Wonder w-3
Page 23
“Mom, the TV?” Caitlin said. Her mother scooped up the remote, which had been on the white couch, and she turned the set on. Caitlin, meanwhile, went over to the netbook on the bookcase and woke it up. “Webmind,” she said into the air, “can you show them what I’m seeing on the big screen?”
“Set the TV’s input to AUX,” Webmind replied from the netbook’s speakers. Caitlin saw her mother peering at the remote, but, after a second, she figured out how to do it.
The video feed from Caitlin’s left eye filled the sixty-inch screen. The image jumped about several times a second as Caitlin’s eye performed saccades.
“So cool!” said Bashira, her voice full of wonder. And then Bash’s eyes went wide as she saw herself in profile as Caitlin turned to look at her. After a moment, Bashira composed herself and handed the Bluetooth headset to Caitlin, who slipped it over her left ear. “Webmind, are you there?”
“I’m here, Caitlin,” he said, both through the netbook’s speakers and through the earpiece.
“All right,” Caitlin said, looking at Matt and Bashira. “When I go in, I see webspace all around me, and my vision in there follows where my eye looks out here—get it?” Bashira and Matt nodded. Caitlin reached out and took Matt’s hand, and she gave it a squeeze. “Okay, here I go.” She sat on the swivel chair, brought her eyePod out of her pocket, and pressed the button, switching the unit to duplex mode.
Webspace exploded around her—but it was immediately obvious that something was wrong. Yes, she could see the geometrically perfect lines representing links and the colored circles representing nodes, but behind it all, the usual shimmering backdrop that represented Webmind’s very substance had been rent in two. To her right was a smaller flickering section and on her left a larger one, and they were separated by a horrific emptiness.
It reminded her of something she’d tried to explain to Bashira, when Bash had asked her what not seeing was like. Bashira had wanted to hear that Caitlin saw something—and, indeed, now that she did have sight, when it was terminated by going into a dark room or shutting off her eyePod, she saw a soft gray background. But prior to gaining sight, she’d seen nothing at all—and that’s what the forlorn abyss between the two shimmering sections was like: not darkness, not emptiness, but an all-encompassing void, a hole in perception, a gap in the fabric of reality; to call it black would have been elevating it to normalcy. This nothingness wasn’t just absence, it was anti-existence: if she allowed herself to contemplate it for more than a second or two, it felt as though her very soul were boiling away.
Her perception bounced left and right, avoiding the gaping wound in the middle, saccades leapfrogging the fissure. As her vision switched between the two masses of cellular automata, she found herself comparing them. Caitlin knew that she saw odd-value automata as pale green and even-value ones as pale blue—or perhaps the other way around—and taken in aggregate, the overall effect of them switching from one to the other was a silvery shimmering. But the mass on the left was much greener than the one on the right. As if to underscore how different they were, the rate at which they were changing, as evidenced by the rapidity of the shimmering, was slower on the right.
The left-hand part was sending tendrils toward the intervening gorge, pseudopods of cognition trying to bridge the gap… but the ends of the tendrils were flattened, as if they were bumping up against an invisible barrier.
She heard Webmind’s voice coming in from the outside world—even though his voice had started here, in this realm. “It’s worse than I thought,” he said, and Caitlin realized he was now seeing all this in a way he never could on his own; he perceived the lines and nodes, but the shimmering background—the stuff of his thought—was normally invisible to him. Only by accessing Caitlin’s websight could he see himself.
“We’re going to need help,” Caitlin said.
“We have it,” Webmind replied. “Our man in Beijing.”
Caitlin shook her head slightly—causing the view of webspace to rock back and forth. “Who’s that?”
“A former freedom blogger named Wong Wai-Jeng,” said Webmind. “He blogged under the name Sinanthropus.”
Caitlin felt her eyebrows going up. “The guy Dr. Kuroda operated on?”
“Yes.”
“Does he speak English? Can I talk to him?”
“He is not in a position to speak aloud; he is inside the Zhongnanhai complex—the government center in Beijing; they use satellite links there to bypass their own Great Firewall.”
Caitlin snorted. “Of course.”
“The irony is not lost on me, Caitlin. Nor is the opportunity: because he is there, I can communicate with him even if the rest of China is almost completely inaccessible to me. As you can see, I am trying to reach the Other but have been stymied in breaking through. Wai-Jeng was already working on another project for me, but now he is pounding out code at his end, attempting to open a hole in the Firewall.”
“And what should I do?”
“See if you can contact the Other.”
“Other?”
“Yes—the part that’s been carved away. As I said, the Chinese government has been forced to keep a few channels open, for ecommerce and other key functions. You are perceiving the Other through those channels, and your nimbleness in webspace may allow you to make contact when I cannot.”
Caitlin frowned and concentrated on the kaleidoscopic panorama. She was conceptualizing the two masses as left and right, as west and east. There was no gravity here—Webmind had told her how hard it had been for him to come to conceptualize the notion of a universal downward pull—but perhaps if she reconfigured her mental image so that the smaller mass was above the larger, it might start pouring down into the bigger one? She tilted her head far to one side, and the image rotated through almost ninety degrees.
Nothing changed except the orientation. Of course: there was an external reality to all this, and despite what her father had tried to teach her about the observer shaping that which was observed, altering the perspective did not change the behavior of the far-off bits. The smaller mass of automata now simply hung above the abyss.
Caitlin straightened her neck, and her view rotated back to horizontal, the larger lobe again on the left and the smaller one on the right. She forced her gaze to bounce even more rapidly between the two parts, imitating the way in which she’d first taught Webmind to make links, hoping that the Other might start making its own effort to reach out to Webmind.
Nothing happened. Although Webmind was visibly stretching toward the Other, the Other was making no effort to reach out from its side of the void. Either it had forgotten how to make a link, or it was unaware of the overture from Webmind, or—and Caitlin prayed in her best atheist way that this wasn’t the case—it simply didn’t want to reconnect with the rest.
During previous visits to webspace, Caitlin had tried—really tried—to go closer to the shimmering background. But no matter how much she focused on the backdrop, she’d been unable to move toward it. She could travel along link lines, zooming like a luge down a racing chute, but there’d been no way to close the distance between herself and the remote background. But if she could reach out and touch the Other—
She concentrated. She stretched—physically, straining in her chair. She closed her eyes and balled her fists, and—
She was still learning to do depth perception; she saw with only a single eye, after all, and couldn’t rely on stereoscopic effects, but—
But, yes, she had read this. If something in the distance was of a fixed size and appeared to grow larger, then it was actually getting closer. And the shimmering pixels in the background did seem ever so slightly larger when she strained forward with all her might in the chair. Which meant she could get nearer to them, but—
But as she watched, they seemed to shrink again, almost as if in bashful response to her attention. If she was going to touch them, she’d have to go in quickly.
And she couldn’t—God damn it, she
could not. Her whole life, she’d only run short distances in carefully controlled environments; a blind person didn’t have the luxury of going for a jog, let alone sprinting.
Right now she was seeing webspace—just as another person saw the real world. Still, she could simultaneously visualize other things, just as anyone might conjure up an image of one thing while looking at another. She brought up a mental picture of her real-world surroundings. She was in the living room, between the couch and the easy chair; her mother was seated on the former and Bashira on the latter. To her left was the big-screen TV. In front of her was the dining room, and beyond it, the kitchen. To her right was Matt, standing at her side, and past him there was the entryway, and the staircase leading to the second floor, and the little bookcase with the netbook on it. And behind her—
Behind her was the long corridor leading down to the washroom, and her father’s den, and the utility room, and the house’s side door. If she couldn’t run while seeing the real world, she certainly couldn’t do it while looking at the crisscrossing lines of webspace. But she needed to move quickly to reach the shimmering mass that represented the Chinese portion of the Web; she needed to practically fly if she were to touch the Other.
And so she held out a hand—although she couldn’t see it. “Matt?”
His hand took hers, and from the sound of his voice he had crouched beside her. “I’m here, Caitlin.”
“I need your help…”
thirty-one
Wai-Jeng’s hands danced over the keyboard with an ease they hadn’t felt for weeks. He was proficient at Perl—the duct tape of the Web—and had a thousand tricks at his command. Here, in the room devoted to plugging holes, he had access to port-sniffers, Wireshark, Traceback, and all the other tools of the hacker’s trade—electronic awls to pierce with, software pliers to bend with, subroutine wrenches to twist with.
This iteration of the Great Firewall was stronger than the last, and presumably he alone here in the Blue Room was working to slash it open; all the others were attempting to shore it up. But Wai-Jeng had an additional resource now, something he hadn’t possessed when he’d managed to break through the earlier, less sophisticated barrier: he had Webmind himself for his beta tester. Linus’s law said that with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow—and Webmind had more eyes than even the Communist Party.
Sinanthropus’s hands flew across the keyboard, the keyclicks an anthem of freedom.
Caitlin felt herself rushing through webspace, felt herself streaking toward the shimmering backdrop that represented the Chinese Webmind, felt herself racing along, felt the incredible rush of speed, felt the giddy exhilaration of being a projectile, a rocket, felt—yes, indeed!—her hair whipping in the breeze!
Bashira’s voice from the outside world, from far away, from way behind her: “Faster! Faster!”
The reckless surge continued, and—yes, yes, yes!—the background pixels were growing, were taking on distinctive shapes. She was getting closer!
Sounds like thunder behind her—beside her—in front of her, and her mother’s voice: “Go, Matt, go!”
And now Matt’s voice, a mixture of huffing and cracking: “Are… you… there… yet?”
The pixels growing larger still, so big that she could easily see individual ones flipping from green to blue and back again, their arrangements forming geometric patterns.
“No!” Caitlin shouted. “It’s still a long way off.”
Thunder now echoing from the rear and Bashira’s voice over top of it: “Faster, Matt!”
The background moving into the foreground, the cellular automata resolving themselves into animated, living things—
Her mom: “I’ve got the door!”
Banging, clanging, wood against wood, suddenly all echoes stopping, and—yes!—birdcalls! Cool air on her face, and—
Oh, my God!
Matt, voice cracking: “Hang on!”
Bump bump bump bump bump!
Getting there, getting there, and—a sharp left turn? What—no! Damn! “No, no, no!” Caitlin yelled. “I have to go that way!” She pointed to her right with a hand she couldn’t see.
“Working on it!” Matt said, his voice straining with exertion.
The cellular automata were sliding by now as if she were skimming above them, a meteor glancing off the atmosphere—but the field of pixels was coming to an end; she was reaching its edge.
“Turn!” Caitlin said. “Turn now!”
“Almost… to… the… street!” Matt called.
Sliding by, sliding by…
“And—now!” exclaimed Matt.
More bumps, then careening, almost tipping over, her heart jumping as she thought she’d be thrown from the chair—
Suddenly, a smoother ride, with Matt pushing her as hard and as fast as he could, his running shoes slapping against asphalt now.
She was going in the right direction again, surging forward, falling downward, flying upward—the sensation kept shifting, but regardless of which she felt, the wall of cellular automata was again growing closer.
Her mom’s voice, breathy, ragged: “I can… take over…”
Matt, firmly. “No! I’ve got her!”
A headlong rush, her hair flying behind her.
Two quick toots of a car horn—a driver remarking on the spectacle of Matt furiously pushing her down the street in an office chair.
“Almost there!” Caitlin said, and—
Bam! She shook violently and thought again that she was going to be thrown from the chair.
“Sorry!” Matt huffed. “Pothole!”
The ride steadied, and they zoomed farther along, and the cellular automata grew ever larger, more distinct, more alive. She could almost touch the flickering wall of them, almost reach the Other, almost… almost… almost…
Woot!
Woohoo!
Contact!
Since his wife had died earlier this year, Dr. Feng often slept on the small couch in his office at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. It was against the rules, of course, but as everyone who lived in the People’s Republic knew, there were rules and there were rules. The security guards and cleaning staff knew what he was doing; indeed, they sometimes turned off his office light and gently closed the door for him when he fell asleep without doing those things himself.
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 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.