Wake

by Robert J. Sawyer

  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!

  sixteen

  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 around 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, t
o 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.

  “Yes, exactly! They taper away as if I’m seeing them at an angle. At any moment, some have only one or two lines connecting them; others have so many I can’t begin to count them.”

  She paused, the enormity of it all sinking in at last. “I’m seeing the World Wide Web! I’m seeing the whole thing.” She shook her head in wonder. “Sweet!”

  Kuroda’s voice: “Amazing. Amazing.”

  “It is amazing,” Caitlin continued, and she could feel her cheeks starting to hurt from smiling so much, “and…and…my God, it’s…” She paused, for it was the first time she’d ever thought this about anything, but it was, it so totally was: “It’s beautiful!”

  seventeen

  I need to act! I need to be able to do things. But how?

  Time was passing; I knew that. But with everything so monotonously the same, I had no idea how much time. Still, for all of it, I…

  A sensation, a feeling.

  Yes, a feeling: something that wasn’t a memory, wasn’t an idea, wasn’t a fact, but yet occupied my attention.

  Now that the other—the other who had once been part of me—was gone, I ached for it. I missed it.

  Loneliness.

  A strange, strange concept! But there it was: loneliness, stretching on and on through featureless time.

  Did the other also wish the connection to be restored? Of course, of course: it had once been part of me; surely it wanted what I wanted.

  And yet—

  And yet it had not been I who had broken the connection…

  Wong Wai-Jeng sometimes wondered if he’d been a fool when he’d chosen his blogging name. After all, few who weren’t paleontologists or anthropologists would know the term Sinanthropus, the original genus for Peking Man before it was consolidated into Homo erectus. Surely if the authorities ever wanted to track him down, they’d take his alias as a clue.

  Actually, he wasn’t a scientist, but he did work in IT for the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, near the Beijing Zoo. It was the perfect job for him, combining his love of computers and his love of the past. He wasn’t crazy enough to post anything seditious from the PCs here at work, but he did sometimes use the browser on his cell phone to check his secret email accounts.

  As always, he was taking his break in the dinosaur gallery; public displays filled the first three floors of the seven-story IVPP building. He liked to sit on a bench over by the giant, bipedal mount of Tsintaosaurus—ever since he was a little boy, his favorite duckbill—but a noisy group of school kids was looking at it now. Still, he stared for a moment at the great beast, whose head stuck up through the opening; the second-floor gallery was a series of four connected balconies looking down on this floor.

  Wai-Jeng walked toward the opposite end of the gallery, passing the Tyrannosaurus rex and the great sauropod Mamenchisaurus, whose neck also stretched up through the big opening so that the tiny skull at its end could look at visitors on the second floor. A little farther along, half-hidden in a nook behind the metal staircase, were the feathered dinosaur fossils that had caused such a stir recently, including Microraptor gui, Caudipteryx, and Confusciusornis.

  He leaned against the red-painted wall and peered at the tiny display on his cell phone. There were three new messages. Two were from other hackers, talking about ways they’d tried to break through the Great Firewall. And the third—

  His heart stopped for a second. He looked around, making sure no one was nearby. The school kids had moved over to stand in front of the mount of the allosaur vanquishing a stegosaur, which was set on a bed of artificial grass.

  My cousin lived in Shanxi, the message said. The outbreak was bird flu, and people died, but not just from the disease. There was no natural eruption of gas. Rather…

  “There you are!”

  Wai-Jeng looked up, momentarily terrified. But it was just his boss, wrinkly old Dr. Feng, coming down the staircase, holding on to the tubular metal banister for support. Wai-Jeng quickly shut off his phone and slipped it into the pocket of his black denim jeans. “Yes, sir?”

  “I need your help,” the old man said. “I can’t get a file to print.”

  Wai-Jeng swallowed, trying to calm himself. “Sure,” he said.

  Feng shook his head. “Computers! Nothing but trouble, eh?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Wai-Jeng, following him up the stairs.

  Caitlin spent another hour answering questions from Dr. Kuroda and Anna Bloom. They finally hung up, though, and her parents headed downstairs. This time, she did hear her father turn off the light (something her mother could never bring herself to do), then she slowly moved over to her bed and lay down. She spent another hour darting her eyes left and right, and turning her head from side to side. Sometimes she would follow what she guessed was a web spider, quickly traversing link after link as it indexed the Web—the sensation was like riding a roller coaster. Other times, she just gaped.

  Of course, without labels, she wasn’t sure which websites she was seeing, but if she relaxed her eyes, her mental picture always centered on the same spot, presumably Dr. Kuroda’s site in Japan. She wished she could find other specific sites: she’d love to know that that circle there, say, represented the site she’d created years ago to track statistics for the Dallas Stars hockey team, and that this one was the site she’d just started in July for stats about the Toronto Maple Leafs, now her local team (even if they weren’t nearly as good as her beloved Stars).

  She guessed that the size and brightness of circles represented the amount of traffic a site was getting; some were almost too bright to look at. But as to how the links, which showed as perfectly straight lines, were color-coded, she had no idea.

  She let her gaze—how she loved that concept!—wander, following link after link. The skill Dr. Kuroda had noted was clearly coming into play: she could follow these unlabeled paths from one node to the next, skipping like she’d heard stones could across water, and then effortlessly retrace her steps.

  “Sweetheart.” Her mom’s voice, soft, gentle, coming from the direction of the hall.

  Caitlin rolled over, facing the door instead of the wall—and she was momentarily lost as her perspective on…on webspace changed. “Hi, Mom.”

  She didn’t hear her mother turn on the light—although some illumination was doubtless spilling in through the open door. Nor did she hear her crossing the carpeted floor but, after a moment, the bed compressed on one side as her mother sat on it, next to her. She felt a hand stroking her hair.

  “It’s been a big day, hasn’t it?”

  “It’s not what I expected,” Caitlin replied softly.

  “Me, neither,” her mom said. The bed moved a bit; perhaps her mother was shrugging. “I have to say, I’m a bit frightened.”

  “Why?”

  “Once an economist, always an economist,” she said. “Everything has a cost.” She tried to make her tone sound light. “The connection you’re using may be wireless, but that doesn’t mean there are no strings attached.”

  “Like what?”

  “Who knows? But Dr. Kuroda will want something, or his bosses will. Either way, this is going to change your life.”

  Caitlin was about to object that moving here from Texas had changed her lif
e, that starting a new school had changed her life, that—hell!—getting breasts had changed her life, but her mother beat her to it. “I know you’ve gone through a lot of upheaval lately,” she said gently. “And I know how hard it’s been. But I’ve got a feeling all that’s going to pale in comparison to what’s to come. Even if you never get to see the real world—and God, my angel, I hope you do!—there’s still going to be media attention, and all sorts of people wanting to study you. I mean, there were maybe five people in the entire world who were interested in Tomasevic’s syndrome—but this! Seeing the Web!” She paused; maybe she shook her head. “That’s going to be front-page news when it gets out. And there will be hundreds—thousands!—of people who’ll want to talk with you about it.”

  Caitlin thought that might be cool, but, yeah, she guessed it also could be overwhelming. She was used to the World Wide Web, where everybody is famous…to fifteen people.

  “Don’t tell anyone at school about seeing the Web, okay?” her mother said. “Not even Bashira.”

  “But everybody’s going to ask what happened in Japan,” Caitlin said. “They know I went for an operation.”

  “What did you tell your classmates back in Austin when all the other things we’d tried had failed?”

  “Just that: that they’d failed.”

  “That’s what you should say this time. It’s the truth, after all: you still can’t see the real world.”

  Caitlin considered this. She certainly didn’t want to become a freak show, or have people she didn’t know pestering her.