Watch

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Shoshana knew the declaration well. It had first been put forward in 1993, and held that great apes should be entitled to the right to life, the protection of their individual liberty, and freedom from torture. So far, Spain was the only country to have adopted its provisions. Sho was all in favor of it, and so, she knew, was Marcuse. If something is self-aware—if it can communicate, and if it passes the mirror test and all that—then it should be recognized as a person, and it should have rights.

  “And you think that’s got a bearing on Hobo’s case?” she asked.

  “Absolutely. The Declaration defines ‘the community of equals’ as ‘all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.’ And Article Two of the Declaration says, ‘Members of the community of equals are not to be arbitrarily deprived of their liberty.’” He spread his arms as if his point were now self-evident. “Well, the Georgia Zoo wants to deprive Hobo of precisely that.”

  Sho thought about the high chain-link fence that surrounded the Marcuse Institute, and the moat around the island on which Hobo spent most of his time. “This isn’t Spain,” she said gently.

  He frowned. “I know that, but the point is still correct. And Hobo should have a say in the matter—and, unlike just about every other ape on the planet, he actually can speak up on his own behalf.”

  Shoshana considered this. No one had told Hobo yet about the lawsuit from the Georgia Zoo. They hadn’t wanted to upset him. Chimps were notorious for hating to travel—which made sense for territorial animals.

  Still, Georgia did have several chimps, and several bonobos, too. It wasn’t clear which group they wanted to keep Hobo with; he had been conceived when the two populations had been housed together during a flood. It probably hadn’t occurred to Marcuse in his zeal to fight the lawsuit, but Hobo might well want to be among his own kind—whichever kind that was.

  But there was more to the zoo’s lawsuit than just custody. They also wanted to have Hobo sterilized—to keep the endangered chimp and bonobo bloodlines from being contaminated by his hybrid sperm. But although lots of reasonably complex ideas could be communicated to him, trying to explain the effects of castration would probably exceed his ability to comprehend.

  “Are you going to brief him about what’s at stake—assuming he’ll listen to us at all now, that is?” Sho asked.

  Marcuse seemed to mull this over for a few moments, then he nodded his great loaf of a head. “He’s likely to just get more antisocial as time goes on. Which means if we’re going to get through to him at all, there’s no time to waste—we’ve got a very narrow window here.”

  And so he and Shoshana headed back out into the sunshine, leaving Dillon behind. Marcuse led the way, taking bold steps as they crossed the bridge, his footfalls like thunder on the wooden boards. Hobo seemed to have been waiting for him, and he swayed on his spindly, bowed legs, looking at Marcuse from a dozen feet away—a standoff. Sho suppressed the urge to whistle the theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

  She couldn’t see Marcuse’s face but she imagined he was again staring directly at the ape, trying to establish dominance.

  Hobo bared his teeth: large, yellow, sharp.

  Marcuse made a hissing sound, and—

  And Hobo averted his eyes and dropped his head.

  Marcuse confidently closed the distance between them, and, straining as he did so, he crouched near the ape, who was now sitting on his haunches.

  Hobo, Marcuse signed. Pay attention.

  Hobo was still looking at the ground, meaning he couldn’t see the signs. Sho gasped as Marcuse reached out to touch the bottom of Hobo’s face, afraid the ape was going to lash out at the contact, but he allowed Marcuse to lift his head.

  Do you like it here? he asked.

  Hobo was still for a time, and Shoshana was afraid the ape had given up signing altogether. But at last, he moved his hand, held in an O shape, from his mouth to his cheek. It was a sign that combined the words for eat and sleep, and it expressed the simple thought: Home.

  Yes, Marcuse signed. It’s your home. A pause. A seagull flew by overhead. But your home used to be Georgia Zoo, remember?

  Hobo nodded, a simple, and very human, gesture.

  Georgia Zoo wants you back—be your home again.

  Hobo briefly looked at Marcuse’s face. You there?

  No.

  He pointed questioningly at Shoshana.

  No. None of us. But: other apes!

  Hobo made no reply.

  What you want? Marcuse asked at last. Here? Or zoo?

  The ape looked around his little island, his eyes lingering for a moment on the statue of the Lawgiver, and lingering again when they came to the gazebo at the island’s center, with its screen windows and doors to keep the insects out, and his easel and work stool in the middle.

  Home, Hobo signed again, and then he spread his arms, encompassing it all.

  Okay, Marcuse replied. But others want to take you away, so you’re going to have to help us.

  Hobo made no reply. Shoshana thought Marcuse’s blue polyester trousers might give up under the strain of him crouching for so long. There will be a fight, he signed. Understand? A fight over where you will live.

  Hobo briefly looked at Shoshana, then back at Marcuse. His eyes were dark, wet.

  If you speak, Marcuse continued, you can stay here—maybe.

  Hobo looked around his little island domain again, and glanced back at the bungalow, off in the distance. Stay here, said Hobo.

  Shoshana wondered if the Silverback was going to raise the question of Hobo’s violent behavior, but he seemed to be letting that pass for now.

  That’s right—but you have to say it to other people. To strangers, or…

  He took a deep breath, then let it out. Shoshana knew there was no way Hobo could understand what Marcuse wanted to convey: Or else people will think I coached you in what to say.

  Strangers, said Hobo, and he shook his head and bared his teeth. Bad.

  It’s important… Marcuse began.

  But Hobo made the downward sign for bad once more, and then suddenly bolted away, running on all fours to the far side of the island.

  sixteen

  Bashira left around 4:00 p.m., and, after seeing her out, Caitlin went back up to her mother’s office. She was still IMing with Webmind there. “How is he?” Caitlin asked.

  “The president?” her mom asked innocently. “Professor Hawking?”

  “Mom!”

  “Sorry, sweetheart.” She smiled. “He is fine; he seems to have completely recovered. Oh, and he hopes you enjoy the Harry Potter books.”

  Caitlin was startled. Yes, Webmind saw what she was seeing—but the notion of him discussing that with her mother was disconcerting to say the least! She’d have to have a talk with him about privacy.

  “Just give me a minute,” her mother said. “Then you can have your computer back. I want to finish this up. We’re talking about academic politics, of all things.”

  “No problem,” said Caitlin. She lay back on her bed, switched her eyePod over to duplex mode, interlaced her hands behind her head, and let the wonder of webspace engulf her. Except for the sound of her mother’s typing, the outside world didn’t intrude.

  There was perfection here: the perfection of Euclid, of geometry, of straight lines and exact circles.

  “Mom?”

  A voice, bridging the two realities. “Yes, dear?”

  “Not everyone is going to like Webmind, are they? I mean, if the public ever finds out about him.”

  She heard her take a deep breath, then let it out. “Probably not.”

  “They’re going to compare him to Big Brother, aren’t they?”

  “Certainly some people will, yes.”

  “But we’re the ones guiding his development—you, me, Dr. Kuroda, Dad. Can’t we make sure he’s, you know, good?”

  “Make sure?” said her mother. “Probably not—no more than a parent can make sure her child turns o
ut well. But we can try our best.” She paused. “And sometimes it does turn out all right.”

  Tony Moretti and Peyton Hume were back in Tony’s office. The colonel was swilling black coffee to keep going, and Tony had just downed a bottle of Coke. The Secretary of State was on the line again from Milan. “So,” she said, “this thing is called Webmind?”

  “That’s what the Decter kid refers to it as, yes,” said Hume.

  “We shouldn’t call it that,” said Tony. “We should give it a code name, in case any of our own future communications are compromised.”

  Hume snorted. “Too bad ‘Renegade’ is already taken.”

  Renegade was the Secret Service’s code name for the current president; the Secretary’s own—left over from her time in the White House—was Evergreen.

  “Call it Exponential,” Hume suggested after a moment.

  “Fine,” said the secretary. “And what have you determined? Is Exponential localized anywhere?”

  “Not as far as we can tell,” said Tony. “Our assumption now is that it’s distributed throughout the Internet.”

  “Well,” said the secretary, “if there’s no evidence that Exponential is located or concentrated on American soil, or for that matter, no evidence that its main location is inside an enemy country, do we—the US government—actually have the right to purge it?”

  Colonel Hume’s voice was deferential. “If I may be so bold, Madam Secretary, we have more than a right—we have an obligation.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, one could technically argue that the World Wide Web is a European invention—it was born at CERN, after all—but the Internet, which underlies the Web, is, without doubt, an American invention. The decentralized structure, which would let the Internet survive even a nuclear attack on several major US cities, was our doing: the fact that the damn thing has no off switch was by design—by American design. This is, in a very real sense, an American-made crisis, and it requires an American-made solution—and fast.”

  At 7:30 p.m. Saturday night—which was 9:30 a.m. Sunday morning in Tokyo—Dr. Kuroda came back online. He said that by the end of the day his time he hoped to have the codecs in place for Webmind to actually start watching movies.

  That reminded Caitlin that she and her father had a date to watch a movie on her birthday, and, although it seemed perhaps frivolous to go through with that plan, she was exhausted from talking with Webmind.

  In a normal IM session, there were delays of many seconds or even minutes between sending a message and getting a response, as the person at the other end composed their thoughts or took time out to do other things. But the freakin’ instant she hit enter—boom!—Webmind’s response popped into her chat window. She really did need to take a break; talking with him was like a marathon cross-examination session. Besides, one didn’t disrupt her father’s planned schedule lightly. And, anyway, her mother was going to spend the evening working with Webmind alongside Dr. Kuroda.

  Her father did not do well in crowds, so Caitlin knew asking him to take her to a theater was out of the question. But her parents had a sixty-inch wall-mounted flat-screen TV, and that would do well enough, she thought.

  Caitlin liked the symmetry: she was going to have her first real experience watching a movie at the same time that Webmind, thanks to Dr. Kuroda, was going to have his first taste of online video.

  Professor Hawking was jet-lagged, and even under the best of circumstances couldn’t be overworked; Caitlin’s dad had gotten home about an hour ago. He was a typical math geek in a lot of ways. He had a collection of science-fiction films on DVD and Blu-ray discs, and although he said he’d seen most of them before, Caitlin was surprised to discover how many of the cases were still shrink-wrapped. “Why’d you buy them if you weren’t going to watch them?” she asked.

  He looked at the tall, thin cabinets that contained the movies and seemed to ponder the question. “My childhood was on sale,” he said at last, “so I bought it.”

  She understood: there had been Braille books, including Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and The Hobbit, that gave her pleasure to own even though it had been years since she’d turned to them.

  “Your choice,” her father said.

  “I have no idea,” said Caitlin. “Was there something you particularly liked when you were my age?”

  His hand went immediately to a package on the bottom shelf. “This one,” he said, “came out the year I turned sixteen.” He held it up, and she peered at the box’s cover. She could only see with one eye, so flat images didn’t present any special challenge: it showed a teenage boy and a teenage girl looking at what she guessed after a second was an old-fashioned computer monitor with a curved display.

  She tried to read the title: “W, a, um, r, c—”

  “It’s a G,” her father corrected. “WarGames.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “A computer wiz. A hacker.”

  “That girl?” asked Caitlin, excited.

  “No. That’s Ally Sheedy. The love interest.”

  “Oh.”

  “The hacker is the boy, Matthew Broderick.”

  “He got married to Sarah Jessica Parker,” Caitlin said, peering at his picture.

  “Who’s that?” asked her dad.

  She found herself not wanting to volunteer a familiarity with Sex and the City, so she just said, “An actress.” She paused. “Okay, let’s watch it.” But then she frowned. Her father hated it when her mother talked while he was watching TV. “I, um, might have to ask you some questions—about what’s on screen, I mean.” There were still so many things she had never seen.

  “Of course,” said her Dad.

  Caitlin wanted to hug him, but didn’t. She moved to the couch. He put the disc in a thing that had to be the Blu-ray player, and then joined her. She was pleased he didn’t sit quite the maximum possible distance from her.

  Caitlin was surprised to see her dad change his glasses, swapping one pair for another; she’d had no idea that he had two different pairs. “Would you like closed captioning?” he asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “Subtitles. Transcriptions of the dialog. Might help you with your reading.”

  Caitlin thought that was a great idea—and not just for herself. It would let Webmind follow the movie, too, as it watched the datastream from her eyePod; it didn’t hear anything from the real world, after all.

  The film began. The opening had two men heading down into an underground missile silo to relieve two other men who had been on duty there. They were bantering among themselves about what she eventually realized was some marijuana one of them had smoked while they’d been away.

  She looked sideways at her dad, wondering what his own experience, if any, with drugs was—but that was something she couldn’t ask him about. She’d have to be content with little revelations, like the fact that he had multiple pairs of glasses.

  Suddenly, the mood in the film turned: the men received the launch order for their missile, but one of them—the pot smoker—was refusing to turn his firing key, and the other—

  Oh, my God!

  The other pulled out what she suddenly realized was a gun and aimed it at the first man, ready to blow his head off if he didn’t launch the missile, and—

  And the opening credits—something she’d heard about but had never before seen—began to appear. She was hooked.

  The film turned out to be about an initiative to take humans out of the loop in launching missiles; instead, the decisions would be made by a computer at NORAD headquarters. But Matthew Broderick’s character accidentally hacked into the system and, thinking he was playing a game, got the computer to prepare to launch a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union (yes, the movie was that old!).

  It was definitely a message film, Caitlin thought. Broderick and the chick—Ally-something—tracked down the original programmer of the NORAD computer, and, with his aid, they tried to teach the computer that nuclear w
ar was as futile as tic-tac-toe. After a gorgeous series of graphic computer simulations—a light show that reminded Caitlin of her own glimpses of webspace—the computer spoke to its creator with a synthesized voice, not unlike the one JAWS produced: “Greetings, Professor Falken.”

  The Ally character had observed earlier in the film that the programmer, Stephen Falken, was “amazing-looking.” She hadn’t meant that he was hot, but rather that he had a captivating face…and he did, Caitlin thought, at least in her limited experience. She’d often read the phrase “intelligent eyes,” but had never known what it had meant before. Falken’s gaze took in everything around him.

  He typed his response to the computer, and also spoke it aloud. “Hello, Joshua.”

  The computer replied: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

  The text was shown on a big computer monitor in the movie, and again in the closed-captioning box: The only winning move is not to play.

  The ending music—which, surprisingly, was mostly a harmonica—played as the credits rolled, but they were in red text on black in some font that Caitlin couldn’t read at all.

  “What did you think?” her dad asked.

  Caitlin was surprised that her heart was pounding. She’d listened to many movies before, and read tons of books, but—my goodness!—there was something special about the rush of visual images.

  “It was incredible,” she said. “But—but was it really like that?”

  Her dad nodded. “My father had an IMSAI 8080 at his office, just like the one Matthew Broderick had in the movie, with eight-inch floppy drives. I did my first programming on it.”

  “No, no,” said Caitlin. “I mean, you know, living in fear like that? Afraid that the superpowers were going to blow up the world?”

  “Oh,” said her father. “Yes.” He was quiet for a time, then he said softly, “I’d thought all that was in the past.”

  Caitlin, of course, had heard the news about the rising tensions between the US and China. She looked at the screen and listened to the sad harmonica play.