The storm was moving off; the thunder was taking longer to arrive each time.
She lifted her shoulders a bit. How do you thank someone who has given you so much, and given up so much for you? She turned to face her, hoping against hope that this was the real beginning — that she would soon at last see her heart-shaped face. “For everything,” she said, hugging her tightly.
* * *
Chapter 25
It was now almost 9:00 P.M. in California. The Silverback was resting his bulk in the one overstuffed easy chair in the bungalow’s main room. Shoshana Glick had propped her rump against the edge of the desk that held the big computer monitor. Dillon Fontana, clad all in black, was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the jamb. Werner and Maria had gone home for the weekend.
“What’s noteworthy,” Dillon said, “is that Hobo began doing representational art after he started communicating with Virgil.”
Shoshana nodded. “I’d noticed that, too. But Virgil doesn’t paint — I asked Juan in Miami. He doesn’t do any sort of art. So it’s not like the orangutan gave Hobo a tip or encouragement.”
Marcuse was drinking Coke from a two-liter bottle that looked small in his hands. He took a swig, wiped his face, and said, “It’s the flat screen.”
Shoshana turned to look at him.
“Don’t you see?” Marcuse said. “Until we linked the two apes in a videoconference, all the ASL signs Hobo had ever seen were three dimensional — done by actual human beings in close physical proximity to him. But now he’s seeing someone sign on a flat two-dimensional screen, on a computer monitor.” He gestured at the Apple display behind Shoshana.
“But he’s watched TV for years,” she said.
“Yes, but he’s never seen signing — at least not for any significant amount of time — on TV. And signing is special: signs are exactly that — representations of things, symbols. By seeing Virgil use signs on the flat screen, somehow Hobo saw how three-dimensional objects could be reduced to two dimensions. Remember, he has to concentrate on the signs in a way he doesn’t concentrate on normal TV images. Doing so caused something to click in his brain, and he got it.”
Shoshana found herself nodding. For all that the Silverback could be a blustering blowhard and a pain in the ass as a boss, he was a brilliant scientist.
“There’s precedent, sort of,” he continued. “Some prosopagnosiacs — people with face-blindness — can recognize faces in photographs but can’t recognize them in the flesh; it’s doubtless a related phenomenon.”
“In the land of the blind,” said Dillon, “the one-eyed ape is painting.” He lifted his narrow shoulders. “I mean, he’s got two eyes, but there’s no depth perception when watching TV, right? Sure, stereoscopic vision adds a lot of valuable information, but there’s a simplicity — a huge ramping down of the mental processing required — when dealing with just two-dimensional images.”
“But why’d he draw me in profile?” Shoshana asked.
Marcuse put down his Coke bottle and spread his arms. “Why did cavemen always draw animals in profile? Why did the ancient Egyptians do it that way? There’s something hardwired in the primate brain to make profiles — even though we’re way better at recognizing faces when seen full on.”
That much was true, Shoshana knew. There were neurons in human brains — and ape brains, too — that responded to the specific layout of a face, two eyes above a mouth. She’d grown up with the smiley face used online:
:)
But she remembered her father telling her it had been months after he’d first seen it in the 1980s before he realized what it was supposed to represent. Because it was sideways, it just didn’t trigger the right neurons in his brain. But one of the reasons that the yellow happy-face logo — which, her father had said, had been ubiquitous when he was a teenager — was so universally appealing was that it caused an immediate pattern-recognition response.
“Maybe the tendency for profiles has to do with brain lateralization,” Marcuse said. “Artistic talent is localized in one hemisphere; drawing profiles may be a subtle response to that, showing, in essence, that particular half of the subject.” He paused. “Whatever the reason, this makes our Hobo even more special.”
Shoshana looked at Dillon, who was doing his doctoral thesis on primate hybridization. It was a topic of real scientific interest. In 2006, a study revealed that there had continued to be a lot of hybridization between the ancestor of chimps and the ancestor of humans even after the two lines had split millions of years ago; they remained able to produce fertile offspring for a long time, and such crossbreeding had apparently given rise to the sophisticated human brain.
“Absolutely,” Dillon said. “I don’t dispute that seeing Virgil signing on the monitor was a catalyst, but I’d bet hybridization set the groundwork for him being so good at language and painting.”
Shoshana smiled at the subtle turf war that she’d just seen begin: each of them was staking out territory, and would doubtless defend their positions in journal papers over the coming years. But then she frowned; they didn’t have time to wait for papers to go through the peer-review process. “If we want to stave off the Georgia Zoo’s desire to sterilize Hobo, we can’t wait,” she said. “We have to go public with this, get Hobo’s special status generally known, and—”
“And what was your first thought when you saw that painting?” Marcuse demanded. “I’ll tell you what it was — it was my thought, too, as soon as I recognized that it was indeed a portrait. I thought it was a fake. Didn’t you?”
Shoshana looked at Dillon, and remembered her accusation of that very thing, and how Hobo had looked so hurt. “Yes,” she said sheepishly.
The Silverback shook his head. “No, that painting isn’t going to save Hobo — but the next one might. We need him to do it again, and with more cameras recording it all. If there’s only one representational painting, people will dismiss it as a fake — or, even if they accept it as being genuine, they’ll say it’s a fluke, something that happens to sort of, by chance, look like a person. Hell, we’ve been accused often enough as is of just projecting what we want to see onto ape behavior. No, unless he does it again, with the whole process filmed and documented — unless we can replicate this — we’ve got nothing, and our grinning genius is still in danger of being sterilized.”
* * *
Chapter 26
Saturday morning always meant pancakes and sausages in the Decter household. Now that they were living in Waterloo, the sausages were, of course, Schneider’s brand, and the syrup was real maple syrup Caitlin’s mom had bought from Mennonites in the nearby town of St. Jacob’s.
“I was up at 5:00 A.M.,” Caitlin’s dad said, as soon as they’d started eating.
“There’s a 5:00 a.m.?” Caitlin joked.
“I set up a workspace for you and Professor Kuroda in the basement,” he continued.
“Thank you, Dr. Decter,” Kuroda said, sounding relieved — apparently everybody but the Hoser was worried about her virtue! But she guessed it probably would be more comfortable downstairs than in her bedroom.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” her mom said. “You’re staying in our house; you can call him Malcolm.”
Her father neither confirmed nor denied this assertion, Caitlin noted. Instead, he said, “I bought a new computer at Future Shop yesterday. It’s set up downstairs for the two of you; I put it on the household network.”
“Thank you,” she said. “And I have some news of my own — I saw the lightning last night.”
The words were simultaneous, overlapping. Her dad, matter-of-fact: “Your mother told me.” And Kuroda, amazed: “You saw lightning?”
“That’s right,” Caitlin said.
“What — what did it look like to you?” Kuroda said.
“Jagged lines against darkness. Bright lines — white, right? Stark against a pure black background.”
Kuroda was clearly eager to look at the data from the eyePod: he
had only one extra helping of pancakes.
Caitlin had been in the basement just a few times in the three months they’d lived in this house, mostly back in August, when it had been surprisingly hot and muggy outside — almost like Texas. The basement had been cool then (and still was), and although her mother had complained about how little light there was down there — apparently, just a single bulb in the middle of the room — it hadn’t bothered Caitlin.
“What’s the 4-1-1?” she asked, hands on hips.
Kuroda’s English was excellent, but the information number must be different in Japan. “Sorry?”
“What’s the setup? Tell me about the room.”
“Ah. Well, it’s an unfinished basement — I suppose you know that. Bare insulation between the slats; cement floor. There’s an old TV — the kind with a picture tube — and some bookcases. And your dad has set up the new computer on one of those worktables with metal folding legs; it’s pushed up against the far wall, the one opposite the staircase. The computer is a mini-tower, and he’s got an LCD screen attached to it. There’s a little window above the table and a couple of comfortable-looking swivel chairs in front of it.”
“Sweet! I wonder where he got the chairs.”
“They have a logo on them — kind of like the Greek letter pi.”
“Oh, he borrowed them from work. Speaking of which, let’s get to it.”
Kuroda helped guide her to one of the chairs, and he settled into the other; she could hear it squeaking a bit. “Let me log onto my servers in Tokyo,” he said. “I want to examine the datastream you sent them during the lightning storm — see if we can isolate what it was that caused your primary visual cortex to respond.”
She could hear him typing away and, as he did, she realized she’d forgotten to mention something over breakfast. “After the lightning flashes,” she said, “webspace looked different.”
“Different how?”
“Well, I could still see the structure of the Web clearly, like before, but the … the background, I guess, was different.”
He stopped typing. “What do you mean?”
“It used to be dark. Black, I guess.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s, um, lighter? I could see details in it.”
“Details?”
“Yeah. Like — like…” She struggled to make the connection; the pattern did remind her of something she was familiar with, but — got it! “Like a chessboard.” She had a blind person’s chessboard, with squares that were alternately raised and lowered, and Braille initials on the top of each piece; she sometimes played her dad. “But, um, not quite. I mean, it was made of lighter and darker squares, but they’re not in the same pattern as a chessboard, and they go on, like, forever.”
“How big are they?”
“Tiny. If they were any tinier, I don’t think I could see them. In fact, I can’t swear that they were squares, but they were packed tightly together and made rows and columns.”
“And there were thousands of them?”
“Millions. Maybe billions. They’re everywhere.”
Kuroda sat as quietly as was possible for him, then: “You know, human vision is made of pixels, just like a computerized image. Each axon in the optic nerve provides one picture element. Now, most people aren’t conscious of them, but if you have decent focus, and you look at a blank wall, some people can see them. Your brain is processing Web information as if it were coming from your eye; it may be hardwired to see it all as a mesh of pixels at the limits of resolution, but…”
He trailed off. After ten seconds she prodded him.
“But?”
“Well, I’m just thinking. You’ve described seeing circles, which we’ve taken to be websites, and lines connecting them, which we’ve assumed represent hyperlinks. And that’s it — that’s the World Wide Web, right? That’s all of it. So, what could make up the background to the Web? I mean, in human vision, the—”
“Don’t say that.”
“Pardon?”
“‘Human vision.’ Don’t say that. I’m human.”
A sharp intake of breath. “I’m so sorry, Miss Caitlin. May I say ‘normal’ vision?”
“Yes.”
“All right. In normal vision, the background is — well, it’s the distant reaches of the universe if you’re looking up at the night sky. But what would be the background for the Web?”
“Background radiation?” she suggested. “Like the cosmic microwave background?”
Kuroda was quiet for a moment. “How old are you again?”
“Hey,” she said, “my father is a physicist, you know.”
“Well, the cosmic microwave background is uniform to a fraction of a degree in all directions. But what you’re seeing is mottled in black and white, you say?”
“Yeah. And it keeps shifting.”
“Pardon?”
“Shifting. Changing. Didn’t I mention that?”
“No. What do you mean precisely?”
Something brushed against her legs — ah, Schrodinger! Caitlin scooped him up into her lap. “The dark squares switch to light, and the light ones to dark,” she said.
“How rapidly?”
“Oh, really fast. Makes the whole thing shimmer.”
The springs on Kuroda’s chair squeaked as he stood up. She heard him walking across the room and then walking back toward her, then repeating the process: pacing. “It can’t be…” he said at last.
“What?”
He ignored her question. “How clearly could you see the individual cells?”
She scratched Schrodinger behind the ears. “Cells?”
“Pixels. I mean pixels. How clearly could you see them?”
“It was really hard.”
“Can you try again? Can you put the eyePod in duplex mode now?”
She fumbled to get the device out of her pocket without sending Schrodinger to the floor. Once it was free, she pressed the switch; the eyePod made its usual high-pitched beep, which Schrodinger answered with a surprised meow, and—
And there it was, spreading out before her: the World Wide Web.
“Can you see the background now?” Kuroda asked.
“Yes, if I concentrate…”
He sounded surprised. “You’re squinting.”
She shrugged. “It helps. But, yeah, if I really try, I can focus on a small group — a few hundred squares on a side.”
“Okay. Do you have a Go board?”
“What?”
“Um, okay — do you have any money?”
She narrowed her eyes again, but this time in suspicion. “Fifty bucks, maybe, but…”
“No, no. Coins! Do you have coins?”
“In a jar on my dresser.” She was saving to go see Lee Amodeo with Bashira when she came to Centre in the Square.
“Great, great. Do you mind if I go get it?”
“I can do it. It’s my house.”
“No, you take the time to look at the Web, see if you can make out any more detail in the background. I’ll be right back.”
Kuroda could never sneak up on anyone. She heard the sounds of his return long before he actually arrived. She then heard a great jangling as he dumped the coins on their worktable, and more noise as he shuffled them around — perhaps sorting them. “All right. Here’s a bunch of coins. Can you arrange them in the pattern you’re seeing? Put one down for each light spot, and leave a coin-sized space for each dark spot.”
Caitlin shooed Schrodinger out of her lap, and swung her chair to face the table. “I told you. They keep changing.”
“Yes, yes, but…” He made a noisy sigh. “I wish there were some way to photograph it, or at least to slow down your perception, and—” His voice brightened. “And there is! Of course there is!”
She heard him moving about, then soft key clicks. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m halting your reception of the datastream from Jagster, and just passing on the last iteration of it over a
nd over again, so it’ll keep coming down the pike without changing, sort of like—”
“A freeze-frame!” she said as the image ceased to move. She was delighted to be able to apply another concept she’d only ever read about before.
“Exactly. Now, can you make a pattern with the coins that matches what you’re seeing in a portion of the background?”
“A very small portion,” she said. And she started moving the coins around; he’d given her a bunch of dimes. After a moment, she pushed one off to a corner of the desk. “American,” she said; all those years of reading Braille made it easy to tell Queen Elizabeth from FDR.
She built up a grid of dimes and dime-sized empty spaces, counting the coins automatically as she deployed them. “Done,” she announced. “Eight dollars and ninety cents.”
“Completely random,” Kuroda said, sounding disappointed.
“No, it’s not. Not quite. See this group of five dimes here?” She had no trouble keeping track of the pattern she’d made, and touched the appropriate coins. “It’s the same as this group here, except turned ninety degrees to the right.”
“So it is,” he said, excitedly. “It looks like the letter L.”
“And this one’s the same, too,” she said, “turned upside down.”
“Excellent!”
“But what does it mean?” she asked.
“I’m not a hundred-percent sure,” he said. “Not yet. Here, focus your attention again on the same spot in your vision. I’m going to update the data going to your implant, just once … and done.”
“Okay. It’s completely different.”
“Can you make it for me with the coins?”
“I’m not even sure I’m looking at the same spot anymore,” she said. “But here goes.” She rearranged the dimes, and, just to underscore that not only the pattern but also the number of light and dark squares had changed, she added, “Six dollars and twenty cents.” She paused. “Ah! Three sets of that five-coin pattern this time.”
“And in different places,” he said.
“But what does it mean?”
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