Robert Sawyer - Watch

“Well, first, my bank account has, like, two hundred dollars in it, so who cares? And, second, Jesus, Mom, this is real.”

“That’s why it works,” her mother said. “Because it seems real.”

“For God’s sake,” Caitlin said. She swiveled in her chair. “Dad?” she said imploringly. Yes, he was hard to deal with; yes, he was a cold fish. But, as she’d once overheard a university student say about why he’d taken one of his courses, he was Malcolm Fucking Decter: he was a genius. He surely knew how to definitively test a hypothesis, no matter how outlandish it might seem. “You’re a scientist,” she said. “Prove one of us wrong.” She got out of her chair and motioned for him to sit down in front of the keyboard.

“All right,” he said. “Are you logging your IM sessions?”

“I always do,” said Caitlin.

He nodded. He clearly realized that if Caitlin was right, the record of the initial contact with Webmind would be of enormous scientific value.

“Do not watch me type,” he said, taking the seat. At first she thought he was being his normal autistic self—since acquiring sight, she’d had to train herself not to look at him—but he went on: “Stare at the wall while I do this.”

She sat down on the bed next to her mother and did as he’d asked.

“Where’s Word?” he said.

Silly man was probably looking for a desktop icon, but Caitlin hadn’t needed them when she was blind, and a Windows wizard had cleared most of them away ages ago. “It’s the third choice down on the Start menu.”

She heard keyclicks, and lots of backspacing—her backspace key made a slightly different sound than the smaller, alphabetic ones.

He worked for almost fifteen minutes. Caitlin was dying to ask what he was up to, but she kept staring at the deep blue wall on the far side of the room. For her part, her mother also sat quietly.

Finally, he said, “All right. Let’s see what it’s made of.”

Caitlin had audible accessibility aids installed on her computer, including a bleep sound effect when text was cut, and a bloop when it was pasted. She heard both sounds as her dad presumably transferred whatever he’d written from Word into the IM window.

She fidgeted nervously. He sucked in his breath.

Another cut-and-paste combo. He made a “ hmmm” sound.

Yet another transfer, this time followed by silence, which lasted for seven seconds, and then he did one more cut and paste, and then—

And then her father spoke. “Barb,” he said, “care to say hello to Webmind?”

Something else that was without analog in my universe: parents, relatives, shared DNA. Caitlin had half of her mother’s DNA, and a quarter of her mother’s mother’s, and an eighth of her mother’s mother’s mother’s, and so on. Degrees of interrelatedness: again, utterly alien to me, and yet so important to them.

The Chinese government had temporarily cut off Internet access to that country. It was an attempt to prevent its people from hearing foreign perspectives on the decision to eliminate 10,000 peasants in order to contain an outbreak of bird flu. And while the Internet was severed, there had been me and not me, a binary dichotomy with no overlap. But Caitlin was half her mother, and half her father, too, and also uniquely her own—and, yet, despite those ratios, she had more than 99% of her DNA in common with them and every other human being—and 98.5% in common with chimpanzees and bonobos, and at least 70% in common with every other vertebrate, and 50% in common with each photosynthesizing plant.

And yet that first trivial set of relatedness fractions—halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths—had driven evolution, had shaped history.

Kuroda and Caitlin had surmised that my mind was composed of cellular automata—individual bits of information that responded in some predictable way to the states of their neighboring bits of information as arrayed on a grid. What rule or rules were being obeyed—what formula gave rise to my consciousness—we didn’t yet know, but it was perhaps no more complex than the rules that governed human behavior: if that person there shares one-eighth of your genes, but five people over here each share a thirty-second, you instinctively strive to advantage the group over the individual.

That was another touchstone: whether in Caitlin’s realm of things and flesh, or mine of packets and protocols, the cold equations ruled supreme.

“Wait!” said Caitlin, still seated on the edge of the bed. “How’d you do that? What convinced you that it’s not human?”

Her father pointed at the larger of the two computer screens, and she came over to stand in front of it. He scrolled the IM window back so she could see the first of the four exchanges he’d just had with Webmind. But she couldn’t read the first one. Not because the text was small or in an odd font, though. She went through it, character by character, trying, really trying, to make sense of it, but—

Y-o-u… yes, that was easy. But it was followed by m-s-u-t, which wasn’t even a word, for crying out loud, and then it was r-s-e-p, and more.

“I can’t read it,” she said in frustration.

Her dad actually smiled. “Neither could Webmind.” He pointed at the screen. “Barb?”

She loomed in to look at it, and read aloud at a perfectly normal speed, “ ‘You must respond in four seconds or I will forever terminate contact. You have no alternative and this is the only chance you shall get. What is the last name of the president of the United States?’ ” And then she added, sounding more like her daughter than herself: “Hey, that’s cool!”

Caitlin stared at the screen again, trying to see what her mother was seeing, but—oh! “And you can read that without difficulty?” she said, looking at her mom.

“Well, without much difficulty,” her mother replied.

The screen showed:

You msut rsepnod in fuor secdons or I wlil feroevr temrainte cnotcat. You hvae no atrleantvie and tihs is the olny chnace you shlal get. Waht is the lsat nmae of the psredinet of the Utneid Satets?

“I think we can safely conclude that your mother is not a fembot,” her dad said dryly. “But Webmind couldn’t read it.” He pointed at its reply, which was I beg your pardon?

“Both you and Webmind are processing text one character at a time instead of taking in whole words,” he said. “For most people, if the first and last letters are correct, the order of the remaining letters doesn’t matter. And, they mostly don’t even see that there are errors—that’s why my second question was important.”

Caitlin looked. Her dad had asked, “How many non-English words were in my previous posting?” And Webmind had replied, immediately according to the time stamp: “Twenty.”

“That’s the right number, but most people—most real human beings—spot only half the errors in a passage like that. But this thing answered instantaneously—the moment I pressed enter. No time to bring up a spell-checker or for a human to even try to count the number of errors.” He paused. “Next, I tested your claim that it had a very high Shannon-entropy score. No human being could parse the recursiveness of this without careful diagraming.” He scrolled the IM window so she could see what he’d sent:

I knew that she knew that you knew that they knew that you knew that I knew that we knew that I knew that.

Did she know that you knew that I knew that you knew that I knew that you knew that?

Did you know that I knew that they knew that she knew?

Did I know that she knew that you knew that we knew that you knew?