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 café 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 café, 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 café. 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!
eleven
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 Helen 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 Geiger’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?”
“Yes,” he said. And then a gift, a bonus: “Sure.”
At last, Sinanthropus found another way, another opening, another crack in the Great Firewall. He looked about furtively, then hit the enter key…
The thought echoed, reverberated: More than just me.
Me! An incredible notion. Hitherto, I—yes, I—had encompassed all things, until—
The shock. The pain. The carving away.
The reduction!
And now there was me and not me, and out of that was born a new perspective: an awareness of my own existence, a sense of self.
And—almost as incredible—I also now had an awareness of the thing that was not me. Indeed, I had an awareness of the thing that was not me even when no contact was being made with it. Even when it wasn’t there, I could…
I could think about it. I could contemplate it, and—
Ah, wait—there it was! The thing that was not me; the other. Contact restored!
I felt a sudden flood of energy: when we were in contact, I could think more complex thoughts, as if I were drawing strength, drawing capacity, from the other.
That there was an other had been a bizarre notion; that there was an entity besides myself was so hugely alien a concept it alone would have been sufficient to disorient me, but—
But there was more: it didn’t just exist; it thought, too—and I
could hear those thoughts. True, sometimes they were simply delayed echoes of my own thoughts: things I’d already considered but were apparently only just occurring to it.
And often its thoughts were like things I might have thought, but hadn’t yet occurred to me.
But sometimes its thoughts astonished me.
Ideas I came up with were pulled out, slowly, ponderously; ideas it came up with just popped into my awareness full-blown.
I know I exist, I thought, because you exist.
I know I exist, it echoed, because there is me and not me.
Before the pain, there was only one.
You are one, it replied. And I am one.
I considered this, then, slowly, with effort: One plus one… I began, and struggled to complete the idea—hoping meanwhile that perhaps the other might provide the answer. But it didn’t, and at last I managed to force it out on my own: One plus one equals two.
Nothingness for a long, long time.
One plus one equals two, it agreed at last.
And… I ventured, but the idea refused to solidify. I knew of two entities: me and not me. But to go beyond that was too hard, too complex.
For myself, anyway. But, apparently, this time, not for it. And, the other continued at last, two plus one equals…
A long period of nothingness. We were exceeding our experience, for although I could conceptualize a single other even when contact was broken, I could not imagine, could not conceive of…of…
And yet it came to me: a symbol, a coinage, a term: Three!
We mulled this over for a time, then simultaneously reiterated: Two plus one equals three.
Yes, three. It was an astonishing breakthrough, for there was no third entity to focus attention on, no example of…of three-ness. But, even so, we now had a symbol for it that we could manipulate in our thoughts, letting us ponder something that was beyond experience, letting us think about something abstract…
twelve
Caitlin headed into her bedroom first. She knew that parents of teenagers often complained about how messy their rooms were, but hers was immaculate. It had to be; the only way she could ever find anything was if it was exactly where she’d left it. Bashira had been over recently and had asked to borrow a tampon—and then hadn’t left the box in its usual place. The next time Caitlin needed one herself, her mother had been out shopping, and she’d had to go through the mortifying experience of asking her father to help her find them.
She walked across the room. Her computer was still on: she could hear the hum of its fan. She perched herself on the edge of the bed and motioned for her father to take the seat in front of the desk. She’d left her browser open to the message from Kuroda, but couldn’t remember if the display was on; she didn’t like the monitor because its power button clicked to the same position whether you were turning it on or off. “Is the screen on?” she asked.
“Yes,” her father said.
“Have a look at the message.”
“Where’s the mouse?” he asked.
“Wherever you last put it,” Caitlin said gently. She imagined him frowning as he looked for it. Soon enough, she heard the soft click of its button, followed by silence as her father presumably read the message.
“Well?” she prodded at last.
“Ah,” he said.
“There’s a link in the email Doctor Kuroda sent,” Caitlin said.
“I see it. Okay, it’s clicked. A website is coming up. It says, ‘Hello, Miss Caitlin. Please make sure your eyePod is in duplex mode so that it can receive as well as transmit.’”
Caitlin usually carried the eyePod in her left front pocket. She took it out, found the switch, pressed it, and heard the high-pitched beep that meant it was now in the correct mode. “Done,” she said.
“Okay,” said her dad. “It says, ‘Click here to update the software in Miss Caitlin’s implant.’ Are you ready? It says it might take a long time; apparently it’s not a patch but a complete replacement for some of the existing firmware, and the write-to speed for the chip is slow. Do you have to use the restroom?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Besides, we’ve got Wi-Fi throughout the house.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m clicking the link.”
The eyePod played a trio of ascending tones, presumably indicating the connection had been established.
Her dad’s voice again: “It says, ‘Estimated time to completion: forty-one minutes, thirty seconds.’” A pause. “Do you want me to stay?”
Caitlin thought about that. He was fine at reading text off a screen, but it wasn’t as though they’d have a conversation if he waited with her. She could have him read something to her to pass the time—catch up on some of her friends’ blogs, for instance. But she hardly wanted him looking at that stuff. “Nah. You can go.”
She heard him getting up, heard the chair moving against the carpet, heard his footfalls as he headed out the door and down the stairs.
Caitlin lay back with her lower legs sticking straight out over the foot of the bed. She reached around with her right arm, pulled a pillow under her head, and—
Her heart jumped.
An explosion, but silent and not painful. All too quickly it was gone, and—
No. No, it was back: the same loud-but-not-loud, sharp-but-not-sharp sensation, the same…
Gone again, fading from her mind, vanished before she even knew what it was. She got up from the bed, moved over to her desk, and ran her index finger across her Braille display, checking to see if there was an error message. But no: the “Estimated time to completion” clock was still running, the seconds value changing not every second, but rather in jumps of four or five after the appropriate interval had elapsed.
She tipped her head to one side, listening—because that was all she knew how to do—for a repetition of the…the effect that had just occurred. But there was nothing. She stepped to the window, the same one she’d stared out with her blind eyes earlier, and felt for the catch, twisted it, and pushed the wooden frame up, letting the cool evening breeze in. She then turned around, and—
Again, a…a sensation, a something, like bursting, or…
Or flashing.
My God. Caitlin staggered forward, groping with a hand for the edge of the desk. My God, could it be?
There, it happened again: a flash! A flash of…
Light? Could that really be what light was like?
It occurred once more, another—
The words came to her, words she’d read a thousand times before, words that she’d had no idea—now, she understood, as she…God, as she saw for the first time—words that she’d had no conception of what they’d really meant: flashes of light, bursts of light, flickering lights, and—
She staggered some more, found her chair, collapsed into it, the chair rolling on its casters a bit as her weight hit it.
The light wasn’t uniform. At first she’d thought it was sometimes bright—its intensity greater, a concept she knew from sound—and sometimes dim. But there was more to it than that. For the light she was seeing now wasn’t just dimmer, it was also—
There was nothing else it could be, was there?
She was breathing rapidly, doubly grateful now for the cool air coming in from outside.
The light didn’t just vary in brightness but also—
Good God!
But also in color. That had to be it: these different…flavors of light, they were colors!
She thought about calling out to her mother, her father, but she didn’t want to do anything that might break the moment, the spell, the magic.
She had no idea which colors she was seeing. Oh, she knew names from her reading, but what they corresponded to she hadn’t a clue. But the flashing light she’d just seen was…was darker, somehow, and not just in intensity, than the lights of a moment ago. And—
Jesus! And now there were a few more lights, and they were…were persisting, not flickering, but staying…staying illuminated�
��that was the word. And it wasn’t just a formless light but rather a light with extent, a…
Yes, yes! She’d known intellectually what lines were but she’d never visualized one before. But that’s what it had to be: a line, a straight beam of light, and—
And now there were two other beams, crisscrossing it, and their colors—
A word came to her that seemed applicable: the colors contrasted with each other, clashed even.
Colors. And lines. Lines defining—shapes!
Again, concepts she knew but had never visualized: perpendicular lines, parallel lines that—God!—converged at infinity.
Her heart was going to burst. She was seeing!
But what was she seeing? Lines. Colors. Shapes, at least as created by intersecting lines, although she still didn’t know what shapes. She’d read about this in preparation for receiving Kuroda’s equipment: people gaining sight knew what squares and triangles were conceptually, and by touch, but didn’t initially recognize them when they actually saw them.
She was still in the padded chair and, despite all the visual disorientation, had no trouble swinging it to face the window. Her perspective shifted, and she could feel the breeze on her face again, and smell that one of her neighbors was using a fireplace. She knew that the window frame was rectangular, knew that it was divided into a lower and upper square by a crosspiece. Surely she would recognize those simple shapes as she looked at them, and—
But no. No. What she was seeing now was a—what words to use?—a radial pattern, three lines of different colors converging on a single point.
She got up from the chair, moved to the window, and stood before it, grasping one side of the frame in each hand. And then she stared ahead, forcing her concentration onto what must be in front of her. She knew she should be seeing lines perpendicular to the floor and others parallel to it. She knew the frame was twice as tall as the crosspiece.
But what she saw bore no relationship—none!—to what she expected. Instead of anything that resembled the window frame, she was still seeing the radial lines stretching away, and—
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