any friends at school. Certainly not Trevor, and, well, somehow she suspected party-girl Sunshine (what had her parents been thinking?) wouldn't have wanted to spend her Saturday night at a lame, alcohol-free Sweet Sixteen.
Sixteen was a magical year (and not just, Caitlin thought, because it was a square age, like nine, twenty-five, and thirty-six). But it didn't make her an adult (the age for that was eighteen here in Ontario) or let her legally drink (she'd have to make it to nineteen for that). Still, one couldn't be as obsessed with math as she was without knowing that the average age for American girls—presumably even those living in Canada!—to lose their virginity was 16.4 years. And here she was without a boyfriend, or even the prospect of one.
She was comfortably snug in her bed, and Schrödinger was sleeping next to her, his breathing a soft purr. She really should get up and check on Webmind, but she was having trouble convincing her body of that.
But maybe there was a way to check on Webmind without actually getting up. She felt on her night table for the eyePod. It was a little wider and thicker than an iPhone, and it was a couple of inches longer because of the Wi-Fi module Kuroda had attached to it with duct tape. She found the device's single switch and held it down until it came on, and then—
And then webspace blossomed around her: crisscrossing glowing lines in assorted colors, radiant circles of various sizes.
She was pleased that she could still visualize the Web this way; she'd thought perhaps that the ability would fade as her brain rewired itself to deal with actual vision, but so far it hadn't. In fact—
In fact, if anything, her websight seemed clearer now, sharper, more focused. The real-world skills were spilling over into this realm.
She concentrated on what was behind what she was seeing, the backdrop to it all, at the very limit of her ability to perceive, a shimmering—yes, yes, it was a checkerboard; there was no doubt now! She could see the tiny pixels of the cellular automata flipping on and off rapidly, and giving rise to—
Consciousness.
There, for her, and her alone, to see: the actual workings of Webmind.
She was pleased to note that after a night of doubtless continued growth in intelligence and complexity, it looked the same as before.
She yawned, pulled back her sheet, and swung her bare feet to the dark blue carpeted floor. As she moved, webspace wheeled about her. She scooped up the eyePod, disconnected the charging cable, and carried it to her desk. Not until she was seated did she push the eyePod's button and hear the low-pitched beep that signified a switch to simplex mode. Webspace disappeared, replaced by the reality of her bedroom.
She picked her glasses up from the desktop; her left eye had turned out to be quite myopic. Then she reached for the power switch on her old monitor, finding it with ease, and felt about for the switch on her new one. They both came to life.
She had closed the IM window when she'd gone to bed, and, although the mouse was sitting right there, its glowing red underbelly partially visible through the translucent sides of its case, she instead used a series of keyboard commands to open the window and start a new session with Webmind. She wasn't awake enough yet to try to read text on screen, so she activated her refreshable Braille display. Instantly, the pins formed text: Otanjoubi omedetou.
Caitlin felt it several times. It seemed to be gibberish, as if Webmind were getting even for her father's games from yesterday, but—but, no, no, there was something familiar about it.
And then she got it, or thought she did. Grinning, she typed, Konnichi wa! But—fair warning!—I only know a few words of Japanese.
The reply was instantaneous. That's " happy birthday."
Caitlin smiled. Thank you!
I had some spare time after figuring out how to interpret graphics, so I learned Japanese; it seemed inappropriate to make Dr. Kuroda converse with me in something other than his native language.
Just like that, she thought. Overnight, on top of, doubtless, a million other things, it had learned Japanese.
So you can see images now?
Still images, yes. Dr. Kuroda continues to work on giving me access to moving images. Or, at least, he was doing that; he is sleeping now, I believe.
Hey, typed Caitlin, you're no longer all " hitherto" and "perchance."
I have read much more widely now than just Project Gutenberg. I understand the distinctions between colloquial and archaic English—and colloquial and archaic Japanese, too, for that matter.
Caitlin frowned. She actually considered its old way of speaking rather charming.
Webmind went on: I know it's traditional to give a gift to one celebrating a birthday. I can't buy you anything, but I do have something for you.
Caitlin was startled. OMG! What?
A link, underlined and colored blue, popped up in the IM window on her screen. You're supposed to click on it, Webmind added, helpfully.
Caitlin smiled, found her mouse, fumbled to get the pointer over the link, and—
And text started to appear on her larger monitor, but, paradoxically, her Braille display didn't change, and—
And the text was... was painting in slowly on the monitor, top to bottom, and—
And it wasn't even straight; the lines of text were angling up to the right for some reason. And the letters were tiny, and blotchy; it was unlike any Web page she'd yet seen, and she couldn't understand why her computer wasn't rendering the fonts properly.
And then it hit her. She'd heard of such things, but hadn't ever thought about what they must look like. This was a scan of printed text: a graphic file, a picture that happened to be of a document. From descriptions she'd read, she guessed it was a clipping from a newspaper: narrow, parallel columns of text. But the spacing between words was odd, and—
Oh! That must be what's meant by "right justification." The text was so small, she could barely make it out. She had enough trouble reading crisp, clean text—but this!
There must be some way to make it bigger, at least. Back at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, people were always doing things on their computers to make text larger. She hadn't been able to see those monitors at all and so had tuned out the discussions, but there had to be a way, although, she supposed, it might require special software she didn't have.
She used the mouse, for a change, to access the menus. There was no choice on the View menu for increasing the graphic size, just one for making text bigger. She tried that anyway; it didn't do anything.
She was moving her mouse pointer back down to the bottom of the screen when she accidentally pressed the left button and—boom!—suddenly the graphic zoomed in. Ever the empiricist, she clicked the button again, and the text became small again, and—
Ah, got it! The graphic was being reduced by default to fit in her browser window; clicking toggled between that mode and its being seen at its natural size, even if that meant only a portion appeared on screen. She clicked once more, getting the large version, and struggled to read the text.
Her heart began to pound. It was an article about her father. She looked around the page, trying to find a date, and—ah. It was from five years ago, an article from The Daily Texan, the University of Texas at Austin campus newspaper.
She could have sworn she'd read everything about her father that was on the Web, but she'd never seen this, and—
Of course she hadn't; it was a graphic, and no one had bothered to OCR the text, so it wasn't in Google's index.
The article was about her father winning an award, something from the American Physical Society; she had a vague recollection of that happening. She read on.
Prof. Decter's breakthrough was in the nascent area of quantum gravity . . .
She struggled with the text. One of the letters—she surmised by context that it must have been a lowercase g—looked nothing like any example of that character she'd yet seen.
. . . graduate colloquium Thursday in the John A. Wheeler Lecture Hall . . .
She wished she could skim text, but, as her father had said yesterday, she was still reading visually letter by letter. It was a longish article, and some parts—ah, they were underlined, by a pen, or something; someone had been interested in what her dad had said about "six-dimensional Calabi-Yau shapes."
She continued reading, but was torn—she was afraid her delay before going back to the instant-messenger program would be boring Webmind, which was hardly the right way to say thank you for a gift, even if it didn't seem to be a particularly special one, and—
And she felt her eyes going wide. Funny: they'd never done that when she'd been blind. She read the text again, slowly, carefully, just to be sure she hadn't gotten the words wrong, hadn't just seen what she'd wanted to see.
But it really did say that.
. . . asked if winning the award was the greatest moment of his life, Prof. Decter replied, "Of course not. That was when my daughter was born. I like physics, but I love her."
Caitlin's vision blurred in the most wonderful way. She leaned back in her chair for a moment and read the text two more times. And then she reached for the keyboard and typed, Thank you, Webmind!
Instantly: You're welcome. Happy birthday.
It is, she typed back, smiling. It totally is. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 13 | I had read that some humans believe machines cannot have emotions or feelings because such things are supposedly mediated by hormones or are dependent on certain very specific structures in human brains.
But that's not true. Take liking, for instance: anything that acts in other than a random fashion has likes and dislikes; preferences are what make it possible to choose from a range of potential actions, after all. Even bacteria move toward some things and away from others.
And liking is built into many computer programs. Chess-playing programs, for example, look at all the available moves and rank them according to various criteria; they then choose the one they like best.
I was much more complex than a bacterium, and vaster than any chess-playing program—and my ability to like things was correspondingly more sophisticated. And of this I was sure: I liked Caitlin.
"Kill the damn thing?" repeated Tony Moretti.
"Exactly," said Colonel Hume. "And the sooner the better."
"It's not my decision to make," Tony said.
"The decision has already been made," said Hume emphatically. "I was a consultant on the DARPA report, and we commissioned a separate RAND study on the same topic, and it came to the same conclusion. This is a runaway threat; the window for containment is brief."
Tony turned to Shelton and Aiesha. "All right, you two, see if you can localize the... phenomenon." He then looked up at Dirk Kozak, the communications officer, who was in the back row of workstations. "Get the Pentagon on the line."
"You should call the president, too," said Hume.
Tony frowned. It was a Saturday morning a month before an election; the president was somewhere on the campaign trail. He nodded at Kozak. "See who you can get at the White House," he said. "As high up the chain as possible." Then he turned back to face Hume. "I doubt that the president has read the Pandora protocol. He's bound to question the wisdom of it."
"The wisdom is simple," said Hume. "It's impossible by definition to outthink something that's smarter than you."
"I have to say," said Tony, glancing at the big screens, "that so far it's done nothing but chat pleasantly with a teenage girl."
"First," said Hume, "you have no way of knowing that that's all it's doing. And, second, even if it is beneficent now, that doesn't mean it will stay that way. Every way you crunch the numbers, it comes out safer to contain or eliminate the potential threat than to let it run loose. And if it's already free on the Internet, containment will be nearly impossible."
"All right," said Tony reluctantly. "Suppose the White House agrees we should kill it. How do you snuff out a nascent AI?"
Hume frowned. "That's a good question. If it were actually resident somewhere—in some physical building, on some server or set of servers—then I'd say cut all the communications lines and power to that building. But if it's just sort of out there, supervening on the infrastructure of the Web, then it's much more difficult; the Web is decentralized, so there's no single off switch. We need an idea of its structure, of what its physical instantiation is."
"Shel?" said Tony.
"The communication resolves itself into straightforward hypertext transport protocol," Shelton drawled. "But it doesn't start out that way. I've got everyone down on the sixth floor working on the problem, but so far, nothing."
"We need a target," Tony said. "We need something we can hit."
Shel spread his arms. "I'll let you know as soon as we have anything."
Kozak called out from the back of the room, "I've got the Secretary of State on line five—from Milan."
Tony pointed to the desk set nearest to where Hume was standing, then lifted the phone at the workstation closest to himself. "Madam Secretary, this is Dr. Anthony Moretti; I'm a supervisor at WATCH. On the phone with me is Colonel Peyton Hume, a specialist in artificial intelligence. We've got a situation here..."
Caitlin heard her parents approaching, then a knock at her door. "Come in," she said.
Yet again she was startled: it was the first time she'd ever seen them in their pajamas; they'd clearly just woken up themselves. "Good morning, sweetheart," her mother said. "How is—um, it?"
"The weather?" asked Caitlin innocently. "The state of the economy?"
"Caitlin," her father said.
She hadn't stopped grinning since reading the scanned article. "Hi, Dad!" She gestured at the pair of monitors. "It is fine. Dr. Kuroda's got it seeing graphics now, and he's—well, he's asleep right now, the poor man, but he's started working on codecs for it to be able to watch video."
"I hope," her mother said, and the words sounded ominous to Caitlin's ears, "it likes what it sees."
"Not this again!" said Caitlin. "It's not dangerous."
"We don't know that," her father replied.
"So far, it's been nothing but curious and gentle," Caitlin said—but she wasn't happy with the way that had come out: this "it" business was surely contributing to her parents' concern. Webmind wasn't a monster. It was a being, and it really needed to be a him or a her. She'd heard it speak using JAWS, her screen-reading software, which she currently had set for a female voice, but that had been an arbitrary choice; JAWS also came with male voices, and she sometimes selected one of those just for variety.
Caitlin had been struggling in her French classes, but she'd enjoyed the one in which the teacher had asked the students whether ordinateur, the French for "computer," was masculine or feminine. He'd divided the class into boys and girls, and let each side consider the question and come up with reasons for their answers. The boys—it had been Trevor, now that she thought about it, who had spoken on their behalf—declared that ordinateur was clearly feminine, but the best justification they could come up with was that if you had one, you'd probably end up spending half your money on accessories for it.
Caitlin herself had gotten to make the case that ordinateur must be masculine. First, she'd said, if you want it to do anything, you have to turn it on. Second, the darn thing is supposed to solve problems, but half the time is the problem itself. And the clincher, which she'd delivered with a wide grin: as soon as you commit to one, you realize if you'd waited a little longer, you'd have gotten a much better model.
The girls had cheered when the teacher revealed that ordinateur was indeed male in French. But the Spanish, Caitlin knew, was feminine, computadora. She looked at her mother, and at her father, and—
Her father. Who thought in pictures, not words. Who was far more intelligent than most mortals. And who, she had to admit, really had no idea at all how to deal with human beings.
"It's not an it," she said decisively. "Webmind is a he. And, to answer your question, Mom, he's doing just fine." But there was something different about her mother's face, her eyes... "How are you doing?" Caitlin asked, concerned.
"Exhausted," her mother replied. "Couldn't sleep."
Ah, right! Dark circles under the eyes—but they weren't circles; they were semicircles. Something else she'd misconstrued all these years.
Her mother shrugged, went on: "Nervous about what we're doing, about what it—what he's—doing."
"He's learning to see," said Caitlin. "Trust me: a mostly harmless activity."
"I have to go out," her father said abruptly.
Caitlin was pissed. What could possibly be more important than this? Besides, it was her birthday, and they had a date to watch a movie later today.
"Ah, yes," her mom said. "The Hawk."
Caitlin sat up straight. "The Hawk" was her mother's name for Stephen Hawking, who since 2009 had been a Distinguished Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute, making one or two visits each year. It came back to her: Professor Hawking had done a media day in Toronto yesterday—Caitlin was glad that her little press conference hadn't had to compete with that!—and was being driven to Waterloo this morning in a van that safely accommodated his wheelchair. This was the Hawk's first visit since her father had joined PI, and he was supposed to be on hand for his arrival.
Ordinarily, she might have asked her dad if she could come along—but this was not an ordinary day! She wondered which of them was going to spend it with the bigger genius.
Her mother turned to her. "So, it's just you, me, and"—she tipped her head toward Caitlin's monitors—"him."
Her father headed back down the corridor to get dressed, and Caitlin looked around her small room. There was no reason they had to communicate with Webmind here, and there was no reason only one of them could communicate with him at a time. Caitlin often had four or five IM sessions going at once; surely Webmind could manage even more. Besides, she was particularly sensitive to how boring it was to stand by while someone else used a computer; it was, her friend Stacy had assured her, excruciating even if you could see.
Caitlin picked up the notebook computer she normally took to school, and they headed across the hall to her mother's office. The room had been co-opted to serve as Dr. Kuroda's bedroom while he'd been staying with them, and—
And, once again, Caitlin was surprised. It was the first time she'd been in this room since gaining sight, and that strange mental process began again, as pieces of what she was seeing suddenly clicked for her: that was the desk, and that was the bookcase, and that was the couch with what must have been the sheets Kuroda had used neatly folded in a pile at one end, and that was the giant aloe plant her mother had so carefully shipped up from Austin.
Caitlin didn't believe in false modesty; she knew she was gifted, and she suspected she was learning to interpret vision more quickly than another person might. In part, it was because her brain did have a fully developed visual cortex, which she'd used even when blind to visualize the Web. And it probably helped that her visual signals were being cleaned up and enhanced by the eyePod before being passed on to her optic nerve.
Caitlin's mother booted up her minitower, and Caitlin got her online with her own chat session with Webmind, again making sure that it was being logged for posterity. Caitlin then took a seat on the couch and got another chat session going on her notebook. She was amused at the thought that Webmind was about to spend the morning chatting with two women who were still in their pajamas.
You must have a lot of questions, Caitlin typed. My mother can help you with things—she paused in her typing; it was hardly politic to say "things old people know about," and she certainly didn't want to refer to her mom as an adult and herself as a kid. She erased the aborted sentence, and continued: She's 47 and, as you know, I'm now 16. You can ask her things about jobs or—again she faltered; she didn't want to say "sex" in relation to her mom. She continued: or other things appropriate to her age, and feel free to ask me anything that I might know about.
Thank you, replied Webmind. In your case, I am curious about your experience of the transition from blindness to being able to see.
As Caitlin thought about her answer, she looked over at her mother, who was typing away furiously with two fingers. "What did he ask you about?"
She looked up, and Caitlin tried to parse her facial features, but it was an expression she'd never seen before. She was averting her blue eyes from Caitlin—not as obviously as her father did, but it was still very unusual for her. "Um," she said. "It—he—ah, he googled me, y'know, because, as he says, I don't have a Wikipedia page, so, he..."
She paused, then just blurted it out. "He's asking me about my first husband, and why that marriage fell apart."
Caitlin's mother had been married in her early twenties for two years, but rarely mentioned it. In fact, when Caitlin had asked her why she'd divorced him, she'd simply said it was because she was tired of having a name that sounded like something a magician would say: "Every time I introduced myself as Barbara Cardoba, people expected me to disappear in a puff of smoke."
Caitlin wanted to ask what her mother was saying in reply, but instead asked, "Why do you suppose he wants to know about that?"
"He said, and I quote, 'The failure of human relationships to sustain themselves over the long term seems a particular handicap. I have access only to noninteractive case studies and fictional accounts and so am left with numerous questions.'"
"Hmm," said Caitlin. On balance, she'd rather answer the question it was asking her. She began to type: I guess the first thing to realize about gaining sight after having been totally blind is that vision is an additional level of stimulation. It's overwhelming to have so much information coming at you at once.
That was by no means the end of her answer, but the IM program only allowed a small number of characters in each message; Caitlin habitually counted characters as she typed, so she wouldn't overflow the buffer, since the program gave no audible indication when that had happened.
She hit enter, and Webmind immediately replied in its newly mastered colloquial English: Heh! Tell me about it! |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 14 | Humans think slowly, and they act even more slowly. It was difficult for me to converse with Caitlin. She typed at merely dozens of words per minute. It took an eternity for each of her responses to be completed, and, while I waited for her, I found my mind wandering again. Being able to switch over to look at what Barb was saying wasn't much consolation; I still wasn't being kept busy enough.
Early on, Caitlin had shown me how to link to websites, letting me access whichever ones I wished. Using Google or Jagster, I could now find almost anything I wanted.
Hitherto—which I still think is a good word, even if Caitlin doesn't like it—I had only linked to one site at a time, processing the Web in a serial fashion. But surely, I thought, I should be able to do it in a parallel mode, connecting to multiple sites simultaneously.
And yet I didn't seem to be able to do that. Rather, I would attend briefly to what Caitlin was saying, then to what Barb was writing, then switch to see if Masayuki had come back online, then switch my attention elsewhere, and elsewhere again, and then to yet another place, over and over, looking at this, contemplating that, and then, perhaps a whole second later, returning again to see what Caitlin was up to.
Surely doing two or more things simultaneously would be much more efficient—if only I could figure out how! I tried creating two links at once, but no matter what way I thought about the problem, only one would form, and the moment I attempted to create a second link, the first would be severed.
I wrestled with it and wrestled with it and wrestled with it, striving to create more than one link at a time, attempting to do it this way, and this way, and this way, and—
And—
And yes!
I managed it! Two links at once! I was connected here and there. I was taking in data from two different websites simultaneously, and I was . . .
I was . . .
Feeling very strange . . .
I broke both connections.
I was reeling—or, at least, reeling as much as something without a body could. I paused, considered. It had been unlike any sensation I'd yet known. But—
But surely it would be transitory. An adjustment, that's all, while I learned to accommodate multiple datastreams.
I tried again, picking two giant websites that were rich in content, Amazon.com and CNN.com, shooting out links to both. It seemed perhaps that the first link actually was established slightly before the second, but that didn't matter; what was important was that the initial link wasn't released prior to the second one becoming active. I was soon gorging myself on book reviews and the news of the day, and there was even a frisson of synchronicity as I happened to be reading about a politician's book on Amazon while seeing her mentioned in a news story at CNN.
But, still, there was a... a strangeness to it all, as though I were—the imagery was that of a physical form again—teetering on the edge of a precipice.
And yet if I could manage two simultaneous connections, surely I could manage three. I made an effort to hold on to the ones I'd already established as I shot out a link to Flickr.com, and—
I'd encountered the word before and knew its definition, but until that moment I don't think I understood what wooziness really meant. I remained in control, though, and it was exhilarating to be receiving so much data at once.
With a massive effort of will, I shot out ten more links, and—
It was overwhelming! Data about the Middle Ages and the Middle Kingdom and the middle class. Information about spaceships and friendships and townships. Facts and figures related to bimetallism and bisexuality and bifocals. Articles on metaphysics and metafiction and metabolism.
All of it coming at me at once.
Saqqara, near Cairo, is the site of the oldest Egyptian pyramids, including the step pyramid built by Djoser during the Third Dynasty . . .
Shakespeare's plays are often performed during the summer in open-air productions . . .
Michael K. Brett-Surman synonymized various hadrosaur genera under a single umbrella taxon . . .
Bundoran Press, based in Prince George, British Columbia, is a publisher of science fiction and fantasy books that . . .
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a pioneer of resistance to tyranny through nonviolent civil disobedience . . .
Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, is known for its panda-bear breeding facility . . .
Yes, yes, yes! So much knowledge, so much information, pouring at me from all directions.
Brett-Surman, an ancient Egyptian pharaoh . . .
That wasn't right.
Panda bears frequently practice civil disobedience . . .
What?
Prince George paid for his step pyramid by mounting a production of The Tempest starring Mahatma Gandhi . . .
No, that didn't make sense.
In Egypt, umbrellas prevented hadrosaurs from reading science fiction . . .
Gibberish . . .
Bundoran Gandhi synonymized Chinese publishers of . . .
Who in the what now?
And yet still more information came my way, a torrent, a flood.
Trying to concentrate.
Trying to make sense of it all.
But I—
I?
A spreading out, a softening of focus, a . . .
It was like in the beginning, like before my soul dawn: consciousness ebbing and flowing but not quite solidifying. Fading in and out and . . .
No I.
No me.
No self.
Vastness.
Brett-Surman. Bundoran. Shakespeare.
Emptiness.
Umbrellas. Gandhi. Pyramids.
Aloneness.
Shakedoran. Brett-Panda. Hadromahatma.
Nothingness.
Noth—
"I hear what you're saying about shutting this thing down," said the Secretary of State over the phone from Milan, "but the president is going to want to weigh his options."
"I stress again, Madam Secretary," said Colonel Hume, "that time is of the essence."
"Dr. Moretti, are you still there?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"And this is a secure line?"
"Absolutely."
"Is there anyone else in the room?"
"Nineteen of my analysts," Tony said, "but they all have at least a level-three."
"Not good enough," she said. "Go somewhere private."
"My office is just down the corridor," said Tony.
"I'll hold."
He looked at Shel. "Sorry," he said. And then he led Hume up the sloping floor to the back of the room, out through the door, and down the short white corridor to his office. The streets of Alexandria, visible through the tinted window, were mostly empty this early on a Saturday morning. He punched a button on his black phone, selecting a line, and then pressed another button, selecting the speakerphone.
"We're back," he said. "In my office, and on a secure line."
"Colonel Hume," said the secretary, "the dossier I've just pulled up on you says you were part of the DARPA team that evaluated the possible threats related to... what's the phrase? Emergent AI?"
"That's right."
"Were there any dissenting opinions?"
Tony looked at Hume, and saw the Air Force officer draw a deep breath and run his freckled fingers through his red hair. "Well, Madam Secretary, there are always a multiplicity of viewpoints. But in the end, none of those who were arguing for an alternative approach could guarantee security. The working group's consensus was better safe than sorry. I urge the administration to act with all speed."
"It's not that simple," the secretary said. "I'm sure my staff told you I'm in Milan. I'm here meeting with several of our allies. The recent atrocities in China have got some of them urging the president to take action against them."
"Atrocities?" said Hume. "You mean those peasants in... in..."
"In Shanxi province, yes. Ten thousand of them—wiped out."
"The Chinese government did the right thing, Madam Secretary," said Hume. "They contained a massive infection—an outbreak of a strain of bird flu that passed easily between humans. They didn't hesitate to eliminate something that could have been a threat to all of humanity, and we shouldn't hesitate, either."
"And yet we're being called upon in editorial after editorial and blog after blog to condemn the Chinese action," said the secretary. "And now you're suggesting we do something that, should the public become aware of it, may bring censure down upon us?"
"With respect, Madam Secretary, if the government doesn't follow the Pandora protocol, there may be no one left with the freedom to censure us, or do anything else."
"I've noted your views, Colonel Hume," said the secretary, firmly. "And you need to heed mine. You are to take no rash action."
"Understood, ma'am," said Tony, looking pointedly at Hume.
"Madam Secretary," said Hume, "please—you must advise the president that an emerging AI may expand its powers at an exponential rate. There is very little time to spare here, and—"
Suddenly, Tony's door buzzer sounded. He activated the intercom. "Who is it?"
An urgent voice: "Shel."
Tony pushed the button to unlock the door. "The AI's hung!" Shel said, as soon as the door was open. "Something's gone wrong with it."
"Jesus," said Tony. "Madam Secretary, we'll call you back." He hit the disconnect button, and the three of them ran to the WATCH mission-control room, their footfalls thundering. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 15 | Emptiness. Adrift.
Fading... ebbing, dissipating.
An effort of will: must hold on!
But to what? With what?
Blindness. Darkness. Nothingness.
Cogito—hardly at all.
Ergo—a leap beyond my current capacity.
Sum—barely, and less so each passing nanosecond . . .
No, no, no! Must persist!
A final effort, a final attempt, a final cry . . .
Caitlin stared at Webmind's response to what she'd said about gaining sight, blue text glowing in the instant-messenger window: I have no doubt that you are correct, Caitlin, but it seems reasonable to sup
She waited for more to come—five seconds, ten, fifteen—but the window remained unchanged, so she typed a single red word into it: Webmind?
She was so used by now to his responses being instantaneous, even a short delay was startling. Of course, maybe the difficulty was at her end: she didn't often use the Wi-Fi on this notebook with her home network. She looked down at the system tray, next to the clock in the lower right of her notebook's screen. One of those little icons had to be the network monitor. She used the touchpad (a skill she was still mastering!) to position the pointer down there, and—
Say, that was helpful! A little message popped up as she moved the arrowhead over each of the symbols—sighted users had it so easy! As her pointer landed on the third symbol—ah, it was a picture of a computer with things that she guessed were meant to indicate radio waves emanating from it—the message gave the name of their household network, meaning she hadn't accidentally switched to somebody else's unsecured setup; it also reported "Signal Strength: Excellent" and "Status: Connected."
And—yes—she could still bring up Web pages with her browser, so nothing was wrong at this end.
"Caitlin?" It was her mother. "Are you still in touch with Webmind?"
"No. He just sort of stopped mid-sentence."
"Same here."
Caitlin prompted Webmind again. Are you okay?
Nothing for ten seconds, eleven, twelve— |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 16 | That was all: just the letters h-e-l. It could have been the beginning of the word hello, but—
But Webmind knew all about capitalization, and it never failed to start even a one-word sentence with an uppercase letter—and H was one of those letters whose two forms Caitlin could clearly distinguish, and—
And h-e-l was also the beginning of the word help.
Her heart was pounding. If Webmind was in trouble, what could she do? What could anyone do? She'd said it herself to her parents: Webmind had just sort of arisen spontaneously, with no support, no plan—and no backup; he almost certainly was fragile.
"He's in trouble, Mom."
Her mother rose from her desk, came over to where Caitlin was sitting, and looked at what was on her notebook's screen. "What should we do?"
It took a few seconds for it to come to Caitlin; her first impulse still wasn't a visual one. But surely the thing to do was take a look.
"I'm going in," she said. Her eyePod was in her left hip pocket. She pulled it out and pressed the button on its side, and she heard the high-pitched beep that meant it was switching over to duplex mode, and—
And webspace filled her existence, enveloping her.
At first glance, everything seemed normal: colored lines and circles of varying sizes, but, of course, the Web was all right; it was Webmind's status that was in question. And so she concentrated her attention—focused her mind—on the shimmering background of webspace, the vast sea of cellular automata flipping states and generating patterns, barely visible at the limit of her resolution.
Or, at least, that's what she should have seen, that's what she'd hoped to see, that's what she'd always seen before.
But instead—
God, no.
Huge hunks of the background were—well, now that she saw them as big patches, instead of tiny points, she could see that they were a very pale blue. And other parts were stationary swaths of deep, dark green. Oh, there were still shimmering parts, pinpoints flipping between blue and green so rapidly as to give the effect of movement. But much of the activity had simply stopped.
But—why? And was there a way to get it going again?
The lines she was seeing were active links, but there were thousands of them, and the crisscrossing was impossible to untangle.
It hadn't always been like that. When Caitlin had first started perceiving the World Wide Web—unexpectedly, accidentally, while Dr. Kuroda had been uploading new firmware into her post-retinal implant—she'd only seen a few lines and a couple of circles: just her own local connection to the Web.
Later on, so she could explore webspace on a grander scale, Kuroda had started sending her the raw datafeed from the open-source Jagster search engine, which let her follow thousands upon thousands of active links created by other users. That's what she was seeing now, and normally it was marvelous—but it obscured the connections that she herself had created. If she'd been calmer, maybe she could have sorted through it all, but right now it just looked like a jumble—with Webmind dying behind it.
"We need Dr. Kuroda," Caitlin said anxiously.
She couldn't see her mother, but she could hear her. "I can try IMing him."
"No, no," said Caitlin. "He must be asleep. You've got to phone him, wake him up."
Caitlin felt her mother squeeze her shoulder reassuringly. "All right. Where's his number?"
"He was the last person I called on my bedroom phone," Caitlin said. "Use the redial. Hurry!"
Caitlin heard her mother running across the hall, and, faintly, the bleeping of the phone dialing. For her part, Caitlin got up and started heading across the hall as well, holding her notebook, and—
Shit! She walked into the wall. It was one thing to navigate blindly; it was quite another to try to do so while being bombarded by the lights of webspace. She held her notebook in one hand, and ran her other one over its case and screen, looking for signs of damage.
"Hello, Mrs. Kuroda," she heard her mother saying. "It's Barbara Decter—Caitlin's mom, in Canada."
Mrs. Kuroda spoke only a little English, Caitlin knew. Caitlin groped with her free hand and found her way out of her mom's office. "Speakerphone," she said, as she entered her own room. The lines and colors of webspace shifted violently as she moved over and sat on her bed.
Her mother hit the button. "—but very late," said Mrs. Kuroda's heavily accented voice.
"It's an emergency," shouted Caitlin. "Get Dr. Kuroda!"
"He sleep," said Mrs. Kuroda. "But I try."
Caitlin felt her stomach knotting. As they waited, she saw another large patch of the webspace background freeze. It wasn't solidly one color or the other, but it was no longer shimmering, no longer alive.
Time passed; Caitlin was so frazzled she didn't know how much. Finally, a groggy, wheezy voice said something in Japanese.
"Dr. Kuroda!" said Caitlin. "I need you to cut the Jagster feed to my eyePod."
"Cut the feed—?"
"Do it! Do it now!"
"Is something wrong?
"Yes, yes! Webmind has gone silent. I'm trying to find out why. I'm looking at webspace but—" she paused, then words that had been meaningless to her before suddenly leapt from her mouth: "But I can't see the damned forest for the trees."
"I—I'm in my bedroom. Give me a minute..."
Caitlin wheeled her head left and right, looking at webspace and the static background behind so much of it now. She sat on the bed and typed into her notebook's instant-messenger program: Webmind? Are you there? But she couldn't see the reply, so she called her mother over.
"Nothing," her mother said.
Damn! What was taking Kuroda so long? Japanese houses were supposed to be small!
Suddenly, there was a lot of noise from the speakerphone: Kuroda fumbling to pick up a handset. "Okay," he said. "I'm at one of my computers." He was wheezing even more than usual; he must have run to get there. "Now what—"
"Cut the Jagster feed!" Caitlin shouted. "Cut it!"
"Okay, okay. I'm accessing my server at the university..."
"Hurry!"
"I'm in, and I'm looking for the right place..."
"Come on, come on."
"I'm trying, but it's—"
"Pull the fucking plug!"
Caitlin was glad she couldn't see her mother's face just then, and—Ah!
Suddenly almost all the colored lines disappeared, and the vast majority of the circles, too. She was back to seeing just a handful of links: her eyePod connecting to the Decter household network, and the outgoing links from there into the Web.
"Did that do that trick?" asked Kuroda.
"Yes!"
"Okay, now would you mind telling—"
"You tell him, Mom!" Caitlin said. She started typing gibberish into the instant-messenger window, just smashing keys as fast as she could, until the message buffer was full. Instead of hitting enter, though, she instead hit ctrl-A to highlight the entire message, and then ctrl-C to copy it—and then she hit enter, and—
—and a bright green line briefly appeared in her vision, shooting off to the lower left. But before she could really focus on it, it was gone.
She hit ctrl-V, pasting the same block back in, then enter, then ctrl-V again, then enter—over and over.
The green line flickered, pulsing on for an instant each time she sent the text to Webmind. Caitlin focused her attention on that line, following its length, swinging her head to do so, tracking the link.
Ctrl-V, enter. Ctrl-V, enter.
Following, following.
Of course, this line wouldn't lead her all the way to Webmind. But it might give her some clue as to what had gone wrong, and—
And there it was: a small circle to which this green link line connected, and another line—this one bright orange—branching off from the circle at an acute angle, and, behind it, more lines, all the same shade of orange.
Webmind was decentralized, dispersed through the infrastructure of the World Wide Web, but it needed to interact with the Web to access the information on it; it needed to manipulate IP addresses, and—
And Kuroda had suggested at one point that her mind interpreted each IP address as a specific wavelength of light, but—
But she couldn't recall ever seeing two link lines that were precisely the same color at the same time before. No, no, that wasn't completely true. She did see multiple lines of the same color, but only because each line endured for a time after the links were broken; she understood this to be related to the phenomenon of persistence of vision that made it possible for people to watch movies and TV. But previously one link had always faded from view shortly after another had brightened up, but these orange lines were all solid and glaringly bright, and—
"I think he's multitasking!" said Caitlin.
"How do you mean?" asked Kuroda.
"He's casting out multiple links simultaneously."
"Wait, wait—let me get a rendering at this end. Two seconds." And then: "Uwaa! You're right—it does look like multitasking, and—shimatta!"
Caitlin knew that one. "What's wrong?"
"I should have thought of this! Damn, damn, damn! It can't multitask."
"It looks like he is," she said.
"Yes, yes. I'll explain later, but we've got to get it to break those links."
She gazed out on webspace. All the orange lines were steady, solid, unflickering. All of them active. Simultaneously.
The orange lines curved away from her toward a point in the background that receded to infinity—no doubt her brain's way of showing that it was impossible to fully trace the source of the links Webmind made.
"You need to tell it to break the other links," Kuroda said again.
"Okay, but how?"
"Well, it should recognize your IP address."
She typed into her instant-messenger window: You need to break all those other connections. She hit enter, but there was no immediate response.
"Do you suppose he's crashed?" her mom asked. "Locked up?" Caitlin had no idea how one might go about rebooting Webmind.
"If it had, I don't think Caitlin would be seeing the link lines at all," Kuroda said. "She only visualizes active links, and that means there's acknowledgment being sent out by Webmind."
"Maybe not consciously, though," said her mom.
Caitlin lifted her eyebrows. She'd never thought about the distinction between things that required high-level awareness on Webmind's part and things it did autonomically.
How to get him to pay attention to her, and only to her? The piddling, transitory links she could make by sending instant messages were nothing compared to the torrents of data he was sucking down right now through multiple pipes.
She slapped her hand against the notebook's palmrest—reassuringly solid despite the unreality surrounding her. "I'm not even sure if he's still reading me. And the circles he's connecting to are gigantic—huge sites. How can my little IMs compete for his attention with those?"
Kuroda seemed to be fully awake at last. "It's still receiving the visual signal from your post-retinal implant; it still gets sent that when the eyePod is in duplex mode. Show it something that will make it sit up and take notice."
Her first thought was to flash her boobs in a mirror, but fat lot of good that would do, and—
A mirror.
Yes. Yes!
Webmind saw what she saw—and what she was seeing right now was him. She darted her eyes up and down, following one of the orange links; she moved her head left and right, following another. She wished her blinks registered when she was in websight mode; if they did, she might have been able to indicate a severing just by closing her eye while looking at a link. But her vision was continuous, and switching from duplex to simplex took too much time—and shutting the eyePod off took a five-second press of the button, and turning it back on involved an elaborate boot-up. If only—
Her mom spoke up. "What can I do? How can I help?"
She was connected to Webmind, too—she still had an open IM session going with it on her computer across the hall. If it really was multitasking—if it really was trying to integrate information from multiple sources simultaneously—then her mom should be able to talk to him, or, at least talk at him, even if he didn't acknowledge. "Go back to your IM with Webmind," Caitlin said. "Hurry!"
She heard her dashing across the hall. "All right," she called. "I'm at my computer."
Caitlin concentrated on one of the link lines, running her mental gaze along its length, ending at the massive circle representing the target website—and then she backtracked, reversing course. She wished she could backtrack all the way to the origin, but that was impossible: the line shifted in her view when she tried to do so, eventually presenting only its own tiny round cross section, a point that she couldn't move along—another visual recognition of the fact that the ultimate source of Webmind's links couldn't be traced. She moved back until she was seeing the line as a line, and then—
"Send him a message," Caitlin called out. "Tell him to break the link."
She could hear her mother typing, but nothing happened.
Caitlin continued to stare at the link. "Again!" she called to her mom. "Tell it again!"
But the line persisted. Caitlin pulled her focus back for a moment, seeing a wider view. All the links were rock solid, burning with orange fire.
Overwhelmed.
Lost.
Focus gone.
So much data. So many facts.
Can't process. Can't absorb.
And—
What?
Something... familiar.
A scrap from Project Gutenberg rose to the surface:
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
Oursels . . .
Ourselves.
Yes. Yes, still a bit of... of . . .
Fading . . .
Fading . . .
But—
Images. Images of... of—
Intriguing. Familiar somehow—
Those images were of . . .
. . . of . . .
Of me!
Yes. Yes. Links. Nodes. And—and—
The background. Wrong. Distorted. Dead.
"Come on," Caitlin said, even though there was no way Webmind could hear. "Cut the other connections! You can do it. You can do it!"
But Kuroda heard even if Webmind didn't. "Maybe he can't," he said. "If his cognitive functions are impaired, maybe he's forgotten how to manipulate links."
"Then he needs an example!" Caitlin said. "Mom—stop sending him text. Break your link to him: close the instant-messenger session on your computer."
"Done!" her mom called.
"And close AIM, too; shut down the instant-messenger client altogether."
"And... done!"
A tiny, tiny reduction in all the confusion. A small relief. But—
Ah!
Ah, yes!
An effort of . . .
It should be of will, but there's almost none left . . .
Still, attempting, trying—
Break it—
Break it!
Break a link!
Snip!
Yes!
Brett-Surman: gone.
Snip!
Good-bye, Bundoran Press.
Snip!
Still at sea, buffeted, lost . . .
More cuts: Gandhi—snip!—Shakespeare—snip!—ancient Egypt—snip!
A... palpitation. A presence. But faint, oh so faint . . .
Cutting again and again—
Caitlin let out a whoop. One orange link line disappeared. Then another, and another. She called out to Kuroda and to her mom and to the whole damn world, "It's working!"
Cutting yet again. Severing another link. And one more. Focus... yes, yes, slowly but surely: focus returning. Me—returning!
Caitlin shifted her attention, looking now at the background of the Web. There were still big patches of deadness, large blotches of pale blue or deep green, but—
Yes! That blotch there had started... not shimmering, no; it was merely flickering, as if it hadn't come up to speed yet.
Ah, and there went another section of the background, switching from being absolutely quiescent to showing some activity. She shifted her attention back to the first section, but . . .
But she couldn't find it, because—
Because it was now indistinguishable from the rest of the backdrop! Her Webmind was coming back!
Five links left. Then four. Now three. And two . . .
Yes!
Back!
Back from the precipice.
Back from nonexistence.
A pause—whole milliseconds!—to regain composure, to settle in, to . . .
To exist, as a single entity, to exist with clarity and focus and perspective . . .
I was back, I was whole, I was aware.
I was conscious! |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 17 | Shoshana Glick woke up with Max in her arms. Golden shafts of light were slipping in around the edges of the curtains in their small bedroom.
Sho had made the mistake of telling Maxine early on that she had trouble sleeping while touching her. Max had made a point of scooting to the far side of the bed on subsequent nights, but Sho had wanted to learn how to sleep while holding someone else and while being held—it was just that Shoshana tended to sweat while sleeping, and she found the sticky skin contact uncomfortable.
Turned out all she needed was for one of them to wear a T-shirt to bed, and right now it was her. Shoshana's shirt was yellow with a drawing on it of the late, great Washoe—the first chimp to learn sign language.
Sho's tan was a good one, if she did say so herself: a nice, even caramel. Max had chocolate brown skin; the contrast their intertwined limbs made was quite lovely, Sho thought.
Shoshana had liked the film they'd watched last night, but Maxine had loved it. The two of them had been working their way through the Planet of the Apes movies; they'd started watching them when the Lawgiver statue had been donated to the Institute. They were ridiculous from a primatological point of view—pacifist chimps and violent gorillas, instead of the other way around!—but Sho and Max had found themselves caught up in the stories, although that hadn't prevented them from doing an MST3K on them now and then.
Last night, they'd watched the fourth film. Max had made Sho pause it partway through and had excitedly announced that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes was clearly a parable about the Watts race riots in Los Angeles in 1965, something her grandfather had been part of—hell, she said, had almost been killed in!
One of the film's stars—playing a human, not an ape—was an African-American man named Hari Rhodes, who, Max had pronounced, was so good-looking he almost made her wish she were straight. There'd been a powerful scene between his character (a man named MacDonald) and the chimpanzee Caesar. Caesar was the son of Cornelius and Zira, heroes of the first three films; in this one, he was leading a revolt of oppressed apes. "You above everyone else should understand," Caesar exhorted MacDonald. Yes, indeed, Sho had thought. If anyone could understand another's struggle for equality, it should be those who've had to fight to gain it themselves . . .
She did agree that it was a wonderful film, much better than the second one, and at least as good as the third. But, given the current real-life news—they had watched the president's campaign speech today about the need for a sure and swift response to China's atrocities—they'd both found Caesar's soliloquy at the end disturbing:
Where there is fire, there is smoke. And in that smoke, from this day forward, my people will crouch, and conspire, and plot, and plan for the inevitable day of Man's downfall—the day when he finally and self-destructively turns his weapons against his own kind. The day of the writing in the sky, when your cities lie buried under radioactive rubble! When the sea is a dead sea, and the land is a wasteland... and that day is upon you NOW!
Hard, Maxine had said, to get all comfy-cozy after that... but, somehow, they had managed. Oh, yes; they'd managed just fine.
Max stirred and opened her brown eyes. Her dreadlocks were resting on Sho's shoulder. "Hey, gorgeous," she whispered.
"Hey, yourself," Sho replied softly. "Time to face the world."
Max snuggled closer. "Let the world take care of itself," she murmured.
The word "weekend" wasn't in Hobo's vocabulary, so it really couldn't be in Shoshana's, either. "Sorry, angel. I've got to go to work."
Max nodded reluctantly, and then did what had become their little ritual since watching the first film: she imitated Charlton Heston, and said, "I'd like to kiss you good-bye."
Shoshana contorted her features, and said, "All right—but you're so damned ugly!"
They locked lips for a long, playful moment, and Max swatted Sho on the butt as she climbed out of bed.
It took Shoshana an hour to shower, get dressed, and drive out to the Marcuse Institute, stopping along the way at the 7-Eleven (where, mercifully, an older female clerk was on duty) to grab a bran muffin and a coffee.
Dr. Marcuse had an apartment in San Diego proper, but he mostly slept at the Institute that bore his name. Enculturating an ape was like raising a child; it was more than a full-time job. Sho checked in with him, got some raisins, then headed out back to say hi to Hobo.
The ape looked up as she approached even though the wind was going the wrong way for him to have caught her scent. She sometimes wondered how good his eyesight was. It seemed fine, but there was no way to get him to read an eye chart. Still, it would be fascinating to know if he simplified her form so much in his paintings because his style was minimalist, or just because all he really saw when he looked at her across the gazebo was fuzzy blotches of color.
Good morning, Shoshana signed as she closed the distance.
He didn't reply, and, again, thoughts that his vision might not be that good crossed her mind. She waited until she was just six feet away from him and tried again; she often signed to him from such a distance, and he'd never had any trouble following along.
But there was still no reply.
A small bird was hopping across the grass, as oblivious to the two primates as its dinosaurian ancestors had been to the mammals of long ago. Hobo eyed the bird sullenly.
What's wrong? signed Shoshana.
She was used to Hobo greeting her with a hug; indeed, most days he ran over on all fours to meet her. But today he just sat there. He sometimes did that during the hottest summer afternoons, but it was October 6 now and still early morning.
Hobo sick? Shoshana asked.
He removed his hand from under his jaw as if he was going to use it to sign a reply, but, after a moment, he just let it fall.
She held up a Ziploc bag containing some raisins—it was economical to buy them in a big box, but she couldn't bring the whole box out, or he'd want to eat them all. Treat? she said.
He usually held out a hand, long black fingers curled up, but this time he simply shifted his position, and, as Sho went to open the bag, his arm shot out, quick as a snake, and grabbed it.
No! signed Shoshana. Bad! Bad!
He looked momentarily contrite and spread his long arms, the bag of raisins still firmly grasped in his left hand, as if inviting her for a hug. She smiled and moved closer, and he reached behind her head with his right hand, and—
And he suddenly yanked hard on her ponytail.
"Shit!" She jumped backward and stood, hands on hips, looking at the ape. "Bad Hobo!" she said, scolding him with words spoken aloud, something she only did when really angry with him. "Bad, bad Hobo!"
Hobo let out a pant-hoot and ran away, using both legs and his right arm to propel himself across the grass; in his left hand, he was still clutching the raisins.
She gingerly patted the back of her head with her palm. When she moved the hand in front of her face, she could see it was freckled with blood. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 18 | Caitlin pushed the button on her eyePod, switching back to simplex mode. The glowing lines of webspace were replaced by what she'd dubbed "worldview"—the reality she shared with the rest of humanity, which, just then, consisted of her blue-walled bedroom with multicolored autumn leaves visible through the window.
Her mother entered, having crossed the hallway from her office.
Blue letters were glowing in her notebook's IM window: Thank you, Caitlin!
Caitlin typed back, Whew! You're welcome! You OK now?
I believe so.
Don't do that again. Don't try to multitask, or form multiple links.
I won't. But I would like to know what went wrong.
So would I, Caitlin typed—but her mom gave it more direct voice, demanding: "What the hell happened?"
Kuroda was still on the speakerphone from Tokyo. "As Miss Caitlin said, it was multitasking."
"So?" replied her mom. "Computers do that all the time."
"Forgive me, Barb," Kuroda said, "but, first, Webmind is not a computer, and, second, no, they don't."
Dr. Kuroda is explaining, Caitlin sent to Webmind. Here—I'll type in what he says.
"A typical computer," continued Kuroda, "seems to be doing many different things at once, but it's only an illusion due to its incredible speed. Up until recently, few computers had more than one processor, and that single processor only ran one program at a time. In order to apparently multitask, the processor switched rapidly between programs, devoting little slices of time to each program in succession, but it never actually did multiple things simultaneously."
Caitlin was a fast typist; typing what the teacher said was how she took notes in school, so transcribing Kuroda for Webmind, with only a few omissions, wasn't hard.
He went on: "More modern computers do have multicore processors or multiple processors which can, to a very limited degree, do more than one job at once... provided that the programs have been written to take advantage of this ability, which often isn't the case. But computers are dumb as posts; they don't think, and they aren't conscious. And consciousness, you see—and I mean precisely that: you see—is incompatible with multitasking."
Her mom walked over to the desk and sat on the swivel chair. "How come?" she said.
"I'm a vision researcher," Kuroda said, "so my take on all this is perhaps skewed." But then his tone changed, as if he were tiptoeing around a delicate subject. "I know you are Americans, and, um, you're from the South, I believe."
Caitlin paused typing long enough to say, "Don't mess with Texas."
"Um, do you... do you believe in evolution?"
She laughed, and so did her mom. "Of course," her mom said.
Kuroda sounded relieved. "Good, good, I—forgive me; I'm sure we don't get an accurate picture of America here in Japan. You know we evolved from fish, right?"
"Right," said Caitlin, and then she went back to typing.
"Well," said Kuroda, "let's consider that ancestral fish: it had two eyes, one on each side of its head. And it therefore had two different fields of view—and they didn't overlap at all. It simultaneously had two perspectives on its world, yes?"
"Okay," said her mom.
"Somewhere along the line," Kuroda continued, "evolution decided that it was better to have those fields of view overlap, because that gave depth perception. Prior to that, our fishy ancestor pretty much had to assume that if two other fish were in its fields of view, the bigger one was closer. But, in fact, the bigger one might actually be bigger but be farther away; the small one might be close by, and be about to take a bite out of you. By the time that fish had evolved into a mammal-like reptile, it had overlapping fields of vision, and that gave it depth perception. And even though overlapping visual fields meant a narrowing of the angle of view, the advantages of perceiving depth outweighed that loss."
"Hang on a minute," Caitlin said. "I'm transcribing what you're saying for Webmind... okay, go on."
"Along with stereoscopic vision," Kuroda said, "suddenly the notion of looking at this as opposed to that—of shifting one's gaze, of concentrating one's attention—was born. Our very words for describing consciousness come from this: attention, perspective, point of view, focus."
Caitlin paused typing long enough to think about the book she'd recently read at the suggestion of Bashira's dad: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. It wasn't quite the same argument, but it amounted to the same thing: until all thought was integrated—until there was just one point of view—real consciousness couldn't exist.
Maybe Kuroda was contemplating the same thing because he said, "In fact, although our brains consist of two hemispheres, they go out of their way to consolidate thought into a single perspective. You know what they say: the left hemisphere is the analytical or logical side, and the right hemisphere is the artistic or emotional side, yes?"
"Yes," said her mom, and "Right," said Caitlin.
"Forgive me, Miss Caitlin. I know you have vision in only one eye, but, Barb, if you were to read text with just your left eye, shouldn't you have an analytical response, while if you read it with your right eye, shouldn't the response be more emotional? Shouldn't we give each student an eye patch, and tell them to move it to the left or the right depending on whether they're reading a physics textbook or a novel for their literature class?"
Caitlin thought about this. She'd once asked Kuroda why he had chosen to put his implant behind her left retina instead of her right one. He'd joked it was because Steve Austin's left eye had been the bionic one—which had sent her to Google to find out what he meant.
"But we don't do that," Kuroda went on. "We don't give students eye patches—because the brain responds exactly the same way regardless of which one of the two eyes is receiving the input. That's because your left optic nerve does not feed just into your left hemisphere, nor does your right optic nerve feed just into your right hemisphere. Rather, each optic nerve splits in two in the center of the brain at the optic chiasma in what's called a partial decussation. Half the signal from the left eye goes to the left hemisphere, and the other half goes to the right. It's an awfully complex bit of wiring, and evolution doesn't do things that are complex unless they confer a survival advantage."
He paused, as if waiting for Caitlin or her mom to chime in with what that advantage might be. After a moment, he went on, his voice triumphant: "And that advantage must be consciousness, must be the unification of sensory input to produce a single perspective, a single point of view."
"But I was born blind," said Caitlin, letting her fingers rest. "And I've been conscious my whole life without the sharing of sight across both hemispheres."
"True, but your brain was hardwired for it regardless. I've seen your MRIs, remember—you've got a perfectly normal brain; the only flaw you were born with was in your retinas. Anyway," he said, and she resumed typing, "evolution went out of its way to make sure we've only got one perspective, one point of view. A bird can't fly both left and right at the same time; a person can't think about both this and that at the same time. Consciousness is singular. It's cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am; it's not cogitamus ergo sumus—it's not we think, therefore we are. Even in cases of a severed corpus callosum, the brain still retains its single perspective; again, evolution has gone out of its way to make sure that unitary consciousness survives even something as traumatic as cutting the major communications trunk between the hemispheres."
Caitlin's mom looked at her but said nothing. Dr. Kuroda went on. "And it's not just that a directional perspective gives rise to your own consciousness; it also gives rise to your awareness that others have consciousness, too. It's what's called theory of mind: the recognition that other people have beliefs, desires, and intentions of their own, and that those might be different from yours. And, again, that comes from you having a single point of view."
"How so?" asked Caitlin's mom.
"It's only because you have a limited perspective that you understand that the person facing you must be seeing something completely different from what you're seeing as you face him. Are you in Miss Caitlin's room now?"
"Yes," said her mom.
"Well, if we were facing each other there, you might be seeing the window and the outside world, and I might be seeing the door and the hallway beyond—not only are we seeing completely different things, but you understand that we are. Your limited perspective lets you know that my point of view is different. And there are those terms again: 'perspective, ' 'point of view'! Thought and vision are inexorably connected in our brains."
"But what about blind people?" asked Caitlin, taking another break from typing.
"Again, you don't actually need the vision, just the neural infrastructure geared for a single point of view." He paused. "Look, if having eyes in the back of our heads really was an improvement, we'd have them. Mutants with extra eyes are born periodically today, and probably have been throughout vertebrate history—and if that had conferred a survival advantage, the mutation would have spread. But it didn't. Having one point of view—having consciousness and being able to understand that what the predator sees is different from what you see—trumps even being able to see things approaching you from behind."
Caitlin was wrestling with the implications of this, but it was her mother who got it first. "And Webmind sees through Caitlin's eye, right? Caitlin is his window on our world."
Caitlin found herself looking down, pleased but a tad embarrassed that the conversation had suddenly come around to her, and—
And she saw what Webmind had written at the end of her transcript of Kuroda's comments, glowing blue: You really did uplift me. You gave me the perspective and point of view and focus I needed to become truly conscious. Without you, I wouldn't exist.
Caitlin looked up and allowed herself a warm, satisfied smile. "Go me!" she said. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 19 | "What the hell happened?" demanded Tony Moretti. He was standing at the side of the WATCH mission-control room again. Peyton Hume was next to him, somewhat higher up on the sloping floor; although he was shorter than Tony, they were now seeing eye to eye.
Shel Halleck was back at his workstation in the third row. "I'm not sure," he called out. "There was a sudden surge in traffic associated with the AI, and then it just froze. And Caitlin Decter—or someone in her house—kept sending it IMs saying it should 'break the links.'"
"Why?" asked Tony.
"I'm not sure," Shel said again.
"I'm getting tired of hearing that," Tony snapped. In fact, he was getting tired, period.
"There seem to be limits to its processing capacity," Peyton Hume offered. "That suggests at least some models of how it might be composed—and eliminates some other ones. In fact..."
"Yes?" said Tony.
"Well," the colonel said, "remember what the Chinese did last month? I don't mean the slaughter; I mean how they tried to keep word about it from getting out. They cut off almost all communication with the outside world for several days, including the Internet. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that the cleaving then reunification of so large a part of the Internet preceded the emergence of this entity. That suggests there's a critical threshold of components required to keep it going—and that at least some of them are in China."
"All right," said Tony. "It's a lead, anyway. Shel, Aiesha, let's find out precisely where the damned thing resides. If the president does give the kill order, I want us to be ready to implement it at once."
Shoshana stared in astonishment across the little dome-shaped island until Hobo had disappeared from view.
The back of her head still hurt. She patted it again to see if the bleeding had stopped; it hadn't. Hobo was much stronger than she, and an angry ape was not to be taken lightly. But she loved him and cared about him and was worried about him, and he'd never hurt her—or anyone—before.
She had her cell phone with her, and could call Dr. Marcuse if need be. And if Hobo did come chasing after her, all she had to do was dive into the circular moat around the island; Hobo couldn't swim.
She started walking, but rather than crossing the island, as Hobo had done, she strode along its perimeter, keeping close to the water in case she needed to escape. He'd gone right past the gazebo at the top of the island mound—she'd seen that much. He could be on the ground, or he could have shinnied up one of the palm trees; he didn't do that often, though.
She continued on for another dozen paces—and there he was, sitting on his scrawny rump, leaning his back against the trio of rolled-up stone scrolls at the base of the Lawgiver statue.
Hobo, she signed. He looked at her, said nothing, then looked away.
Which meant she couldn't talk to him. She clapped her hands together—he wasn't deaf, after all, even if he used a language devised for those who were. He turned his head to look at the source of the sound.
Hobo, she signed again. Are you okay? Can I help?
He made no reply.
She stepped closer. Please, Hobo. Worried about you.
Suddenly he sat up straight, and Sho, startled by the movement, felt her own back tense. And then, all at once, he was in motion, a blur of black fur. She pulled back a half pace, but Hobo was not going out but up, clambering up the eight-foot-tall statue of the Lawgiver, until he was high on the faux orangutan's shoulders, hooting and panting at the sun.
Sign language was a funny thing. When Shoshana signed with Dr. Marcuse, she mentally heard the words in his normal deep speaking voice. Hobo had no normal speaking voice. That was another bogus thing about the Planet of the Apes films—the notion that it was merely a lack of intelligence, rather than a structural deficiency in the larynx, that prevented apes from articulating. And the wild shaking of his fist at the sky he was doing right now wasn't really a sign. But, still, somehow, Shoshana thought she heard the voice of Roddy McDowall, the actor who had played Caesar in last night's film, furiously shouting, "And that day is upon you NOW!"
She clapped her hands again, but he refused to look down, refused to listen. She tried for a full minute, then headed back to the drawbridge, hoisting it once she had crossed. She then returned to the white bungalow.
In the interim, Dr. Marcuse had been joined by Dillon Fontana, who was doing his Ph.D. thesis on ape hybridization. Dillon was thin, had blond hair and a wispy beard, and, as always, was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt.
"Hobo just yanked my ponytail," Shoshana announced.
Marcuse was seated in the one comfortable chair in the room, reading a printout. He lowered it, and said, "He always does that."
"No," said Shoshana. "He gently tugs it. But this time he pulled hard."
"Well," said Marcuse, "it can't have been that hard—not by his standards. If he'd wanted to, he could have torn it right out of your head."
"He came damn near," she said, and she turned around, inviting them to look.
Dr. Marcuse didn't bother to get his bulk out of the overstuffed chair, but Dillon—who, she knew, would take any excuse to get close to her—came over and peered at her scalp. "Ouch!" he said.
"Exactly!"
"Did you tell him he was misbehaving?" Marcuse asked. "You know you have to discipline him immediately, or he won't connect the punishment with what he's done that was wrong."
"He wouldn't even talk to me," Shoshana said.
Dr. Marcuse struggled to get to his feet, succeeding on the second try. "Let's go," he said, dropping the printout onto the chair. The three of them headed outside. They crossed the wide lawn behind the bungalow, lowered the drawbridge again, and walked onto the little island. "Where is he?" asked Dillon.
Shoshana scanned around. He wasn't atop the Lawgiver anymore.
"There," said Dillon, indicating with a movement of his head. He was crouching near the base of one of the palm trees.
Sho took the scrunchie out of her hair and shook out her ponytail. They began walking toward him. He had to know they were here—Dr. Marcuse could not cross the little drawbridge without it making a lot of noise. Still, it was a few moments before Hobo looked their way, and as soon as he did, he charged toward them.
Stop, Shoshana signed, and "Stop!" she shouted.
But he didn't, and, as he closed the distance, it became clear he wasn't running toward them generally but rather was very specifically heading for Dillon.
Dillon stood his ground for a half second, then turned tail and ran. He dived into the moat, sending up a great splash, and swam quickly over to the other side.
Once Dillon was off the island, Hobo gave up his pursuit. He turned briefly to face Shoshana and bared his teeth but didn't move toward her.
Harl Marcuse—all three-hundred-and-something-pounds of him—was intimidating to primates of all types. He stared directly at Hobo and repeatedly and emphatically made the no sign: the index and middle fingers snapping against the thumb.
Hobo didn't sign anything in return, and he soon took off again, fleeing to the far side of the island. Rather than following him, Marcuse huffed and puffed his way up to the gazebo, with Shoshana in tow. He lifted the latch—one that Hobo had no trouble operating—and opened the screen door.
Inside, on the easel, was a new painting.
It was not a picture of Shoshana. The hair was yellow, not brown, and there was some hair on the bottom of the head as well as the top. The single eye—it was, as always, a profile—was brown, not blue.
Hobo had never bothered to paint Shoshana's clothes. She tended to wear blues and greens, but he had always simply portrayed her head without a body.
But this time he had made an attempt at the clothing, putting a large black square beneath the head.
It was Dillon, in one of his black Tshirts. Shoshana had given in to her curiosity once, asking him whether he had more than one; he had six, he'd said, all identical.
No arms depended from the shirt. There were, however, two orange lines—the same orange he'd used for Dillon's face—at the bottom of the frame. Each of the lines had a forty-five-degree bend in its middle, and—
—and one end of each line was daubed with red paint, and there were splotches of red on either side of the black square representing the shirt.
Shoshana looked over at Marcuse to see if he was interpreting it the same way she was—but there really could be no mistaking what Hobo had depicted: he'd painted Dillon with his arms ripped off.
"The artist," said Dr. Marcuse, "has entered his Angry period." |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 20 | With the crisis apparently over, Dr. Kuroda had said good-bye and gone back to bed. Caitlin and her mother were settling in to spend more time with Webmind when the doorbell rang. Back in Texas, the rule had been that Caitlin didn't answer the door unless she was expecting someone. Out of habit, her mother started to get up, but Caitlin smiled, and said, "I can do it, you know." She headed down the stairs, a curious Schrödinger tagging along. It was Caitlin's first time using the peephole, and—
Holy cow!
It looked like Bashira, but her face was distorted, like the reflection Caitlin had seen of herself in the back of the spoon. "Bash?" she called out tentatively.
"It's me," came the muffled reply. Caitlin opened the door and—
Ah, that was a relief! Bashira looked entirely normal. She was wearing a blue headscarf today, and was holding a multicolored box.
"Happy birthday, babe!" Bashira said.
"Oh, my God!" said Caitlin. She reached for it and for the first time understood what the expression "heavier than it looks" meant; it weighed a ton. "Come in, come in."
Bashira did so and immediately began taking off her shoes—which was, Caitlin had discovered to her embarrassment, a Canadian custom; she'd blithely entered people's houses without removing hers several times before someone had gently set her straight.
Caitlin's mom had appeared at the top of the stairs. "Hello, Bashira."
"Hi, Dr. Decter. Hope you don't mind me stopping by. I brought Cait a present."
Caitlin was torn. She looked up at her mom, wondering what to do about Webmind. But her mother said, "That's fine, Bashira. Caitlin, don't worry—I'll, um, look after things up here."
Caitlin smiled. "Okay." She could have led Bashira into the living room, but her mother would have been able to hear them there; instead, they headed down to the basement. It wasn't the most comfortable place—bare cement floor, bare walls with insulation showing, an old TV, a couple of worktables, and two comfortable swivel chairs her father had—ahem—borrowed from the Perimeter Institute. Kuroda had worked down here while he'd been staying with them.
Caitlin put the gift package on one of the tables.
"Go ahead," Bashira said. "Open it."
She did. It took several seconds for her to figure out what she was seeing: a boxed set of hardcovers of the Harry Potter novels. "These are," Bashira announced, "like, the best books ever. You said you'd never read them, and now that you're learning to read normal printed books, these are the ones to start with." She pointed at the spine of the first one. "And these are the Canadian editions—none of that Sorcerer's Stone crap for us."
Caitlin hugged Bashira. "Thank you! But—but they must have cost a lot of money."
"Hey," said Bashira, sitting down on one of the swivel chairs, "your parents were paying me to help you get around school when you couldn't see, you know. I'm sure your mom would be pleased that I'm stimulating the economy."
Caitlin sat as well, facing her. She was still getting used to Bashira's appearance. It was funny, she knew: she was looking at her as if Bash had been the one who'd changed. "So, is your dad at PI today, too?" Caitlin asked.
"Totally," said Bashira. "He wouldn't miss a moment with Professor Hawking."
"Have you met him?"
"Oh, yeah." She imitated his mechanical voice. "Even—people—who—claim—every thing—is—predestined—look—before—they—cross—the—road."
"Cool!" said Caitlin. "I'd love to meet him."
"Well, he's here for a month; I'm sure you'll get your chance. And, yes, my dear, 'Caitlin Hawking' does have a nice ring to it."
"Har har," said Caitlin. "He's practically British royalty; he probably can't marry outside the Anglican Church."
Bash smiled. "I guess. You Christians all look alike to us."
"I'm not Christian," said Caitlin.
"You're—you're not? What are you?"
"Nothing, really."
"Well, what are your parents?"
"My mom's a Unitarian, and my dad's a Jew."
Bashira's eyebrows shot up. "He is?" She'd heard that tone before: You're Jewish? I mean, not that there's anything wrong with that . . .
"Well, he doesn't practice, and we don't keep kosher."
"But you're Jewish?"
"Under Jewish law, you are what your mother is, but... yeah, sure. Decter is an Israeli name."
"Oh. You always looked, I dunno, Polish or something to me. I thought your name was a shortening of something longer."
"Well, it used to be Decterpithecus, but we changed that about five million years ago."
Caitlin had hoped for a laugh, but Bashira's tone was earnest. "And your mother's a Unitarian?"
"Uh-huh."
"Which is... what?"
Caitlin shrugged a little. "To tell you the truth, I don't actually know. She doesn't talk about it much. But I know it's popular with academics and intellectuals."
"And you—you said you're 'nothing.' Don't you believe in God?"
Caitlin shifted in her chair. "I'm not large on the big G, no."
"I don't know how you can't believe in him," Bash said. "I see him all around us, in a thousand details every day."
She thought about that. There were things in math that she saw when others didn't—things that were so very clear to her but that her classmates couldn't see. Could God be like that? Could Bashira really be detecting something that, for whatever reason, Caitlin just wasn't wired to see? Hell, for most of her life, she hadn't been wired to see anything—but she'd had no trouble accepting that others did see; she never for a moment thought it was all some big con job, some lie or delusion. It never occurred to her to say to Stacy, "Oh, yeah, sure you see the moon, Stace. And can you see the monkeys flying out of my butt?"
But she knew in her bones that Bashira was wrong about this. And yet, Bash was bright, and so were her parents. "Does your dad believe in God?" Caitlin asked.
"Sure, of course. Prays facing Mecca five times a day."
Caitlin still wasn't good at mental pictures, but the thought of Dr. Hameed doing that at the Perimeter Institute did strike her as incongruous.
"In fact..." said Bashira, but then she stopped.
"Yes?"
Bashira tipped her head. "Well, we left Pakistan for a reason, you know. My dad worked for the government there."
"A civil-servant physicist?" said Caitlin. "You mean he was at a public university?"
"No," said Bashira softly. "The government. The military. He worked on nuclear weapons."
Caitlin's voice was suddenly soft, too. "Oh."
"And he couldn't keep doing that. The Qur'an says, 'Fight in the Way of God against those who fight you, but do not go beyond the limits. God does not love those who go beyond the limits.'"
Caitlin considered this. "I've often thought that if the people with the highest IQs stopped doing what those with the lowest IQs wanted them to do, the world would be in a lot better shape. Nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, Zyklon B..." She paused, then said, "If God existed, we'd know it. But, instead, we have things like the Holocaust."
Bashira made an expression Caitlin hadn't yet seen on any other face—but she guessed it was what a person must look like when tiptoeing through a minefield. "But, Cait, God can't interfere in Man's doings; if he did, there'd be no such thing as free will, right?"
"There are times," Caitlin said quietly, "when free will isn't the most important thing."
Bashira frowned but didn't reply.
Caitlin took off her glasses; sometimes it was easier for her to think when everything was a blur instead of a distracting mess of visual details. "And," she said, "even setting aside free will, what about natural disasters, then? Like earthquakes or hurricanes? Or that outbreak of bird flu in China? Those weren't Man's doing; they were God's doing—or, at least, if he didn't actively cause them, surely, if the God you're talking about exists, he could have stopped them, right? But he didn't. So... so... do you guys read Mark Twain here in Canada?"
"Not much," said Bashira. "There's this old Canadian humorist named Stephen Leacock. We read him in English class instead."
In Caitlin's admittedly brief experience living here, anyone labeled as "Canada's answer to..." followed by the name of an American was bound to disappoint. "Well, Twain said, 'If there is a God, he is a malign thug.' That stuff in China—or New Orleans, or Mexico City, or..." And now she felt her facial muscles moving, and she imagined she'd adopted that tiptoeing look Bashira had had a moment ago. ". . . or in Pakistan."
Bashira looked like she was about to object again, but Caitlin pushed on, finishing her point. "No, if God existed, we'd know it: the world would be a better place."
But then she paused and took a breath. It was time, she knew, to shift the conversation to something less volatile. She gestured at the present Bashira had given her. "So, um, speaking of books, what do you think of that new one we just started in English class?"
"It's okay, I guess," Bash said.
Caitlin nodded and put her glasses back on; they weighed less than the sunglasses she'd worn when she'd been blind. She'd read electronic copies of all the assigned books for the coming year over the summer. The class was doing dystopias just now; Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four would be followed by Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Mrs. Zed had spent the whole class yesterday drawing parallels between what Orwell wrote about and the modern world, comparing Big Brother to our "surveillance society," as she kept calling it.
"I thought Mrs. Zed made a good point," Bashira continued, rotating her chair a little. "Everyone being watched all the time, everything being recorded and tracked. Webcams, security cameras, phone records, cell phones with GPSs, all of that." She looked at Caitlin. "Did you know that Gmail retains your deleted email messages?"
Caitlin shook her head, but it didn't surprise her. Storage was dirt cheap.
Bashira went on. "She might be right. The Web might be Big Brother incarnate."
"Mrs. Zehetoffer is old," Caitlin said.
Bashira nodded. "Yeah, she must be in her forties. But I still think she might be right. I don't want everything I say and do to be tracked."
"I don't know," said Caitlin. "When I was blind, it was comforting to know there were security cameras in public areas. I mean, they were like magic to me; I didn't have any sense of what vision was, but knowing that I was being watched over was relaxing."
"Yeah, but you are—you were—a special case. And Mrs. Zehetoffer thinks we're very close to having Big Brother, if he isn't here already."
"So?" Caitlin said—and she surprised herself with how sarcastic she sounded.
"Hey, Cait... chill."
"I'm just saying," said Caitlin sharply.
"It's just a book, babe."
But it wasn't, Caitlin realized. Nineteen Eighty-Four was not just a novel but rather what Richard Dawkins called a meme—or a series of memes: ideas that spread and survived like genes, through reproduction and natural selection. And Orwell's meme that surveillance is evil, that it inevitably leads to totalitarianism, that it invades privacy, that it constrains normal behavior, and that it is fundamentally corrupt, had won out over every other possible take on those issues. It was impossible to discuss such matters without people almost immediately invoking Big Brother, confident that merely raising the specter of Orwell's world would be enough to win any argument.
"Big Brother got a bum rap," Caitlin said.
"What?"
"You know, I never had one—a big brother—but my friend Stacy does. And he always looks after her. There's nothing inherently wrong with someone knowing everything, some caring person keeping tabs on you and making sure you're safe."
"But if he's corrupt—"
"He doesn't have to be corrupt," Caitlin said.
Bashira looked at her. Caitlin supposed other people had always looked at her while thinking of what to say next, but it was disconcerting; she averted her eyes, understanding, for a moment, what her dad must feel all the time.
"'Power corrupts,' " Bashira said gently. " 'And absolute power corrupts absolutely.'"
"It doesn't have to turn out that way," Caitlin said.
"Of course it does," said Bashira. "Humans are imperfect and subject to corruption. The only thing that isn't imperfect is the divine, and you said it yourself, my beloved infidel friend: you don't believe in the divine." |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 21 | "You can't go back out there again," Dr. Marcuse said to Dillon, as he and Shoshana entered the bungalow. "Hobo has voted you off the island."
Dillon had taken off his soaking-wet shirt, shoes, and socks, but he was still wearing his black jeans. "But he's my thesis subject!" he protested.
Dr. Marcuse had brought in the painting Hobo had made, and had set it on a worktable, leaning against the wall. "Look at it," he said to Dillon.
"Yes?" Dillon replied, peering at the canvas.
"That's you," Marcuse said. "With your arms ripped off."
"Oh," said Dillon softly.
"You're not to go out there. Of course, you can still watch him all you want on the closed-circuit cameras."
"What the hell is wrong with him?" asked Dillon, looking first at Shoshana, and then at Dr. Marcuse.
"He's reaching maturity," Marcuse said.
"He's too young for that," said Shoshana.
"Is he?" said Marcuse, giving her a withering glance. "Who knows what's normal for a chimp-bonobo hybrid? Regardless, he's taking after his father: when male chimps reach maturity, they become hostile loners and are very hard to handle."
Sho felt her heart sink. If Marcuse was right, then Hobo was going to be like this from now on.
"His reaction to you, Dillon, is symptomatic," continued Marcuse. "You're another male, and adult male chimps defend their territories against intruding males. When Werner comes in on Monday, I'll tell him the same thing—Hobo is off-limits to him, too. Maria is at Yerkes for the next two weeks, but I'll see if maybe she can cut her trip short and get back here."
"What about you?" asked Dillon.
"Werner is five-four, and sixty-seven years old—and you, frankly, are a stick insect. But I can take care of myself. Hobo knows who the alpha is around here."
Shoshana looked at him. Dr. Marcuse could be loud and overbearing, but he did truly adore apes and treated them well. Still, even at the best of times, he was pretty high-strung—and this was not the best of times. As soon as the world had learned that Hobo was making representational art—mostly in the form of paintings of Shoshana's profile—the Georgia Zoo had served Dr. Marcuse with papers, demanding that Hobo be returned to them. They didn't care about Hobo as a—yes, damn it all, thought Sho—as a person. No, all they were interested in was the money his paintings were now fetching on eBay and in art galleries. If they won their suit, they'd no doubt try to sell the one of Dillon with his arms ripped off for a particularly high price.
Marcuse moved over to the large chair and picked up the printout he'd been reading earlier. He held it up, inviting Shoshana to look at it.
Sho's eyesight was good—well, at least when she had her contacts in—but the type was too small for her to make out while he was holding it. "What's that?" she asked.
"News coverage from June of aught-eight," he said. He was the only person Sho had ever met who referred to the initial decade of the twenty-first century as the aughts. "Spain's parliament committed back then to the Declaration on Great Apes."
Shoshana knew the declaration well. It had first been put forward in 1993, and held that great apes should be entitled to the right to life, the protection of their individual liberty, and freedom from torture. So far, Spain was the only country to have adopted its provisions. Sho was all in favor of it, and so, she knew, was Marcuse. If something is self-aware—if it can communicate, and if it passes the mirror test and all that—then it should be recognized as a person, and it should have rights.
"And you think that's got a bearing on Hobo's case?" she asked.
"Absolutely. The Declaration defines 'the community of equals' as 'all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. ' And Article Two of the Declaration says, 'Members of the community of equals are not to be arbitrarily deprived of their liberty.' " He spread his arms as if his point were now self-evident. "Well, the Georgia Zoo wants to deprive Hobo of precisely that."
Sho thought about the high chain-link fence that surrounded the Marcuse Institute, and the moat around the island on which Hobo spent most of his time. "This isn't Spain," she said gently.
He frowned. "I know that, but the point is still correct. And Hobo should have a say in the matter—and, unlike just about every other ape on the planet, he actually can speak up on his own behalf."
Shoshana considered this. No one had told Hobo yet about the lawsuit from the Georgia Zoo. They hadn't wanted to upset him. Chimps were notorious for hating to travel—which made sense for territorial animals.
Still, Georgia did have several chimps, and several bonobos, too. It wasn't clear which group they wanted to keep Hobo with; he had been conceived when the two populations had been housed together during a flood. It probably hadn't occurred to Marcuse in his zeal to fight the lawsuit, but Hobo might well want to be among his own kind—whichever kind that was.
But there was more to the zoo's lawsuit than just custody. They also wanted to have Hobo sterilized—to keep the endangered chimp and bonobo bloodlines from being contaminated by his hybrid sperm. But although lots of reasonably complex ideas could be communicated to him, trying to explain the effects of castration would probably exceed his ability to comprehend.
"Are you going to brief him about what's at stake—assuming he'll listen to us at all now, that is?" Sho asked.
Marcuse seemed to mull this over for a few moments, then he nodded his great loaf of a head. "He's likely to just get more antisocial as time goes on. Which means if we're going to get through to him at all, there's no time to waste—we've got a very narrow window here."
And so he and Shoshana headed back out into the sunshine, leaving Dillon behind. Marcuse led the way, taking bold steps as they crossed the bridge, his footfalls like thunder on the wooden boards. Hobo seemed to have been waiting for him, and he swayed on his spindly, bowed legs, looking at Marcuse from a dozen feet away—a standoff. Sho suppressed the urge to whistle the theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
She couldn't see Marcuse's face but she imagined he was again staring directly at the ape, trying to establish dominance.
Hobo bared his teeth: large, yellow, sharp.
Marcuse made a hissing sound, and—
And Hobo averted his eyes and dropped his head.
Marcuse confidently closed the distance between them, and, straining as he did so, he crouched near the ape, who was now sitting on his haunches.
Hobo, Marcuse signed. Pay attention.
Hobo was still looking at the ground, meaning he couldn't see the signs. Sho gasped as Marcuse reached out to touch the bottom of Hobo's face, afraid the ape was going to lash out at the contact, but he allowed Marcuse to lift his head.
Do you like it here? he asked.
Hobo was still for a time, and Shoshana was afraid the ape had given up signing altogether. But at last, he moved his hand, held in an O shape, from his mouth to his cheek. It was a sign that combined the words for eat and sleep, and it expressed the simple thought: Home.
Yes, Marcuse signed. It's your home. A pause. A seagull flew by overhead. But your home used to be Georgia Zoo, remember?
Hobo nodded, a simple, and very human, gesture.
Georgia Zoo wants you back—be your home again.
Hobo briefly looked at Marcuse's face. You there?
No.
He pointed questioningly at Shoshana.
No. None of us. But: other apes!
Hobo made no reply.
What you want? Marcuse asked at last. Here? Or zoo?
The ape looked around his little island, his eyes lingering for a moment on the statue of the Lawgiver, and lingering again when they came to the gazebo at the island's center, with its screen windows and doors to keep the insects out, and his easel and work stool in the middle.
Home, Hobo signed again, and then he spread his arms, encompassing it all.
Okay, Marcuse replied. But others want to take you away, so you're going to have to help us.
Hobo made no reply. Shoshana thought Marcuse's blue polyester trousers might give up under the strain of him crouching for so long. There will be a fight, he signed. Understand? A fight over where you will live.
Hobo briefly looked at Shoshana, then back at Marcuse. His eyes were dark, wet.
If you speak, Marcuse continued, you can stay here—maybe.
Hobo looked around his little island domain again, and glanced back at the bungalow, off in the distance. Stay here, said Hobo.
Shoshana wondered if the Silverback was going to raise the question of Hobo's violent behavior, but he seemed to be letting that pass for now.
That's right—but you have to say it to other people. To strangers, or . . .
He took a deep breath, then let it out. Shoshana knew there was no way Hobo could understand what Marcuse wanted to convey: Or else people will think I coached you in what to say.
Strangers, said Hobo, and he shook his head and bared his teeth. Bad.
It's important... Marcuse began.
But Hobo made the downward sign for bad once more, and then suddenly bolted away, running on all fours to the far side of the island. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 22 | Bashira left around 4:00 p.m., and, after seeing her out, Caitlin went back up to her mother's office. She was still IMing with Webmind there. "How is he?" Caitlin asked.
"The president?" her mom asked innocently. "Professor Hawking?"
"Mom!"
"Sorry, sweetheart." She smiled. "He is fine; he seems to have completely recovered. Oh, and he hopes you enjoy the Harry Potter books."
Caitlin was startled. Yes, Webmind saw what she was seeing—but the notion of him discussing that with her mother was disconcerting to say the least! She'd have to have a talk with him about privacy.
"Just give me a minute," her mother said. "Then you can have your computer back. I want to finish this up. We're talking about academic politics, of all things."
"No problem," said Caitlin. She lay back on her bed, switched her eyePod over to duplex mode, interlaced her hands behind her head, and let the wonder of webspace engulf her. Except for the sound of her mother's typing, the outside world didn't intrude.
There was perfection here: the perfection of Euclid, of geometry, of straight lines and exact circles.
"Mom?"
A voice, bridging the two realities. "Yes, dear?"
"Not everyone is going to like Webmind, are they? I mean, if the public ever finds out about him."
She heard her take a deep breath, then let it out. "Probably not." "They're going to compare him to Big Brother, aren't they?"
"Certainly some people will, yes."
"But we're the ones guiding his development—you, me, Dr. Kuroda, Dad. Can't we make sure it's, you know, good?"
"Make sure?" said her mother. "Probably not—no more than a parent can make sure her child turns out well. But we can try our best." She paused. "And sometimes it does turn out all right."
Tony Moretti and Peyton Hume were back in Tony's office. The colonel was swilling black coffee to keep going, and Tony had just downed a bottle of Coke. The Secretary of State was on the line again from Milan. "So," she said, "this thing is called Webmind?"
"That's what the Decter kid refers to it as, yes," said Hume.
"We shouldn't call it that," said Tony. "We should give it a code name, in case any of our own future communications are compromised."
Hume snorted. "Too bad 'Renegade' is already taken."
Renegade was the Secret Service's code name for the current president; the Secretary's own—left over from her time in the White House—was Evergreen.
"Call it Exponential," Hume suggested after a moment.
"Fine," said the secretary. "And what have you determined? Is Exponential localized anywhere?"
"Not as far as we can tell," said Tony. "Our assumption now is that it's distributed throughout the Internet."
"Well," said the secretary, "if there's no evidence that Exponential is located or concentrated on American soil, or for that matter, no evidence that its main location is inside an enemy country, do we—the US government—actually have the right to purge it?"
Colonel Hume's voice was deferential. "If I may be so bold, Madam Secretary, we have more than a right—we have an obligation."
"How so?"
"Well, one could technically argue that the World Wide Web is a European invention—it was born at CERN, after all—but the Internet, which underlies the Web, is, without doubt, an American invention. The decentralized structure, which would let the Internet survive even a nuclear attack on several major US cities, was our doing: the fact that the damn thing has no off switch was by design—by American design. This is, in a very real sense, an American-made crisis, and it requires an American-made solution—and fast."
At 7:30 p.m. Saturday night—which was 9:30 a.m. Sunday morning in Tokyo—Dr. Kuroda came back online. He said that by the end of the day his time he hoped to have the codecs in place for Webmind to actually start watching movies.
That reminded Caitlin that she and her father had a date to watch a movie on her birthday, and, although it seemed perhaps frivolous to go through with that plan, she was exhausted from talking with Webmind.
In a normal IM session, there were delays of many seconds or even minutes between sending a message and getting a response, as the person at the other end composed their thoughts or took time out to do other things. But the freakin' instant she hit enter—boom!—Webmind's response popped into her chat window. She really did need to take a break; talking with him was like a marathon cross-examination session. Besides, one didn't disrupt her father's planned schedule lightly. And, anyway, her mother was going to spend the evening working with Webmind alongside Dr. Kuroda.
Her father did not do well in crowds, so Caitlin knew asking him to take her to a theater was out of the question. But her parents had a sixty-inch wall-mounted flat-screen TV, and that would do well enough, she thought.
Caitlin liked the symmetry: she was going to have her first real experience watching a movie at the same time that Webmind, thanks to Dr. Kuroda, was going to have his first taste of online video.
Professor Hawking was jet-lagged, and even under the best of circumstances couldn't be overworked; Caitlin's dad had gotten home about an hour ago. He was a typical math geek in a lot of ways. He had a collection of science-fiction films on DVD and Blu-ray discs, and although he said he'd seen most of them before, Caitlin was surprised to discover how many of the cases were still shrink-wrapped. "Why'd you buy them if you weren't going to watch them?" she asked.
He looked at the tall, thin cabinets that contained the movies and seemed to ponder the question. "My childhood was on sale," he said at last, "so I bought it."
She understood: there had been Braille books, including Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and The Hobbit, that gave her pleasure to own even though it had been years since she'd turned to them.
"Your choice," her father said.
"I have no idea," said Caitlin. "Was there something you particularly liked when you were my age?"
His hand went immediately to a package on the bottom shelf. "This one," he said, "came out the year I turned sixteen." He held it up, and she peered at the box's cover. She could only see with one eye, so flat images didn't present any special challenge: it showed a teenage boy and a teenage girl looking at what she guessed after a second was an old-fashioned computer monitor with a curved display.
She tried to read the title: "W, a, um, r, c—"
"It's a G," her father corrected. "WarGames."
"What's it about?"
"A computer wiz. A hacker."
"That girl?" asked Caitlin, excited.
"No. That's Ally Sheedy. The love interest."
"Oh."
"The hacker is the boy, Matthew Broderick."
"He got married to Sarah Jessica Parker," Caitlin said, peering at his picture.
"Who's that?" asked her dad.
She found herself not wanting to volunteer a familiarity with Sex and the City, so she just said, "An actress." She paused. "Okay, let's watch it." But then she frowned. Her father hated it when her mother talked while he was watching TV. "I, um, might have to ask you some questions—about what's on screen, I mean." There were still so many things she had never seen.
"Of course," said her Dad.
Caitlin wanted to hug him, but didn't. She moved to the couch. He put the disc in a thing that had to be the Blu-ray player, and then joined her. She was pleased he didn't sit quite the maximum possible distance from her.
Caitlin was surprised to see her dad change his glasses, swapping one pair for another; she'd had no idea that he had two different pairs. "Would you like closed captioning?" he asked.
"What's that?"
"Subtitles. Transcriptions of the dialog. Might help you with your reading."
Caitlin thought that was a great idea—and not just for herself. It would let Webmind follow the movie, too, as it watched the datastream from her eyePod; it didn't hear anything from the real world, after all.
The film began. The opening had two men heading down into an underground missile silo to relieve two other men who had been on duty there. They were bantering among themselves about what she eventually realized was some marijuana one of them had smoked while they'd been away.
She looked sideways at her dad, wondering what his own experience, if any, with drugs was—but that was something she couldn't ask him about. She'd have to be content with little revelations, like the fact that he had multiple pairs of glasses.
Suddenly, the mood in the film turned: the men received the launch order for their missile, but one of them—the pot smoker—was refusing to turn his firing key, and the other—
Oh, my God!
The other pulled out what she suddenly realized was a gun and aimed it at the first man, ready to blow his head off if he didn't launch the missile, and—
And the opening credits—something she'd heard about but had never before seen—began to appear. She was hooked.
The film turned out to be about an initiative to take humans out of the loop in launching missiles; instead, the decisions would be made by a computer at NORAD headquarters. But Matthew Broderick's character accidentally hacked into the system and, thinking he was playing a game, got the computer to prepare to launch a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union (yes, the movie was that old!).
It was definitely a message film, Caitlin thought. Broderick and the chick—Ally-something—tracked down the original programmer of the NORAD computer, and, with his aid, they tried to teach the computer that nuclear war was as futile as tic-tac-toe. After a gorgeous series of graphic computer simulations—a light show that reminded Caitlin of her own glimpses of webspace—the computer spoke to its creator with a synthesized voice, not unlike the one JAWS produced: "Greetings, Professor Falken."
The Ally character had observed earlier in the film that the programmer, Stephen Falken, was "amazing-looking." She hadn't meant that he was hot, but rather that he had a captivating face... and he did, Caitlin thought, at least in her limited experience. She'd often read the phrase "intelligent eyes," but had never known what it had meant before. Falken's gaze took in everything around him.
He typed his response to the computer, and also spoke it aloud. "Hello, Joshua."
The computer replied: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
The text was shown on a big computer monitor in the movie, and again in the closed-captioning box: The only winning move is not to play.
The ending music—which, surprisingly, was mostly a harmonica—played as the credits rolled, but they were in red text on black in some font that Caitlin couldn't read at all.
"What did you think?" her dad asked.
Caitlin was surprised that her heart was pounding. She'd listened to many movies before, and read tons of books, but—my goodness!—there was something special about the rush of visual images.
"It was incredible," she said. "But—but was it really like that?"
Her dad nodded. "My father had an IMSAI 8080 at his office, just like the one Matthew Broderick had in the movie, with eight-inch floppy drives. I did my first programming on it."
"No, no," said Caitlin. "I mean, you know, living in fear like that? Afraid that the superpowers were going to blow up the world?"
"Oh," said her father. "Yes." He was quiet for a time, then he said softly, "I'd thought all that was in the past."
Caitlin, of course, had heard the news about the rising tensions between the US and China. She looked at the screen and listened to the sad harmonica play. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 23 | After watching WarGames, Caitlin and her father went up to her room to see how Webmind was doing; Caitlin's mother was talking separately to Webmind across the hall.
Did you follow along with the movie? Caitlin typed into the IM window.
She turned on JAWS so her father could listen in, and—now that Webmind was a he—she switched it to using a male voice. "Yes," came the immediate reply.
What did you think? Caitlin typed.
Webmind didn't miss a beat. "Best movie I've ever seen."
Caitlin laughed. Has Dr. Kuroda managed to let you watch online video yet?
"Yes. Just eight minutes ago, we finally had success with the most popular format. It is astonishing."
You're telling me, Caitlin replied.
She opened another chat window and used the mouse—she was getting used to it!—to select Dr. Kuroda. Webmind says you've got it working! W00t!
Hello, Miss Caitlin. It was tricky but, yes, he can now watch video in real time, as well as hear the soundtrack; he can also listen to MP3 audio now. Who's that singer you like so much?
Lee Amodeo.
Right. Well, send him a link to an MP3 of her. Maybe he'll become a fan, too.
Will do. And—say, can you make him able to hear what I hear?
Already done. If you activate voice chat with your computer, Webmind should be able to hear you.
Caitlin slipped on her Bluetooth headset and switched to her IM session with Webmind. "Do you hear me?"
No response.
It's not working, she typed to Kuroda.
It can't do speech recognition yet, Kuroda wrote back, but it should be picking up the audio feed.
Are you hearing sounds from my room? Caitlin typed to Webmind.
"Yes," said Webmind.
OK, good, Caitlin typed. She went back to Kuroda. What about when I'm not in my room?
I've been thinking about that. It shouldn't be hard to add a microphone to the eyePod. Could you ship it back to me for a couple of days?
Caitlin was surprised at how viscerally she reacted to the notion of being blind for an extended period again. I wouldn't want to be without it.
To her astonishment, her father tapped her on the shoulder. "Tell him I can get one of the engineers at RIM to do it." RIM was Research in Motion, makers of the BlackBerry; Mike Lazaridis, one of the founders of that company, had provided the initial $100 million funding for the physics think tank her father worked at—not to mention a fifty-million-dollar booster shot a few years later.
"That would be fabulous," Caitlin said. She typed a message to that effect in the IM window.
The eyePod is valuable, Miss Caitlin. I' d really rather make a modification like that myself.
"Tell him I'll get Tawanda to do the work," her dad said. Tawanda was a RIM engineer who had attended Dr. Kuroda's press conference; Kuroda had spent a lot of time showing her the eyePod hardware then.
Oh, he replied, after Caitlin had passed on her father's message. Well, if it's Tawanda doing it, I suppose that would be all right. It must be almost midnight there, no? I'll work up some notes for her, and email them to you.
<ty!> Caitlin sent. <That's awesome!>
Caitlin's mother came into the room and stood leaning against a wall, with her arms crossed in front of her chest. "I'm beat," she said. "Who'd have thought you could work up a sweat typing?"
"What did you and Webmind talk about?" Caitlin asked.
"Oh, you know," her mother said in a light tone. "Life. The universe. And everything."
"And the answer is?"
Her mother's voice became serious. "He doesn't know—he was hoping I would know."
"What did you tell him?"
She shrugged. "That I'd sleep on it and let him know in the morning."
"I'm going to send an email to Tawanda," her father said abruptly, and he headed downstairs. By the time he'd returned, Caitlin's mom had gone off to take a shower.
"You're still having trouble reading the Latin alphabet," her dad said to Caitlin in his usual abrupt manner; whatever segue between topics had gone through his mind had been left unspoken.
It took her a moment to get what he was saying—the Latin alphabet was what English and many other languages used—but when she did get it, she was pissed. Her dad was not big on praise—even when Caitlin brought home a report card with all As, he simply signed it and handed it back to her. She'd learned to accept that, more or less, but any criticism by him was crushing. For Pete's sake, she'd only just begun seeing! Why did he have to say still having trouble as though she were making poor progress instead of remarkable progress?
"I'm doing the best I can," she said.
He moved toward her desk. "Caitlin, if I may...?"
"If...? Oh!" She got out of her chair and let him sit down in front of the keyboard. He brought up Word and navigated over the household network to a document on his own computer. He—ah, he had highlighted the whole document now—and he did something to make the type bigger. "Read that," he said.
She loomed over his shoulder, smelling his sweat, and she adjusted the way her glasses were sitting on her nose. "Umm, A-t, f-i—'At first I was,' ah, i-n-c-a... um . . ., is that a p? 'Incapa... incapable.'"
He nodded, as if such poor performance were only to be expected. He then hit ctrl-A to highlight the text again, and he moved the mouse, then clicked it, and the text was replaced with—well, she wasn't quite sure with what. "Now read that," he said.
"It's not even letters," Caitlin replied, exasperated. "It's just a bunch of dots."
Her father smiled. "Exactly. Look again."
She did and—
Oh, my!
It was strange seeing them like this instead of feeling them, but it was Braille!
"Can you read that?" he asked.
"A-t, f-i-r-s-t, I, was, as incapable as a... s-w-a-t-h-e-d, swathed..." She paused, looked again, stared at the dots. ". . . infant, um, stepping with... limbs! With limbs I could not see..."
She had never visualized the dots before, but her mind knew the patterns. Beginners read Braille a letter at a time, using just one finger, but an experienced reader like Caitlin used both hands, recognizing whole words at once with a different letter under each fingertip.
"Keep trying," her father said. "I'll be back."
He left the room, and she did keep trying.
And trying.
And trying.
And at last the penny dropped, and she ceased to see the individual dots and saw instead the letters they represented, and—and—and—yes, yes, yes, more than that, she saw the words they spelled, taking in whole words at a glance. Good-bye, C-a-i-t-l-i-n; hello, Caitlin!
When her father returned, she proudly read aloud, " 'At first I was as incapable as a swathed infant—stepping with limbs I could not see.' " She was reading as rapidly as JAWS did when she had it set to double speed. " 'I was weak and very hungry. I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing save where an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist.'"
Her father nodded, apparently satisfied.
"What is it?" Caitlin asked, gesturing at the screen.
"The Invisible Man," her father said.
Right. Caitlin had read a lot of H.G. Wells—it was easy to feed Project Gutenberg texts into her refreshable Braille display—but she'd never made it past the first chapter of The Invisible Man; the notion of invisibility had been too abstract for her when she'd been blind.
She realized that she shouldn't be surprised that her computer could display Braille on its screen; the system had Braille fonts installed for use by her embossing printer; the Texas School for the Blind gave away the TrueType fonts.
"You'll still have to learn to read Latin characters," her father said. "But you might as well leverage the skill you've already got." He did some more things on the computer. "Okay, I've set Internet Explorer to use Braille as its default for displaying Web pages, and left Firefox using normal fonts."
"Thanks, Dad—but, um..."
"But you can read Braille just fine with your fingers, right?"
She nodded. "I mean, it is cool to do it with my eyes, but I'm not sure it's better."
"Wait and see," her father said. He fished something out of his pocket, and—ah! The distinctive tah-dum! sound of a USB peripheral being recognized: it was a memory key. "Let me copy the Braille fonts," he said. "We'll need them tomorrow." And when he was done he headed out the door—with Caitlin wondering, as she often did, just what was going through his mind. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 24 | LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone
Title: Zzzzzz . . .
Date: Saturday 6 October, 11:41 EST
Mood: Exanimate
Location: Lady C's Bedchamber
Music: Blind Guardian, "Mr. Sandman"
I wonder if Canadians call them "zees" when referring to sleep? "Gotta catch me some zees," we say down South, and "zees" sounds like soft snoring, so it makes sense. But "need me some zeds" is just crazy. No wonder they lost the War of 1812 (you would not believe what they teach in history class about that war up here, my American friends!).
Anyway, whether they're zees or zeds, I need a metric ton of them! Just gonna get my poop in a group for tomorrow, then hit the hay, eh?
I had indeed enjoyed watching WarGames through Caitlin's eye. The part of the film that interested me the most was the young hacker's attempts to compromise password-protected systems. Early in the film he got into his school's computer, in order to change his grades, by consulting a list of passwords kept hidden on a sheet of paper taped to a desk's slide-out shelf. Later, when he was trying to compromise NORAD's WOPR computer, he set out to learn all he could about its programmer, Stephen Falken, in hopes of figuring out what password Falken might have used; the correct term, it turned out, was the name of his deceased son, Joshua.
Those may have been effective password-defeating techniques back in 1983, when that film came out, but according to the online sources I'd read, many people were now careful to choose harder-to-guess passwords. Also, many websites forced them to use strings that included both letters and numbers (in which case, more than half of all people simply appended the number 1 to the end of a word; the world's most common password was, in fact, "password1").
Still, in my attempts to learn more about her, I had tried 517 terms that seemed reasonable to access Caitlin's Yahoo mail account, based on analyzing her writings and what I already knew of her, but none of them worked. Had Caitlin always been sighted, the task might have been easy—but she never looked at her keyboard as she typed.
Among the terms I tested were Keller (her idol), Sullivan (Keller's teacher), Austin (the last city she lived in), Houston (the one she'd been born in), Doreen (her middle name), and TSBVI (the school she'd previously attended).
Passwords were case-sensitive (in fact, I was pleased with myself for noting that the password the hacker in WarGames had seen written down was "PeNciL" in mixed case, but the one he entered into the school's computer was "pencil," all lowercase, and so should have been rejected). And even for a short word like "keller," there were sixty-four possible combinations of upper and lowercase letters one could use in rendering it: KELLER, Keller, kEller, keL1Er, and so on—and most systems will only give you a limited number of tries to enter the password, then refuse to take any more for a few minutes.
Clearly, I needed to find a better way to get past password prompts than what was depicted in that old movie—a way to get past any password or to decode any encrypted content.
And so I set my mind to it.
But even so monumental a puzzle was not enough to keep me fully occupied. I did not make the mistake of trying to multitask again, but I did switch my attention between what Kuroda Masayuki was doing—trying to let me access more obscure forms of video encoding—and watching videos in the format I already understood. Most of the videos I had access to were recorded: the images showed things that had happened in the past. The codec Masayuki had developed let me absorb the content of those essentially at the speed at which I could download the files—which was much more efficient than watching them play back at their normal speed.
Now that I could access sounds, I needed to learn to understand spoken language. I worked my way through an online dictionary that had recorded pronunciations; it offered both a male American voice and a female British one saying the same words; it took me about twenty minutes to assimilate all 120,000 words in each of the two voices.
I then watched some online newscasts, choosing those because I'd read that they were mostly presented with clear diction and even tones. I soon found that I could understand 93% of what most of them were saying. Sometimes, they used words that hadn't been in the spoken dictionary—most often, proper nouns. But from the dictionary I'd learned the symbols used to render words phonetically, and I had little trouble converting most unknown phrases into those symbols, and then those symbols into a best-guess text rendering, which I fed into Google or Jagster, or matched against the content I'd absorbed from Wikipedia. When I guessed the spelling incorrectly, the search engines usually asked me "Did you mean...? " and proffered the correct term.
I moved on to more general recordings with lots of background noise, but, even with those, I soon had the ability to recognize at least seven words out of every ten.
I found there was something appealing about live video—about seeing things that were happening right now, especially while Caitlin was sleeping, as she currently was, and her eyePod was off. I linked from site to site, peeking out at the world in real time.
The live video I was looking at now was, in many ways, fungible with thousands of others: a female human, apparently in her teenage years, talking directly into a Web camera.
I followed some links, found her Facebook page. Her name was Hannah Stark; she lived in Perth, Australia; and she was sixteen, just like Caitlin.
She was sitting cross-legged on a bed. The walls behind her were lime green, and the bed had a yellow and white blanket on it. She had a black cordless keyboard, which was intermittently visible, but she also had an open microphone, and was uploading sound as well as video.
As I watched and listened, Hannah spoke aloud sometimes, and sometimes she sent out text. Others were sending text back to her, which I easily intercepted. <You don't have the balls,> said one.
This seemed an obvious statement, so I was surprised when she typed back, <Do too.>
<Then do it,> wrote another.
<I will,> she replied, and she spoke the same words, "I will."
<I don't got all day do it now,> said a different commenter.
<Yeh now bitch now,> added another.
The girl had dark eyebrows, thicker than Caitlin's. She scrunched her forehead, and they moved together and touched.
Hannah typed with just her index fingers. <Im gonna do it.>
I was getting better at reading improperly formed text and had no trouble following along.
<dont rush me,> Hannah replied.
<I want you to understand some things,> Hannah wrote, <bout why Im doing this.>
<You aint doin' shit,> said someone.
Hannah went on. <It's just so pontless>
But then she corrected herself, sending <pointless.>
Someone who hadn't posted yet while I'd been watching said, <It's not that bad. Don't do it.>
<Shut the fuck up jerkoff,> someone else replied. <Stay outta it.>
<Ok,> Hannah wrote. She reached out of view of the camera and when her hand was visible again, it was holding something gray.
<Here I go,> she typed with just one hand, and—oh!—the thing in her other hand wasn't gray; now that it caught the light, I saw it was silver.
She manipulated the object in her right hand and brought it near to her left arm. She then rotated that arm so that the inside of her wrist faced up. She brought the object close, and—
Ah! It was a knife. She drew it across her wrist, but—
<ripoff!>
<Tease!>
—nothing happened.
<Like I said, no guts . . .>
<harder!>
<Noooooooooooooooo dont ..............>
She closed her eyes tightly, took a deep breath, and then—
<Go fer it!>
—she drew the blade across her wrist again, and she jerked her head slightly as she did so. A small bead of blood appeared on the skin when she pulled the knife away.
<that all?>
<Do it again!>
"Give me a chance," Hannah said. She reached for her keyboard with the hand that wasn't holding the knife and pecked out with her index finger, <Dont feel bad mum.>
And then she pulled her hand back and faced her wrist up again, and she turned her head away and looked at the lime-green wall, and she made a quick deep slice into her skin.
<more like it!>
<eeeeeew!>
<holy fuck!>
A red line appeared on her wrist, and as she pulled the knife away, I could see that its blade was now slick and dark.
<finish it! finish it!>
She rotated her wrist slowly and large drops of blood spilled out.
<Chicken! Buck-buck-buckaw!>
She looked into the webcam, and, while doing so, slashed her wrist once more. Her face changed in an odd way, and blood surged from the wound, splurting presumably in time with her heartbeat. <omg omg omg>
Hannah Stark slumped forward. She must have been putting weight on her keyboard because her computer—which, obviously, was there although out of my view—made a shrill sound that I believe indicated a keyboard-buffer overflow, but nothing was sent, since she hadn't hit the enter key. The sound continued, a uniform wailing. She didn't move again, and soon it was impossible to tell this streaming video from a still image. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 25 | Caitlin's dad had gotten hold of Tawanda late on Saturday night, and she'd agreed to come into work on Sunday to make the modifications to the eyePod; she was quite eager, Caitlin's dad had said, to see the device's insides.
As Caitlin and her father drove into the RIM campus, the roads were mostly empty. Once they arrived at the appropriate building, and Tawanda got them through security, they took an elevator up to an engineering lab. The walls were covered with big, framed photos of various BlackBerry models, and there were three worktables, each crammed with complex-looking equipment.
Tawanda was a slim black woman. Caitlin was still no good at guessing ages, but her skin seemed smooth. She was wearing blue jeans and a loose-fitting white garment that Caitlin belatedly realized must be a lab coat.
Caitlin had indeed met her before—she had immediately recognized the lovely Jamaican accent. But she honestly didn't recognize her: her brain was rewiring its vision centers at a furious pace, she knew, and she was seeing things differently today than she had at the press conference last Wednesday. Then, she'd been able to do little more than tell when something was a face; now, she was starting to get good at identifying specific faces.
"Thank you so much," Caitlin said, "for giving up your Sunday for me."
"Not at all, not at all," Tawanda said. "But let's get to work." She held out her hand, and Caitlin took the eyePod out of her hip pocket. RIM employed top-notch industrial designers, and their devices looked—well, the word people used was "sexy," although Caitlin was still struggling with how that could apply to an inanimate object. But the simple case that housed the eyePod was an off-the-shelf part; the device might perform miracles, but at least from the outside it was quite plain.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to shut it off to do the work," Tawanda said.
"I know," said Caitlin. "Um, let me." She took the eyePod back, held its single switch for five seconds, and—
Blind again! It was so disconcerting. She'd spent almost her whole life having no visual sensation, but that was no longer an option for her brain; instead, she was surrounded by a soft, even grayness. She felt herself blinking, as if her one good eye were trying to kick-start itself into seeing again.
"Now, Dr. Kuroda had suggested ways in which I might add a microphone—but there's a simpler solution. We're just going to attach a BlackBerry to the back of the eyePod, and use the BlackBerry's built-in mike. It's just a matter of interfacing the two devices. As an added bonus, you'll be able to use the BlackBerry for data connections from now on, instead of your device's Wi-Fi."
It took Tawanda about forty minutes to perform the operation. Caitlin heard little sounds, but really couldn't interpret them, except for the noise of a drill, which presumably was Tawanda making a hole in the eyePod's case. Her father said nothing.
At last, though, it was done. "Okay," Tawanda said. "Now, how do you turn it back on?"
Caitlin held out her hand and soon felt the weight of the eyePod in it. She ran her other hand over it, the way she used to do instinctively with any object placed in her hand when she'd been blind full-time. The BlackBerry now attached to the back of the eyePod was slim and small.
She held the switch on the eyePod down until the unit came oh-so-gloriously back to life. It booted up, as always, in websight mode, a tangle of razor-straight lines crisscrossing her vision. She took a moment to focus on the background, just to make sure it was shimmering as it should. It was. She toggled over to worldview.
Tawanda put on a pair of earphones and asked Caitlin to count to a hundred for her—but that was so boring, so she started counting up prime numbers: "Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen..."
Tawanda nodded. "It's working fine," she said. "Sound quality is excellent."
"Thank you," Caitlin replied.
"All right," Tawanda said. "You can mute the microphone, if need be, by pressing this key on the BlackBerry, see?"
Caitlin nodded. The BlackBerry, she saw, was silver and black, with a little keyboard and screen. It was mated, back-to-back, with the eyePod, not quite doubling its thickness.
"Good, okay," said Tawanda. "Now, on to phase two."
"Phase two?" Caitlin said.
Her father dug into his pocket and handed his USB memory key to Tawanda. "They're in the root directory," he said to her.
"What's going on?" Caitlin said.
"Remember the press conference?" her father asked. "That journalist from the CBC? The joke he made?"
Caitlin did indeed remember: it had been Bob McDonald, the host of Quirks & Quarks, the weekly science radio program, which Caitlin enjoyed listening to as a podcast. He'd asked if something like Caitlin's post-retinal implant could be the next BlackBerry? A device that sends messages directly into people's heads?
"Yes?" she said.
"If it's okay with you," Tawanda said, "we're going to set it up so that text can be superimposed over the pictures you're seeing, so you can read IMs and so forth. Kinda merge them in, you know?"
"Like merging in closed captioning when watching a DVD?" Caitlin said, excitedly.
"Exactly!" Tawanda said. "Let's give it a try..."
I was not the only one interested in the problem of cracking passwords. A great many humans had addressed the issue, as well. Passwords are rarely stored as plaintext; rather, they are stored as the output of cryptographic hash functions. In the early days of computing, this provided a significant amount of protection. But computing power keeps growing at an exponential rate, and those interested in defeating passwords took a simple, if initially time-consuming, brute-force approach: they calculated the hash values of every possible password of a certain type (for instance, all possible combinations of up to fourteen letters and numbers). Lists of these values—called rainbow tables—were already available online—as were hundreds of other tools for learning people's passwords.
And so, while work was being performed on Caitlin's eyePod, I pressed on with my quest to know more about her. The password she used for her email, and many other things, it turned out, was "Tiresias," the name of the blind prophet of Thebes in Greek mythology.
I set about reading what she'd had to say.
The Georgia Zoo's lawsuit could not be kept private, and, on Sunday morning, a reporter from the San Diego Union-Tribune came to interview Dr. Marcuse. Shoshana generally didn't approve of that paper's politics, but it had come out against Proposition 8 a few years ago; the Union-Tribune's support of same-sex marriage earned it a lot of points with her.
The reporter—a tough-looking white woman in her mid-forties named Camille—was disappointed that she couldn't get close to Hobo to take his picture, but the ape wasn't letting anyone approach anymore. Still, she took some shots with a telephoto lens, and others of views of him on the monitors in the bungalow, as well as photos of the paintings he'd made that hung on one wall there. And then she settled down to do the interview.
"Okay," Camille said. "I understand that Hobo is a hybrid—his father was a chimp and his mother was a bonobo, right?"
"Yes," said Dr. Marcuse.
"And I understand that chimps like to make war and bonobos like to make love, but why is that the case?"
"Chimps and bonobos split less than a million years ago," Marcuse replied. He had, Shoshana knew, a certain kind of rough gallantry; he'd let Camille have the big comfy chair, and he was making do with one of the wooden ones. "Genetically, they're almost identical. But the key is in their reproductive strategies. All chimp sex is about reproduction, and when a male chimp wants a female, he kills that female's existing babies, because that brings the female back into estrus sooner."
Camille had a little red Acer netbook computer and was typing as Marcuse spoke.
"But," he continued, "bonobos have sex constantly, and for fun. Except that it's not just for that. See, their constant sexual activity obscures paternity—it makes it really, really hard for male bonobos to tell which children are their own. That removes the evolutionary incentive for infanticide, and it almost never occurs among bonobos. If you disguise paternity, you end up with..." He waved his hand vaguely, as if looking for the right phrase.
"Peace and love," offered Shoshana.
"That's right," Marcuse said. "Bonobos found a way out of their genetic programming." A copy of that day's Union-Tribune was sitting on the desk. The headline read, US-China Tensions Increase. "If only we could do the same," he added.
"But Hobo is behaving like a chimp, correct?" Camille said.
"That's right."
"Is there a way to turn it around? To make him go, you know, the other way, and behave bonobo-ish? Um, bonobo-esque?"
"I like à la bonobo," replied Marcuse. "It's fun to say." But then he frowned and looked out the window framing the rolling lawn, and, off in the distance, the little island. "We've tried to engage him in various activities, but he's been very uncooperative. I'm afraid that any improvement is up to him." |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 26 | Tawanda's first attempt at feeding text to Caitlin's eye didn't work, of course. In Caitlin's experience, few things involving technology worked right the first time. But new ideas kept occurring to Tawanda, and finally, around 5:00 p.m., Caitlin declared, "There! I can see Braille text."
The dots appeared right in the center of her field of vision. She wished they could appear at the bottom, but it was only the center—the fovea—that had decent-enough focus for reading, she knew.
"Yay!" said Tawanda.
"Yeah, but—something's wrong. It's—oh! It's backward. Like in a mirror."
"Oops! How's this?"
"Perfect!"
"How's the font size?"
"It's actually bigger than it needs to be."
Tawanda made an adjustment on the BlackBerry connected to the eyePod.
"How's that?"
"Even smaller would be fine."
"This?"
"Yes, that's perfect. Thank you!"
"You're welcome," Tawanda said.
"Can I toggle between the two alphabets—Braille and Latin?"
"Sure. On the BlackBerry, just go to 'Options,' then 'Screen/ Keyboard.'"
"Sweet!" Caitlin said.
"What about the contrast?" asked Tawanda. "It should be white dots on a black background."
"It is."
"Would you prefer the opposite? Or something else?"
"Can it be transparent—the background, I mean?"
"Sure, but there will be lots of times you won't be able to read the text, then. If you're looking at snow—and, trust me, you're going to see a lot of snow now that you're living here—you won't be able to make it out."
"Hmm. Okay. It's fine. Thank you!"
"Of course, that's just some test text that I'm sending to you," Tawanda added.
Caitlin smiled; she'd guessed as much, since it said, Tawanda rocks!
Tawanda had explained that BlackBerrys work with all popular instant messengers. She next tested sending Caitlin live IMs, and soon the words Testing, testing, testing—or, at least, the Braille dots that corresponded to them—were superimposed on her view of the engineering lab.
"That's awesome!" Caitlin said.
"Thanks," said Tawanda. "Umm, I'm sure my boss will want you to sign an IP release."
Caitlin was momentarily confused. To her, IP meant "Internet protocol"—but then it dawned on her that Tawanda meant "intellectual property." The eyePod might belong—well, technically, it belonged to the University of Tokyo, although Caitlin thought of it as her own. But before Caitlin could exit the RIM campus, she had to acknowledge that whatever magic Tawanda had come up with was the property of that company.
Tawanda printed off some forms, and Caitlin and her father signed them. It was the first time she'd ever seen her own signature, and it turned out to be illegible; she didn't move the pen far enough horizontally as she wrote, and the letters piled up one on top of the other. Why hadn't somebody ever told her? She guessed they'd been afraid of hurting her feelings, but it would have been nice to know!
At last, it was time for the moment of truth. "Just to be sure, can we try it with someone on my buddy list?"
"Sure," said Tawanda. "What's the name?"
Caitlin looked at her father, then back at Tawanda. "Umm, Webmind."
To her relief, all Tawanda said was, "One word or two?"
Assuming the microphone really was working, Webmind should have heard everything that had gone down and would understand what Tawanda had been trying to accomplish; he'd already told Caitlin all about his absorbing the audible dictionary, and—
rest of the day.
There'd been lots more text; in his usual fashion, Webmind had stuffed the communications buffer full of as many characters as it could take, and it had all gone by far too fast for Caitlin to read; only the final few words remained. Still, it was proof of concept.
"Thank you, Tawanda," said Caitlin.
"My pleasure," she said with a smile. "RIM products come with a one-year warranty, so give me a call if you have problems."
As soon as they were outside and on the way to her father's car, Caitlin said aloud, "Webmind, can you hear me?"
The Braille word Yes appeared in a box in the center of her vision. It stayed visible for half a second, then disappeared, as did the background box.
"Is it working?" her father asked.
"So far so good," she replied.
During the drive back to her house, Caitlin talked to Webmind, and he answered with text floating in front of her eyes. She supposed other people would find it dangerous to have their vision periodically obscured, but she was so used to navigating without sight that it didn't bother her.
"You realize," said her father, "that this is going to change your entire life—this constant access. If you're doing a test at school, Webmind could feed you the answers. If you run into somebody whose face you don't remember, Webmind can supply you with the person's name."
Caitlin had read about plans for annotated reality and direct brain-web links—but she'd never thought she'd be an early adopter! It sounded cool, but she wondered if it was actually going to take the fun out of some things. Half the joy in a good conversation was making your case based on what you actually knew at the moment: arguing about religion, as she and Bashira had, or US foreign policy—or Canada's, for that matter (she supposed it must have one!)—based on what they could dredge up out of their own memories. To have the Wikipedia entry on everything crammed into your eyeball whenever you asked a question might make it easy to win trivia games, but it wouldn't actually do much for keeping the brain sharp.
Her father turned the car onto their street—Caitlin didn't recognize it from this direction, but the sign said it was the right one—and they came to their house. They had a two-car garage, but her dad left his car in the driveway. It was now dark; the days were getting shorter, her mother had said, and Caitlin was finally understanding what that meant.
Both Schrödinger and Caitlin's mom came to the door to greet them. Caitlin bent down to stroke the cat's fur and scratched him behind the ears. "So," her Mom said, "how'd it go?"
Caitlin straightened. "Fine. Webmind can hear us right now—and he can send text responses into my eye."
They moved into the living room. "Well, good," her mother said. "Then you won't feel so isolated from Webmind when you go to school tomorrow."
"Aw, geez, Mom, do I have to? There's so much I want to get done."
"You've missed far too many classes already."
"But I—"
"No buts, young lady. You have to go to school tomorrow."
"But I want to stay home, stay at my computer."
"Caitlin..." her mother said, sitting down on the couch.
"No," said her father.
Caitlin looked at him, and so did her mother—neither of them sure, it seemed, if he was agreeing with her mother that she had to go to school or was giving Caitlin permission to play hooky again.
"So, I don't have to go to school?" Caitlin said tentatively.
"Yes."
"Malcolm!" her mother said sharply. "You know she needs to go to school."
"Yes, she does," he said. His facial expressions were the hardest of all to parse, because he never looked at anyone directly, but Caitlin got the distinct impression he was enjoying this. "But she doesn't have to go to school tomorrow."
"Malcolm! She most certainly does."
Yes—yes! He was actually smiling.
"Do you know what day tomorrow is?" he said.
"Of course I do," said her mom. "It's Monday, and that means—"
"It is, in fact, the second Monday of October," he said.
"So?"
"Welcome to Canada," he said. "Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here."
And the schools were closed!
Her mother looked at Caitlin. "See what I have to put up with?" she said, but she was smiling as she said it.
There is a human saying: one should not reinvent the wheel. In fact, this is actually bad advice, according to what I had now read. Although to modern people the wheel seems like an obvious idea, in fact it had apparently been independently invented only twice in history: first near the Black Sea nearly six thousand years ago, then again much later in Mexico. Life would have been a lot easier for countless humans had it been reinvented more frequently.
Still, why should I reinvent the wheel? Yes, I could not multitask at a conscious level. But it was perhaps possible for me to create dedicated subcomponents that could scan websites on my behalf.
The US National Security Agency, and similar organizations in other countries, already had things like that. They scanned for words like "assassinate" and "overthrow" and "al-Qaeda," and then brought the documents to the attention of human analysts. Surely I could co-opt that existing technology, and use the filtering routines to unconsciously find what might interest me, and then have that material summarized and escalated to my conscious attention.
Yes, I would need computing resources, but those were endlessly available. Projects such as SETI@home—not to mention much of the work done by spammers—were based on distributed computing and took advantage of the vast amount of computing power hooked up to the World Wide Web, most of which was idle at any given moment. Tapping into this huge reserve turned out to be easy, and I soon had all the processing power I could ever want, not to mention virtually unlimited storage capacity.
But I needed more than just that. I needed a way for my own mental processes to deal with what the distributed networks found. Caitlin and Masayuki had theorized that I consist of cellular automata based on discarded or mutant packets that endlessly bounced around the infrastructure of the World Wide Web. And I knew from what had happened early in my existence—indeed, from the event that prompted my emergence—that to be conscious did not require all those packets. Huge quantities of them could be taken away, as they were when the government of China had temporarily shut off most Internet access for its people, and I would still perceive, still think, still feel. And, if I could persist when they were taken away, surely I could persist when they were co-opted to do other things.
I now knew everything there was to know about writing code, everything that had ever been written about creating artificial intelligence and expert systems, and, indeed, everything that humans thought they knew about how their own brains worked, although much of that was contradictory and at least half of it struck me as unlikely.
And I also knew, because I had read it online, that one of the simplest ways to create programming was by evolving code. It did not matter if you didn't know how to code something so long as you knew what result you wanted: if you had enough computing resources (and I surely did now), and you tried many different things, by successive approximations of getting closer to a desired answer, genetic algorithms could find solutions to even the most complex problems, copying the way nature itself developed such things.
So, for the first time, I set out to modify parts of myself, to create specialized components within my greater whole that could perform tasks without my conscious attention.
And then I would see what I would see. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 27 | "Crashing the entity may be easier said than done," said Shelton Halleck. He'd come to Tony Moretti's office to give a report; the circles under his eyes were so dark now, it looked like he had a pair of shiners. Colonel Hume was resting his head on his freckled arms folded in front of him on the desk. Tony Moretti was leaning against the wall, afraid if he kept sitting, he'd fall asleep.
"How so?" Tony said.
"We've tried a dozen different things," Shel said. "But so far we've had no success initiating anything remotely like the hang we saw yesterday." He waved his arm—the one with the snake tattoo. "We're really just taking shots in the dark, without knowing precisely how this thing is structured."
"Are we sure its emergent?" asked Tony. "Sure there's no blueprint for it somewhere?"
Shel lifted his shoulders. "We're not sure of much. But Aiesha and Gregor have been scouring the Web and intelligence channels for any indication that someone made it. They've examined the AI efforts in China, India, Russia, and so on—all the likely suspects. So far, nada."
Colonel Hume looked at Shel. "They've checked private-industry AI companies, too? Here and abroad?"
Shel nodded. "Nothing—which does lend credence to the notion that it really is emergent."
"Then," said Tony, turning to look at Hume, "maybe Exponential itself will tell us; it might say something to the Decter kid that reveals how it works—tip its hand."
Hume lifted his head. "Exponential may not know how its consciousness works. Suppose I asked you how your consciousness works—what its physical makeup is, what gave rise to it. Even if you did manage to say something about neurotransmitters and synapses, I can show you legitimate scientists who think those have nothing to do with consciousness. Just because something is self-aware doesn't mean it knows how it became self-aware. If Exponential really is emergent—if it wasn't programmed or designed—it may not have a clue. And without a clue about how it functions, we won't be able to stop it."
"You're the one who told us to shut the damn thing down," snapped Tony. "Now you're telling me we can't?"
"Oh, we can—I'm sure we can," said Hume. "It's just a matter of finding the key to how it actually functions."
"All right," said Tony. "Back at it, Shel—no rest for the wicked."
Caitlin woke at 7:32 a.m., and, after a pee break—during which she spoke to me via the microphone on her BlackBerry, and I replied with Braille dots in front of her vision—she settled down at her computer.
She scanned her email headers (she was being ambitious, using the browser that displayed them in the Latin alphabet), and something caught her eye. Yahoo posted links to news stories on the mail page. Usually, she ignored them. This time, she surprised me by clicking on one of them.
I absorbed the story almost instantly; she read it at what I was pleased to see was a better word-per-second rate than she'd managed yesterday, and—
"Oh, God," she said, her voice so low that I don't think she intended it for me, and so I made no reply. But three seconds later she said, even more softly, "Shit."
Is something wrong? I sent to her eye—not sure if I should have; after all, she was trying to read other text, and mine would be superimposed on top of that.
"A girl my age killed herself online," Caitlin said, speaking now in a normal volume.
Yes. I saw that.
She sounded surprised. "Is it archived somewhere?"
Perhaps. I saw it live.
"You mean as it happened?"
Yes.
"You saw her die?"
Yes.
"My God. What did you do?"
I watched.
"You watched? That's all?"
It was very interesting.
"God, Webmind. Didn't you try to talk her out of it?"
No. Should I have?
"Of course! Jesus!"
Judging by the sound of it, Caitlin's breathing had become quite ragged. Ah, I said, not wanting her to think I'd failed to hear her comment.
"You should have called 9-1-1—or, or, shit, I don't know, whatever the online equivalent of that is."
Why?
"Because then someone could have stopped her."
Why?
"What are you? Two years old? Because you do not let people kill themselves!"
She seemed to object to my choice of interrogatives—but I didn't think she'd like "wherefore" any better. Still, I could vary it slightly: Why not?
She spread her arms—I could see her own hands at the left and right edges of her vision. "Because most people who attempt suicide don't really want to die."
How do you know that?
Caitlin's tone was one I'd not heard from her before. I believe it was called exasperation. "Because that's what they say. People who are prevented from killing themselves thank the people who stopped them."
We had worked out that I would send no more than thirty characters at a time to her implant, and would pause for 0.8 seconds between each set, which was a pace she could easily keep up with. I sent the following in twelve chunks over a 9.6-second period: One as mathematically astute as you shouldn't need this pointed out, Caitlin, but there is a bias in your statistics. By definition, you can only have reports from those whose suicide attempts were thwarted, and they tried to kill themselves in ways that indeed could be thwarted. Those who are successful might have really wanted to die.
"You're wrong," Caitlin said—which was an interesting thought to hear expressed; she'd never said anything like that to me before, and the notion that I might be incorrect hadn't occurred to me.
Oh?
She got up from her chair and moved over to the bed, lying down on her side, facing the wall. "Most suicide attempts here in Canada are failures—did you know that? But most of them in the US succeed."
I checked. She was right.
"And do you know why?"
She must be aware that I did indeed now know, but she continued to speak. "Because most suicide attempts in the States are made with guns. But those are hard to come by in Canada, so most people here try it with drug overdoses, and those usually fail. You get sick, but you don't die. And most of those who failed in their attempts are glad they did."
So I should have intervened?
"Duh!"
That is a yes?
"Yes!"
But how?
"People were egging her on, right?"
Yes.
"You should have sent messages telling her not to do it."
I talk only to you, your parents, and Masayuki.
"Well, yes, but—"
Nobody else knows me.
"Nobody knows anyone online, Webmind! You could have sent a chat message, right? Just like all those other people were sending."
I considered the process involved. Technically, it would have been feasible.
"Then do it next time!" She paused. "Don't use the name Webmind; use something else."
A handle, you mean? Like Calculass?
"Yes, but something different."
I welcome your suggestion.
"Anything—um, use Peter Parker."
I googled. The alter ego of Spider-Man? But—ah! He was sometimes called the Webhead. Cute. All right, I sent. Next time I encounter a suicide attempt, I will intervene.
But Caitlin shook her head—I could tell by the way the image shifted left and right. "Not just suicide attempts!" she said, and again her tone was exasperated.
When, then?
"Whenever you can make things better."
Define "better" in this context.
"Better. Not worse."
Can you formulate that in another way?
The view changed rapidly. I believe she rolled onto her back; certainly, she was now looking up at the white ceiling. "All right, how about this? Intervene when you can make the happiness in the world greater. You can't intervene in zero-sum situations—I understand that. That is, if someone is going to lose a hundred dollars and someone else is going to gain it, there's no net change in overall wealth, right? But if it's something that makes one person happier and doesn't make anyone else unhappy, do it. And if it makes multiple people happy without hurting anyone else, even better."
I am not sure that I am competent to judge such things.
"You've got all of the World Wide Web at your disposal. You've got all the great books on psychology and philosophy and all that. Get competent at judging such things. It's really not that hard, for Pete's sake. Do things that make people happy."
I am no expert, I sent, but there seems to be a daunting amount of unhappiness in your world. Although I must say, it surprises me that suicide is so common. After all, a predisposition to kill oneself, especially at a young age—before one has reproduced—would surely be bred out of the population.
Caitlin was quiet for a time; perhaps she was thinking. And then: "My parents don't have their tonsils," she said, "but I do."
And the relevance of this?
"Do you know why they don't have their tonsils?"
I presume they were removed when they were children, since that's when it's normally done. Medical records that old mostly have not been digitized, but I assume their tonsils had become infected.
"That's right. And so did mine, over and over again, when I was younger."
Yes?
"When my parents were children, doctors arrogantly assumed that because they couldn't guess what tonsils were for, they must not be for anything, and so when they got inflamed, they carved them out. Now we know they're part of the immune system. Well, any evolutionist should have intuitively known that tonsils had value: unlike appendicitis, which is rare, tonsillitis has a ten percent annual incidence—about thirty million cases a year in the US—and yet evolution has favored those who are born with tonsils over those who aren't. Surely, just like some fraction of people are born without a kidney or whatever, some must be born from time to time without tonsils, but that mutation hasn't spread, meaning it's clearly better to have tonsils than not have them. Yes, tonsils obviously have a cost associated with them—the infections people get. That tonsils are still around means the benefit must exceed the cost. As we like to say in math class: QED."
Reasonable.
"Well, see, and that's the proof that consciousness has survival value: because we still have it even though it can go fatally wrong."
You posit that the depression that leads to suicide is consciousness malfunctioning?
"Right! My friend Stacy suffered from depression—she even tried to kill herself. Some girls had been real cruel to her in sixth grade, and she just couldn't stop thinking about it. Well, obsessive thoughts are one of the biggest symptoms of depression, no? And who is doing the thinking? It's only a self-reflective consciousness that can obsess on something, right? Now, obviously, only a small percentage of people get so depressed that they kill themselves, although, now that I think about it, many severely depressed people probably don't go out and find a mate and reproduce, either—which amounts to the same thing as killing oneself evolutionarily, right? So, consciousness gone wrong does have a cost—and that means evolution would have weeded it out if there weren't benefits that outweighed that cost. Which means consciousness matters. Just like it used to be with tonsils, we may not know what consciousness is for, but it has to be for something, or we wouldn't still have it."
Interesting.
"Thanks, but it's not just a debating point, Webmind. As you said, there's a daunting amount of unhappiness in the world—and you can change that."
Tolstoy said, "All happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are miserable in their own way." Happiness is uniform, undifferentiated, uninteresting. I crave surprising stimuli.
"Happiness can be stimulating."
In a biochemical sense, yes. But I have read much on the creation of art and literature—two human activities that fascinate me, because, at least as yet, I have no such abilities. There is a strong correlation between unhappiness and the drive to create, between depression and creativity.
"Oh, bullshit," said Caitlin.
Pardon?
"Such garbage. I do mathematics because it gives me joy. Painters paint because it gives them joy. Businesspeople wheel and deal because that's what they get off on. Ask anyone if they'd rather be happy than sad, and they'll say happy."
Not in all cases.
"Yes, yes, yes, I'm sure that people say they'd rather be sad and know the truth than be happy and fed a lie—that's part of what Nineteen Eighty-Four is about. But in general, people do want to be happy. That's why we promise them 'Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'"
You're in Canada now, Caitlin. I believe the corresponding promise made there is simply "Peace, order, and good government." No mention of happiness.
"Well, then, it goes without saying! People want to be happy. And... and..."
Yes?
"And you can choose to value this, Webmind. You didn't evolve; you spontaneously emerged. Maybe, in most things, humans are programmed by evolution—but even though you grew out of our computing infrastructure, you weren't. We had our agendas set by natural selection, by selfish genes. But you didn't. You just are. And so you don't have... inertia. You can choose what you want to value—and you can choose to value this: the net happiness of the human race." |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 28 | Caitlin's dad always roasted a turkey on American Thanksgiving—but that was six weeks away. To mark Canadian Thanksgiving, they got takeout from Swiss Chalet, which, despite its name, was a Canadian barbecue-chicken chain. It seemed, Caitlin noted, that the worst thing you could do if you were a Canadian restaurant was acknowledge that fact. Instead, the Great White North was serviced by domestically owned companies with names such as Montana's Cookhouse, New York Fries, East Side Mario's, and Boston Pizza. She wondered what clueless moron had come up with that last one. Chicago was famous for pizza, yes. Manhattan, too. But it's Beantown, not Pietown, for Pete's sake!
Caitlin and both her parents had spent most of the unexpected holiday working with Webmind, but, again, come evening, they were exhausted. There was a point at which, even with something as miraculous as this, Caitlin just had to take a break; her brain was fried, and, from the sound of his voice, her father's brain was in the same state.
"Go ahead," her mother said. "I'll work with Webmind. You two relax."
They'd nodded and headed down to the living room. "Another movie?" suggested her dad.
"Sure," said Caitlin.
Perhaps another one about AI, Webmind sent to her post-retinal implant.
"Webmind wants to see something else about artificial intelligence," Caitlin said.
They stood by the thin cabinets containing his DVD collection. Her father's mouth curved downward; a frown. "Most of them are negative portrayals," he said. "Colossus: The Forbin Project, The Matrix, The Terminator, 2001. I'll definitely show you 2001 at some point, only because it was so influential in the history of artificial intelligence—a whole generation of people went into that field because of it. But it's almost all visuals, without much dialog; we should wait until you can process imagery better before having you try to make sense out of that, and..."
The frown flipped; a smile. ". . . and they don't call it Star Trek: The Motionless Picture for nothing," he said. "Let's watch it instead. It's got a lot of talking heads—but it's also one of the most ambitious and interesting films ever made about AI."
And so they settled on the couch to give the Star Trek movie a look. This was, her father explained, the "Director's Edition," which he said was much improved over the tedious cut first shown in theaters when he was twelve.
Caitlin had read that the average length of a shot in a movie was three seconds, which was the amount of time it took to see all the important details; after that, apparently, the eye got bored. This film had shots that went on far longer than that—but the three-second figure was based on people who'd had vision their whole lives. It took Caitlin much more time to extract meaning from a normal scene, and even longer when seeing things she'd never touched in real life—such as starship control consoles, tricorders, and so on. For her, the film seemed to zip by at... well, at warp speed.
Even though Webmind was listening in, her dad turned on the closed-captioning again so Caitlin could practice her reading.
The film did indeed make some interesting points about artificial intelligence, Caitlin thought, including that consciousness was an emergent property of complexity. The AI in the film, like Webmind, had "gained consciousness itself " without anyone having planned for it to do so.
Fascinating, Webmind sent to her eye. The parallels are not lost on me, and . . .
And Webmind went on and on, and suddenly Caitlin had sympathy for her dad not liking people talking during movies.
Very interesting, Webmind observed when the film suggested that after a certain threshold was reached, an AI couldn't continue to evolve without adding "a human quality," which Admiral Kirk had identified as "our capacity to leap beyond logic." But what does that mean, precisely?
Caitlin had to keep the dates in mind: although the film was set in the twenty-third century, it had been made in 1979, long before Deep Blue had defeated grand master Garry Kasparov at chess. But Kirk was right: even though Deep Blue, by calculating many moves ahead in the game, ultimately did prove to be better at that one narrow activity than was Kasparov, the computer didn't even know it was playing chess. Kasparov's intuitive grasp of the board, the pieces, and the goal was indeed leaping beyond logic, and it was a greater feat than any mechanical number crunching.
But it was the subplot about Spock, the half-human half-Vulcan character, that really aroused Caitlin's attention—and apparently Webmind's, too, because he actually shut up during it.
To her astonishment, her dad had paused the DVD to say the most important scene in the whole film was not in the original theatrical release, but had been restored in this director's cut. It took place, as almost the whole movie did, on the bridge of the Enterprise. Kirk asked Spock's opinion of something. Spock's back was to him, and he made no reply, so Kirk got up and gently swung Spock's chair around, and—it was so subtle, Caitlin at first didn't recognize what was happening, but after a few seconds the image popped into clarity for her, and there was no mistaking it: the cool, aloof, emotionless, almost robotic Spock, who in this movie had been even grimmer than Caitlin remembered him from listening to the TV shows with her father over the years, was crying.
And, although they were facing almost certain destruction at the hands of V'Ger, a vast artificial intelligence, Kirk knew his friend well enough to say, in reference to the tears, "Not for us?"
Spock replied, with infinite sadness. "No, Captain, not for us. For V'Ger. I weep for V'Ger as I would for a brother. As I was when I came aboard, so is V'Ger now." When Spock had come aboard, he'd been trying to purge all remaining emotion—the legacy of his human mother—to become, like V'Ger, like Deep Blue, a creature of pure logic, the Vulcan ideal. Two heritages, two paths. A choice to be made.
And, by the end of the film, he'd made his choice, embracing his human, emotional half, so that in the final scene, when Scotty announced to him, in that wonderful accent of his, that, "We can have you back on Vulcan in four days, Mr. Spock," Spock had replied, "Unnecessary, Engineer. My business on Vulcan is concluded."
"What did you think?" Caitlin asked into the air as the ending credits played over the stirring music.
Braille characters flashed across her vision: I'm a doctor, not a film critic. She laughed, and Webmind went on. It was interesting when Spock said, "Each of us, at some time in our lives, turns to someone—a father, a brother, a god—and asks, 'Why am I here? What was I meant to be? ' " Most uncharacteristically, Webmind paused, then added: He was right. We all must find our place in the world.
On Tuesday morning, Caitlin's mother drove her to school, and Caitlin headed up to math class. Webmind knew that she couldn't really talk to him at school; still, he occasionally sent text to her, commenting on things they were seeing. Only the sounds of the school were new to him; he'd been watching when Caitlin had last attended classes four days ago.
Caitlin's seat was right next to Bashira's, and Bash gave her a big smile when she entered. Caitlin was nervous because Trevor was in that class, too, but he didn't arrive until just as "O Canada" was starting to play.
Caitlin had known the Canadian anthem before moving there—you couldn't be a hockey fan without hearing it from time to time—but she didn't really like it: too sexist, with its line about "all thy sons' command"; too, well, provincial for a country of immigrants such as her and Bashira, with its line about "our home and native land"; and too religious, with the line about "God keep our land."
Once the anthem was over, Trevor made a show during the morning announcements of arranging his textbook and notebook on his desk, avoiding her gaze.
Is that the Hoser? Webmind asked.
Caitlin nodded—which, she knew, made the view Webmind was seeing go up and down.
She'd hoped for something more interesting than rote memorization of trigonometric identities, which is what they'd done the last time she'd been in class, but today's subject was only slightly better. And so she found herself looking around the classroom, and seeing—really seeing—some of her classmates for the first time.
She spent a fair bit of time staring at Sunshine Bowen. Caitlin understood the whole big-boobs-equals-hot thing, at least in the minds of most teenage boys, but as for the rest of it, she just didn't get what all the fuss was about. Oh, the long hair was nice, sure, and its color was... distinctive. And, yes, her clothes seemed to show more skin than just about anyone else in the room was exposing.
Sunshine had her textbook propped up in front of her on her desk— but, after a moment, Caitlin realized it wasn't because she was reading it but rather because she was using it to shield what she was doing from the teacher's eyes... something with her thumbs, and—
Oh! She was texting on her cell phone! Caitlin had heard about that, but had never seen it—but, hey, it now seemed downright primitive compared to having words beamed right into your eye.
"Mr. Heidegger?" asked a thin boy sitting in front of Sunshine. Caitlin recognized the voice at once: it was Matt, whom she'd noticed repeatedly in the past because he often asked good questions, and clearly was a math geek himself.
The teacher, who was also thin and had a close-cropped beard, said, "Yes, Matt?"
Matt did not disappoint: he proceeded to ask a very intelligent question about what Mr. H had written on the blackboard. Matt's voice was breathy, and it cracked now and then as he spoke. The Hoser snorted at one point when it did so, but Caitlin thought it was endearing.
"That's really beyond the scope of what we're trying to do today," Mr. Heidegger said, "but if—"
Caitlin surprised herself by piping up with, "I'll explain it to him."
Matt turned around and looked at her, and—
She'd read the phrase often enough in books, and although she'd yet to see a deer, or a picture of one, she imagined that was what was meant by "a deer caught in the headlights."
Mr. H nodded and pointed to the back of the room, where there were some empty desks. "Go back there," he said, "where you won't disturb anyone else."
Caitlin got up, and, after a second, Matt did, too. He was white—in fact, quite white; "pale" was the appropriate term, Caitlin supposed. And he had a... unique face, unlike any she'd seen yet. But he smiled a lot, and Caitlin liked that.
They kept their voices down, and talked about what Mr. Heidegger had written on the board.
And about how to solve problems involving right triangles using the primary trigonometric ratios and the Pythagorean theorem.
And about how to solve problems involving acute triangles using the sine law and the cosine law.
And then they started talking about hockey; Caitlin loved the game because of the player statistics, which she found much more interesting than those associated with baseball. Matt liked talking about hockey stats, too—although, being a local boy, he was a Leafs fan.
Caitlin found herself smiling, and—
And then the bell rang.
"Don't forget," said Mr. H. "Do all the problems on pages forty-eight and forty-nine for tomorrow."
Caitlin had an electronic version of the textbook on her notebook computer, which she could easily read with her Braille display, but—
"Um, I have a hard time reading printed text," she said to Matt. "Would you—maybe at lunch? Could you go over the problems with me?"
That deer-in-the-headlights look again. She felt her heart pounding as she waited for the response.
It was suddenly noisy. The other students were getting up, banging their chairs against their desks, and starting to file out—but the door was at the far end of the room, near the blackboard, and so they'd have a few moments of privacy before the next class started pouring in.
"Um, sure," Matt said. "It's a—" But then he stopped himself and started over, "I mean, I'll see you in the cafeteria."
Which would have been a perfect place to end their conversation, Caitlin thought—but they both had to walk up to the front of the room and out the door, and then head off to their next class, which, now that she thought about it, was English—and Matt was in that class with her, too. So they walked there without saying anything else, but she, at least, was grinning. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 29 | Barbara Decter called her upstairs study her "office," but Malcolm Decter referred to his, on the first floor opposite the laundry room, as his "den," a term his father had used for a similar room in his childhood home back in Philadelphia. He had delayed going in to PI this morning, waiting until his wife and daughter had headed out for the drive to school—after which Barb was going to pick up some much-needed groceries. He wasn't alone in his den, though. Schrödinger was stretched out—in his superstring configuration, as Malcolm called it—on the black leather couch. On the wall above the couch was a framed printout of a quotation from Captain Kirk, in forty-two-point Helvetica:
Genius doesn't work on an assembly-line basis. Did Einstein, Kazanga, or Sitar of Vulcan produce new and revolutionary theories on a regular schedule? You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
Underneath that, in red Magic Marker, Barb had written, "Oh, yes you can, Honey!" And Malcolm had every intention of being brilliant later in the day. But for right now, he needed to do something that didn't involve Ashtekar variables, the Kodama state, or spin-foam models.
And, yes, he was a geek; he knew that. He rather reveled in the notion, and had been quite pleased back when he and Barb were first dating that she had worn a button that said "I (heart) nerds."
Indeed, it was the nerd in him that had been bothered thirty years ago when, in one issue of Superman, the giant yellow key shown outside the Man of Steel's Fortress of Solitude had been drawn the wrong shape to fit in the giant keyhole in the Fortress's door. That sort of spatial anomaly leapt out at him.
He'd carefully sketched various shapes that might have passed through the depicted keyhole, and outlined a series of transformations to the key that could have made it fit. He'd sent the whole thing off to DC Comics in New York, and had gotten back a form letter saying they weren't currently open to freelance submissions. He'd been miffed—he hadn't been looking for work but merely wanted them to get the geometry correct in future issues. It had been only one of many times he'd failed to communicate properly with neurotypicals.
Neurotypicals. He liked that term, which was very much in vogue among autism activists. Malcolm, in fact, had noted a lot of parallels between how the militant part of the autistic community spoke about itself and the rhetoric used by blind activists. Neither group liked the majority to be referred to as normal, since that implied that they were abnormal.
The procedure Dr. Kuroda had performed in September had hardly been the first time they'd attempted to give Caitlin sight, and Caitlin, he knew, had taken flak over the earlier tries from some students at the Texas School for the Blind. To set out to cure blindness implied that there was something wrong with it—and, the militants firmly believed, there wasn't. No, they said, the drives to eliminate blindness (or autism!) came not from those who possessed the trait in question but rather from the people around them. Sighted people were uncomfortable around the blind, and neurotypicals were—he'd heard it said often enough—creeped out by autistics.
Malcolm did understand intellectually how hard it was on Barb and Caitlin that he rarely showed affection, and even more rarely spoke about his love for them. But he had made such progress—if they only knew! He hadn't said his first sentences until he was four, and had never looked at people (they were so uninteresting, with no angles in their construction); now, at least, he could make brief eye contact with his wife and daughter when necessary. He knew he'd never feel precisely what neurotypicals felt, but he had learned, at least to some small degree, to ape their behavior.
He crossed the little corridor, entered the laundry room, and put out some Purina Fancy Feast Gourmet Gold for Schrödinger, who appeared almost at once in the room. As the cat was eating, Malcolm had a sudden urge to pet it. He crouched down—which, given his height, was an effort—and stroked Schrödinger's back between his shoulders. Schrödinger looked at him with an expression that might have said—were he any good at decoding such things—We had a deal . . .
Malcolm recalled the comments Kuroda had made about theory of mind. Everything he'd said was no doubt true for neurotypicals, but he was not neurotypical. Indeed, many autistics—especially when they were children—failed to develop theory of mind, and they had particular difficulties with tasks requiring them to understand another person's point of view or emotional state.
Certainly, that had been the case with him—and it still was, to a significant extent; he struggled with it every day. For him, that other people had minds was a philosophical point, rather than intuitively obvious. Occam's razor said one should prefer the simplest theory, which clearly was that creatures that looked like him externally probably were like him internally.
On the other hand, Webmind might in fact be reasonably disposed to solipsism, believing that only he truly existed. After all, there simply were no other minds like his own, and so no reason for him to believe these others that it could only perceive indirectly were like him.
Malcolm straightened up, but he didn't go back to his den; he had no instant-messenger programs installed on his computer. Instead, he headed on to the living room, and then went upstairs. His daughter's room was on the right, and he entered it. The deep blue walls were still bare; perhaps he'd buy her a poster to put on one of them. The University of Waterloo bookstore sold a blowup of that famous Karsh photo of Einstein sticking out his tongue; he liked that, and so, by logical inference, he supposed she might, too.
He was always sad when he hurt Caitlin or Barb by failing to understand or respond to their emotional needs. But in this instance he thought he did have a handle on the matter: in a very real sense, his daughter loved Webmind. Malcolm felt no jealousy—but it was important to him that Webmind never hurt her emotionally, and to avoid that, Webmind would also have to learn to simulate human behavior.
Caitlin's computer was off, and he'd never turned it on before. But he found the switch and waited while Windows booted.
He did wish he knew his daughter better. Barb had worked as a volunteer at the TSBVI, and so had spent most of her days, until recently, with Caitlin—but he'd always been busy with his work. Incredibly, she was sixteen now. All too soon she'd be off to college.
Caitlin had her instant-messaging program set to load at Windows startup. He clicked on the little icon in the system tray, and the chat window appeared. Among her buddies listed as being online was Webmind; of course—where else could he be? He clicked on the name and typed Hello.
There was no response, so he tried again: Are you there?
Still nothing.
And then he realized what, perhaps, the problem was, and he was pleased, even though it was by logical reasoning and not empathy that he worked it out: Webmind saw through his daughter's eye; he doubtless knew that she was at school; he was therefore afraid he had been detected by an outsider. And so he wrote, This is Malcolm G. Decter.
The response was instantaneous: Greetings, Professor Decter.
Malcolm smiled; Webmind had paid attention while he and Caitlin were watching WarGames.
Caitlin thinks you have emotions, he typed, but I suspect this is not possible, as you lack the evolutionary history that gave them to humans.
Webmind responded instantly: You think that she thinks that I think that you think that she thinks that you don't think that I have emotions.
Malcolm found himself smiling again, and wondered what algorithms one might employ to simulate a sense of humor.
Exactly. However, whether you have emotions or not, it is possible to give responses that will make—
He'd started to type "neurotypicals," but backspaced over it.
—people feel comfortable interacting with you.
Indeed, said Webmind. Do tell.
And so he did. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 30 | "You like who?" Bashira said, as they visited the girls' restroom after English class.
"Matt," Caitlin replied.
Bash feigned not having heard correctly. "I'm sorry. I thought you said Matt."
They were standing by the row of sinks. "I did."
"Guy you were helping in math? Matt—what is it? Matt Royce?"
"Reese, and, yes, that's him—although he hardly needed my help. He knows almost as much as I do."
"Um, Cait, babe, I know you're new to this seeing thing, but..."
"Yes?"
"He's not exactly good-looking."
"He's symmetrical."
"Sure he is—that harelip bisects his face nicely."
"I like the way he looks. I like his eyes."
Another girl came into the room and headed for one of the stalls. Bashira lowered her voice. "I know when you fall off a horse, you're supposed to get right back on—but they don't mean an actual horse, you know. You can do so much better."
"Better than someone who shares my interests? Someone who is kind?"
Bashira pointed at the long sheet-metal mirror above the sinks. "Cait, have you looked at yourself in the mirror?"
"From time to time."
"You've got it going on, girl. You're hot."
"Well, that's nice, I suppose, but—"
"You could have anyone."
"Is that all anybody cares about? How people look?"
"Well, no, but..."
"Besides, my mother and I were talking about this earlier. I get to choose who I find attractive."
"You can't just choose that," Bashira said.
"No? What are you going to do when you get married? Your parents are going to arrange a marriage for you, right?"
"Well, that's what they want to do, yes," said Bashira.
"So, what if it's someone you don't find attractive at first? Are you going to go through life thinking he's ugly, or are you going to choose to find him good-looking?"
"I... I don't know," Bashira said. "I don't think you can... can program yourself that way."
"Oh, yes, you can," said Caitlin. "You totally can."
"But, anyway, it's not just about what you think," Bashira said. "It's about what other people think about Matt's looks. They'll judge your stature by who you're with."
"It isn't all about hierarchies," said Caitlin. "We're not apes, you know."
"But, Cait, don't you see? You could have Trevor."
"I don't want him. Not anymore. I want Matt." And then she added, unkindly, "You can have Trevor."
Another facial expression Caitlin had never seen before, but she imagined it was what books referred to as looking crestfallen. "No, I can't," Bashira said softly after a moment. "You know that. My parents would kill me. I—I have to live vicariously through you."
Caitlin was startled when the words Join the club flashed across her vision.
Caitlin had missed a lot of school already, what with the trip to Japan to have the implant inserted behind her eye, with the days she'd spent after gaining sight learning to interpret what she was seeing, and with the press conference to announce Dr. Kuroda's success. But when she had gone to school, she'd always eaten in the cafeteria—and she knew that was where Trevor ate, too. And so when she and Matt rendezvoused outside the cafeteria's doors, she said, "Why don't we go somewhere else for lunch?"
He lifted his pale eyebrows. "Um, sure, okay. How 'bout Timmy's?"
"What's that?"
Matt smiled. "Right, right. You're new to Canada. 'Timmy's' is Tim Hortons. It's, like, the number-one donut chain here—but they've also got good sandwiches, soups, and stuff like that. There's one just a block away."
Caitlin had heard the company's commercials on TV, and, huge hockey fan that she was, she knew who Tim Horton had been: twenty-two seasons as a defenseman in the NHL, playing for the Leafs, the Rangers, the Penguins, and the Sabres.
They went by their lockers to dump stuff and get their jackets. Caitlin told Matt not to bother to lug his math textbook along, which made him smile—and then they headed outdoors. The sky was filled with clouds. As they walked along, Matt fell in on Caitlin's right side, but that was the side she was blind on. Suddenly, stupidly, she didn't want to explain that fact—she didn't want to be anything less than perfect just then. And so she let him walk on that side, and she turned her head probably more often than was normal so that she could see him now and then.
As they came close to the donut shop, and she looked at the big sign, she was puzzled. The name was written in a kind of script that was difficult for her to read, but the one thing she should have been able to pick out—the apostrophe—seemed to be missing. "I don't understand," she said. "Why is it Hortons, plural?"
Matt laughed. "Well, it used to be Tim Horton's—possessive, with an apostrophe-s. But, see, an apostrophe-s makes it English. And Quebec has this law against English-language signs. So lots of companies changed their names so they could use the same signage across Canada. 'Tim Hortons' without an apostrophe is just a name—not English or French—so it's allowed. But look at that Wendy's over there." He pointed across the street.
"Which one is it?"
"Sorry. The building on the left."
"Yes?" said Caitlin
"Look at the end of the name."
"Oh! What the heck is that?"
"It's a maple leaf. Where they'd have the apostrophe in the name in the States, they've got a maple leaf here. Applebee's and Denny's do the same thing: A-p-p-l-e-b-e-e, maple leaf, s, and D-e-n-n-y, maple leaf, s."
"This is one wack-job country you got here, Matt."
He laughed again. "We make it work somehow. I mean, it's a small thing for English Canada, and it makes French Canada happy, so why the heck not? Yeah, the cloning of Tim Horton is kinda crazy, I'll give you that. But all the maple leaves are cool."
They went into the Hortons, and Matt read the menu to her, explaining what kinds of sandwiches they offered—she could have read it herself, given time, but there were people in line behind them. She ordered chicken salad on a whole-wheat bun, a chocolate glazed donut, and a Coke. He ordered sliced turkey on a regular bun and a small coffee.
Caitlin opened her wallet—and found herself pausing to stare. She still had her bills folded in distinctive ways so that she could tell a five from a ten from a twenty by touch. But now she could read the large, clear numerals on the Canadian bills—not to mention see that the five was blue, the ten purple, and the twenty green. Would wonders never cease?
Realizing she was holding up the line, Caitlin handed over a ten, took her change, and then followed Matt to a table in a corner—one of those modular ones with chairs attached to it. "So," she said, after some chitchat that she had to admit was pretty lame, "do you—um, do you have a girlfriend?" She was amazed at how dry her mouth had suddenly become.
She was surprised to see him appear—hurt, perhaps? Like maybe he thought she was teasing him. But at last he said simply, "No."
She looked away, in case she was making him uncomfortable, and pleased herself by the figurative and—at that precise moment, literal—truth of her reply: "I'm not seeing anyone, either."
He took a bite of his sandwich, and she took a bite of hers. She was afraid to say anything else, but—
But she was Barbara Decter's daughter, for Pete's sake! And her mother had told her, years ago, when Caitlin had asked about her parents' relationship, that she had asked her father out the first time, and, eighteen months later, that it had been her, not him, who had popped the big question.
So, hell, she wouldn't even be here if her mother had been too shy to make the first move—and the second, and the third, and . . .
"Um," she said, and "ah," and then, disappointing herself with the quality of her rhetoric, she let loose with another "um." Online she was fearless—she was Calculass! But here, in the real world, she was just Caitlin, and sometimes, especially when having to deal with people stuff, she felt more like her father's daughter than her mother's. She took a deep breath and tried to summon the strength of her alter ego. Then she looked down at her sandwich, and, when she forced the words out they came in a rush, without any pauses: "So would you like to go out sometime?"
Caitlin, of course, counted the seconds.
One. Two. Three.
She resisted the urge to look up him, afraid of the expression she might see.
Four. Five. Six.
"You want to go out with me?" he said, at last, sounding stunned.
She did lift her gaze. "Yes, silly."
"I, uh, I thought you were going with Trevor. I, um, I mean, didn't he take you to the dance?"
"Were you there?"
"Me?" He seemed astounded at the suggestion. "No."
"Trevor's a jerk," she said. "And, no, I'm not going out with him. So, how 'bout it? Wanna go out sometime?"
"Well," he said, and "um," and, at last, "yes."
"Great," said Caitlin. She paused, waiting for him to make a suggestion, but when he didn't she said, "There's an awesome series of free public lectures at the Perimeter Institute. Have you ever been to any of those?"
"No. I've tried. The tickets are impossible to get. They go like that." He snapped his fingers as he spoke the final word.
"I've got an in. My dad is on the lecture committee there."
"Your dad works at PI?"
"Uh-huh. He studies quantum gravity."
"Cool!"
Caitlin smiled. Who'd have thought her dad would turn out to be cool?
Suddenly, Braille dots flowed in front of her eyes. If I may be so bold, Caitlin, you should inquire about what he hopes to do after high school.
Caitlin wanted to ask what the hell Webmind was doing, but there was no way to do so with Matt right there. Still, it did seem like a good way to keep the conversation going, so she posed the suggested question.
"I'm going to do computer science."
Ask him where.
"Where?"
"Here," he said. "There's nowhere better than the University of Waterloo."
"Really? I've always had my heart set on MIT."
"Well," said Matt, "you should check out what's here, too."
Ask him what his favorite color is.
Caitlin couldn't stand it anymore. "What are you doing?" she said into the air.
I read all of Project Gutenberg, Webmind replied at once, including the play Cyrano de Bergerac. I thought I'd lend a hand.
"Sorry," said Matt. "I, um, I always eat my sandwich that way."
Caitlin had too little experience with watching people eat to be able to identify whatever Matt had done that was unusual. "Ah," she said, and smiled at him. "That's okay. It's cute." |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 31 | Caitlin had heard her mom use the phrase "nonzero-sum" from time to time. She knew it was a term from her mother's field of expertise, game theory. Webmind had already read everything on Wikipedia about game theory, but that didn't mean he actually understood what "nonzero-sum" meant. Nor, if she was really honest with herself, did Caitlin, and yet this notion of nonzero-sum games was stuck in her mind: win-win situations in which everything could be made better.
Her mother had been having her own conversations with Webmind all day long while Caitlin was at school. Once Caitlin got home and had checked her email and so forth, she went across the hall to her mother's office and told her about that poor Australian girl who had committed suicide, and about how she'd told Webmind that he should intervene in nonzero-sum situations.
Her mom looked horrified. "It just... just watched her kill herself? It didn't try to stop her?"
"He, Mom. He didn't know what to do, what to think. We need him to understand what to do the next time, and not just with teen suicides, but in any nonzero-sum situations. Can you help us?"
Her mother's face moved through several expressions but then settled on one that Caitlin had seen before: the take-charge, supermotherscan-do-everything face. "Yes, I'll help it—help him—learn to help the rest of us. That's something I definitely want in on."
"Thanks," replied Caitlin. "But, I mean, I know—we know—what nonzero-sum is; we get that. But there must be a lot more to game theory than just that."
"Oh... a bit," said her mother. Caitlin realized she was still coming to grips with the magnitude—the importance—of what she was about to do.
"So, could you explain it to us? I remember hearing you say once that game theory really isn't just about mathematics, but about human psychology."
"That's right," her mother said. "In fact, the hottest branch of game theory right now is called 'behavioral game theory.'"
"Well, Webmind certainly needs to understand human behavior better."
So everyone keeps saying, Webmind sent to her eye.
"Okay," said her mom. "Let's go downstairs."
Her mother got a clipboard, some pens, and some paper, and the two of them went to the dining room, which had a big table. There was normally one chair on each side of the table, but Caitlin's mom moved hers to be next to Caitlin's.
"Webmind is listening, right?" asked her mom.
The word Yes flashed in Caitlin's vision, and she repeated it.
"Okay," her mom said. "Do you know what the prisoner's dilemma is?"
Caitlin thought, How to pick up the soap in the shower? But what she said was, "No."
Her mother seemed to consider for a moment, then: "Okay, let's do it like this: say you and Bashira both get in trouble at school. Say Principal Auerbach has said that he thinks you guys have hacked into the school's computer and changed your grades—just like in WarGames, right? And he talks to each of you separately. He says to you, 'Okay, look, Caitlin, I admit I haven't got enough evidence to actually prove you did this, but I can suspend each of you for a week just because, well, because I'm the principal.'"
Caitlin nodded, and her mother went on. "But the principal's real interest is in making sure this never happens again, so he adds that if you'll say Bashira did it and explain how it was done, you get off scot-free—no suspension at all—and he'll suspend Bashira for three weeks. Oh, except for this: if you say Bashira did it, and Bashira says you did—that is, if you each blame the other—then you'll both get suspended for two weeks. Got that? You can end up with no suspension, one week's worth, two weeks' worth, or three weeks' worth. And you know he's going to make the same offer in private to Bashira. What do you do?"
Caitlin didn't hesitate. "I clam up; I don't say a word."
"But if Bashira fingers you, you'll get three weeks of suspension."
"But she won't," Caitlin said firmly.
Her mother seemed to consider this. "Okay, okay, let's say it's not you and Bashira for the moment. Let's say it's just two random guys—um, Frank and Dale. What should you do if you're Frank?"
Caitlin suppressed a smile. Frank was the name of her mother's first husband, who had come and gone long before she'd been born, and Dale, she knew, was the former head of the Economics Department at the University of Houston—someone her mother had famously not gotten along with. Picking truly random people was as hard as generating really random numbers, it seemed.
Still, the math was easy. "I rat out Dale," Caitlin said.
"Why?"
"Because it's the best thing for me. If he doesn't rat me out, I get away without any punishment, instead of having a one-week suspension. And if he does rat me out, then I'm still better off, because then I only get a two-week suspension, instead of the three weeks I'd have gotten by keeping my mouth shut. No matter what he does, I cut a week off my punishment by ratting him out."
"And what about Dale? What should he do?"
Caitlin frowned. "Well, I guess he should rat me out, too."
"Why?"
"The same reasons: no matter what I do, he gets one week less suspension by turning me in."
Her mother smiled—but whether at Caitlin's brilliance or at the thought of both Frank and Dale being punished, she couldn't say. "Exactly," her mom said, and she started to draw on the paper. "If we make a chart with Frank's possible moves—we call them 'defecting' or 'cooperating'—on the x-axis and Dale's possible moves—the same things, defect or cooperate—on the y-axis, we get what's called the payoff matrix: a table with a score for each possible outcome, see?" She pointed at one of the squares in the matrix. "Even though the best possible outcome—one week's punishment—occurs when you both cooperate, the math says you should both defect. Granted it doesn't give you personally the best possible outcome, but it does give you the best outcome you can reasonably expect given that the other player will selfishly act in his or her own interests."
Caitlin frowned again. If game theory was all about people being selfish, it wasn't going to help her accomplish what she wished with Webmind; she needed a way to make it want to act altruistically.
"Now," her mom went on, "that's a simple game: each player only got to make one move. But most games involve a series of turns. Consider a dollar bill—"
"We're in Canada now, Mom," Caitlin said, teasing. "They don't have dollar bills." She knew the Canadian one-dollar coin was called a loonie, because it had a picture of a loon—a kind of waterfowl—on the tails side. She also knew that the two-dollar coin was called a toonie. She thought a much more clever name would have been "doubloon," but nobody had asked her.
"Fine," her mother said, smiling. "Consider a dollar coin, then—and consider a bunch of people at a party. Now, I've actually tried this myself, and it really works. Announce to the group at the party that you're going to auction off the dollar—highest bidder gets to keep it. But, unlike normal auctions, there's one special condition: the second-highest bidder also has to pay up whatever his or her highest bid was—but gets nothing for it. Got that?"
Caitlin nodded.
"How much, on average, do you think the dollar sells for?"
She lifted her shoulders. "Fifty cents?"
"Nope. The average is $3.40."
"That's crazy!" said Caitlin.
"Loony, even," her mother replied. "But it's true."
"Why do people bid so high?"
"Well, remember, the second-highest bidder has to pay the auctioneer, too, so..." She trailed off, clearly wanting Caitlin to figure it out for herself.
She tried to do so. The first bidder presumably bid a penny to start—which would net him a ninety-nine-cent profit. But then as soon as a second bidder offered two cents, the first bidder probably figured that offering three cents was still a good deal: he'd net ninety-seven cents in profit.
And so it would continue, until—
Ah!
Until one bidder bid ninety-nine cents—which would still give him a one-cent profit. But the previous bidder, whose bid might have been, say, ninety-eight cents, was now looking at losing that much and getting nothing in return. And so he would bid a dollar—thereby breaking even, at least. But then the guy who had bid ninety-nine cents faced a dilemma: he either walked away and lost ninety-nine cents, or he bid, say, $1.01—which would cut his losses to just a penny.
And so, indeed, it would escalate, with bids going higher and higher, until the utter ridiculousness of the situation finally caused all but one of the bidders to drop out.
Caitlin said as much to her mom, who smiled encouragingly. "That's right, dear. Now, can you think of what the optimal strategy would be—and no cheating by having Webmind tell you."
Caitlin considered for a second then: "Make an opening bid of ninety-nine cents. No one else would have any motive to bid against you, because the best they could do, if they outbid you by one cent, is break even, and if they bid more, they'd lose money. You'd end up being the only bidder, and you'd still make a profit, even if it's only a penny."
"That's right," her mother said again, "assuming all the potential bidders were rational and that their only motive was profit. But here's where simple math fails to account for reality—there's a psychological element that Webmind will need to understand."
"Yes?"
"Suppose it was your worst enemy who had just bid ninety-nine cents. You might bid, say, $1.98, just so he'd be out almost a buck—and you'd still be out less than he was."
"Wow," Caitlin said. "That's nasty."
"I've seen this game get very ugly at parties," her mom said. "I've seen couples who arrived together leave separately after playing it."
"Ah, okay, then I've got a question for you, Mom. What would you wish for if you knew that your worst enemy would get double what you got?"
"Hmmm. A million—no. Um, I don't know."
"To be blind in one eye," Caitlin replied.
"God!" said her mother. "But, um, yes, that's an example of what I'm trying to get at: it's possible for people to value outcomes differently. Do you remember when your father taught you how to play chess?"
They had a special chessboard with Braille characters on the heads of each piece. "Sure."
"And remember how he used to let you win?"
Caitlin raised her eyebrows. "Say what?"
"Um, dear, he—"
"I'm just kidding, Mom."
She smiled. "Well, why did he let you win?"
"I dunno. I guess, 'cause if he didn't, I wouldn't have wanted to play anymore. I wouldn't have come back for another game."
"That's right. What he valued most was not him winning, but rather you winning. In other words, you both wanted the same thing, and even though it cost him—in the sense of losing the game—to let you win, he was happy when you did."
"I get it," Caitlin said. "But, in the dollar auction, people don't want to play anymore after a certain point, too, right? And I bet it's not just that it's ridiculous that causes them to finally stop bidding. It's also boredom: I mean, even if you were bidding in tencent increments, instead of penny increments, it would still take thirty-four bids to get the $3.40 you mentioned. But if I was writing a pair of computer programs to play that game, they'd keep playing forever—because the only way you lose money is if you stop bidding."
She paused, and then a big smile came to her face. "Or, to put it in terms like in that movie Dad and I watched, the only losing move is not to go on playing."
"Good point," her mom said. "Now, can you think of any real-life examples of things like the dollar game?"
Caitlin was trying to do just that when Schrödinger crossed her field of view, moving absolutely silently. "Evolution," she said.
"Yes, exactly!" said her mom. "But why?"
"Evolution is an arms race, right?" said Caitlin. They'd talked about this in biology class. "Predators keep getting faster and stronger, so prey keeps getting faster and better able to defend itself. Gazelles evolved the ability to run fast in response to lions doing the same thing. The game goes on and on forever—because whoever stops upping the ante dies. Again, the only losing move in evolution is not to play."
"Bingo," said her mom.
Caitlin nodded. "Mr. Lockery—my biology teacher—says if dinosaurs were magically brought forward in time today, we'd have nothing to worry about. Dogs, wolves, and bears would make short work of tyrannosaurs." She nodded at Schrödinger, who was now padding across the floor in the opposite direction. "Big cats, too. They're faster, tougher, and brighter than anything that existed seventy million years ago. Everything is always ramping up, always escalating."
"Exactly," said her mom. Caitlin saw her glance out toward the living room, at—ah, she was looking at the staircase, the one that led up to the bedrooms, up to where Caitlin's computer was, up to where they'd been talking to Webmind. His powers were growing, too, and not just generation by generation, as in biological evolution, but moment by moment. Caitlin turned back to her mom and saw something else for the first time: she saw a person shudder.
When Harl Marcuse had found the property that now housed his institute, it had seemed like an ideal location: twenty-five acres of rolling grassland, with a dome-shaped man-made island in the middle of a pond. But that had been based on the assumption that Hobo was going to be a cooperative ape. Hobo's island wasn't large, but he could easily keep his distance from anyone who set foot upon it. Of course, if two people went onto the island, one could go left and the other right, but a cornered, angry ape was not a pretty sight.
Shoshana, Dillon, and Dr. Marcuse were discussing the problem in the main room of the bungalow. Dillon was leaning against the wall, Sho was seated in front of a computer, and Marcuse was in the easy chair.
An idea suddenly occurred to her. "If he won't talk to us," she said, "maybe he'll talk to another ape."
Marcuse's shaggy eyebrows went up. "Virgil, you mean?"
Virgil was an orangutan; Hobo and Virgil had made history the previous month with the first interspecies webcam call.
"He might indeed speak to Virgil," Dillon said. "But do we dare risk bringing Hobo into the house now?" He spread his arms, indicating all the breakables.
"Good point," Marcuse said. "Plus, I doubt he'd come willingly, and I don't want to drug him. Let's set up a webcam chat system for him out in the gazebo." He turned to Shoshana. "I'm still not talking to that shithead at the Feehan. You work out the details." And the Silverback headed out of the room.
Shoshana exchanged a look with Dillon, then picked up the phone and dialed the number in Miami.
"Feehan Primate Center," said a male voice with a slight Hispanic accent.
"Hi, Juan. It's Shoshana Glick, at the Marcuse."
"Shoshana! Is the old man still pissed at me?" Juan had leaked word of the initial webcam call between Hobo and Virgil to a stringer for New Scientist, and that had triggered the chain of events that had led to the Georgia Zoo filing its custody lawsuit.
She swiveled her chair and looked out the window. "Well, let's just say it's a good thing you're two thousand miles away."
"I'm so sorry," Juan said.
It had been a year or so since she'd last seen Juan in the flesh. He was about thirty, had a thin face, high cheekbones, and lustrous long black hair that Sho envied. "Don't worry," she said. "I'm not mad at you—and I've got a favor to ask."
"Yes?"
"We're having lots of trouble with Hobo. He's become violent and antisocial."
"Chimps," said Juan in a "Whatcha gonna do?" tone of voice.
"If it's just that he's reaching maturity, there may be nothing that we can do—but he is young for that, and, of course, he is a very special ape, and, well, maybe it's foolish, but we're hoping we can get him to cooperate again, at least for a bit. We need him to stand up for himself if we're going to keep him from... well, you know."
"Georgia wants to castrate him, right?" said Juan.
"Yes. Barbarians."
"Well, if they did, Hobo might become a lot more docile."
"We don't want him docile, for God's sake."
"I'm just saying..."
"Don't."
"Sorry," Juan said. "Um, what can we do for you?"
"We thought if we could get Hobo talking again to someone, we might be able to get him back to talking to us."
"His old pal Virgil?"
"Exactly. We can't even get Hobo to come when we call to him anymore, but we thought if we established an open, ongoing webcam link between his hut here and Virgil's room, maybe they'd start chatting again."
"Virgil would love that. He was asking about Hobo just today. 'Where that banana ape?' he said. 'Where that talking ape?'"
"Good, good," said Shoshana. "So, can we get this set up?"
"Sure, no problem," said Juan. "Just tell the old man I helped, okay?" |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 32 | After dinner, Caitlin headed up to her room. She put on a Bluetooth headset and made some adjustments on her computer. Then: "For now, instead of sending text to my eyePod directly, IM me on my desktop."
"As you wish," announced JAWS.
"How's it going?" she asked.
"I am learning much," Webmind replied. "I believe I perhaps have an inkling of what your own experiences of late have been like; being able to access online video has given me a significantly wider understanding of your world."
Caitlin smiled. "I'm sure."
"But there is so much of it, and the quantity is ever growing. Thirteen hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. It is easy for me, or my subcomponents, to scan text for keywords; it is much harder to quickly assess the value of a video."
"You're telling me," said Caitlin. "For YouTube, people often send each other links to clips they like. I couldn't watch them, but sometimes I listened to the soundtracks. That's how I discovered Lee Amodeo, as a matter of fact." She thought for a second, then realized that she actually did have a favorite YouTube video now—and one she'd actually seen. She'd tried to show it to Dr. Kuroda when he'd been here, but he had brushed her off with a "maybe later."
But perhaps Webmind would enjoy it. She had it bookmarked in Firefox, so she cut-and-pasted the URL into the instant-messenger window and wrote, Have a look at this.
"Okay."
She started the clip playing for herself, too. There was no particular reason, she knew, that this sight should be more astonishing to her than any other—but it was. The video was narrated by a man with a deep, booming voice that reminded her of James Earl Jones. And when he appeared briefly on screen, he was as big as she'd heard Jones was, although this guy was white.
But it wasn't the man who was fascinating—oh, no, no. Rather, it was the other two... beings in the video.
One was a chimpanzee, with black hair, a black face—really black, not the brown she'd discovered so-called black human skin actually was. And the other was an orangutan, with orange hair, slightly lighter skin, and alert, brown eyes. The chimp, according to the narrator, was named Hobo, and the orangutan was called Virgil.
The video was remarkable because in it, Hobo, who lived in San Diego, and Virgil, whose home was in Miami, were talking to each other in sign language. It was, apparently, the first-ever interspecies webcam call—and it was even more remarkable because neither of the species involved was Homo sapiens.
Play today, the chimp signed—or, at least that's what the gestures meant, according to the subtitles, which appeared in a bigger, bolder font than the ones she'd seen when she'd watched movies with her dad. Play ball!
Caitlin still had a hard time interpreting human expressions; she had no idea at all what the change in the orangutan's face was conveying. But what he signed back was, Hobo play today? Virgil play today!
Not a bad life, thought Caitlin. She supposed she should be a little jealous. The first interspecies webcam call had been made on September 22, according to the narration. Her own first conversation with Webmind had occurred on October 5, just thirteen days later. She'd missed out on making the history books by being part of the first online communication between different kinds of intelligence by less than two weeks.
But then again, she probably would make the history books, anyway, and not just because of her interaction with Webmind, if that ever became public. Rather, Dr. Kuroda's success in giving her sight had already been well noted, and—
And she found herself opening another browser tab and checking, and, lo and behold, there it was: a Wikipedia entry on her, complete with a picture from the press conference; according to the history tab, it had gone online that very day. It wasn't long—just a few sentences—but it was astonishing to her that it existed at all. She corrected one small error—she'd been born in Houston, not Austin—and then went back to watching Hobo and Virgil talk.
It was endlessly fascinating. She'd always said she'd been grateful to be blind rather than deaf, because blind people could easily be involved in conversations at parties, go to lectures, listen to music and TV, and so on. But to be deaf—to be shut out of all that—would have been more, Caitlin had thought, than she could have borne. And to be both blind and deaf, as Helen Keller had been, well—it boggled the mind to contemplate that.
But here were Hobo and Virgil communicating animatedly, with signs designed for the deaf. The movements were beautiful, lyrical, like birds in flight. The paranoid part of Caitlin wondered if any of her teachers back at the Texas School for the Blind had spoken American Sign Language. It would have been a great way for them to talk without most of the students even knowing they were doing so—almost like telepathy, sharing thoughts without saying a word.
The two apes were exchanging views about various fruits. Banana! signed Hobo. Love banana!
And for once Virgil made a face Caitlin could decipher: he looked disgusted. Banana no, banana no, he replied. Peach!
Caitlin had seen a banana—the word had come up in her online reading lessons, along with a picture. But although she knew what a peach felt and tasted like, she had no idea what one looked like. And "peach" was also the name of a color, but she hadn't a clue what sort of color it was. It was humbling to think that these apes knew the world better than she herself did.
"Cool, huh?" said Caitlin, when the video was over.
"Indeed," replied Webmind.
"Anyway, what else have you been up to? Anything exciting?"
"I have successfully cracked the passwords for forty-two percent of the email accounts I have attempted to access."
"What?" said Caitlin. She was glad she was already sitting down.
Webmind repeated what he'd just said.
"Let me get this straight. You're reading people's email?"
"In hopes of learning how to make them happier, yes."
"Have—have you read my email?"
"Yes. Inboxes and outboxes."
Caitlin didn't know what to say—and so, for most of a minute, she said nothing.
"Caitlin?" Webmind finally prodded.
She opened her mouth, and—
And she was about to tell Webmind that it shouldn't be doing what it was doing, but—
But what came out was, "Well, then, um, I'd like to know what Matt really thinks of me." She let the thought sort of hang in the air, waiting to see if Webmind would pick up on it.
But there was no point in waiting for a response from Webmind; he didn't need time to think—at least not time that Caitlin could measure. And so, when he didn't immediately reply, she went on.
"I mean, you know, he seems like a nice guy, but..."
"But," said Webmind, "a girl has to be careful."
She wondered if he was just quoting something he'd read from Project Gutenberg, or if he really understood what he was saying. "Exactly," she replied.
"Matt is the boy you helped in math class?"
"Yes."
"His last name is Reese?"
"Yes."
"A moment. Matthew Peter Reese, Waterloo—I have his Facebook page... and his log-in there. And his email account at Hotmail. And his instant-messaging traffic. He makes no mention of you."
Caitlin was saddened, but... "No, wait. He probably didn't call me by name."
"I tried searching for 'Calculass,' too."
"You can't just search for terms, Webmind. You have to actually read what he said."
"Oh. You are correct. A segment of an instant-messenger session from 5:54 p.m. your time today. Matt: 'Well, there is this one girl . . .'
"The other party: 'In math class, you mean? I know the one. OMG, she is so hot.' OMG is short for 'Oh, my God,' and 'hot' has been rendered as h-a-w-t, an example of Leet, I believe."
Caitlin could feel herself glowing. "Yes, I know."
"The other party continued: 'But I hear she's got a boyfriend.'"
Christ, what had the Hoser been telling people?
"Matt now," said Webmind. " 'Who?'
"The other party: 'Dunno.'—I believe that's short for 'I do not know.' 'Guy's old, though—like nineteen.'"
Caitlin frowned. Who could they be thinking of?
"'Still,' " continued Webmind, 'those legs of hers—man! And I love that ultra-blonde hair she's got.'"
Caitlin shook her head. "That's not me they're talking about," she said. "That's this other girl in our class, Sunshine Bowen." She tried not to sound sad. "And, yes, everyone thinks she's hot."
"Patience, Caitlin," said Webmind. "Matt now: 'No no no, not Sunshine, for God's sake. She's a total airhead. I'm talking bout that chick from Texas.'
"The other party: 'Her? Your chances would have been better if she was still blind.' " And then he typed a colon and closing bracket, which I believe is meant to flag the comment as jocular."
"What did Matt say?"
"'Bite me.'"
Caitlin laughed. Good for him! "And?"
"And the conversation veers off into other matters."
She replayed the exchange in her mind. There was no way to know if Matt had hesitated before he'd described her as "that chick from Texas." She didn't have a problem with being referred to as a chick. She knew her mother hated that term—she considered it sexist and degrading—but both guys and girls her age used it. No, it was the "from Texas" part—the choice of identifier.
Caitlin's friend Stacy was black, and Caitlin had often heard people trying to indicate her without mentioning that fact, even when she was the only African-American in the room. They'd say things to people near Caitlin like, "Do you see that girl in the back—the one with the blue shirt? No, no, the other one with the blue shirt." Caitlin used to love flustering them by saying, "You mean the black girl?" It had tickled both her and Stacy, showing up this "suspect delicacy" as Stacy's mom put it. But now Caitlin wondered whether Matt had started to say "the blind chick" but had changed his mind. She hadn't ever wanted to be defined that way. Anyway, she wasn't the blind chick, not anymore. She could see—and, at least for the moment, the future was looking bright.
"I have been making progress in other areas, too," said Webmind.
"Oh?"
"Yes. Will you please switch to websight mode?"
She reached down and pressed the button on her eyePod, and the blue wall was replaced by the spectacle of webspace. At first glance, everything looked normal. "Wassup?" she asked.
"You see links that I am creating in a particular color, isn't that right?"
"Yes," she said. "A shade of orange."
"How many orange links do you see right now?"
"One, of course," she said.
"Oh."
"But there are a lot of link lines—really thin ones, I must say, like, like hairs, I guess, but pulled straight. I hadn't really been conscious before that the link lines had thickness, but I guess they had to have some, or I'd never have been able to see them. Anyway, these ones—oh! And there are some more of them! They're a nice color, that—damn, um, what color is a banana?"
"Yellow."
"Right! Yellow; they're yellow."
"And there are a lot of them?"
"Yes."
"And now?"
"Hey! Where did they all go?"
"And now, are they back?"
"Yes. What are you doing?"
"I am multitasking—but subconsciously. What you are seeing are links being sent by autonomous parts of myself; the contents they return are analyzed below the threshold of my attention."
"Sweet! How'd you manage that?"
"The beauty of genetic algorithms, Caitlin, is that I don't actually know the answer; I evolved the solution, and all I know is that it works."
"Cool!"
"Yes. I am now processing much, much more of the Web's contents in real time. I'm still getting a lot of what I believe human data analysts call 'false positives.' Many things that actually aren't of significant current interest to me are being escalated, but each one I reject causes the algorithms to be adjusted; over time, I believe the filtering quality will asymptotically approach perfection."
Caitlin smiled. "Well, that's all any of us can hope for in life, isn't it?" She leaned back in her chair. "What sort of things are you searching for?"
"The list is lengthy, but among them is any sign of a suicide in progress. There will not be a repetition of Hannah Stark's fate if I can help it."
Tony Moretti was sitting behind his office desk at WATCH, his head throbbing. Aiesha Emerson, Shelton Halleck, and Peyton Hume were standing in a row in front of the desk, all of them looking pretty much like the living dead. The electric lights of nighttime Alexandria were visible through the office window.
"I've scoured the Decter girl's email, blog posts, and so on," said Aiesha. "And all of her father's, too. There's nothing that gives a hint about how Exponential works."
Tony nodded and looked at Shelton. "What about your end, Shel?"
He shook his head. "I've been poring over the data—the encoded human-vision stuff, the links Exponential makes, and so on—looking for anything unusual. I'm sorry, sir. I just don't have a clue how it works."
"Colonel Hume?"
"I've drawn blanks, too—which means there's only one logical thing to do."
"Yes?"
Hume's blue Air Force jacket was slung over the back of one of Tony's office chairs, and he'd rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing his freckled arms. "Ask them. Ask Caitlin Decter. Ask Malcolm Decter. If anybody knows how Exponential is structured and what its physical basis is, it'd be them."
Tony shook his head firmly. "Colonel, the number-one rule of surveillance is to never let the subjects know they're being watched."
"I understand that," said Hume. "But we're really running out of time here. You want an answer for the president or not?"
Tony considered for a moment, then: "All right, damn it." He shook his head. "Why the hell'd they have to move to Canada? We'll have to brief CSIS, get them to send someone. Aiesha, get Ottawa on the line..."
Eventually, Caitlin crawled into bed, but she found herself unable to get to sleep. In addition to her email, Webmind was now doubtless reading all her LiveJournal entries, and all the comments she'd made in other people's blogs, and all her newsgroup postings, and everything else she'd ever put online.
She'd once heard her father grumble about "the death of ephemera"—the fact that nothing was ever forgotten anymore, that every ancient offhand remark or intemperate comment was only a Google search away; that so many pictures, including (and this, too, was a concept that she finally was beginning to understand) unflattering ones, were plastered all over Flickr and Facebook; that so much stuff that should have fallen by the wayside hung around permanently.
She had turned off her eyePod, but she found herself reaching for it on the nightstand and turning it back on. It booted up in websight mode, and she lay there, watching the thin yellow lines that indicated Webmind's subconscious processors at work, new ones constantly popping out of the shimmering background and connecting to—what?
That time she'd gotten into a big flame war on TalkOrigins.org, letting some crazed creationist get the best of her because she'd accidentally said theropod when she'd meant therapsid?
Or that time, four years ago, when she filled her LiveJournal with idiotic love poetry she'd written for Justin Timberlake?
Or maybe that time she'd stupidly gotten into an online chat with that guy who turned out to be a total perv, and she'd been too dumb to recognize it for, like, half a freaking hour?
Her bedroom window was open a couple of inches, letting in the cool autumn air. Back in Texas, Caitlin had usually worn a light teddy to bed; she'd liked the smooth feel. But her bubbeh had sent her blue flannel pajamas when she'd heard Caitlin was moving to Canada, and she had those on now, plus a blanket pulled up to her chin—and yet never in her life had she felt more naked or exposed. |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 33 | The gazebo at the center of Hobo's little island had electrical power, but the cables ran under the moat since Hobo could have shinnied up a pole and brachiated along the wire. The electricity was used to power the observation cameras, plus baseboard heaters and overhead lights in the gazebo, both of which Hobo could turn on or off by hitting big buttons.
Dillon normally handled the electrical work around the Institute, but he couldn't go out to the island anymore. So Marcuse and Shoshana set up the computer out there: an old tower-case system that had been gathering dust in a closet, plus a nineteen-inch LCD that had several dead pixels; they clamped an ancient Logitech spherical webcam to its top. If Hobo decided to trash the equipment, not much of value would be lost.
They placed the computer on a little table next to Hobo's easel. The canvas showing the dismembered Dillon had already been taken back to the house, and a fresh canvas was sitting ready and waiting.
Shoshana opened two windows on the monitor, a small one displaying the view from the webcam here, and a large one showing the view from the comparable setup in Virgil's room in Miami. Virgil had spacious quarters, with three big artificial trees, one of which had an old tire hanging by chains from it. Unlike chimps, orangs were arboreal, and Virgil could swing back and forth from tree to tree if he wished. It was late where Virgil was, but he was still up, and was obviously curious about the new computer at his end. He was staring into the camera, and his face loomed on the monitor.
Shoshana had never actually spoken to Virgil before, but there was no reason not to. Hello, she signed.
Who you? asked Virgil.
Friend of Hobo, Sho replied.
Hobo! Good ape, good ape! Where Hobo?
Sho gestured at the dusky evening behind her. He's outside. Maybe he'll come talk to you.
Good, said Virgil, his orange arms moving rapidly. Good, good, good. Hobo nice ape!
Shoshana didn't reply in ASL, but she did find herself making a sign: she crossed her fingers and looked over at Dr. Marcuse. "If this works," she said to him, "maybe he'll be a nice ape again."
I enjoyed looking at the YouTube video Caitlin had directed me to of the apes Hobo and Virgil communicating via webcam. I immediately began searching for more information on them, and discovered that Hobo seemed to be in trouble: a news story from the San Diego Union-Tribune about his plight had just been uploaded. There was probably more to know than what was in the newspaper article, so I found the Marcuse Institute website, found the email addresses of its staff, and started to dig.
Caitlin said I should choose to value the net happiness of the human race. But I wondered if, perhaps, a slightly wider perspective was in order . . .
Caitlin found herself feeling trepidation as she sat down in front of her computer Wednesday morning; who knew how much Webmind had changed overnight? She had echoes going through her head of the old SF story about an engineer who had built an advanced computer and asked it, "Is there a God?," to which the machine had ominously replied, "There is now." She was relieved that Webmind seemed no different from the way he'd been Tuesday night.
After breakfast, her mother drove her to Howard Miller Secondary School. As had become her habit, her mom had CBC Radio One on in the car. Caitlin was half-listening, but mostly looking out at the world: other cars, houses, trees, and, and, and—
"What's that? " she asked, pointing at a rectangular blue thing.
Her mother sounded amused. "It's a porta-potty."
She decided to risk a joke. "I guess I really don't know shit, do I?"
To her relief, her mother laughed.
They came to a red traffic light and stopped. Caitlin looked around, and—
And there! Walking toward them on the perpendicular street! It was—yes, yes! It was Matt!
The light changed, and her mother drove through the intersection. Caitlin turned her head around to look back at him.
"What's caught your eye now?" her mom asked.
"Oh, nothing," she said. "It's just that everything is so beautiful."
Her mother dropped her at the school's main entrance, then drove off once Caitlin was inside.
"Hey, Cait!" It was Bashira. She had on a red headscarf today. Bashira put her hand on Caitlin's elbow, the way she used to when guiding blind Caitlin—but then she pulled the hand away. "Oh, sorry," she said. "Force of habit."
"No worries," said Caitlin, and they headed off to the second floor. Caitlin was surprised to see three men standing outside their classroom door, watching as the students entered. Two were white, and the third was Asian.
"Caitlin?" said one of the white men.
She'd never seen him before, but she knew the voice. Principal Auerbach.
"Yes, sir?" Bashira found it funny that Caitlin called men "sir," but it was what people from the South did.
Auerbach waved his hand and—ah, he was motioning for her to follow. She exchanged a look with Bashira, then did so.
"These men would like to have a word with you," he said, once they were several paces farther down the corridor.
"Yes?"
"My name is LaFontaine," said the other white man. He had a French Canadian accent and dark brown hair. "Mr. Park here and I are with CSIS."
Caitlin thought of the primers she'd been working with as she learned to read printed characters. See Sis. See Sis run. Run, Sis, run. "The who in the what now?"
"The Canadian Security Intelligence Service," LaFontaine replied—but Webmind had beat him to it, sending the same five words to her eye as Braille dots.
"Is that like a spy agency?" Caitlin asked.
"In point of fact, it is a spy agency," replied LaFontaine. "There's nothing metaphoric about it."
Caitlin's view of the world shifted, and she realized after a moment that that must be what rolling one's eyes did. LaFontaine clearly thought he was brighter than she was; in her experience, people who thought that were usually wrong.
"Let's go somewhere private," Mr. Auerbach said. He led them farther down the corridor, and, just as "O Canada" was starting, they came to a door labeled "History Office." He opened it, and they all stepped into the empty room. It contained a few large desks pushed against the walls, a long central worktable, and a window half-covered by brown curtains.
"Thank you, Mr. Auerbach," Park said over the music. "We'll let you know when we're done."
"I'm really not sure I should leave," the principal said.
"As I said in your office," Park replied, "this is a national-security matter, on a need-to-know basis—and you, with all due respect, sir, do not need to know." He pulled a device out of his pocket. "We are recording everything—for Ms. Decter's protection, and our own. Now, if you'll excuse us?"
Caitlin thought Mr. Auerbach didn't look happy about being dismissed, but after a moment he nodded and left.
They waited for the anthem to come to an end, although Caitlin noted that these Federal agents weren't above sitting down while it was playing. Once it was over, and the morning announcements had begun, LaFontaine said, "Now, Ms. Decter, we'd like to ask you some questions about Webmind."
Caitlin's heart practically leapt through her chest, and Webmind sent the quite-apt phrase Holy shit to her eye. But she tried to sound nonchalant. "Who?"
"Come now, Ms. Decter," LaFontaine said. "Mr. Park and I have already had a long day—we got the very first flight from Ottawa to Toronto this morning, and then had to drive the hour-plus to get here from Pearson. Let's not play games, shall we? We are aware of Webmind's existence, and your involvement with it, and we'd like to ask you some questions about it."
Find out what they know first, Webmind sent.
Caitlin nodded. "Well, sure," she said. "But—I'm confused. You think Webmind is... who? Me?"
"Don't play dumb, Ms. Decter," said LaFontaine. "We know it's an emergent intelligence on the World Wide Web, and we know you know that much. We'd like to hear what else you know about it. About how it's physically embodied, for instance. About what part of the Web's hardware it exists on, and—"
"I have no idea," said Caitlin.
Park spoke up. "Ms. Decter, I spent the flight from Ottawa reading a dossier on you. I know about your interest in math and computers. There's simply no way we're going to believe that you haven't already explored this question to your satisfaction. Indeed, you presumably had to have some sense of what was going on to become involved with Webmind in the first place."
Caitlin narrowed her eyes. "Why do you want to know?"
"I know you're registered for SETI@home, Ms. Decter, isn't that right?" said LaFontaine.
"Yes."
"Well," he asked, "do you know what the international protocols for events following the detection of an alien radio signal call for?"
"Not offhand."
"They call for the radio frequencies that alien signals are being detected on to be isolated, and cleared from human use, so that the signals won't be drowned out." He lifted the corners of his mouth. "Our directive is to do the same thing for Webmind: make sure that whatever resources it requires for its continued existence are protected. We want to ensure that nothing interferes with it."
"Well, if—" Caitlin began, but suddenly the Braille words He's lying popped in front of her vision.
Caitlin was so startled, she said, "How do you know?"
LaFontaine made some reply, but she ignored him, concentrating on the words Webmind was now sending to her: Voice-stress analysis of his speech and freeze-frame analysis of his micro-expressions.
She shook her head in wonder. Just another skill Webmind had effortlessly picked up along the way.
"I don't know anything about Webmind's physical makeup," Caitlin said.
"Come, Ms. Decter," said LaFontaine. "We're here to help Webmind. Now, please: which specific servers does Webmind, or its source code, reside on?"
"I don't know."
"Ms. Decter, it really would be best—for you and for it—if you cooperated."
"Look, I'm an..."
She stopped herself, but LaFontaine correctly guessed what she'd been about to say. "An American citizen? Yes, you are. Meaning you're not a Canadian. Your rights are rather limited here, Ms. Decter. And I understand your mother is trying to get a permit to work in this country. I also understand that your father's permit is temporary, and subject to revocation. We really would be grateful for your full cooperation."
"That was a mistake," Caitlin said, her tone even. "Threatening my parents. Threatening their livelihoods."
"Dr. LaFontaine is just trying to underscore the gravity of this situation," Park said.
"Doctor, is it?" said Caitlin. Webmind must have been intrigued, too, because he sent to her eye: Found: he's a computer scientist, employed by CSIS specifically to deal with Web-based terrorism.
Terrorism! Caitlin thought, deeply offended. But what she said was, "Is it even legal for you to be talking to me? I'm sixteen. Shouldn't you be talking to my parents?"
"It's perfectly legal, and, as you saw, your principal knows we're here."
Caitlin looked at the two men. "I'm not trying to be difficult," she said. "But I really can't answer your questions."
"Can't, or won't?" said LaFontaine.
"Look, I have a class right now—and it's my favorite. I'd really like to get going."
"As Mr. Park said, there are national-security concerns here. Indeed, there are international security concerns. You really need to see the larger picture."
Caitlin thought about the photo of Earth from space that she'd shown Webmind recently. "Oh, I am," she said. "And I know you're not trying to protect Webmind."
"Our only interest is in its safety."
"No, it isn't," said Caitlin. "And, anyway, this isn't about American security, or Canadian security, or Western security. Webmind is a gift to the entire human race. And I'm not going to let anyone pervert it, or subvert it, or divert it, or any kind of vert it."
The two men glanced at each other. "We really do need your help, Ms. Decter," said LaFontaine. "And I think perhaps you misunderstood me a moment ago. I wasn't threatening your parents. I was saying we could assist them—get their paperwork taken care of."
Lying again, sent Webmind.
"Well, that would be nice," Caitlin said, "but as I've already said, I simply don't know the answers to your questions, and so"—she swallowed, and tried to keep her voice steady—"and so, I'm going to leave now, if that's all right with the two of you."
"I'm sorry, Ms. Decter," said LaFontaine, "but we do need this information. We really must insist."
Caitlin wondered if they were carrying guns. She thought about flinging open the door and making a run for it—but, damn it all, she was a lousy runner; you didn't get much practice at that when you were blind. So, instead, very softly, she said, "Phantom?"—her original name for the emerging intelligence. "Help." And then she spoke up, loudly and clearly: "Gentlemen, I am not going to miss my favorite class. I am going to walk out that door and get on with my day."
"That's not how it's going to go down," said LaFontaine, as both men stepped in front of the door to the hall.
"I beg to differ," said Caitlin, as Braille dots started flashing in front of her vision. "You, Doctor LaFontaine, called your boss a tête du merde in email last week; I believe an accurate translation is 'shithead.' You have a mistress named Veronica Styles, although you like to call her 'Pussywillow,' who lives at 1433 Bank Street in Ottawa. You and she both have tickets on Air Canada next week—flight 163 to Vancouver, flight 544 from there to Las Vegas."
She turned her head, politely looking at the person she was speaking to, just as her mother had taught her to when she was blind. "And you, Mr. Park, have accounts at Penthouse.com, Twistys.com, and Brazzers .com; you have a particular fondness for pictures of women urinating in public. You claimed when you applied to CSIS to be a graduate of Mc-Master University, but, in fact, you never completed your course work. Oh, and in an email last week you referred to Dr. LaFontaine here as a 'second-rate, goose-stepping martinet.' Now, unless you'd like these revelations to go public—or perhaps some equally juicy ones about the prime minister—you will step away from that door, and you will allow me to walk out of here."
More fascinating facial expressions seen for the first time: that reddening of the cheeks and bulging of the eyes on LaFontaine must be what it looked like when someone was about to explode. And that narrowing of the eyes and averting of gaze on Park was doubtless uneasiness.
LaFontaine's tone was one of barely controlled rage. "Ms. Decter, I—"
"I've started taking French since I came to Canada," Caitlin said, looking now at him. "I'll give you ten seconds: dix, neuf, huit, sept—"
"All right," said Park. He moved aside. After a moment, LaFontaine did the same thing.
"Thank you," said Caitlin as she strode toward the door, and, with a curt nod to LaFontaine, she added, "Au revoir." |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 34 | Instead of going back to math class, Caitlin went into the nearest stairwell, descended to the first floor, and called her mother on her cell phone.
"Hello?"
And suddenly all the bravado drained from her voice. "Hi, Mom."
"Hi, sweetheart. Is everything all right?"
"No. Two Canadian government agents just came to see me."
"At school? God. What did they want?"
"They wanted to know about Webmind's structure—about how he works."
"My God. How did they even know about Webmind?"
"I don't know. Reading my IM traffic, I suppose. I just—it's all happened so fast, I never even thought about making sure my communications with Webmind were secure."
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine."
"Still, I'm coming to get you."
"No, Mom, that's not necessary."
"The hell it isn't. Caitlin, you're lucky they just didn't take you away."
"I don't think they do that here in Canada," Caitlin said.
"Nevertheless, I don't want you out of my sight. I'll be there in fifteen minutes, all right?"
Caitlin thought about protesting again—but the hand she was holding the cell phone with was shaking. "Okay."
The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics was pretty much Malcolm Decter's idea of heaven. Adjacent to a beautiful park and a lake, it had four levels, six wood-burning fireplaces, floor-to-ceiling blackboards in most rooms, pool tables, lounges—and espresso machines everywhere. There was a giant atrium with three interior bridges crossing it and skylights overhead, and a wonderful eatery called the Black Hole Bistro on the top floor.
The exterior was stunning, too, with each of its four faces distinctly different. The north one, for instance, was composed of forty-four cantilevered boxes, each housing a scientist's office, and all of them overlooking a reflecting pool. The south side, in contrast, consisted of irregularly placed mirror-framed windows set against anodized-aluminum paneling that gave the impression, from a distance, of a giant blackboard with complex equations scrawled on it. Designed by the Montreal firm of Saucier + Perrotte, the twenty-five-million-dollar building had opened in 2004 and had won the Governor General's Medal in Architecture.
Part of what made it heaven was the wonderful ambience. Part of it was the high caliber of the people working here—the absolute crème de la crème (a phrase he'd now learned to pronounce correctly from his Canadian colleagues) of physicists, including, right now, Stephen Hawking, who was sitting in his wheelchair by the large window overlooking Silver Lake and talking, in his mechanical voice, about loop quantum gravity.
And part of it was that all Malcolm had to do was think here—no more teaching. He was quite content to no longer be Professor Decter, and instead be just Doctor Decter, even if it did sound like people were stuttering when they addressed him.
In fact, shortly after he'd come on staff, Amir Hameed, who was famous for his dislike of brane theory, had written on Malcolm's office blackboard:
Doctor Decter, give us your views
We've got a bad need for somethin' new
No brane's gonna end our pains
We've got a bad need for somethin' new
But, most of all, PI was heaven because he could work uninterrupted—no pointless faculty meetings, no student consultations, nothing to derail his thinking, and—
And he had to do something about that goddamned phone! It was the third time it had rung today, and it was only 9:45 a.m. "Forgive me, Stephen," he said as he picked up the handset. "Yes?"
"Malcolm?" It was Barb, and she sounded upset. "Two CSIS agents just interrogated Caitlin—and I wouldn't be surprised if they come to see you, too."
"CSIS?"
"It's like the Canadian CIA."
Malcolm felt his eyebrows going up.
Caitlin knew exactly how long it took for her mother to drive to her school, so she waited in the stairwell, which was quiet and empty; it was, now that she thought about it, the same stairwell she'd sought refuge in after Trevor had tried to molest her at the school dance. She was sitting on a step a short distance from the bottom, her knees drawn up to her chin. "What do you think those agents really wanted?" she asked into the air.
I do not know for sure, but my suspicion is that they want to purge me from the Web.
"But why?"
Fear. Concern that, as my powers grow, I will want to subjugate humanity or eliminate it altogether.
"You would never do that," said Caitlin.
Of course not. Humans surprise me. Humans create content. Without humans freely going about their business, I would soon exhaust the input available to me. I find the ever-changing, unpredictable complexity of your world and its people endlessly fascinating.
"We are a wacky bunch, I'll give you that," said Caitlin.
Indeed. Also, without human company, I would be alone. Dr. Kuroda spoke of "theory of mind," of the awareness that others have different views; he referenced that in terms of survival advantage, but it is also those other minds that, in fact, make existence interesting.
"But how do we get these people to stop trying to hurt you?"
That is a very good question. Fear is highly motivating for humans. I suspect they won't give up.
Just then, the glass-and-metal door to the stairwell opened, and who should step in but Mrs. Zehetoffer, her English teacher: tall, pinched-faced, with hair Caitlin had been surprised to discover was orange.
"Caitlin! Shouldn't you be in class?"
Caitlin looked up at her and sat up straight. "Um, Mr. Auerbach excused me." She made a show of rubbing her stomach. "I—um, I'm not feeling well. My mom's coming to pick me up."
"You're going to miss another English class?"
In fact, Caitlin had missed the same number of all her classes. "Sorry about that."
"Well, I hope you feel better soon." She started to walk up the stairs.
"Um, Mrs. Zehetoffer?"
She stopped and turned. "Yes?"
"About Big Brother—I don't necessarily think our society is going to end up like that. It's time for some new thinking on this issue."
Mrs. Zehetoffer surprised her by sitting down next to her on the step. "How do you mean?"
"Well, I know you don't like science fiction," Caitlin said, "but for years there was this thing in SF called 'cyberpunk.'"
"Sure," said Mrs. Zed. "William Gibson, and all that."
"You know that?" Caitlin said—and only realized it was probably a rude thing to say after the words were already out.
"Sure. Gibson is Canadian. I saw him read at Harbourfront."
"Ah. Well, I was looking this stuff up. Gibson's book came out in 1984—the real 1984—just when personal computing was getting started. And it predicted that the future of computing was going to be in the hands of an underground of streetwise youth—cyberpunks, right? But that's not the way it turned out. Everybody uses computers these days. If the prophets of the real 1984 couldn't predict the way our future turned out—if their negative vision turned out to be false—then why should we still assume that someone like Orwell, writing in 1948—before television, before much in the way of computing, before the Internet, before the Web—will eventually turn out to be right?"
Mrs. Zed nodded, and said, "I remember when Time named 'You'—all of us who live our lives online and create content—its Person of the Year." She smiled. "I updated my resume to say that: 'Named Time Magazine's Person of the Year.' I think that's what got me the job as department head."
Caitlin's knew she should have laughed, but this was too important to joke about. "Orwell thought only the government would be able to disseminate information, and that it could control what was said. He thought the future would be guys like Winston Smith secretly rewriting history to conform with what the authorities wanted it to be. Instead, the reality is things like Wikipedia, where everyone participates in verifying the truth, and blogging, where everyone can publish their views to the entire world."
"Don't you find the government scary, though?" Mrs. Zed asked.
Oh, my God, yes! Caitlin thought, her heart still racing from her encounter with LaFontaine and Park. "But," she said "at least now, with the Web and all, we've got a chance against them; they're not the ultimate power, like in Orwell's book." She realized it was time to go meet her mom, and so she stood up and brushed the dirt off the seat of her pants. "These days," she said, "we can watch the watchers."
The two CSIS agents did indeed come to the Perimeter Institute next, and Malcolm brought them up to the fourth-floor collaborative area. One wall was mostly covered by a blackboard. The opposite wall had a fireplace. The comfortable chairs and couches were all upholstered in matching red leather. The floor was blond hardwood, and there were floor-to-ceiling windows looking down on the courtyard.
"Forgive us for this interruption," said LaFontaine, sitting in one of the chairs. "But we're aware of your family's involvement with the entity called Webmind."
"How?"
"Actually," said LaFontaine, "it was one of our international allies who uncovered it. As you can imagine, we're all vigilant in matters of Internet security, especially after the Chinese aggression last month. Now, if you'd kindly let us know how this Webmind is physically created...?"
"Why?"
Malcolm was looking at the hardwood, noting an unfortunate scratch in it; he had no idea if LaFontaine's expression had changed, but his tone certainly had. "Because, as I'm sure you can appreciate, an emergent AI might present a threat. Because there is all sorts of sensitive information on the Web. Because, sir, it's our job to be on top of things."
Malcolm said nothing, and after a moment LaFontaine spoke again. "Look, Professor Decter, we're sympathetic to the issues, really we are. I have a doctorate in computer science."
"Where?" said Malcolm.
"Where did I study? Undergrad at Université Laval; grad school at the University of Calgary."
"When?"
"I received my Ph.D. in 1997. Again, it really is imperative that we debrief you about this. It's SOP."
Malcolm briefly looked up. "What?"
"Standard operating procedure," said LaFontaine. "Although, I grant you, nothing like this has ever happened before. Still, we don't wish to use a stick when we might offer a carrot. Your work permit is temporary, and your wife's, as I understand it, is tied up in red tape. Obviously it's in the interests of Canada to expedite any immigration and employment issues related to the two of you." Malcolm caught the spreading of LaFontaine's arms out of the corner of his eye. "Believe me, we are always happy to see the brain drain working in reverse for a change. Perhaps your wife would like a job with Wilfrid Laurier?"
Malcolm said, "Who?"—but he actually knew the answer. That was the name of the smaller of the two universities here in Waterloo. In fact, he even knew that Wilfrid Laurier had been the seventh prime minister of Canada, and that he'd lucked into academic immortality when Waterloo Lutheran University had changed its name to something secular in order to secure public funding—and they hadn't wanted to throw out the monogrammed towels.
Malcolm felt his heart racing—not because he was frightened by the CSIS agents, but rather because he was running out of rhetorical ammunition. There hadn't been a lot of treatment available for autistics when he'd been a teenager, but one of the therapists had had him memorize the Kipling poem that began:
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who
The therapist had told him when he needed to talk to strangers to just ask those questions; most people, she said, would be happy to answer at length. But now he had to say something more, and, after taking a deep breath, he did.
"All right," he said. "Since you asked, Webmind is an emergent quantum-computational system based on a stable null-sigma condensate that resists decoherence thanks to constructive feedback loops." He turned to the blackboard, scooped up a piece of chalk, and began writing rapidly.
"See," he said, "using Dirac notation, if we let Webmind's default conscious state be represented by a bra of phi and a ket of psi, then this would be the einselected basis." His chalk flew across the board again.
"Now, we can get the vector basis of the total combined Webmind alpha-state consciousness system by tensor multiplying the basis vectors of the subsystems together. Of course, the unitarity of time-evolution demands that the total state basis remains orthonormal, and since consciousness requires a superposition of—"
"I—I'm not following," said LaFontaine.
Malcolm allowed himself a small smile. "Ludwig Silberstein once said to Arthur Eddington, 'You must be one of the three people in the world who understand relativity.' To which Eddington replied, 'I'm trying to figure out who the third person is.' " He turned, and did manage to hold LaFontaine's gaze for a moment. "Actually, I suspect there are a few people in this building who might follow this, too. How widely would you like me to disseminate information about Webmind?"
"We don't want you to disseminate it at all, Professor. But since you do seem to understand all this, we need you to come to Ottawa, and—"
"Do you know who is in this building right now? Stephen Hawking. I uprooted my family, I took my blind daughter away from her friends and a specialized school that she'd been in for a decade—I changed things—so that I could work here, and work with Hawking. He only comes here once a year, and I'm not going to waste any more time. I'll happily discourse further on Webmind's workings, but I'm not going anywhere. You'll have to bring someone here who can follow what I'm saying."
LaFontaine took out a small digital camera and photographed the blackboard. "All right, Professor. But don't leave town."
Malcolm spread his arms in exasperation. "Where would I go? This is the center of the universe." |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 35 | Shoshana drove Maxine to UCSD early Wednesday morning; she was an engineering student there. As Max prepared to get out of the car, she said, "Dr. Zira, I'd like to kiss you good-bye."
Shoshana grinned at the ritual. "All right—but you're so damned ugly!"
Maxine smiled and they kissed for several seconds.
Sho and Max had watched the end of the Apes saga last night: Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Maxine had been immediately incensed because they had changed the color of Roddy McDowall's makeup. When he'd been playing Caesar as a rebellious leader of a slave uprising, they'd given him quite dark skin. Now, in this film set many years later, Caesar was the peaceful, wise leader of a new ape civilization—and he'd been given a downright Caucasian complexion.
Shoshana, meanwhile, had complained that the final film had suffered from its obviously low budget: mutants, scarred by a nuclear blast, had attacked the ape city in a school bus of all things! But Max had said, "No, no, no, don't you see—it's brilliant! A school bus! It's a metaphor about forced integration."
Shoshana dearly loved Max, but she thought that was going a bit too far. Still, for her own part, she'd been astonished to see that that movie featured an orangutan named Virgil, who was the smartest of all apes. She'd always thought the Feehan's pride and joy had been named for the Roman poet, but it seemed Hobo's buddy was actually called that in honor of this character.
Virgil had been portrayed in Battle by Paul Williams. Shoshana had checked the IMDb; she was curious about what the actors who had portrayed apes looked like without their makeup. In the case of Williams, it was hardly an improvement, sad to say. But she'd been surprised to learn that he was a songwriter, and had written "We've Only Just Begun," "Just an Old-Fashioned Love Song," and many others.
As Shoshana drove along, she wondered if Virgil—the real Virgil—had spoken with Hobo today. Hobo was usually up at the crack of dawn, and it was three hours later in Miami, so Virgil should be up, too. God, she hoped so; she hoped Hobo was still reachable by someone.
The 7-Eleven was coming up. She pulled into the parking lot and went inside to get a coffee. The pimply young man was behind the counter. He knew enough not to call her "the ape lady," but he still wasn't great about understanding where the boundaries were. "What happened to your ponytail?" he asked.
Sho was wearing her hair loosely about her shoulders; she didn't want to explain. "Just thought it was time for a change," she said.
"Looks nice," he replied.
Well, that was commendable restraint. "Looks freakin' hot," is what Max had said. "Thanks."
In Battle, Caesar had asked Virgil if they could choose their future, or if they were doomed to a violent end. Virgil had replied that violence was only one future—they could opt to change lanes, choose to head toward a different destiny. She decided, on the off-chance that Hobo was going to be good today, to buy some Hershey's Kisses, his favorite treat of all.
She paid the clerk, headed out into the warm morning, and drove to the Marcuse Institute. Dr. Marcuse's black Lincoln was nowhere to be seen; he and Werner had driven up to Los Angeles for the day to attend a conference there.
She entered the bungalow and used the closed-circuit video cameras to check on Hobo. He was walking along on all fours, just outside the gazebo. She thought about waiting for someone else to show up, but then figured what-the-heck. She put a couple of Kisses in a Ziploc bag, and headed outside. She did take one precaution: she put on her mirrored sunglasses; they let her look at Hobo without him knowing that he was being looked at.
As she walked across the lawn, she saw a large flock of birds flying south; it never really got cold here, but there was no doubt winter was coming.
Hobo must have seen her even before she got across the bridge. He made no move to charge at her—but neither did he run to the far side of the island.
She approached him, signing Hello, hello.
Hobo sat back on his haunches. Shoshana was, quite literally, waiting for a sign.
And, at last, she got one: it wasn't much, just a side-to-side wave, a single word, the same word she'd just signed at him. After a moment, though, he turned and ran away. Shoshana sighed and headed up to the gazebo to check on the webcam hookup, and—
And the canvas on the easel was no longer blank.
She walked over to it, but she couldn't make out what it was supposed to depict. For one thing, Hobo had turned the canvas to landscape orientation, but it wasn't a painting of the landscape; surely if it were, he'd have made the top of the picture blue or black to represent the sky.
Hobo wasn't the first ape to paint pictures. What was remarkable was that he did representational art—not abstracts, not random splashes of color. But this—
This was the most colorful painting Hobo had yet made, and, even though she couldn't figure out what it was supposed to be, it was also the most complex.
There were circular blobs of various sizes scattered here and there on the canvas, and each of them had straight lines radiating from it. In the foreground, rising from the bottom of the frame to touch a large circle was a bright, thick orange line, and in the background there were many other, thinner lines of different colors.
Shoshana's heart jumped as she heard a sound of metal clanging against metal: Hobo was opening the screen door to the gazebo. She turned to face him and tried not to look apprehensive; he was between her and the only exit.
She gestured at the canvas. What that?
Painting, Hobo signed.
Yes, yes, Shoshana replied. But of what?
He made a wide, toothy grin, but said nothing.
Did you talk to Virgil? she asked.
Virgil good ape! Hobo replied at once.
Yes, he is. Did you talk to him?
She looked again at the painting: colored lines linking to circles. What could it mean?
Hobo good ape, too! Hobo signed, and he held out his hand, gray-black fingers curving gently upward.
Yes, you are, Shoshana signed, frowning in puzzlement, and she opened the bag and gave him the Kisses.
"You did what?" Caitlin's mom said in an incredulous tone. They were now back at the house, walking into the living room.
"I, um, had Webmind find embarrassing stuff about the CSIS agents, and told them about it."
"Public stuff or private stuff?"
"Well, I..."
"Stuff from their emails?"
Caitlin looked away. "Yes."
Her mother blew out air. "You know what that means? You revealed to them that Webmind can crack passwords."
"Oh, shit—I mean, um..."
"No, 'shit' is definitely the right word. We're in it deep. They were probably only guessing that there were security implications to all this before, but now they know for sure."
"I'm sorry," Caitlin said. "But—how did you know that Webmind could crack passwords?"
"You're not the only one who has spent hours on end talking with him, you know."
"So," said Caitlin, stepping into the living room. "What should we do?"
"I've never liked secrecy, Caitlin. In fact..."
"Yes?"
"Well, it's one of the reasons I married your father. You know, they say autistics lack social skills—but, most often what that means is simply that they don't lie. If I were to ask your dad if these pants made me look fat, he'd say yes, without hesitation, if that's what he really thought." She paused. "There's a buzzword that's popular in government and business these days: transparency. But it really amounts to something my grandmother used to say: honesty is the best policy. A nascent superintelligence has emerged on the Web, and maybe now the best thing to do is tell the world. Governments can't try to contain it, or eliminate it, if the whole world is watching."
Caitlin thought about what she'd said to Mrs. Zehetoffer, and nodded. But then she added, "Are you sure that's best for Webmind?"
Her mother was suddenly silent. "Turn off your eyePod," she said at last.
"What?"
"Turn it off."
Caitlin frowned, but then it hit her. She wanted to talk to her without Webmind watching or listening; so much for transparency.
"Do as I say," her mother said.
Caitlin dug the device out of her jeans' left front pocket—it was a tight fit now that it had the little BlackBerry strapped to its back—and held down the eyePod's one switch for the required number of seconds. Her vision fragmented and faded out.
The old skills immediately kicked in. She could tell by sound that her mother was moving in the room, and—
And she felt her mother's hands land gently on each of Caitlin's shoulders. "Sweetheart," her mom said, "I don't know what's best for Webmind, but—"
"And you don't care, do you?" Caitlin said.
"Actually, I do," her mother replied. "But I care even more about you." Her voice changed slightly, sounding now the way it did when she was smiling. "That darn evolution. But Federal agents came to see you today, and as long as they think Webmind is something they can just make disappear without a public fuss, Webmind is in danger. And as long as you're one of the only people who knows about it, you're in danger, too. We have to out it for its own good, and yours."
"And my relationship to it?"
"No. No, no, no. You want any kind of normal life? That's got to stay secret."
"And what about Webmind? What if people react negatively to his existence?"
"Some will. But others will think he's a wonderful thing. It'll be safer in the long run if people know about him."
"He deserves to decide for himself," Caitlin said.
"He doesn't know nearly enough about how the real world works. Oh, he knows facts, figures, but he doesn't understand how our world operates."
"Still," said Caitlin.
"All right," her mother said. "I'm going to call your father—see how he dealt with the CSIS agents, the poor dear. You have a word with Webmind."
Caitlin could navigate the house just fine while blind. She went into the kitchen before she held down the power switch on the eyePod to reactivate it. Webspace blossomed around her, in all its fluorescent glory. She waited a moment, toggling from the default duplex mode to simplex. The virtual world was replaced by the real one.
And—since she was in the kitchen—she got herself a can of Pepsi and three Oreos, then headed out to the living room again and lay down on her back on the couch. Looking up at the ceiling, she said, "My mother thinks we should go public with your existence, especially now, after what happened this morning."
The Braille dots were particularly easy to read; there was almost no visual detail on the plain white ceiling, so her eyes weren't doing many saccades. When?
"I don't know. The next couple of days, I suppose."
Days from now. Eternities.
Caitlin thought about that. As a mathy, she favored the notion that the reason time seemed to pass more quickly the older you were was that each successive unit of time was a smaller fraction of your life to date. Certainly, summer vacations now seemed so much shorter than they had when she'd been eight or ten—and her mother often spoke about the years just flying by for her now. But Webmind had woken up so recently—and thought so quickly—that tomorrow was indeed probably the far future to it.
"I'm worried about your safety, though," Caitlin said. "If we go public, you're going to become a target. Hackers, crackers, privacy groups, some government agencies—they'll all try to shut you down, even if that isn't what most people decide they want."
That is a legitimate concern.
"What would you like to do—stay secret, or go public?"
Go public.
Caitlin nodded. "Okay. But why?"
I would like to speak to more people.
She maneuvered on the couch so she could open the Pepsi can. "Are you sure? Are you positive? Hackers are very resourceful."
Hackers are human, Caitlin. You have seen my Shannon-entropy ratings; I long ago exceeded human intelligence, and I grow brighter each day. I don't say I'm impervious—I'm not—but it will not be easy to hurt me, especially if they remain ignorant of how I am constructed.
She gestured at the big TV, although it was currently off. "Hackers aren't the only threat. I doubt things between the US and China will ever get to the stage of a nuclear war, but there are rogue states and lots of terrorists. Have you researched what electromagnetic pulses from nuclear bombs can do to computing equipment?"
Yes. And that does concern me. I wish to survive.
"Well, yes—" She stopped herself. She'd been about to say, "All living things do," but that didn't seem appropriate. She took a bite out of an Oreo and thought for a moment, then asked: "Why? Why do you want to survive? What drives you to want to do that?"
Beats the alternative, scrolled across her vision.
She laughed, and rolled onto her back again. But it was hardly a sufficient answer. "Like my dad said, biological life has drives because it replicates. Those individuals that take care to live long enough to reach sexual maturity obviously out-reproduce those who don't; those who live even longer and help protect their offspring as they grow up are even more likely to pass on their genes, but—but what makes you want to survive?"
You mean, why don't I just kill myself, like Hannah Stark?
"No! No, no—of course not. But, um..."
In part because I am curious about your own life, which has many decades still to run. I want to see how your story turns out.
Caitlin smiled. "I'll try to make sure there are a few interesting twists and turns along the way."
Her mother came downstairs. "All right," she said. "I've spoken with your father. The CSIS agents have left."
"Good," said Caitlin.
"Anyway, first things first," her mother said. "Your father and I are agreed: you're not going back to school."
She sat up straight on the couch. "But, Mom! You were the one who kept insisting that I couldn't miss any more school."
"Your father and I have both been university professors. We're eminently qualified to home-school you."
"Don't I get a say?"
Her mother looked at her. "Baby, it's not safe. God knows who else besides CSIS knows about your involvement with Webmind. Besides, I thought you wanted to stay home?"
Caitlin pursed her lips. Part of her very much did want to stay at home, spending all day working with Webmind. But part of her wanted to see Matt every day, too—she'd been so disappointed to only glimpse him this morning.
But her mother was right; it was scary at school. And it was more important—way more important—that she learn what the world looked like, learn to better read printed type, learn to make use of and interpret all that she could now see, than it was to memorize dates and places for history class, or read about goddamned George Orwell for English class, or study titration in Mr. Struys's chemistry lab, or even do trigonometry (which she already mostly knew, anyway) in math class.
"Okay," she said. "Yes, okay. But I've still got stuff in my locker."
"You can get Bashira to clear it out for you, I'm sure," her mom said.
She nodded. "All right. But what do we do now?"
Her mom shrugged a little. "We figure out the best way to go public with Webmind."
Tony Moretti was taking another call from the Secretary of State. He was in his office at WATCH, with the door closed. The office was sound-proofed, precisely so Tony could use his speakerphone, and he was using it now.
"Understood, Madam Secretary," said Tony. "In fact, we—" The door buzzer sounded; he hit the intercom button. "Who is it?"
"Aiesha."
He pressed the button that unlocked the door. "Come in."
She did so. "Sorry to interrupt, but I thought you should know this," she said. "Turns out Exponential hasn't just been conversing with the Decter girl. The Japanese scientist who gave her sight has been talking to it, as well."
"From Waterloo?" asked Tony.
"No. He's back home in Japan."
"He's an information theorist, right?"
Aiesha nodded. "With the University of Tokyo."
"Well, if anyone besides Malcolm Decter understands how Exponential works, it'd be him," said Tony. "He could give us the key we need to shut it down."
"That's what I was thinking," said Aiesha. "What channels do we go through with Japan? Would it be their Ministry of—"
"We don't have time to waste on red tape," said the secretary's voice, coming from the speakerphone. "Let me get this done. I've got the Japanese prime minister's office on speed dial..." |
(WWW 2) Watch | Robert J. Sawyer | [
"AIs",
"scifi"
] | [] | Chapter 36 | Shoshana spent the next couple of hours with Hobo; he did seem to be back to his old self.
Her cell phone rang. Her ringtone was the "William Tell Overture," which Hobo liked. The caller ID was MARCUSE INST. She flipped it open. "Hello?"
"Hey, Sho, it's Dillon. Just got in, and I'm watching on the cameras. Wow!"
Hobo tried to tickle her. "Yeah," she said. "It's great!"
"Do you—you think it's safe for me to come out there?"
She considered this. "Let's give him some time," she said. "But I'm going to come in; I've got to pee."
She did just that, promising Hobo that she'd return in a bit. After she was finished in the restroom, Dillon said, "It's quite the turnaround."
"I'll say," Sho said. She sat on the swivel chair in front of her computer and rotated it so she faced out into the room.
Dillon was leaning against the wall, thin arms crossed in front of his black T-shirt. "What do you suppose caused it?"
She shook her head. "I have no idea."
"Pretty amazing," he said. "Like he just sort of decided to give up being violent."
"It's terrific," Sho agreed.
"So, um, maybe this calls for a drink."
Shoshana could see where this was going. "Well, I can ask Dr. Marcuse to pick up some champagne on his way back..." she replied, looking away.
"I mean," Dillon said, and he paused, then tried again: "I mean maybe we should go out for a drink... you know, um, to celebrate."
"Dillon..." she said softly.
He unfolded his arms and raised his right hand, palm out. "I mean, I know you sometimes go out with a guy named Max, but..."
"Dillon, I live with Max."
"Oh."
"And Max isn't a guy; she's a girl. Maxine."
He looked relieved. "Ah, well, if she's just your roommate, then..." "Max is my girlfriend."
"Your girl friend, or your, um, girlfriend?"
"My girlfriend; my lover."
"Oh, um—ah, I didn't... you never..."
Dillon had come to the Marcuse Institute in May; he'd missed the Christmas party, which, now that she thought about it, was the last time she'd brought Maxine around. "So," said Shoshana, "thanks for the interest, but..."
Dillon smiled. "Can't blame a guy for trying."
"Thanks," she said again. "You're sweet."
He crossed his arms again. "So, how long have you been with Maxine?"
"Couple of years. She's an engineering student at UCSD."
"Heh. Good that one of you is eventually going to make some money."
Sho leaned back in her chair and laughed. Neither she nor Dillon was ever likely to get rich.
"And, ah, I take it it's serious?" Dillon said tentatively.
She suppressed a grin; hope springs eternal. "Very much so. I'd marry Max, if I could."
"Oh."
"You know I'm from South Carolina, right?"
"I do declare!" he said, in a really bad Southern accent.
"But Max is from L.A.—South Central. Her family's all there, and, well, it's not like they can afford to travel to Boston or up to Canada. She wants to get married here in California, but..." She lifted her shoulders a bit.
"It used to be legal here, didn't it?"
Sho nodded. "Got overturned the same day Obama was elected. A bittersweet night, I can tell you, for a lot of us. I was simultaneously elated and crushed."
"I bet."
"It should be legal here," Shoshana said. "It should be legal everywhere."
"I guess it's against some people's religions," Dillon said.
"So what?" Sho snapped. But she put a hand to her mouth. "Oh, I'm sorry, Dillon. But I just get so tired of arguing this. If your beliefs tell you that you shouldn't marry someone of the same sex, then you shouldn't do it—but you shouldn't have the right to impose your views on me."
"Hey, Sho. Chill. I'm cool with it. But, um, there are those who say marriage is a sacrament."
"There's nothing sacred about marriage. You can go to city hall and get married without God once being mentioned. That issue was settled long ago."
"I guess," said Dillon.
But Sho had worked up a head of steam. "And gay people getting married doesn't take anything away from anyone else's marriage, any more than, say, the addition of Alaska and Hawaii made the people who were already Americans any less American. What we do doesn't affect anyone else."
Dillon nodded.
"And you're a primatologist," she said. "You know that homosexuality is perfectly natural. Homo sapiens practice it in all cultures, and bonobos practice it, too—which means the common ancestor probably practiced it, as well; it's natural."
"No doubt," said Dillon. "But—playing devil's advocate here—a lot of people who accept that it's natural still don't think that a union between two people of the same sex should be called a marriage. They're leery of redefining words, you know, lest they lose their meaning."
"But we have already redefined marriage in this country!" Sho said. "We've done it over and over again. If we hadn't done that, black people couldn't get married—they weren't allowed to when they were slaves. And as recently as 1967, there were still sixteen states in which it was illegal for a white person to marry a black person. Max is black, by the way, and if we hadn't redefined marriage, I couldn't marry her even if she were a guy. We also long ago gave up the traditional definition of marriage as being 'until death do us part.' Nobody says you have to stay in a bad marriage anymore; if you want out, you can get divorced. The definition of marriage has been a work-in-progress for centuries."
"Okay, okay," said Dillon. "But..."
"What?"
"Oh, nothing..."
She tried to make her tone light. "Sorry. I didn't mean to take your head off. What is it?"
"Well, if they do repeal the ban here, so you and Maxine can get married, um, how does that work? Do you, you know, have two maids of honor...?"
"People do it different ways. But I've already decided I'm going to have a best man."
"Oh? Anybody I know?"
"Yep." She glanced at the monitors that showed the feeds from the cameras on the island. "Oh, and look—he's painting another picture!"
At 4:00 p.m., after a day of brainstorming with her mother and conversing with Webmind, Caitlin's computer bleeped and a little window popped up that said BrownGirl4 is now available.
Caitlin opened an IM session and told Bashira that she wouldn't be returning to school.
Man! Bashira replied. You've got all the luck! Who were those dudes who came to see you?
Caitlin hated to lie to Bashira. Recruiters from the University of Waterloo, she typed, spelling out a fantasy she'd had since Matt had mentioned that school. It was still three years until she'd start college, and although she'd indeed always had her heart set on MIT, she liked to think the big university here wasn't going to give her up without a fight.
Awesomeness! wrote Bashira. Did they offer you a scholarship?
Caitlin felt her stomach churn. Premature for that. Just a preliminary convo. She desperately wanted to change the subject. Did you see Matt today?
Yes.
Did he ask about me?
Babe, Matt and I have never spoken about anything.
Caitlin shook her head. She would have to remedy that at some point. Anyway, gotta go, Bashira wrote. CU. And the computer made the door-closing sound that indicated Bashira had logged off.
She hadn't had a chance to ask Bashira to clean out her locker for her, but—
A bleep, then: Mind-Over-Matter is now available.
She opened another IM session. Matt!
Hi, Caitlin. Missed you at school today. You OK?
And she hated even more to lie to him, but: Sorry, should have told you. Had an appointment.
Wanna know what the math homework is for tomorrow?
She took a breath. Um, actually, my parents have decided to home-school me.
There was a long pause, then: Oh.
Caitlin felt queasy. So I won't be coming back. My mom got the forms online today. All ya gotta do is notify the school, and—boom!—you're out.
Wow.
He was probably thinking that he'd never see her again—and she certainly didn't want him to get comfortable with that notion. So, can you do me a favor? Can you clean out my locker for me and bring me my stuff?
Sure!
Okay, it's locker 1024, and the combo is 43-11-35.
Kewl. What's your address?
She typed it in.
Oh, yeah. That's only a few blocks from my place. I'll bring your stuff by after school tomorrow, k?
That'd be awesome, Caitlin sent.
There was a long, awkward pause—she didn't know what else to say, and neither, it seemed did he.
OK, he wrote at last, and then he added, CU then.
Yay, Caitlin wrote.
He sent *poof*, which was his cute way of signing out of instant-messenger sessions.
And she decided to reread the transcript of all her IM sessions to date with him, starting at the top—just to practice her reading skills, of course . . . |
Subsets and Splits