Robert Sawyer - Watch

“Evolution is an arms race, right?” said Caitlin. They’d talked about this in biology class. “Predators keep getting faster and stronger, so prey keeps getting faster and better able to defend itself. Gazelles evolved the ability to run fast in response to lions doing the same thing. The game goes on and on forever—because whoever stops upping the ante dies. Again, the only losing move in evolution is not to play.”

“Bingo,” said her mom.

Caitlin nodded. “Mr. Lockery—my biology teacher—says if dinosaurs were magically brought forward in time today, we’d have nothing to worry about. Dogs, wolves, and bears would make short work of tyrannosaurs.” She nodded at Schrödinger, who was now padding across the floor in the opposite direction. “Big cats, too. They’re faster, tougher, and brighter than anything that existed seventy million years ago. Everything is always ramping up, always escalating.”

“Exactly,” said her mom. Caitlin saw her glance out toward the living room, at—ah, she was looking at the staircase, the one that led up to the bedrooms, up to where Caitlin’s computer was, up to where they’d been talking to Webmind. His powers were growing, too, and not just generation by generation, as in biological evolution, but moment by moment. Caitlin turned back to her mom and saw something else for the first time: she saw a person shudder.

When Harl Marcuse had found the property that now housed his institute, it had seemed like an ideal location: twenty-five acres of rolling grassland, with a dome-shaped man-made island in the middle of a pond. But that had been based on the assumption that Hobo was going to be a cooperative ape. Hobo’s island wasn’t large, but he could easily keep his distance from anyone who set foot upon it. Of course, if two people went onto the island, one could go left and the other right, but a cornered, angry ape was not a pretty sight.

Shoshana, Dillon, and Dr. Marcuse were discussing the problem in the main room of the bungalow. Dillon was leaning against the wall, Sho was seated in front of a computer, and Marcuse was in the easy chair.

An idea suddenly occurred to her. “If he won’t talk to us,” she said, “maybe he’ll talk to another ape.”

Marcuse’s shaggy eyebrows went up. “Virgil, you mean?”

Virgil was an orangutan; Hobo and Virgil had made history the previous month with the first interspecies webcam call.

“He might indeed speak to Virgil,” Dillon said. “But do we dare risk bringing Hobo into the house now?” He spread his arms, indicating all the breakables.

“Good point,” Marcuse said. “Plus, I doubt he’d come willingly, and I don’t want to drug him. Let’s set up a webcam chat system for him out in the gazebo.” He turned to Shoshana. “I’m still not talking to that shithead at the Feehan. You work out the details.” And the Silverback headed out of the room.

Shoshana exchanged a look with Dillon, then picked up the phone and dialed the number in Miami.

“Feehan Primate Center,” said a male voice with a slight Hispanic accent.

“Hi, Juan. It’s Shoshana Glick, at the Marcuse.”

“Shoshana! Is the old man still pissed at me?” Juan had leaked word of the initial webcam call between Hobo and Virgil to a stringer for New Scientist, and that had triggered the chain of events that had led to the Georgia Zoo filing its custody lawsuit.

She swiveled her chair and looked out the window. “Well, let’s just say it’s a good thing you’re two thousand miles away.”

“I’m so sorry,” Juan said.

It had been a year or so since she’d last seen Juan in the flesh. He was about thirty, had a thin face, high cheekbones, and lustrous long black hair that Sho envied. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not mad at you—and I’ve got a favor to ask.”

“Yes?”

“We’re having lots of trouble with Hobo. He’s become violent and antisocial.”

“Chimps,” said Juan in a “Whatcha gonna do?” tone of voice.

“If it’s just that he’s reaching maturity, there may be nothing that we can do—but he is young for that, and, of course, he is a very special ape, and, well, maybe it’s foolish, but we’re hoping we can get him to cooperate again, at least for a bit. We need him to stand up for himself if we’re going to keep him from… well, you know.”

“Georgia wants to castrate him, right?” said Juan.

“Yes. Barbarians.”

“Well, if they did, Hobo might become a lot more docile.”

“We don’t want him docile, for God’s sake.”

“I’m just saying…”

“Don’t.”

“Sorry,” Juan said. “Um, what can we do for you?”

“We thought if we could get Hobo talking again to someone, we might be able to get him back to talking to us.”

“His old pal Virgil?”

“Exactly. We can’t even get Hobo to come when we call to him anymore, but we thought if we established an open, ongoing webcam link between his hut here and Virgil’s room, maybe they’d start chatting again.”

“Virgil would love that. He was asking about Hobo just today. ‘Where that banana ape?’ he said. ‘Where that talking ape?’ ”

“Good, good,” said Shoshana. “So, can we get this set up?”

“Sure, no problem,” said Juan. “Just tell the old man I helped, okay?”

After dinner, Caitlin headed up to her room. She put on a Bluetooth headset and made some adjustments on her computer. Then: “For now, instead of sending text to my eyePod directly, IM me on my desktop.”

“As you wish,” announced JAWS.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“I am learning much,” Webmind replied. “I believe I perhaps have an inkling of what your own experiences of late have been like; being able to access online video has given me a significantly wider understanding of your world.”

Caitlin smiled. “I’m sure.”

“But there is so much of it, and the quantity is ever growing. Thirteen hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. It is easy for me, or my subcomponents, to scan text for keywords; it is much harder to quickly assess the value of a video.”

“You’re telling me,” said Caitlin. “For YouTube, people often send each other links to clips they like. I couldn’t watch them, but sometimes I listened to the soundtracks. That’s how I discovered Lee Amodeo, as a matter of fact.” She thought for a second, then realized that she actually did have a favorite YouTube video now—and one she’d actually seen. She’d tried to show it to Dr. Kuroda when he’d been here, but he had brushed her off with a “maybe later.”

But perhaps Webmind would enjoy it. She had it bookmarked in Firefox, so she cut-and-pasted the URL into the instant-messenger window and wrote, Have a look at this.

“Okay.”

She started the clip playing for herself, too. There was no particular reason, she knew, that this sight should be more astonishing to her than any other—but it was. The video was narrated by a man with a deep, booming voice that reminded her of James Earl Jones. And when he appeared briefly on screen, he was as big as she’d heard Jones was, although this guy was white.

But it wasn’t the man who was fascinating—oh, no, no. Rather, it was the other two… beings in the video.

One was a chimpanzee, with black hair, a black face—really black, not the brown she’d discovered so-called black human skin actually was. And the other was an orangutan, with orange hair, slightly lighter skin, and alert, brown eyes. The chimp, according to the narrator, was named Hobo, and the orangutan was called Virgil.

The video was remarkable because in it, Hobo, who lived in San Diego, and Virgil, whose home was in Miami, were talking to each other in sign language. It was, apparently, the first-ever interspecies webcam call—and it was even more remarkable because neither of the species involved was Homo sapiens.