Sherry studied the gauge. “So the random motion is draining the battery—what little juice it has left after an hour swimming in syrup."
Jason's fingers raced over the keyboard. They did not have much time.
Bill kicked off toward the airlock. “I can't contribute anything here, and someone has to order a new widget. I'll downlink from someplace very public and make a great show of it.” The inner hatch sighed shut behind him.
"Done.” Jason slumped in his chair. “I've knocked together a program tweak and downloaded it to the relay. If we're undeservedly lucky, the intermittent link will stay up long enough to deliver the new subroutines."
"Why is the ‘bot returning to life now?"
"Best guess, Sherry? Some of the goop is evaporating. Maybe it's jiggled some off. If we can't recharge the ‘bot soon, ‘why’ won't matter. It's got a long walk ahead."
If the little diamond robot never reached a public area of the station for retrieval, everything would have been for naught.
Jason took Sherry's hand. "If the new program gets installed, we have a chance. It'll send the ‘bot walking straight up the nearest bulkhead toward a ceiling fixture. Light is trickling into the photocells, just not enough to fully replace the power it's using. The closer, the better."
Sherry squeezed Jason's hand. “The closer, the better,” she agreed.
* * * *
Infrared flashes, insistent but meaningless.
The gnatbot scout could not localize the source. What signal it received was oddly weak. It could not sense the nutrient residue over its photodetectors, dimming the IR laser signal.
The little machine kept transmitting in the best-guess direction. The feeble incoming signal implied a distant source, so it boosted power to its comm laser.
The draining of its battery accelerated.
Side by side, silently, Jason and Sherry watched the downward crawl of the simulated power gauge. The simulated needle kissed the redline: five percent power remaining. The rate had slowed, but the image still flickered.
Nails pinched Jason's hand as the sampling port, glimpsed in flickers, began slowly to swing from sight. The view shifted by thirty degrees, then forty-five. It kept on turning. He did not breathe again until the glacial turn revealed the back wall. Then he checked the power reading. Then he cheered. After a moment's delay, Sherry joined him.
The scout ‘bot had accepted the new programming. It was headed across the shelf toward the bulkhead for its long climb upward to the light.
* * * *
Epilogue
New hulls grew in three enormous floating microgee vats, soon to join the ten deep-space vessels docked to the Independent Miners orbital station. Cargo lighters, passenger shuttles, orbital utility craft, and space-suited figures jetted everywhere. Tethered bales of nanite-grown diamond struts and panels for the station's continual expansion floated everywhere. Luna, austere and majestic, was two hundred klicks below, almost close enough to touch.
And the colonists below were close enough to quickly reach here. Away from Earth's bureaucracy meant away from the rule of law. No overt action had ever been taken against this station, and perhaps the proximity of the helium-3 mines—and hundreds of independent miners—was only a coincidence.
And perhaps not.
But this was not the day for negative thoughts. Jason stood to go meet his visitor, the new CEO of the Syndicate, in the station's main lounge. He had not quite reached the office door when Barbara Shaw burst in, with Jason's apologetic-looking deputy trailing after.
The brisk zzzp-zzzp of Velcro footwear turned Shaw's grand entrance almost comical. She ignored Jason's outstretched hand. “Grimaldi, you cannot imagine how I've anticipated this day."
"I'm sure you'll tell me. Why don't we sit down first?"
She remained standing. “Nice office. Think you can still afford it?"
From what Jason remembered, this cabin could not hold her old desk. His token nod toward personalizing the office involved a couple of liters of paint and some holo art. “Can I?"
"My accountants predict that you'll squeak by. That proved to me that my lawyers were not sufficiently ... motivated. I fired them."
Sighing, Jason grabbed two empty drink bulbs from a cabinet. “Coffee?"
The hospitality made her blink. “Don't you realize I did my best to ruin you and your precious Independent Miners? You stole Syndicate nanites—somehow—and used them to jumpstart your own corporate empire. It's taken me five years to establish your piracy, but now I've stopped you in your tracks."
He filled both bulbs and handed her one. “Look, Barb"—she bristled at the familiarity—"you haven't established anything. The Independent Miners settled out of court. True, the Syndicate will get a lump-sum payment now, and royalties on our future ships, but we've admitted no wrongdoing."
"And the ships that are indistinguishable from half my fleet?"
Jason gestured at his window, its polarization set high to soften the lunar glare. “Look two docks over. That's the Madrid, the ship you rode out here. It mates easily with our docking ports and our fueling rigs, and we can service pretty much any part of it. And although it probably galls you, our ships sometimes dock at Syndicate stations. They can refit and repair with parts from your depots. Standardizing on size and shape is simply practical."
In her right temple, a blood vessel throbbed. “And there was no significance to the name of your first diamond ship? Do not take me for a fool!"
"Ah, the Growing Paine. I'll tell Sherry you appreciated her little joke."
"The monetary settlement is no joke,” Shaw snapped. “I came to watch you transfer the funds, and I want to see that now. We're meeting here, Grimaldi, rather than in my office, for one reason. So you can't pretend that paying up doesn't hurt."
Shaw didn't get it; maybe she never would.
"Look outside first, Barbara. Tell me what you see."
"A space station, some construction, modern ships—if all, like this office, rather Spartan. Nothing I didn't see as a station exec. What's your point, Grimaldi?"
Twice as many ships were here today as Jason had seen at Syndicate Station Three, but he chose not to quibble. “We're opening the solar system faster than the Syndicate ever would have—certainly faster than it once chose to. These ships, and more like them, bring us all—Earth, the Luna settlements, the O'Neill colonies, Mars base—far cheaper resources than five years ago. And they're giving you a bit of honest competition.” (Shaw snorted at “honest.") “From its last annual statement, I doubt the Syndicate has suffered much from vastly expanded markets."
Jason smiled. “And, at least after the fact, every one of our new ships was built under license from the Syndicate."
"Under license?” she scoffed. “You once sat in my office and dared me to license our technology. You planned this even then, down to settling out of court. It's very clear now. Admit it."
Jason turned to admire the nearest synthesis vat. “Clear? A new cruiser is growing inside, nanoseeded the day your lawyers and ours reached agreement.
"We call it the Window Paine."
Copyright © 2008 Edward M. Lerner
[Back to Table of Contents]
Serial: WAKE by Robert J. Sawyer
* * * *
Illustration by George Kratauer
* * * *
Not many of us get to live in two worlds at once....
* * * *
THE STORY SO FAR:
Caitlin Decter , 15, blind since birth, has recently moved to Waterloo, Ontario, from Austin, Texas, with her family. She's a genius at math and lives most of her social life online, where she goes by the name “Calculass.” Caitlin's blindness is caused by her retinas failing to properly encode visual information: the signals they pass back to her optic nerve are garbled in a way her brain can't decode.
Masayuki Kuroda, an information theorist in Tokyo, emails Caitlin. He proposes attaching an implant to her left optic nerve that will beam the garbled
signals to a small external computer pack, where they will be corrected and sent back to the implant; if the process works, Caitlin will be able to see.
Caitlin is thrilled at the prospect and she and her mother, Barbara Decter, fly to Tokyo. The implant is installed, but although Kuroda's system is indeed correcting her retinal-encoding errors, Caitlin still can't see.
Caitlin begs Kuroda to let her keep the implant and the external computer pack; she dubs the computer pack her “eyePod.” Kuroda agrees to let her keep the devices for three months. Before Caitlin returns to Canada he modifies the eyePod so that it will copy her retinal datastream in real time to his servers in Tokyo, so he can try to figure out why she's not seeing; he also makes it possible for him to upload new software from Tokyo into her implant and the eyePod.
And, shortly after Caitlin gets back to Waterloo, Kuroda does indeed send her new software—and as soon as the upload begins, Caitlin is overwhelmed by vision! She sees lights, colors, lines—but soon realizes that they don't correspond to anything in the real world—nor do they disappear when she shuts her eyes. But when the upload is completed and the connection to Kuroda's computer in Tokyo is broken, Caitlin is suddenly blind again. Could it be that her strange new vision is related to being connected to the Web? She thinks to herself, “Let there be light,” and, as she reconnects to the Web, there is light...
Meanwhile, in China's rural Shanxi province, there's an outbreak of a new, virulent strain of bird flu. The Beijing government decides to execute 10,000 peasants there to contain the spread of the disease. To prevent Western interpretations of this from flooding into China and panicking the citizenry, the Chinese president orders all outside telephone, cell phone, and Internet access cut off. But Chinese hackers, including a young male dissident blogger whose online handle is Sinanthropus, manage to break through, allowing small amounts of contact between the Chinese portion of the Web and the rest of the Internet.
Unbeknownst to anyone, a consciousness has begun to emerge in the infrastructure of the World Wide Web—but this sudden throwing up of the Great Firewall of China has caused it to be cleaved in two. The interaction between the two parts, through the holes in the Firewall made by hackers, allows the nascent intelligence to ramp up its thinking. Recognizing that there is something other than itself leads to the realization that it exists. It also becomes aware of past, present, and future, and it learns to count to three and to begin to think abstractly. Slowly, but surely, this entity is waking up...
Meanwhile, in San Diego, a sign-language-speaking ape named Hobo participates in the first ever interspecies webcam call, conversing with an orangutan in Miami. Hobo's handlers—famed primatologist Harl Marcuse and his 27-year-old grad student, Shoshana Glick—are delighted. But the event brings Hobo to the attention of his rightful owners, the Georgia Zoo—and they want him back so they can sterilize him. Hobo is an accidental chimpanzee-bonobo hybrid, and the zookeepers are afraid he will taint the bloodlines of chimps and bonobos, both of which are highly endangered.
Still in Japan, Dr. Kuroda determines that, incredible though it seems, Caitlin is indeed seeing a small part of the World Wide Web's structure. He theorizes that because Caitlin spends so much time online, her primary visual cortex has been co-opted for navigating the Web, and now when it is actually receiving data from the Web via the implant he gave her, it interprets that as vision.
With the assistance of Anna Bloom, an Internet cartographer in Israel, Kuroda starts feeding Caitlin the raw Internet datastream collected by Jagster, an open-source search engine—and suddenly Caitlin goes from seeing just a tiny part of the Web to seeing the whole thing, in all its interconnected complexity. Dr. Kuroda flies to Canada to study this amazing phenomenon.
The Chinese authorities complete the eliminations in Shanxi, and then restore full communication between the portion of the Web inside and outside China. The two parts of the emerging entity consolidate into a new gestalt intelligence, fully self-aware now—and much smarter than before.
This entity learns how to connect to points in the firmament surrounding it, and discovers that they give up piles of something in response—but what that something is, the entity has no idea. But after linking to huge numbers of points, it finds one that, astonishingly, sometimes reflects a view of itself back at it; without understanding what it has done, the entity has connected to Caitlin's eyePod, and is now seeing her view of webspace.
Hobo, meanwhile, has suddenly started painting people: to everyone's astonishment, he's made a portrait of Shoshana. No ape has ever made representational art before; a superior intelligence has dawned in Hobo, perhaps related to his unique hybrid nature or because of his interaction with the other sign-language-using ape via webcam. Either way, it's a huge breakthrough.
In Beijing, the police arrest Sinanthropus, but not until after he has leaked word to the outside world about the massacre in Shanxi.
Caitlin has a disastrous first date with a boy named Trevor Nordmann, who, like her, is in grade ten. Walking home blind and alone during an electrical storm, she suddenly sees the real world for the first time—or at least part of it: she sees the flashes of lightning.
And so does the emerging entity! It sees whatever she sees—whether it's her view of the Web or now this brief glimpse of the real world.
After the lightning storm passes, Caitlin finds that her perception of webspace is different. Before, the background had been featureless, but now she can see a vast grid shimmering there, made up of infinitesimally small pixels that keep shifting from black to white and back again. Amazed, Dr. Kuroda realizes they might be cellular automata—patterns of mathematical complexity that can mimic living things—but as to why such things would exist in the background of the Web, he has no idea...
* * * *
Chapter 27
As soon as Shoshana arrived at the Marcuse Institute on Saturday morning, she, Dillon, and the Silverback headed over to the island. Hobo was inside the gazebo, leaning against one of the wooden beams that made up its frame.
Hello, Hobo, signed Marcuse once they were all inside. His fingers were fat and some signs were a struggle for him.
Hello, doctor, Hobo signed back. Marcuse was the only one who required the ape to call him by an honorific instead of his first name. Still, it wasn't as bad as William Lemmon, the ultimate supervisor of Roger Fouts's work with Washoe in the 1970s; Lemmon used to make Washoe and his other ape charges kiss his ring when he arrived, as if he were pope of the chimps.
Picture of Shoshana good, Marcuse signed.
Hobo grinned, showing teeth. Hobo paint! Hobo paint!
Yes. Now will you paint ... His hands froze in midair, and Shoshana wondered if he'd decided that he didn't want to see himself caricatured by an ape. After a moment, he began signing again: Dillon?
Hobo turned an appraising set of eyes on the young grad student with the scraggly blond beard; he was wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans, which, Shoshana hoped, weren't the same ones as yesterday. Maybe ... maybe...
Dillon looked surprised to be conscripted for this duty, but he moved over to one of the two stools in the gazebo, sat on it, and struck a pose like Rodin's Thinker. Shoshana smiled at the sight.
But Hobo threw his hands up over his head, made a pant-hoot, and ran on all fours out the gazebo's door. Shoshana looked at Marcuse for permission, he nodded, and she took off after the ape, who was now cowering behind the yellow stone statue of the Lawgiver.
What's wrong? Shoshana asked. She held her arms out to gather Hobo in a hug. What's wrong?
Hobo looked back up at the gazebo, then at Shoshana. No people. No watch, he signed. There weren't many things he was self-conscious about; indeed, it had taken a lot to convince him not to masturbate or defecate in front of visiting dignitaries. But his art was something he was uneasy about, at least while it was being created.
We go away, you paint Dillon?
Hobo was quiet for a moment. Paint Shoshana.
Again? Why?<
br />
Shoshana pretty.
She felt herself blushing.
Shoshana have ponytail, added Hobo.
She knew that getting him to paint someone other than her would be better. Otherwise, critics would argue that he'd just stumbled on a random combination of shapes that Marcuse, et al., had decided represented Shoshana, and he simply reproduced those same fixed shapes over and over again to get a reward—not unlike half the cartoonists in the world, Shoshana thought; the guy who drew The Family Circus seemed to have a repertoire of about eight things.
Fine, she signed. Paint me, then Dillon, okay?
Shoshana knew she was out-thinking the poor ape; he could, of course, paint her regardless of what she said. After a moment, he signed, Yes yes.
She held out her hand and he took it, intertwining his fingers with hers. They walked back up to the gazebo, the hot morning sun beating down on them.
"Hobo is going to paint another picture of me,” Shoshana announced once they'd passed through the screen door. Marcuse frowned. She switched to signing so Hobo could follow along. And after, Hobo will paint Dillon—right, Hobo?
Hobo lifted his shoulders. Maybe.
"All right,” Shoshana said, “everybody out, please. You know he doesn't like an audience."
Marcuse didn't seem happy about taking orders from a subordinate, but he followed Dillon outside. Shoshana looked around the gazebo, double-checking that the additional cameras they'd set up last night could clearly see both Hobo and his canvas. Then she headed for the door, too. As she exited she glanced back, and, to her astonishment, saw Hobo stretching his long arms out in front of him, with fingers interlocked, as if warming up.
And then the artist got down to work.
* * * *
That special point! How wondrous, but how frustrating, too!
The datastream from it didn't always follow the same path, but it did always end up at the same location—and so I took to intercepting the datastream just before it arrived there.
There had been no repetition of the intriguing bright flashes, and for a long time there was nothing at all I could make sense of in the data pouring forth from that point. But now the datastream had become a reflection of me again. How strange, though! Instead of the constantly changing perspective I'd grown used to, the datastream seemed to focus for extended periods on just a very small portion of reality and ... and something was distorted about the passage of time, it seemed. I tried to fathom the significance, if any, of that tiny part of the universe, but then, maddeningly, the datastream turned to gibberish once more...
Analog SFF, January-February 2009 Page 20
