Robert Sawyer - Watch

“Not much,” said Bashira. “There’s this old Canadian humorist named Stephen Leacock. We read him in English class instead.”

In Caitlin’s admittedly brief experience living here, anyone labeled as “Canada’s answer to…” followed by the name of an American was bound to disappoint. “Well, Twain said, ‘If there is a God, he is a malign thug.’ That stuff in China—or New Orleans, or Mexico City, or…” And now she felt her facial muscles moving, and she imagined she’d adopted that tiptoeing look Bashira had had a moment ago. “…or in Pakistan.”

Bashira looked like she was about to object again, but Caitlin pushed on, finishing her point. “No, if God existed, we’d know it: the world would be a better place.”

But then she paused and took a breath. It was time, she knew, to shift the conversation to something less volatile. She gestured at the present Bashira had given her. “So, um, speaking of books, what do you think of that new one we just started in English class?”

“It’s okay, I guess,” Bash said.

Caitlin nodded and put her glasses back on; they weighed less than the sunglasses she’d worn when she’d been blind. She’d read electronic copies of all the assigned books for the coming year over the summer. The class was doing dystopias just now; Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would be followed by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Mrs. Zed had spent the whole class yesterday drawing parallels between what Orwell wrote about and the modern world, comparing Big Brother to our “surveillance society,” as she kept calling it.

“I thought Mrs. Zed made a good point,” Bashira continued, rotating her chair a little. “Everyone being watched all the time, everything being recorded and tracked. Webcams, security cameras, phone records, cell phones with GPSs, all of that.” She looked at Caitlin. “Did you know that Gmail retains your deleted email messages?”

Caitlin shook her head, but it didn’t surprise her. Storage was dirt cheap.

Bashira went on. “She might be right. The Web might be Big Brother incarnate.”

“Mrs. Zehetoffer is old,” Caitlin said.

Bashira nodded. “Yeah, she must be in her forties. But I still think she might be right. I don’t want everything I say and do to be tracked.”

“I don’t know,” said Caitlin. “When I was blind, it was comforting to know there were security cameras in public areas. I mean, they were like magic to me; I didn’t have any sense of what vision was, but knowing that I was being watched over was relaxing.”

“Yeah, but you are—you were —a special case. And Mrs. Zehetoffer thinks we’re very close to having Big Brother, if he isn’t here already.”

“So?” Caitlin said—and she surprised herself with how sarcastic she sounded.

“Hey, Cait… chill.”

“I’m just saying,” said Caitlin sharply.

“It’s just a book, babe.”

But it wasn’t, Caitlin realized. Nineteen Eighty-Four was not just a novel but rather what Richard Dawkins called a meme—or a series of memes: ideas that spread and survived like genes, through reproduction and natural selection. And Orwell’s meme that surveillance is evil, that it inevitably leads to totalitarianism, that it invades privacy, that it constrains normal behavior, and that it is fundamentally corrupt, had won out over every other possible take on those issues. It was impossible to discuss such matters without people almost immediately invoking Big Brother, confident that merely raising the specter of Orwell’s world would be enough to win any argument.

“Big Brother got a bum rap,” Caitlin said.

“What?”

“You know, I never had one—a big brother—but my friend Stacy does. And he always looks after her. There’s nothing inherently wrong with someone knowing everything, some caring person keeping tabs on you and making sure you’re safe.”

“But if he’s corrupt—”

“He doesn’t have to be corrupt,” Caitlin said.

Bashira looked at her. Caitlin supposed other people had always looked at her while thinking of what to say next, but it was disconcerting; she averted her eyes, understanding, for a moment, what her dad must feel all the time.

“ ‘Power corrupts,’ ” Bashira said gently. “ ‘And absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ ”

“It doesn’t have to turn out that way,” Caitlin said.

“Of course it does,” said Bashira. “Humans are imperfect and subject to corruption. The only thing that isn’t imperfect is the divine, and you said it yourself, my beloved infidel friend: you don’t believe in the divine.”

“You can’t go back out there again,” Dr. Marcuse said to Dillon, as he and Shoshana entered the bungalow. “Hobo has voted you off the island.”

Dillon had taken off his soaking-wet shirt, shoes, and socks, but he was still wearing his black jeans. “But he’s my thesis subject!” he protested.

Dr. Marcuse had brought in the painting Hobo had made, and had set it on a worktable, leaning against the wall. “Look at it,” he said to Dillon.

“Yes?” Dillon replied, peering at the canvas.

“That’s you,” Marcuse said. “With your arms ripped off.”

“Oh,” said Dillon softly.

“You’re not to go out there. Of course, you can still watch him all you want on the closed-circuit cameras.”

“What the hell is wrong with him?” asked Dillon, looking first at Shoshana, and then at Dr. Marcuse.

“He’s reaching maturity,” Marcuse said.

“He’s too young for that,” said Shoshana.

“Is he?” said Marcuse, giving her a withering glance. “Who knows what’s normal for a chimp-bonobo hybrid? Regardless, he’s taking after his father: when male chimps reach maturity, they become hostile loners and are very hard to handle.”

Sho felt her heart sink. If Marcuse was right, then Hobo was going to be like this from now on.

“His reaction to you, Dillon, is symptomatic,” continued Marcuse. “You’re another male, and adult male chimps defend their territories against intruding males. When Werner comes in on Monday, I’ll tell him the same thing—Hobo is off-limits to him, too. Maria is at Yerkes for the next two weeks, but I’ll see if maybe she can cut her trip short and get back here.”

“What about you?” asked Dillon.

“Werner is five-four, and sixty-seven years old—and you, frankly, are a stick insect. But I can take care of myself. Hobo knows who the alpha is around here.”

Shoshana looked at him. Dr. Marcuse could be loud and overbearing, but he did truly adore apes and treated them well. Still, even at the best of times, he was pretty high-strung—and this was not the best of times. As soon as the world had learned that Hobo was making representational art—mostly in the form of paintings of Shoshana’s profile—the Georgia Zoo had served Dr. Marcuse with papers, demanding that Hobo be returned to them. They didn’t care about Hobo as a—yes, damn it all, thought Sho—as a person. No, all they were interested in was the money his paintings were now fetching on eBay and in art galleries. If they won their suit, they’d no doubt try to sell the one of Dillon with his arms ripped off for a particularly high price.

Marcuse moved over to the large chair and picked up the printout he’d been reading earlier. He held it up, inviting Shoshana to look at it.

Sho’s eyesight was good—well, at least when she had her contacts in—but the type was too small for her to make out while he was holding it. “What’s that?” she asked.

“News coverage from June of aught-eight,” he said. He was the only person Sho had ever met who referred to the initial decade of the twenty-first century as the aughts. “Spain’s parliament committed back then to the Declaration on Great Apes.”