Watch

by Robert J. Sawyer

  He usually held out a hand, long black fingers curled up, but this time he simply shifted his position, and, as Sho went to open the bag, his arm shot out, quick as a snake, and grabbed it.

  No! signed Shoshana. Bad! Bad!

  He looked momentarily contrite and spread his long arms, the bag of raisins still firmly grasped in his left hand, as if inviting her for a hug. She smiled and moved closer, and he reached behind her head with his right hand, and—

  And he suddenly yanked hard on her ponytail.

  “Shit!” She jumped backward and stood, hands on hips, looking at the ape. “Bad Hobo!” she said, scolding him with words spoken aloud, something she only did when really angry with him. “Bad, bad Hobo!”

  Hobo let out a pant-hoot and ran away, using both legs and his right arm to propel himself across the grass; in his left hand, he was still clutching the raisins.

  She gingerly patted the back of her head with her palm. When she moved the hand in front of her face, she could see it was freckled with blood.

  twelve

  Caitlin pushed the button on her eyePod, switching back to simplex mode. The glowing lines of webspace were replaced by what she’d dubbed “worldview”—the reality she shared with the rest of humanity, which, just then, consisted of her blue-walled bedroom with multicolored autumn leaves visible through the window.

  Her mother entered, having crossed the hallway from her office.

  Blue letters were glowing in her notebook’s IM window: Thank you, Caitlin!

  Caitlin typed back, Whew! You’re welcome! You OK now?

  I believe so.

  Don’t do that again. Don’t try to multitask, or form multiple links.

  I won’t. But I would like to know what went wrong.

  So would I, Caitlin typed—but her mom gave it more direct voice, demanding: “What the hell happened?”

  Kuroda was still on the speakerphone from Tokyo. “As Miss Caitlin said, it was multitasking.”

  “So?” replied her mom. “Computers do that all the time.”

  “Forgive me, Barb,” Kuroda said, “but, first, Webmind is not a computer, and, second, no, they don’t.”

  Dr. Kuroda is explaining, Caitlin sent to Webmind. Here—I’ll type in what he says.

  “A typical computer,” continued Kuroda, “seems to be doing many different things at once, but it’s only an illusion due to its incredible speed. Up until recently, few computers had more than one processor, and that single processor only ran one program at a time. In order to apparently multitask, the processor switched rapidly between programs, devoting little slices of time to each program in succession, but it never actually did multiple things simultaneously.”

  Caitlin was a fast typist; typing what the teacher said was how she took notes in school, so transcribing Kuroda for Webmind, with only a few omissions, wasn’t hard.

  He went on: “More modern computers do have multicore processors or multiple processors which can, to a very limited degree, do more than one job at once…provided that the programs have been written to take advantage of this ability, which often isn’t the case. But computers are dumb as posts; they don’t think, and they aren’t conscious. And consciousness, you see—and I mean precisely that: you see—is incompatible with multitasking.”

  Her mom walked over to the desk and sat on the swivel chair. “How come?” she said.

  “I’m a vision researcher,” Kuroda said, “so my take on all this is perhaps skewed.” But then his tone changed, as if he were tiptoeing around a delicate subject. “I know you are Americans, and, um, you’re from the South, I believe.”

  Caitlin paused typing long enough to say, “Don’t mess with Texas.”

  “Um, do you…do you believe in evolution?”

  She laughed, and so did her mom. “Of course,” her mom said.

  Kuroda sounded relieved. “Good, good, I—forgive me; I’m sure we don’t get an accurate picture of America here in Japan. You know we evolved from fish, right?”

  “Right,” said Caitlin, and then she went back to typing.

  “Well,” said Kuroda, “let’s consider that ancestral fish: it had two eyes, one on each side of its head. And it therefore had two different fields of view—and they didn’t overlap at all. It simultaneously had two perspectives on its world, yes?”

  “Okay,” said her mom.

  “Somewhere along the line,” Kuroda continued, “evolution decided that it was better to have those fields of view overlap, because that gave depth perception. Prior to that, our fishy ancestor pretty much had to assume that if two other fish were in its fields of view, the bigger one was closer. But, in fact, the bigger one might actually be bigger but be farther away; the small one might be close by, and be about to take a bite out of you. By the time that fish had evolved into a mammal-like reptile, it had overlapping fields of vision, and that gave it depth perception. And even though overlapping visual fields meant a narrowing of the angle of view, the advantages of perceiving depth outweighed that loss.”

  “Hang on a minute,” Caitlin said. “I’m transcribing what you’re saying for Webmind…okay, go on.”

  “Along with stereoscopic vision,” Kuroda said, “suddenly the notion of looking at this as opposed to that—of shifting one’s gaze, of concentrating one’s attention—was born. Our very words for describing consciousness come from this: attention, perspective, point of view, focus.”

  Caitlin paused typing long enough to think about the book she’d recently read at the suggestion of Bashira’s dad: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. It wasn’t quite the same argument, but it amounted to the same thing: until all thought was integrated—until there was just one point of view—real consciousness couldn’t exist.

  Maybe Kuroda was contemplating the same thing because he said, “In fact, although our brains consist of two hemispheres, they go out of their way to consolidate thought into a single perspective. You know what they say: the left hemisphere is the analytical or logical side, and the right hemisphere is the artistic or emotional side, yes?”

  “Yes,” said her mom, and “Right,” said Caitlin.

  “Forgive me, Miss Caitlin. I know you have vision in only one eye, but, Barb, if you were to read text with just your left eye, shouldn’t you have an analytical response, while if you read it with your right eye, shouldn’t the response be more emotional? Shouldn’t we give each student an eye patch, and tell them to move it to the left or the right depending on whether they’re reading a physics textbook or a novel for their literature class?”

  Caitlin thought about this. She’d once asked Kuroda why he had chosen to put his implant behind her left retina instead of her right one. He’d joked it was because Steve Austin’s left eye had been the bionic one—which had sent her to Google to find out what he meant.

  “But we don’t do that,” Kuroda went on. “We don’t give students eye patches—because the brain responds exactly the same way regardless of which one of the two eyes is receiving the input. That’s because your left optic nerve does not feed just into your left hemisphere, nor does your right optic nerve feed just into your right hemisphere. Rather, each optic nerve splits in two in the center of the brain at the optic chiasma in what’s called a partial decussation. Half the signal from the left eye goes to the left hemisphere, and the other half goes to the right. It’s an awfully complex bit of wiring, and evolution doesn’t do things that are complex unless they confer a survival advantage.”

  He paused, as if waiting for Caitlin or her mom to chime in with what that advantage might be. After a moment, he went on, his voice triumphant: “And that advantage must be consciousness, must be the unification of sensory input to produce a single perspective, a single point of view.”

  “But I was born blind,” said Caitlin, letting her fingers rest. “And I’ve been conscious my whole life without the sharing of sight across both hemispheres.”

  “True, but your brain was hard
wired for it regardless. I’ve seen your MRIs, remember—you’ve got a perfectly normal brain; the only flaw you were born with was in your retinas. Anyway,” he said, and she resumed typing, “evolution went out of its way to make sure we’ve only got one perspective, one point of view. A bird can’t fly both left and right at the same time; a person can’t think about both this and that at the same time. Consciousness is singular. It’s cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am; it’s not cogitamus ergo sumus—it’s not we think, therefore we are. Even in cases of a severed corpus callosum, the brain still retains its single perspective; again, evolution has gone out of its way to make sure that unitary consciousness survives even something as traumatic as cutting the major communications trunk between the hemispheres.”

  Caitlin’s mom looked at her but said nothing. Dr. Kuroda went on. “And it’s not just that a directional perspective gives rise to your own consciousness; it also gives rise to your awareness that others have consciousness, too. It’s what’s called theory of mind: the recognition that other people have beliefs, desires, and intentions of their own, and that those might be different from yours. And, again, that comes from you having a single point of view.”

  “How so?” asked Caitlin’s mom.

  “It’s only because you have a limited perspective that you understand that the person facing you must be seeing something completely different from what you’re seeing as you face him. Are you in Miss Caitlin’s room now?”

  “Yes,” said her mom.

  “Well, if we were facing each other there, you might be seeing the window and the outside world, and I might be seeing the door and the hallway beyond—not only are we seeing completely different things, but you understand that we are. Your limited perspective lets you know that my point of view is different. And there are those terms again: ‘perspective,’ ‘point of view’! Thought and vision are inexorably connected in our brains.”

  “But what about blind people?” asked Caitlin, taking another break from typing.

  “Again, you don’t actually need the vision, just the neural infrastructure geared for a single point of view.” He paused. “Look, if having eyes in the back of our heads really was an improvement, we’d have them. Mutants with extra eyes are born periodically today, and probably have been throughout vertebrate history—and if that had conferred a survival advantage, the mutation would have spread. But it didn’t. Having one point of view—having consciousness and being able to understand that what the predator sees is different from what you see—trumps even being able to see things approaching you from behind.”

  Caitlin was wrestling with the implications of this, but it was her mother who got it first. “And Webmind sees through Caitlin’s eye, right? Caitlin is his window on our world.”

  Caitlin found herself looking down, pleased but a tad embarrassed that the conversation had suddenly come around to her, and—

  And she saw what Webmind had written at the end of her transcript of Kuroda’s comments, glowing blue: You really did uplift me. You gave me the perspective and point of view and focus I needed to become truly conscious. Without you, I wouldn’t exist.

  Caitlin looked up and allowed herself a warm, satisfied smile. “Go me!” she said.

  thirteen

  “What the hell happened?” demanded Tony Moretti. He was standing at the side of the WATCH mission-control room again. Peyton Hume was next to him, somewhat higher up on the sloping floor; although he was shorter than Tony, they were now seeing eye to eye.

  Shel Halleck was back at his workstation in the third row. “I’m not sure,” he called out. “There was a sudden surge in traffic associated with the AI, and then it just froze. And Caitlin Decter—or someone in her house—kept sending it IMs saying it should ‘break the links.’”

  “Why?” asked Tony.

  “I’m not sure,” Shel said again.

  “I’m getting tired of hearing that,” Tony snapped. In fact, he was getting tired, period.

  “There seem to be limits to its processing capacity,” Peyton Hume offered. “That suggests at least some models of how it might be composed—and eliminates some other ones. In fact…”

  “Yes?” said Tony.

  “Well,” the colonel said, “remember what the Chinese did last month? I don’t mean the slaughter; I mean how they tried to keep word about it from getting out. They cut off almost all communication with the outside world for several days, including the Internet. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the cleaving then reunification of so large a part of the Internet preceded the emergence of this entity. That suggests there’s a critical threshold of components required to keep it going—and that at least some of them are in China.”

  “All right,” said Tony. “It’s a lead, anyway. Shel, Aiesha, let’s find out precisely where the damned thing resides. If the president does give the kill order, I want us to be ready to implement it at once.”

  Shoshana stared in astonishment across the little dome-shaped island until Hobo had disappeared from view.

  The back of her head still hurt. She patted it again to see if the bleeding had stopped; it hadn’t. Hobo was much stronger than she, and an angry ape was not to be taken lightly. But she loved him and cared about him and was worried about him, and he’d never hurt her—or anyone—before.

  She had her cell phone with her, and could call Dr. Marcuse if need be. And if Hobo did come chasing after her, all she had to do was dive into the circular moat around the island; Hobo couldn’t swim.

  She started walking, but rather than crossing the island, as Hobo had done, she strode along its perimeter, keeping close to the water in case she needed to escape. He’d gone right past the gazebo at the top of the island mound—she’d seen that much. He could be on the ground, or he could have shinnied up one of the palm trees; he didn’t do that often, though.

  She continued on for another dozen paces—and there he was, sitting on his scrawny rump, leaning his back against the trio of rolled-up stone scrolls at the base of the Lawgiver statue.

  Hobo, she signed. He looked at her, said nothing, then looked away.

  Which meant she couldn’t talk to him. She clapped her hands together—he wasn’t deaf, after all, even if he used a language devised for those who were. He turned his head to look at the source of the sound.

  Hobo, she signed again. Are you okay? Can I help?

  He made no reply.

  She stepped closer. Please, Hobo. Worried about you.

  Suddenly he sat up straight, and Sho, startled by the movement, felt her own back tense. And then, all at once, he was in motion, a blur of black fur. She pulled back a half pace, but Hobo was not going out but up, clambering up the eight-foot-tall statue of the Lawgiver, until he was high on the faux orangutan’s shoulders, hooting and panting at the sun.

  Sign language was a funny thing. When Shoshana signed with Dr. Marcuse, she mentally heard the words in his normal deep speaking voice. Hobo had no normal speaking voice. That was another bogus thing about the Planet of the Apes films—the notion that it was merely a lack of intelligence, rather than a structural deficiency in the larynx, that prevented apes from articulating. And the wild shaking of his fist at the sky he was doing right now wasn’t really a sign. But, still, somehow, Shoshana thought she heard the voice of Roddy McDowall, the actor who had played Caesar in last night’s film, furiously shouting, “And that day is upon you NOW!”

  She clapped her hands again, but he refused to look down, refused to listen. She tried for a full minute, then headed back to the drawbridge, hoisting it once she had crossed. She then returned to the white bungalow.

  In the interim, Dr. Marcuse had been joined by Dillon Fontana, who was doing his Ph.D. thesis on ape hybridization. Dillon was thin, had blond hair and a wispy beard, and, as always, was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt.

  “Hobo just yanked my ponytail,” Shoshana announced.

  Marcuse was seated in the one comfortable chair in the room, reading a printou
t. He lowered it, and said, “He always does that.”

  “No,” said Shoshana. “He gently tugs it. But this time he pulled hard.”

  “Well,” said Marcuse, “it can’t have been that hard—not by his standards. If he’d wanted to, he could have torn it right out of your head.”

  “He came damn near,” she said, and she turned around, inviting them to look.

  Dr. Marcuse didn’t bother to get his bulk out of the overstuffed chair, but Dillon—who, she knew, would take any excuse to get close to her—came over and peered at her scalp. “Ouch!” he said.

  “Exactly!”

  “Did you tell him he was misbehaving?” Marcuse asked. “You know you have to discipline him immediately, or he won’t connect the punishment with what he’s done that was wrong.”

  “He wouldn’t even talk to me,” Shoshana said.

  Dr. Marcuse struggled to get to his feet, succeeding on the second try. “Let’s go,” he said, dropping the printout onto the chair. The three of them headed outside. They crossed the wide lawn behind the bungalow, lowered the drawbridge again, and walked onto the little island. “Where is he?” asked Dillon.

  Shoshana scanned around. He wasn’t atop the Lawgiver anymore.

  “There,” said Dillon, indicating with a movement of his head. He was crouching near the base of one of the palm trees.

  Sho took the scrunchie out of her hair and shook out her ponytail. They began walking toward him. He had to know they were here—Dr. Marcuse could not cross the little drawbridge without it making a lot of noise. Still, it was a few moments before Hobo looked their way, and as soon as he did, he charged toward them.

  Stop, Shoshana signed, and “Stop!” she shouted.

  But he didn’t, and, as he closed the distance, it became clear he wasn’t running toward them generally but rather was very specifically heading for Dillon.