Robert Sawyer: Watch

As she walked into the shop, a bit from The Simpsons ran through her mind. Bart holds a fake ponytail to the back of his head, and exclaims, “Look at me, I’m a grad student! I’m thirty years old and I made $600 last year.” Marge scolds him, “Bart, don’t make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice.”

And sometimes it felt that way, although at least she wasn’t a guy with a ponytail—and she was only twenty-seven. Besides, between what she made and what Max made as a TA, they were almost keeping up with expenses.

There must have been a thirty-degree Fahrenheit difference between the hot air outside and the overly air-conditioned interior of the store. She was wearing a blue halter top, and her nipples went hard in the cold. She assumed that’s why the gangly-looking guy behind the counter was staring at her; the clerk’s pimply face suggested he was at least a decade her junior.

But apparently that wasn’t the reason.

“I know you,” he said. His voice squeaked a little.

Sho raised her eyebrows.

The guy nodded. “You’re the ape lady.”

That was the second time this week—although the last time, at the Barnes Noble at Hazard Center, she’d been referred to as “Homo’s favorite subject.”

She’d politely corrected the elderly woman in the bookstore. “That’s Hobo,” she’d said. It was an interesting Freudian slip, though, and it surely hadn’t been a gay-bashing comment. Hobo did sometimes seem more like he belonged in genus Homo rather than Pan.

Sho looked at the kid behind the 7-Eleven’s counter. “The ape lady?” she repeated coolly.

The young man seemed disconcerted, perhaps at last recognizing that what he’d said could have been construed as an insult—although it wasn’t to Sho: she admired apes a lot, which was why she was pursuing a career in primate communications.

“I mean,” he said, “you’re the woman that ape likes to paint—you know, Bobo.”

“Hobo,” said Shoshana. For God’s sake, it wasn’t that hard a name.

“Right, right,” said the guy. “I saw it on the news and on YouTube.”

Sho wasn’t quite sure she liked being famous—but, then again, her fifteen minutes would doubtless soon be up.

She stopped here often enough—although she’d never seen this kid before—to buy raisins, one of Hobo’s favorite treats. She knew where they were kept and went over to get a box, feeling the boy’s eyes on her as she did so.

When she went up to the cash register, the boy seemed to want to say something to make up for calling her the “ape lady.” “Well, I can see why he likes to paint you.”

Sho decided to take it in stride. “Thanks,” she said, opening her little purse and paying for the raisins.

“I mean—”

But anything else he said would be too much; she knew that, even if he didn’t, and so she cut him off. “Thanks,” she said again. She headed out of the cold store into the harsh late-afternoon sunshine. As she approached her car, she idly wondered if the California vanity plate APELADY was already taken—not that she could afford any such thing.

Shoshana drove the additional fifteen minutes to the Marcuse Institute, which was located outside San Diego on a large grassy lot, pulling her car in next to the black Lincoln owned by Harl Marcuse himself. If he’d had a vanity plate, it might have read 800 LBS; he was known around the NSF as the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. Or, she supposed, it could have said SLVRBCK—although she actually rather hoped that he’d never overheard either her or Dillon, the other grad student, calling him the Silverback.

She entered the Institute’s white clapboard bungalow. Dr. Marcuse was in the little kitchen, fixing himself a snack. “Good afternoon,” Sho said. She didn’t actually know if she was allowed to call him “Harl,” and yet “sir” seemed too formal. He always called her Shoshana—all three syllables—even though he’d doubtless often heard the others call her just Sho. She tilted her head toward the window. “How is he?”

“A bit grumpy,” said Marcuse, slicing a big hunk off a brick of white cheese. “He misses you when you’re late coming in.”

Sho ignored the barb. “I’ll go say hi.” She headed out the back door and walked across the wide lawn leading toward the pond. In its middle was a circular dome-shaped island about seventy feet in diameter, with a gazebo at the center. Shoshana crossed the little wooden drawbridge.

The island had two occupants. One was made of stone: an eight-foot-tall statue of the Lawgiver, the orangutan Moses from the Planet of the Apes movies. The other was flesh and blood. Hobo was sitting in the shade of one of the island’s six palm trees, his chinless jaw propped up by a bent arm; the pose reminded Shoshana of Rodin’s Thinker.

But suddenly the pose dissolved into a flurry of long hairy limbs. Hobo caught sight of Sho and came bounding on all fours toward her. When he’d closed the distance, he gathered her into a hug and, as always, gave a playful tug on her ponytail.

Where been? he demanded, as soon as his hands were free. Where been?

Sorry! Shoshana signed back. At university today.

Fun? asked Hobo.

Not as much fun as being here, she said, and she reached out and tickled him on either side of his flat belly.

Hobo hooted with joy, and Shoshana laughed and squirmed away as he tried to even the tickling score.

Caitlin knew nothing yet about telling people’s ages by their appearance. Her mother was forty-seven, but she couldn’t say if she looked it or not, although Bashira said she didn’t. Her hair was brown, and her eyes were large and blue, and she had an upturned nose.

Her father was two years younger than her mother, and quite a bit taller than either of them. He had brown eyes, like Caitlin, and hair that was a mixture of dark brown and gray.

Her mother was looking at Caitlin; her father was staring off in another direction. “Yes, dear?” her mom said, concerned, in response to Caitlin having announced that she had something to tell them.

But, Caitlin discovered, it was not the sort of thing that came trippingly to the tongue. “Um, Dad, you remember those cellular automata Dr. Kuroda and I found in the background of the World Wide Web?”

He nodded.

“And, well, remember the Zipf plots we did on the patterns they made?”

He nodded again. Zipf plots showed whether a signal contained information.

“And, later, remember, you calculated their Shannon entropy?”

Yet another nod. Shannon entropy showed how complex information was—and, when her dad had done his calculations, the answer had been: not very complex at all. Whatever was in the background of the Web hadn’t been sophisticated.

“Wellll,” said Caitlin, “I did my own Shannon analyses… over and over again. And, um, as time went by, the score kept getting higher: third-order, fourth-order.” She paused. “Then eighth and ninth.”

“Then it was secret messages!” said her father. English, and most other languages, showed eighth- or ninth-order Shannon entropy. And that had indeed been their fear: that they’d stumbled onto an operation by the NSA, or some other spy organization, running in the background of the Web.

“No,” said Caitlin. “The score kept getting higher and higher. I saw it reach 16.4.”

“You must have been—” But he stopped himself; he knew better than to say “—doing the math wrong.”

Caitlin shook her head. “It isn’t secret messages.” She paused, recalling that Webmind’s first words to her were, in fact, “Seekrit message to Calculass,” imitating a phrase Caitlin herself often used online.