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!”
* * * *
Chapter 17
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...
* * * *
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 laid 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.”
* * * *
Chapter 18
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 terra-cotta 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 cufflinks 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.
* * * *
Chapter 19
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 Schrodinger—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 auto-refresh: 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.
* * * *
Chapter 20
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 badmouthed 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 and her boyfriend 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 cold-bloodedly, “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.”
* * * *
Chapter 21
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)
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