WWW: Wake (12 page)

“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 grade ten, 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.”

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 video conferences 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!