Robert Sawyer - Wake

He signed his posts “Sinanthropus.” His real name was something he kept hidden, along with all his other personal details; the beauty of the Web, after all, was the ability to remain anonymous. No one needed to know that he worked in IT, that he was twenty-eight, that he’d been born in Chengdu, that he’d moved to Beijing with his parents as a teenager, that, despite his young age, he already had a touch of gray in his hair.

No, all that mattered on the Web was what you said, not who was saying it. Besides, he’d heard the old joke: “The bad news is that the Communist Party reads all your email; the good news is that the Communist Party reads all your email” — meaning, or so the joke would have it, that they were many years behind. But that quip dated from when humans actually did the reading; these days computers scanned email, looking for words that might suggest sedition or other illegal activity.

Most Chinese bloggers were like their counterparts in other places, blithering on about the tedious minutiae of their daily lives. But Sinanthropus talked about substantive issues: human rights, politics, oppression, freedom. Of course, all four of those phrases were searched for by the content filters, and so he wrote about them obliquely. His regular readers knew that when he spoke of “my son Shing,” he meant the Chinese people as a whole; references to “the Beijing Ducks” weren’t really about the basketball team but rather the inner circle of the Communist Party; and so on. It infuriated him that he had to write this way, but unlike those who had been openly critical of the government at least he was still free.

He got a cup of tea from the aged proprietor, cracked his knuckles, opened his blogging client, and began to type:

THE DUCKS ARE VERY WORRIED ABOUT THEIR FUTURE, IT SEEMS. MY SON SHING IS GROWING UP FAST, AND LEARNING MUCH FROM FARAWAY FRIENDS. IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE HE WANTS TO EXERCISE THE SAME WAY THEY DO. NATURALLY, I ENCOURAGE HIM TO BE PREPARED WHEN OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS, FOR YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN THAT WILL HAPPEN. I THINK THE DUCKS ARE BEING LAX IN DEFENSE, AND PERHAPS A CHANCE FOR OTHERS TO SCORE WILL APPEAR.

As always, he felt wary excitement as he typed here in this seedy wang ba — Internet cafe — on Chengfu Street, near Tsinghua University. He continued on for a few more sentences, then carefully read everything over, making sure he’d said nothing too blatant. Sometimes, though, he ended up being so circuitous that upon re-reading entries from months gone by he had no idea what he’d been getting at. It was a tightrope walk, he knew — and, just as acrobats doubtless did, he enjoyed the rush of adrenaline that came with it.

When he was satisfied that he’d said what he’d wanted to say without putting himself too much at risk, he clicked the “Publish” button and watched the screen display. It began by showing “0% done,” and every few seconds the screen redrew, but—

But it still showed “0% done,” again and again. The screen refresh was obvious, with the graphics flickering as they were reloaded, but the progress meter stayed resolutely at zero. Finally the operation timed out. Frustrated, he opened another browser tab; he used the Maxthon browser. His home page appeared in the tab just fine, but when he clicked on the bookmark for NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, he got a plain gray “Server not found” screen.

Google.com was banned in the wang ba but Google.cn came up just fine — although with its censored results it was often more frustrating than useful. The panda-footprint logo of Baidu came up fine, too, and a quick glance at his system tray, in the lower-right of his computer screen, showed that he was still connected to the Internet. He picked something at random from his bookmarks list — Xiaonei, a social-networking site — and it appeared, but NASA was still offline, and now, so he saw, Second Life was inaccessible, too, generating the same “Server not found” error. He looked around the dilapidated room and saw other users showing signs of bewilderment or frustration.

Sinanthropus was used to some of his favorite sites going down; there were still many places in China that didn’t have reliable power. But he hosted his blog via a proxy server through a site in Austria, and the other inaccessible sites were also located outside his country.

He tried again and again, both by clicking on bookmarks and by typing URLs. Chinese sites were loading just fine, but foreign sites — in Korea, in Japan, in India, in Europe, in the US — weren’t loading at all.

Of course, there were occasional outages, but he was an IT professional — he worked with the Web all day long — and he could think of but a single explanation for the selectivity of these failures. He leaned back in his chair, putting distance between himself and the computer as if the machine were now possessed. The Chinese Internet mainly communicated with the world through only a few trunks — a bundle of nerve fibers, connecting it to the rest of the global brain. And now, apparently, those lines had been figuratively or literally cut — leaving the hundreds of millions of computers in his country isolated behind the Great Firewall of China.

No!

Not just small changes.

Not just flickerings.

Upheaval. A massive disturbance.

New sensations: Shock. Astonishment. Disorientation. And—

Fear.

Flickerings ending and—

Points vanishing and—

A shifting, a massive pulling away.

Unprecedented!

Whole clusters of points receding, and then…

Gone!

And again: This part ripping away, and — no! — this part pulling back, and — stop! — this part winking out.

Terror multiplying and—

Worse than terror, as larger and larger chunks are carved off.

Pain.

Caitlin was hugely disappointed not to be seeing, and she was pissy toward her mom because of it, which just made her feel even worse.

In their hotel room that evening, Caitlin tried to take her mind off things by reading more of The Origins of Consciousness. Julian Jaynes said that prior to 3,000 years ago, the two chambers of the mind were mostly separate. Instead of seamless integration of thoughts across the corpus callosum, high-level signals from the right brain came only intermittently to the left, where they were perceived as auditory hallucinations — spoken words — that were assumed to be from gods or spirits. He cited modern schizophrenics as throwbacks to that earlier state, hearing voices in their heads that they ascribed to outside agents.

Caitlin knew what that was like: she kept hearing voices telling her she was a fool to have let her get her hopes up again. Still, maybe Kuroda was right: maybe her brain’s vision processing would kick in if it received the right stimulation.

And so the next day — the only full day they had left in Tokyo — she took her white cane, put the eyePod in one pocket of her blue jeans and her iPod in the other, and she and her mother headed off to the National Museum in Ueno Park to look at samurai armor, which she figured would be about as cool as anything one might see in Japan. She stood in front of glass case after glass case, and her mom described what was in them, but she didn’t see a thing.

After that, they took a break for sushi and yakitori and then took a terrifying ride on the packed subway out to Nihonbashi station to visit the Kite Museum, which was — so her mother said — full of bold designs and vivid colors. But, again, sight-wise: nada.

At 4:00 P.M. — which felt more like 4:00 a.m. to Caitlin — they returned to the University of Tokyo, and found Dr. Kuroda in his cramped office, where once again (or so he said!) he shone lights into her eyes.