Analog SFF, December 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "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."

  * * * *

  Chapter 15

  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.

  T
hat 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!

  * * * *

  Chapter 16

  It was now way past Caitlin's bedtime, but—hot damn!—she was seeing the Web! Her mother and father stayed with her, and she kept downloading the new software over and over again into her implant in order to keep the Web connection open. Her father was (so her mom had told her) a good artist, and Caitlin was describing what she saw for him so he could draw it. Of course, she couldn't see the drawings, so none of them knew if he was getting it right but, still, it was important to have some sort of record, and—

  The phone rang. Caitlin had the caller ID hooked up through her computer, and it announced, “Long Distance, Unknown Caller."

  She hit the speakerphone button and said, “Hello."

  "Miss Caitlin,” wheezed the familiar voice.

  "Dr. Kuroda, hi!"

  "I have an idea,” he said. “Do you know about Jagster?"

  "Sure,” said Caitlin.

  "What's that?” asked her mom.

  "It's an open-source search-engine—a competitor for Google,” said Kuroda. “And I think it may be of use to us."

  Caitlin swiveled in her chair to face her computer and typed “jagster” into Google; not surprisingly, the first hit wasn't Jagster itself—no need for Coke to redirect customers to Pepsi!—but rather an encyclopedia entry about it. She brought the article up on screen so her mother could read it.

  From the Online Encyclopedia of Computing: GOOGLE IS THE de facto PORTAL TO THE WEB, AND MANY PEOPLE FEEL THAT A FOR-PROFIT CORPORATION SHOULDN'T HOLD THAT ROLE—ESPECIALLY ONE THAT IS SECRETIVE ABOUT HOW IT RANKS SEARCH RESULTS. THE FIRST ATTEMPT TO PRODUCE AN OPEN-SOURCE, ACCOUNTABLE ALTERNATIVE WAS WIKIA SEARCH, DEVISED BY THE SAME PEOPLE WHO HAD PUT TOGETHER WIKIPEDIA. HOWEVER, BY FAR THE MOST SUCCESSFUL SUCH PROJECT TO DATE IS JAGSTER.

  THE PROBLEM IS NOT WITH GOOGLE'S THOROUGHNESS, BUT RATHER WITH HOW IT CHOOSES WHICH LISTINGS TO PUT FIRST. GOOGLE'S PRINCIPAL ALGORITHM, AT LEAST INITIALLY, WAS CALLED PAGERANK—A JOKEY NAME BECAUSE NOT ONLY DID IT RANK PAGES BUT IT HAD BEEN DEVELOPED BY LARRY PAGE, ONE OF GOOGLE'S TWO FOUNDERS. PAGERANK LOOKED TO SEE HOW MANY OTHER PAGES LINKED TO A GIVEN PAGE, AND TOOK THAT AS THE ULTIMATE DEMOCRATIC CHOICE, GIVING TOP POSITIONING TO THOSE THAT WERE LINKED TO THE MOST.

  SINCE THE VAST MAJORITY OF GOOGLE USERS LOOK AT ONLY THE TEN LISTINGS PROVIDED ON THE FIRST PAGE OF RESULTS, GETTING INTO THE TOP TEN IS CRUCIAL FOR A BUSINESS, AND BEING NUMBER ONE IS GOLD—AND SO PEOPLE STARTED TRYING TO FOOL GOOGLE. CREATING OTHER SITES THAT DID LITTLE MORE THAN LINK BACK TO YOUR OWN SITE WAS ONE OF SEVERAL WAYS TO FOOL PAGERANK. IN RESPONSE, GOOGLE DEVELOPED NEW METHODS FOR ASSIGNING RANKINGS TO PAGES. AND DESPITE THE COMPANY'S MOTTO—"DON'T BE EVIL"—PEOPLE COULDN'T HELP BUT QUESTION JUST WHAT DETERMINED WHO NOW GOT THE TOP SPOTS, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING NUMBER TEN AND NUMBER ELEVEN MIGHT BE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN ONLINE SALES.

  BUT GOOGLE REFUSED TO DIVULGE ITS NEW METHODS, AND THAT GAVE RISE TO PROJECTS TO DEVELOP FREE, OPEN-SOURCE, TRANSPARENT ALTERNATIVES TO GOOGLE: “FREE” MEANING THAT THERE WOULD BE NO WAY TO BUY A TOP LISTING (ON GOOGLE, YOU CAN BE LISTED FIRST BY PAYING TO BE A “SPONSORED LINK"); “OPEN SOURCE” MEANING ANYONE COULD LOOK AT THE ACTUAL CODE BEING USED AND MODIFY IT IF THEY THOUGHT THEY HAD A FAIRER OR MORE EFFICIENT APPROACH; AND “TRANSPARENT” MEANING THE WHOLE PROCESS COULD BE MONITORED AND UNDERSTOOD BY ANYONE.

  WHAT MAKES JAGSTER DIFFERENT FROM OTHER OPEN-SOURCE SEARCH ENGINES IS JUST how TRANSPARENT IT IS. ALL SEARCH ENGINES USE SPECIAL SOFTWARE CALLED WEB SPIDERS TO SCOOT ALONG, JUMPING FROM ONE SITE TO ANOTHER, MAPPING OUT CONNECTIONS. THAT'S NORMALLY CONSIDERED DREARY UNDER-THE-HOOD STUFF, BUT JAGSTER MAKES THIS RAW DATABASE PUBLICLY AVAILABLE AND CONSTANTLY UPDATES IT IN REAL-TIME AS ITS SPIDERS DISCOVER NEWLY ADDED, DELETED, OR CHANGED PAGES.

  IN THE TRADITION OF SILLY WEB ACRONYMS ("YAHOO!” STANDS FOR “YET ANOTHER HIERARCHICAL OFFICIOUS ORACLE"), JAGSTER IS SHORT FOR “JUDICIOUSLY ARRANGED GLOBAL SEARCH-TERM EVALUATIVE RANKER"—AND THE BATTLE BETWEEN GOOGLE AND JAGSTER HAS BEEN DUBBED THE “RANKER RANCOR” BY THE PRESS...

  Caitlin and her parents were still on the phone with Dr. Kuroda in Tokyo. “I've got a conference call going here,” Kuroda said. “Also on the line is a friend of mine at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. She's part of the Internet Cartography Project. They use data from Jagster to keep track moment by moment of the topology of the Web—its constantly changing shape and construction. Dr. Decter, Mrs. Decter, and Miss Caitlin, please say hello to Professor Anna Bloom."

  Caitlin felt a bit miffed on behalf of her mom—she was Dr. Decter, too, after all, even if she hadn't had a university appointment since Bill Clinton was president. But there was nothing in her mother's voice to indicate she felt slighted. “Hello, Anna."

  Caitlin said, “Hello,” too; her father said nothing.

  "Hello, everyone,” Anna said. “Caitlin, what we want to do is keep the link between your post-retinal implant and the Web open, but instead of just going back and forth downloading and redownloading the same piece of software from Masayuki's site, we want to plug you directly into the datastream from Jagster."

  "What if it overloads her brain?” said Caitlin's mom, her tone conveying that she couldn't believe she was uttering such a sentence.

  "I rather doubt that's possible from what I've heard about Caitlin's brain,” Anna said warmly. “But, still, you should have your cursor on the ‘abort’ button. If you don't like what's happening, you can cut the connection."

  "We shouldn't be messing a
round like this,” her mom said.

  "Barbara, I do need to try things if I'm going to help Miss Caitlin see the real world,” Kuroda said. “I need to see how she reacts to different sorts of input."

  Her mother exhaled noisily, but didn't say anything else.

  "Are you ready, Miss Caitlin?"

  "Um—you mean right now?"

  "Sure, why not?” said Kuroda.

  "Okay,” Caitlin said nervously.

  "Good,” said Anna. “Now, Masayuki is going to terminate the software download, so I guess your vision will shut off for a moment."

  Caitlin's heart fluttered. “Yes. Yes, it's gone."

  "All right,” said Kuroda. “And now I'm switching in the Jagster datastream. Now, Miss Caitlin, you may—"

  He perhaps said more, but Caitlin lost track of whatever it was because—

  —because suddenly there was a silent explosion of light: dozens, hundreds, thousands of crisscrossing glowing lines. She found herself jumping to her feet.

  "Sweetheart!” her mom exclaimed. “Are you okay?” Caitlin felt her mother's hand on her arm, as if trying to keep her from flying up through the roof.

  "Miss Caitlin?” Kuroda's voice. “What's happening?"

  "Wow,” she said, and then “wow” and “wow” again. “It's ... incredible. There's so much light, so much color. Lines are flickering in and out of existence everywhere, leading to ... well, to what must be nodes, right? Websites? The lines are perfectly straight, but they're at all angles, and some..."

  "Yes?” said Kuroda. “Yes?"

  "I—it's...” She balled her fist. “Damn it!” She normally didn't swear in front of her parents, but it was so frustrating! She was way better than most people at geometry. She should be able to make sense of the lines and shapes she was seeing. There had to be a ... a correspondence between them and things she'd felt, and—

  "They're like a bicycle wheel,” she said suddenly, getting it. “The lines are radiating in all directions, like spokes. And the lines have thickness, like—I don't know, like pencils, I guess. But they seem to ... to..."

  "Taper?” offered Anna.