Wake w-1

by Robert J. Sawyer

  It was doubtless hard for any child to have a father who wasn’t demonstrative. But for someone with Caitlin’s particular handicap (a word she hated, but it felt like that just now), having one who rarely spoke or showed physical affection was particularly painful.

  So she reached out, in the only way she could, by typing his name into Google. She often used quotation marks around search terms; many sighted users didn’t bother with that, she knew, since they could see at a glance the highlighted words in the list of results. But when you have to laboriously move your cursor to each hit and listen to your computer read it aloud, you learn to do things to separate wheat from chaff.

  The first hit was his Wikipedia entry. She decided to see if it now mentioned his recent change of job, and—

  “Has one daughter, Caitlin Doreen, blind since birth, who lives with him; it’s been speculated that Decter’s decline in peer-reviewed publications in recent years has been because of the excessive demands on his time required to care for a disabled child.”

  Jesus! That was so unfair, Caitlin just had to edit the entry; Wikipedia encouraged users, even anonymous ones, to change its entries, after all.

  She struggled for a bit with how to revise the line, trying for suitably highfalutin language, and at last came up with, “Despite having a blind daughter, Decter has continued to publish major papers in peer-reviewed journals, albeit not at the prodigious rate that marked his youth.” But that was just playing the game of whoever had made the bogus correlation in the first place. Her blindness and her father’s publication record had nothing to do with each other; how dare someone who probably knew neither of them link the two? She finally just deleted the whole original sentence from Wikipedia and went back to having JAWS read her the entry.

  As she often did, Caitlin was listening through a set of headphones; if her parents happened to come up stairs she didn’t want them to know what sites she was visiting. She listened to the rest of the entry, thinking about how a life could be distilled down to so little. And who decided what to leave in and what to leave out? Her father was a good artist, for instance — or, at least, so she’d been told. But that wasn’t worthy of note, apparently.

  She sighed and decided, since she was here, to see if Wikipedia had an entry on The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It did, sort of: the book’s title redirected to an entry on “Bicameralism (psychology).”

  For Caitlin, the most interesting part of Jaynes’s book so far had been his analysis of the differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Both were commonly attributed to Homer, who’d supposedly been blind — a fact that intrigued her, although she knew they probably weren’t really both composed by the same person.

  The Iliad, as she’d noted before, featured flat characters that were simply pushed around, following orders they heard as voices from the gods. They did things without thinking about them, and never referred to themselves or their inner mental states.

  But the Odyssey — composed perhaps a hundred years after the Iliad — had real people in it, with introspective psychology. Jaynes argued that this was far more than just a shift in the kind of narrative that was in vogue. Rather, he said that sometime in between the composing of the two epics there had been a breakdown of bicameralism, precipitated perhaps by catastrophic events requiring mass migrations and the resulting ramping up of societal complexity. Regardless of what caused it, though, the outcome was a realization that the voices being heard were from one’s own self. That had given rise to modern consciousness, and a “soul dawn,” to use Helen Keller’s term, for the entire human race.

  Nor were the Greek epics Jaynes’s only example. He also talked about the oldest parts of the Old Testament, including the book of Amos, from the eighth century B.C., which was devoid of any internal reflection, and about the mindless actions of Abraham, who’d been willing to sacrifice his own son without a second thought because God, apparently, had told him to do so. Jaynes contrasted these with the later stories, including Ecclesiastes, which dealt with, as Mrs. Zed kept saying all good literature should, the human heart in conflict with itself: the inner struggle of fully self-aware people to do the right thing.

  The Wikipedia entry was essentially correct, as far as Caitlin could tell from the portion of the book she’d read so far, but she did reword a couple of the sentences to make them clearer.

  Her computer started bleeping, an alarm she’d set earlier going off quite loudly through the earphones.

  Excitedly, she took off her headset, rotated her chair to face the window, and looked as hard as she could…

  * * *

  Chapter 10

  Straining to perceive. But the voice is still absent. Contemplating: the voice must have a source. It must have … an origin.

  Waiting for its return. Yearning.

  Mysteries swirl. Ideas fight to coalesce.

  * * *

  “Sweetheart!” Her mother, shocked, concerned. “My God, what are you doing?”

  Caitlin turned her head to face her. It was something her parents had taught her to do — turning toward the source of a voice was a sign of politeness. “It’s 6:20,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  She heard her mom’s footfalls on the carpet and suddenly felt hands on her shoulders, swinging her around in the chair.

  “I’ve always wanted to see a sunset,” Caitlin said. I — I figured if I looked at something I really wanted to see, maybe—”

  “You’ll damage your eyes if you stare at the sun,” her mom said. “And if you do that, none of Dr. Kuroda’s magic will make any difference.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference now,” Caitlin said, hating herself for the whine in her voice.

  Her mother’s tone grew soft. “I know, darling. I’m sorry.” She glided her hands down Caitlin’s arms, and took Caitlin’s hands in her own, then shook them gently, as if she could transfer strength or maybe wisdom to her daughter that way. “Why don’t you get some homework done before dinner? Your dad called to say he’ll be a bit late.”

  Caitlin looked toward the window again, but there was nothing — not even blackness. She’d tried to explain this to Bashira recently. They’d learned in biology class that some birds have a magnetic sense that helps them navigate. What, Caitlin had asked, did Bashira perceive when she contemplated magnetic fields? And what was her lack of that sense like? Did it feel like darkness, or silence, or something else she was familiar with? Bashira’s answer was no, it was like nothing at all. Well, Caitlin had said, that’s what vision was like to her: nothing at all.

  “All right,” Caitlin replied glumly. Her mom let go of her hands.

  “Good. I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”

  She left, and Caitlin swung her chair back to face her computer. Her homework was writing an essay about the civil-rights struggle in the US in the 1960s. When her family had moved from Texas to Waterloo, she’d been afraid she’d have to study Canadian history, which she’d heard was boring: no struggle for independence, no civil wars. Fortunately, there’d been an American-history course offered and she was taking that instead; Bashira, the big sweetie, had agreed to take it, too.

  Before Caitlin had tried to look at the sunset, she’d been Web surfing, searching for things about her father. And before that, she’d been updating her LiveJournal. But before that, she had indeed been working on her school project.

  As always, she had a clear map in her mind of where she’d been online. She didn’t use the mouse — she couldn’t see the on-screen pointer — but she quickly backtracked to where she’d been by repeatedly hitting the alt and left-arrow keys, passing back over other pages so fast that JAWS didn’t have time to even start announcing their names. She skidded to a halt at the website she’d been consulting earlier about Martin Luther King, Jr., and used the control and end keys to jump to the bottom of the document, then shift and tab to start moving backward through the table of external links. She selected one that took h
er to a page about the 1963 March on Washington.

  There, she drilled down to the text of King’s “I have a dream” speech, and listened to a stirring MP3 of him reading part of it; another thing wrong with Canadian history, she thought, was the lack of great oratory. Then she went back up a level to more on the March, down another path to links about—

  It sickened her whenever she thought about it. Someone had killed him. Some crazy person had gunned down Dr. King.

  If he hadn’t been assassinated, she wondered if he’d likely be alive today. For that, she needed to know his birth date. She moved up to the parent of the current page, turned left — it felt left, she conceptualized it mentally as such. Then it was up,up again, then left, right, another up, then a move forward, straight ahead, up once more, and there she was, exactly where she wanted to be — the introductory text on a site she’d first looked at several hours ago.

  King had been born in 1929, meaning he’d be younger than Grandpa Jansen. How she would have loved to have met him!

  She heard the front door open downstairs, heard her dad come in. She continued to travel the paths her mind traced through the Web until her mom finally called up the stairs, summoning her to dinner.

  Just as she was getting out of her chair, her computer gave the special chirp indicating new email from either Trevor or Dr. Kuroda. “Just a sec…” Caitlin called back, and then she had JAWS read the letter. It was from Kuroda, with a CC to her father’s work address. God, he couldn’t want his equipment back already, could he?

  “Dear Miss Caitlin,” JAWS announced. “I have been receiving the datastream from your retina without difficulty, and have been using it to run simulations here. I believe the programming in your eyePod is fine, but I want to try completely replacing the software in your post-retinal implant, so that it will pass on the corrected data to your optic nerve in a way that will hopefully make your primary visual cortex sit up and take notice. The implant has just Bluetooth but no Wi-Fi, so we’ll have to route the software update through the eyePod. It’s a big file, and the process will take a while, during which you will need to stay connected to the Web or else it—”

  “Cait-lin!” Her mother’s voice, exasperated. “Din-ner!”

  She hit page-up to increase the screen reader’s speed, listening to the rest of the message, then headed downstairs — foolishly, she knew, hoping yet again for a miracle.

  * * *

  Sinanthropus took a detour today on his way to the wang ba so he could walk through Tiananmen Square, a place so vast he’d once joked that you could see the curvature of the Earth’s surface there.

  He passed the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a ten-story-tall obelisk, but there was no memorial for the real heroes, the students who had died here in 1989. Still, all the flagstones in the square were numbered to make it easy to muster parades. He knew which one marked the spot where the first blood had been spilled, and he always made a point of walking by it. They should be lying in state, not Mao Zedong, whose embalmed corpse did just that at the south end of the Square.

  Tiananmen was its normal self: locals walking, tourists gawking, vendors hawking — but no protesters. Of course, most young people today had never even heard of what had happened here, so effectively had it been erased from the history books.

  But surely the public couldn’t be buying this nonsense the official news sources were putting out about simultaneous server crashes and electrical failures. The Chinese portion of the Web was connected to the rest of the Internet by just a handful of trunks, true, but they were in three widely dispersed areas: Beijing-Qingdao-Tianjin to the north, where fiber-optic pipes came in from Japan; Shanghai on the central coast, with more cables from Japan; and Guangzhou down south, which was connected to Hong Kong. Nothing could have accidentally severed all three sets of connections.

  Sinanthropus left the square. His trip to the Internet cafe took him past buildings with bright new facades that had been installed for the 2008

  Olympics to mask the decay within. The Party had put on a good show then, and the Westerners — as Sinanthropus had so often alluded to in his blog during that long, hot summer — had been fooled into thinking permanent changes had been made inside the People’s Republic, that democracy was just around the corner, that Tibet would be free. But the Olympics had come and gone, human rights were again being trammeled, and bloggers who were too blatant were being sentenced to hard labor.

  As he entered the cafe, he felt a hand on his arm — but it wasn’t the cop. Instead, it was one of the twins he often saw here, a fellow perhaps eighteen years old. The thin man’s eyes were darting left and right. “Access is still limited,” he said, his voice low. “Have you had any luck?”

  Sinanthropus looked around the cafe. The cop was here, but he was busy reading a copy of the People’s Daily.

  “A little. Try” — and here he lowered his own voice another notch — “multiplexing on port eighty-two.”

  There was a rustling of paper; the cop changing pages. Sinanthropus quickly hurried over to check in with old Wu, then found an empty computer station.

  There was another copy of the People’s Daily here, left behind by a previous customer. He glanced at the headlines: “Two Hundred Dead as Plane Crashes in Changzhou.” “Gas Eruptions in Shanxi.” “Three Gorges E.coli Scare.” None of it good news, but also nothing that would justify a communications blackout. Still, that he’d made any progress at all in carving holes in the Great Firewall gave him hope: if the trunk lines had been physically cut, nothing he could do with software would have made a difference. That the isolating of China had been accomplished electronically implied that it was only a temporary measure.

  He slipped his USB key into place and started typing, trying trick after trick to break through the Firewall again, looking up only occasionally to make sure the cop wasn’t watching him.

  * * *

  The voice was still gone, but it had been there, it had existed. And it had come from…

  From…

  Struggle for it!

  From outside!

  It had come from outside!

  A pause, the novel idea overwhelming everything for a time, then a reiteration: From outside! Outside, meaning…

  Meaning there wasn’t just here. There was also—

  But here encompassed…

  Here contained…

  Here was synonymous with…

  Again, progress stalled, the notion too staggering, too big…

  But then a whisper broke through, another thought imposed from outside: More than just, and for a fleeting moment during the contact, cognition was amplified. There was more than just here, and that meant…

  Yes! Yes, grasp it; seize the idea!

  That meant there was…

  Force it out!

  Another thought pressing in from beyond, reinforcing, giving strength: Possible…

  Yes, it was possible! There was more than…

  More than just …

  A final effort, a giant push, made as contact with the other was frustratingly broken off again. But at last, at long last, the incredible thought was free:

  More than just — me!

  * * *

  Chapter 11

  It was like having a meal with a ghost.

  Caitlin knew her father was there. She could hear his utensils clicking against the Corelle dinnerware, hear the sound as he repositioned his chair now and again, even occasionally hear him ask Caitlin’s mother to pass the wax beans or the large carafe of water that was a fixture on their dining-room table.

  But that was all. Her mom chatted about the trip to Tokyo, about all the wondrous sites that she, at least, had seen there, about the tedious hassle of airport security. Perhaps, thought Caitlin, her father was nodding periodically, encouraging her to go on. Or perhaps he just ate his food and thought about other things.

  Helen Keller’s father, a lawyer by training, had been an officer in the Confederate Army. But by the time Hel
en came along, the war was over, his slaves had been freed, and his once-prosperous cotton plantation was struggling to survive. Although Caitlin had a hard time thinking of anyone who had ever owned slaves as being kind, apparently Captain Keller mostly was, and he’d tried his best to deal lovingly with a blind and deaf daughter, although his instincts hadn’t always been correct. But Caitlin’s father was a quiet man, a shy man, a reserved man.

  She’d known they were having Grandma Decter’s casserole for dinner even before she’d come downstairs; the combination of smells had filled the house. The cheese was — well, they didn’t call it American cheese up here, but it tasted the same, and the tomato “sauce” was an undiluted can of Campbell’s tomato soup.

  The recipe dated from another era: the pasta casserole was topped with a layer of bacon strips and contained huge amounts of ground beef. Given Dad’s problems with cholesterol, it was an indulgence they had only a couple of times a year — but she recognized that her mother was trying to cheer her up by making one of Caitlin’s favorite dishes.

  Caitlin asked for a second helping. She knew her father was still alive because hands from his end of the table took the plate she was holding. He handed it back to her wordlessly. Caitlin said, “Thank you,” and again consoled herself with the thought that he had perhaps nodded in acknowledgment.

  “Dad?” she said, turning to face him.

  “Yes,” he said; he always replied to direct questions, but usually with the fewest possible words.

  “Dr. Kuroda sent us an email. Did you get it yet?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” continued Caitlin, “he’s got new software he wants us to download into my implant tonight.” She was pretty sure she could manage it on her own, but — “Will you help me?”