“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—
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!
But . . .
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 . . .
And . . .
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!
eleven
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. “Sor
ry, 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.
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