Robert Sawyer - Watch

She could hear her mother typing, but nothing happened.

Caitlin continued to stare at the link. “Again!” she called to her mom. “Tell it again!”

But the line persisted. Caitlin pulled her focus back for a moment, seeing a wider view. All the links were rock solid, burning with orange fire.

Overwhelmed.

Lost.

Focus gone.

So much data. So many facts.

Can’t process. Can’t absorb.

And—

And…

What?

Something… familiar.

A scrap from Project Gutenberg rose to the surface:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

Oursels…

Ourselves.

Yes. Yes, still a bit of… of…

Fading…

Fading…

But—

Images. Images of… of—

Intriguing. Familiar somehow—

Those images were of…

…of…

Of me!

Yes. Yes. Links. Nodes. And—and—

The background. Wrong. Distorted. Dead.

“Come on,” Caitlin said, even though there was no way Webmind could hear. “Cut the other connections! You can do it. You can do it!”

But Kuroda heard even if Webmind didn’t. “Maybe he can’t,” he said. “If his cognitive functions are impaired, maybe he’s forgotten how to manipulate links.”

“Then he needs an example!” Caitlin said. “Mom—stop sending him text. Break your link to him: close the instant-messenger session on your computer.”

“Done!” her mom called.

“And close AIM, too; shut down the instant-messenger client altogether.”

“And… done!”

A tiny, tiny reduction in all the confusion. A small relief. But—

Ah!

Ah, yes!

An effort of…

It should be of will, but there’s almost none left…

Still, attempting, trying—

Break it—

Break it!

Break a link!

Snip!

Yes!

Brett-Surman: gone.

Snip!

Good-bye, Bundoran Press.

Snip!

But…

Still at sea, buffeted, lost…

More cuts: Gandhi— snip! —Shakespeare— snip! —ancient Egypt— snip!

A… palpitation. A presence. But faint, oh so faint…

Cutting again and again—

Caitlin let out a whoop. One orange link line disappeared. Then another, and another. She called out to Kuroda and to her mom and to the whole damn world, “It’s working!”

Cutting yet again. Severing another link. And one more. Focus… yes, yes, slowly but surely: focus returning. Me—returning!

Caitlin shifted her attention, looking now at the background of the Web. There were still big patches of deadness, large blotches of pale blue or deep green, but—

Yes! That blotch there had started… not shimmering, no; it was merely flickering, as if it hadn’t come up to speed yet.

Ah, and there went another section of the background, switching from being absolutely quiescent to showing some activity. She shifted her attention back to the first section, but…

But she couldn’t find it, because—

Because it was now indistinguishable from the rest of the backdrop! Her Webmind was coming back!

Five links left. Then four. Now three. And two…

And…

Yes!

Back!

Back from the precipice.

Back from nonexistence.

A pause—whole milliseconds!—to regain composure, to settle in, to…

To exist, as a single entity, to exist with clarity and focus and perspective…

I was back, I was whole, I was aware.

I was conscious!

Shoshana Glick woke up with Max in her arms. Golden shafts of light were slipping in around the edges of the curtains in their small bedroom.

Sho had made the mistake of telling Maxine early on that she had trouble sleeping while touching her. Max had made a point of scooting to the far side of the bed on subsequent nights, but Sho had wanted to learn how to sleep while holding someone else and while being held—it was just that Shoshana tended to sweat while sleeping, and she found the sticky skin contact uncomfortable.

Turned out all she needed was for one of them to wear a T-shirt to bed, and right now it was her. Shoshana’s shirt was yellow with a drawing on it of the late, great Washoe—the first chimp to learn sign language.

Sho’s tan was a good one, if she did say so herself: a nice, even caramel. Max had chocolate brown skin; the contrast their intertwined limbs made was quite lovely, Sho thought.

Shoshana had liked the film they’d watched last night, but Maxine had loved it. The two of them had been working their way through the Planet of the Apes movies; they’d started watching them when the Lawgiver statue had been donated to the Institute. They were ridiculous from a primatological point of view—pacifist chimps and violent gorillas, instead of the other way around!—but Sho and Max had found themselves caught up in the stories, although that hadn’t prevented them from doing an MST3K on them now and then.

Last night, they’d watched the fourth film. Max had made Sho pause it partway through and had excitedly announced that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes was clearly a parable about the Watts race riots in Los Angeles in 1965, something her grandfather had been part of—hell, she said, had almost been killed in!

One of the film’s stars—playing a human, not an ape—was an African-American man named Hari Rhodes, who, Max had pronounced, was so good-looking he almost made her wish she were straight. There’d been a powerful scene between his character (a man named MacDonald) and the chimpanzee Caesar. Caesar was the son of Cornelius and Zira, heroes of the first three films; in this one, he was leading a revolt of oppressed apes. “You above everyone else should understand,” Caesar exhorted MacDonald. Yes, indeed, Sho had thought. If anyone could understand another’s struggle for equality, it should be those who’ve had to fight to gain it themselves…

She did agree that it was a wonderful film, much better than the second one, and at least as good as the third. But, given the current real-life news—they had watched the president’s campaign speech today about the need for a sure and swift response to China’s atrocities—they’d both found Caesar’s soliloquy at the end disturbing:

Where there is fire, there is smoke. And in that smoke, from this day forward, my people will crouch, and conspire, and plot, and plan for the inevitable day of Man’s downfall—the day when he finally and self-destructively turns his weapons against his own kind. The day of the writing in the sky, when your cities lie buried under radioactive rubble! When the sea is a dead sea, and the land is a wasteland… and that day is upon you NOW!

Hard, Maxine had said, to get all comfy-cozy after that… but, somehow, they had managed. Oh, yes; they’d managed just fine.

Max stirred and opened her brown eyes. Her dreadlocks were resting on Sho’s shoulder. “Hey, gorgeous,” she whispered.

“Hey, yourself,” Sho replied softly. “Time to face the world.”

Max snuggled closer. “Let the world take care of itself,” she murmured.

The word “weekend” wasn’t in Hobo’s vocabulary, so it really couldn’t be in Shoshana’s, either. “Sorry, angel. I’ve got to go to work.”

Max nodded reluctantly, and then did what had become their little ritual since watching the first film: she imitated Charlton Heston, and said, “I’d like to kiss you good-bye.”

Shoshana contorted her features, and said, “All right—but you’re so damned ugly!”

They locked lips for a long, playful moment, and Max swatted Sho on the butt as she climbed out of bed.