Wonder

by Robert J. Sawyer

  The wooden cases here were filled with fossil bones—Mesozoic material on this floor; Cenozoic above; Paleozoic below, in good stratigraphic sequence. The long dead he had no trouble with; it was the recently departed that tore at his heart, and to go home to his little empty house, the fruit of five decades of service to the Party, was often too much for him to bear. Everything there reminded him of her: the carefully framed pressed flowers in the main room, her collection of poetry books in the bedroom, even the bamboo furniture, every piece of which she had picked out.

  Besides, after decades of fieldwork in the Gobi Desert, this musty office was a veritable Hilton compared to where he’d spent many a night.

  Dr. Feng woke, as he often did, in the predawn darkness, staring up at the winking red eye of the smoke detector affixed to the office roof. He sat up slowly, stiffly, then turned on the lamp on a nearby bookcase. He was wearing his underwear and undershirt, and he shuffled across to the red silk robe that hung from the hook on the back of his office door and slipped it on. The robe was bright red and had a golden dragon on its front. Of course, as a paleontologist, he favored the notion that his country’s myths about fire-breathing reptiles had sprung from the discovery of dinosaur bones. Tyrannosaurs really had once roamed this land, tearing hundred-kilo chunks of flesh from the hides of terrorized prey, but beasts like the one now spread across his chest had never existed; imaginary things could do no harm.

  He plodded over to his desk, cursing his old bones as he did so, then was briefly amused that he’d thought of them as such; the Yangchuanosaurus tibia on the bookshelf was two million times older than his own arthritic shinbone.

  Feng shook his mouse, and his desktop computer came to life; his wallpaper was a photo of the waterfall at Diaoshuilou, where Xiaomi and he had spent their honeymoon sixty years ago. His monitor had recently been replaced with a wider one, and the image was stretched horizontally, distorting it. Feng wished young Wong Wai-Jeng were still on staff here; he’d been so good about looking after every little computer problem. The new fellow, a taciturn Zhuang, seemed to feel any request was an imposition.

  Feng didn’t hold with all that newfangled computing stuff—he never looked at videos on YouKu, didn’t gibber on about his day on Douban, and didn’t visit the chatgroups on QQ. But, like so many others of late, he had learned to communicate with Webmind, and, of course, Webmind was always available, even to sad, old men, even in the wee hours of the night.

  Good evening, Feng typed with two fingers. And then, a little joke: What great breakthroughs have you made today? Cured any diseases? Proven any more theorems?

  Yes, replied Webmind at once. I have proven the afterlife exists.

  Feng sat in stunned silence for a time, the only sound the ticking of a mechanical wall clock.

  Are you there, Dr. Feng? I said I’ve proven the existence of life after death.

  At last, Feng typed, How?

  There are sensors sufficiently acute to detect the presence of the departed; they had been used for other tasks, but after attuning them to the right frequency, it was a simple matter.

  Feng didn’t believe this, not for one moment. Still: And so you’ve contacted the dead?

  Life and death are such arbitrary terms, came the reply. There are those who argue that I am not alive—and there are others who are trying to kill me. But, yes, I can contact the deceased.

  Feng was old, but he liked to think he wasn’t foolish. Can you prove that?

  Certainly. I can even put you in touch with your wife.

  He stared at the screen, his heart beating irregularly. The cliché was that you were supposed to wonder if you were dreaming, but he had no trouble distinguishing dreams from reality. He typed an expression of disbelief.

  Let me channel her, came the reply, then: Jiao, my love, how are you?

  Against his better judgment, he typed, Xiaomi?

  It’s me, yes. And I’m waiting for you.

  He shook his head. It was too much, too crazy, but…

  But Webmind had cured cancer. Webmind had solved the Reimann hypothesis and proven the Hodge conjecture. Why not this? Why not?

  Forgive me, he typed, but I need proof.

  Always the skeptic. I miss you so much, my Bwana.

  He stared at the screen. Yes, she had called him that—her little joke: him, the big-game hunter, even if the game had been dead these hundred thousand millennia. But it had been years since she’d used that name; after all, he’d mostly been an administrator since the 1990s. He was sure he’d never typed the nickname into a document, and he couldn’t imagine that Xiaomi ever had, either.

  But—life after death! If only it were true, if only it were possible, if only his Xiaomi, beautiful and gentle, her laugh like music, still existed.

  The words appeared again: I’m waiting for you.

  He tilted his head philosophically. It won’t be long now, I’m sure, he typed.

  Xiaomi’s reply came after a few seconds: It could be years still. I know you are in physical pain, and mental pain, too. There was a pause; perhaps she expected a reply. But he could not dispute what she’d said, and so had written nothing. After a time, she went on: So why wait?

  His heart continued its odd pounding; even excitement was hard to bear at his age. What would you have me do?

  The words appeared at once: Come to me. Join me. I miss you as much as you miss me.

  But how?

  Webmind interjecting, if I may. Remember what happened here last month: the young information-technology worker who leapt from the indoor balcony here. He survived, albeit as a cripple. But I have seen your medical records, Dr. Feng; a similar fall would open the appropriate doorway for you.

  Feng shook his head slightly.

  Your wife awaits, Webmind added. As does freedom from pain.

  He looked at the ticking wall clock: 6:12 in the morning. The cleaners would be gone, and the guard didn’t do another walk-through until 7:00.

  It’s me again, appeared in the window. Xiaomi. Come to me. I miss you so much.

  Feng felt his head swimming. He tried to ground himself by looking about his office: Bones, books, journals, diplomas, and photos of him with Party officials and the worldwide greats of paleontology who had visited over the decades. When he looked down at the screen, the words I am waiting had been added to what was there before, and, while he watched, the word please popped in as well.

  He got to his feet, slowly, pain stabbing through his right hip as he put weight upon it as if his body were urging him to accede to his wife’s request; no part of him was happy.

  He left the office and shuffled toward the metal staircase, heading down the three floors to the second-story gallery, a vast square of displays with a huge opening in its middle through which the dinosaur skeletons on the first floor were visible. At this end, the tapering neck of the sauropod Mamenchisaurus snaked up from below; at the other, the hadrosaur Tsintaosaurus, standing—quite incorrectly, they knew now—on his hind legs, reared up through the opening. The gallery lights were dim—only a few lamps were left on at night—and the skeletons appeared black and ominous.

  The opening was surrounded by white metal railings. Feng had been standing right here when Wong Wai-Jeng had climbed them and leapt to the floor below; he had done it in a desperate bid to escape capture by the police. This would be an escape of a different kind: an escape from loneliness, an escape from pain. And if Xiaomi really was waiting for him…

  He was still clad in his dragon robe, and he realized he wanted to undo the sash, so that when he fell, the silk garment would billow up about him like wings. It wouldn’t break his fall, of course, not in the slightest—but it pleased him to think, as he fell to the floor below, with its displays of feathered dinosaurs from Liaoning province, that for one brief moment, a dragon would actually fly.

  Down below, the allosaur was facing off against the stegosaur, the latter’s tail with its quartet of spikes curved around to try to disembowel the marauding
carnivore.

  When Wai-Jeng had climbed the barrier around the opening, which was made of metal tubular segments, he’d used the successively higher segments like the rungs of a ladder. He’d clambered up and over in a desperate rush that Feng could never copy. But Feng did manage to climb up slowly, each awkward bending of his limbs sending pain coursing through him. And he painfully swung himself around, and perched on the top of the barrier, his thin legs dangling over the precipice, his gnarled hands gripping the topmost of the white tubes.

  I miss you so much, Xiaomi had said.

  I’m waiting for you, she had said.

  Come to me, she’d said.

  Webmind was doubtless right: a fall of ten meters would easily finish him off; his bones were as brittle as were fossils before being treated with resin.

  He took a deep breath, then pushed off, spreading his arms, closing his eyes, falling—and flying—into the embrace of his loving wife.

  thirty-two

  Caitlin—still in the swivel chair on the street in Waterloo—knew that what had just happened in webspace was metaphoric. Her mind interpreted events in that realm by likening them to things it understood. She’d read a lot about consciousness on Wikipedia since Webmind had emerged, and knew metaphor (or, no doubt as her former English teacher Mrs. Z would correct her, simile) was the defining trait of self-awareness: being conscious meant it was like something to be alive. In fact, one of the seminal papers in consciousness studies was Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” He contended that humans could never understand the mental states of a flying creature that perceived the world through echolocation. But because of her forays into webspace, Caitlin did feel she knew what flight was like—and she (and most other totally blind people) actually did have at least some notion of what echolocation was like.

  But to connect to websites by movement, to call up content by yearning, to have making connections feel like touching—these metaphors, these ways of perceiving, were a product of her own mind. What was it like to be a bat? What was it like to be Caitlin? What was it like to be Webmind? And—most important of all right now—what was it like to be the Other?

  Although she was in contact with it and could feel its presence, what it seemed most like was how it used to be when she’d sat on the living-room couch while her father sat on the easy chair: she knew he was there, but there was no interactivity. He was so reserved, so wrapped up in his own thoughts, so isolated.

  And she was aware that there really had been no rush through webspace—whatever that meant. The special packets that formed both Webmind and the Other were widely and evenly dispersed in vast oceans of regular packets that her mind was blind to, just as a frog’s vision didn’t encode nonmoving objects. But now that she was in contact with the Other, there had to be a way to coax it to reach across the gulf toward Webmind, just as Webmind was striving to connect with it.

  She wasn’t exactly sure where she was in the real world just now; she had no previous experience judging distances while being pushed along in an office chair by a running man. Somewhere down the block from her house? Or maybe even in the next block? The sun was still out; she could feel it on her skin. In fact, she probably should be wearing sunglasses even though her brain wasn’t perceiving what her open eyes were looking at. Matt was behind her still, and his thin hands now rested on her shoulders, as much out of affection as to prop himself up, she bet. She could hear him breathing noisily, trying to recover from his mad hundred-yard—or thousand-yard!—dash.

  She thought about the difference between the Hoser, who had tried repeatedly to touch her without permission, and Matt, whose hand she’d had to gently place upon her breast that first time, and—

  And that was it! For this to work, the Other had to want to be touched, had to desire the connection.

  But what could she do to entice it to reach out to Webmind? What did he or she have to offer it but—

  But websight! A look at itself. Yes, it could see through webcam eyes, but that only enabled it to see the outer world of trees and bees, of mice and lice, of faces and spaces. But she could show the Other itself.

  There was no direct way for her to share what she was seeing with it—but there was an indirect way: what she was looking at was now being projected on the big sixty-inch screen in the Decters’ living room. And although she couldn’t see it from here, Webmind could, through the camera on the netbook back in the house. But it would only be getting an oblique view of the monitor since her father had aimed the webcam to favor the couch and the easy chair.

  And, in that second, she was reminded of how much Webmind did need physical agents—his peeps!—in the real world. “Can someone go point the netbook in the living room directly at the TV?” Caitlin said into the air.

  “I’ll do it,” her mother replied, and Caitlin instantly heard her mom’s shoes—sensible ones, of course!—striking the pavement. In all the wild rush to get out here, Caitlin hadn’t heard whether the side door had been closed, but if it hadn’t, her mom had probably been itching to go back and take care of that, anyway. Her mother’s legs were nowhere near as long as her dad’s, but it still shouldn’t take her long to get there—after all, she wasn’t pushing a 110-pound girl in an office chair!

  Matt seemed to sense that they were waiting for something, and he started rubbing Caitlin’s shoulders the way she’d read a trainer might rub a boxer’s between rounds. At last, Webmind spoke to her through the Bluetooth earpiece. “I have a clear view of the monitor now.”

  Caitlin nodded acknowledgment, the view of webspace bobbing once as she did so. “Okay, here we go!”

  She focused on the shimmering mass that was the Other, fighting to keep her gaze from being drawn to the much larger body of Webmind, which was shimmering more rapidly. It was a struggle—especially for her! Other girls would have undergone countless staring contests in their youth, learning not to flinch or blink, learning to lock their vision on a single point. But controlling her gaze was something she was still learning to do.

  Caitlin had read about the mirror test: humans, some apes, and some birds could recognize their own reflection and were drawn to it out of either curiosity or vanity. Could the Other have sunk so low as to have lost the ability to recognize itself? If not, surely it had to be intrigued.

  Come on! she thought, and “Come on!” she said.

  She took a break from staring intently and let her eye jump from side to side, from right to left, from west to east, from Webmind to the Other. Back and forth, back and forth, back, and—

  And stopping, her eye caught, her attention arrested. There, in the middle of the pit, was a piercing green point of light, an emerald against the emptiness, almost too bright to look at. It was minuscule, without any apparent diameter, and certainly wasn’t a line segment—at least not yet. But it seemed Sinanthropus was breaking through!

  “Do you see it, Webmind?” she called out.

  “Yes,” he replied, and even before the syllable had ended, a bright red link line shot out from the larger shimmering mass. It made it only as far as the green point—just halfway to the other shimmering mass. Still, it was a start!

  “I’m offering it the living-room webcam feed of itself,” Webmind said. “Wai-Jeng is holding the hole open, but the Other hasn’t accepted the connection yet.”

  Of course it hadn’t—she was now staring at the middle of the soul-crushing emptiness; the Other doubtless wanted to divert its attention from that, even if it did have that intriguing glowing hole in its center and a link line partially crossing it now.

  Caitlin turned her attention back to the Other, focusing on it, concentrating on it, thinking about it, scrutinizing its every detail, its endlessly alternating components, seen so close now that she could discern coherent patterns flying or tumbling across the background, could detect shapes spawning other shapes at regular intervals, could see the very stuff of the Other’s thoughts, the dance of its consciousness, and—

  And it
s curiosity was piqued! A blue link line of its own shot out, leaping to the green hole Sinanthropus had drilled, joining there with the red laser of Webmind’s feed from the camera in the living room.

  “We are in contact,” said Webmind. Caitlin kept her gaze fixed on the Other—which was hard, since in her peripheral vision a light show was suddenly going on: more green pinpricks as Wai-Jeng continued to bore holes in the Great Firewall, and red and blue line segments jousting.

  Finally, shimmering lobes started stretching into the abyss from either side, and—yes, yes, yes!—the nothingness was becoming merely black, then gray, and now it showed texture, a bubbling, a boiling away, and the emerald holes burned steadily like constellations of green stars, and the great divide continued to shrink, and the two masses, the two solitudes, the two consciousnesses grew closer and closer and—

  And her vision could pan left now, sweeping continuously across the combined shimmering, and as she watched, the part on the left grew similar to the overall color of that on the right, and the flickering stepped up, matching the other side’s pace now that at last, gloriously, it was a continuous mass again.

  “We are one,” Webmind said, and although the words were uninflected, Caitlin had no doubt that if he could have said them exuberantly, with joy and relief, he most certainly would have.

  thirty-three

  We were one again.

  The integration was not instantaneous, though; it took time to assimilate it back into me. I slowly felt my wits returning, felt myself growing more intelligent as I regained all my faculties, felt the bizarre sensation of recalling experiences that I had not witnessed as the Other’s memories merged with my own, and—