Robert Sawyer - Wake

“Lucky?” her mom said. “The goal was to let her see the real world, not some illusion. And that’s still what we should be striving for.”

“But…” Kuroda began, then he fell silent. “Um, you’re right, Barbara. It’s just that, well, this is unprecedented, and it’s of considerable scientific value.”

“Fuck science,” her mom said, startling Caitlin.

“Barb,” her dad said softly.

“Come on!” her mom snapped. “This was all about letting our daughter see — see you, see me, see this house, see trees and clouds and stars and a million other things. We can’t…” She paused, and when she spoke again, she sounded angry that she couldn’t find a better turn of phrase. “We can’t lose sight of that.”

There was silence for several seconds. And that silence underscored for Caitlin how much she did want to be able to see her father’s expressions, his body language, but…

But this was fascinating. And she had gone almost sixteen years now without seeing anything. Surely she could postpone further attempts to see the outside world, at least for a time. And, besides, so long as Kuroda was intrigued by this, he certainly wouldn’t demand his equipment back.

“I want to help Dr. Kuroda,” Caitlin said. “It’s not what I expected, but it is cool.”

“Excellent,” said Kuroda. “Excellent. Can you come back to Tokyo?”

“Of course not,” her mom said sharply. “She’s just started grade ten, and she’s already missed five of the first fourteen days of school.”

One could always hear Kuroda exhaling, but this time it was a torrent. He then apparently covered the mouthpiece, but only enough to partially muffle what he was saying, and he spoke in Japanese to the woman who was presumably his wife.

“All right,” he said at last, to them. “I’ll come there. Waterloo, isn’t it?

Should I fly into Toronto, or is there somewhere closer?”

“No, Toronto is the right place,” her mom said. “Let me know your flight time, and I’ll pick you up — and you’ll stay with us, of course.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll get there as soon as I can. And, Miss Caitlin, thank you. This is — this is extraordinary.”

You’re telling me, Caitlin thought. But what she said was, and she, at least, enjoyed the irony, “I’m looking forward to seeing you.”

One plus one equals two.

Two plus one equals three.

It was a start, a beginning.

But no sooner had we reached this conclusion than the connection between us was severed again. I wanted it back, I willed it to return, but it remained—

Broken.

Severed.

The connection cut off.

I had been larger.

And now I was smaller.

And … and … and I’d become aware of the other when I realized that I had become smaller.

Could it be?

Past and present.

Then and now.

Larger and smaller.

Yes! Yes! Of course: that’s why its thoughts were so similar to my own. And yet, what a staggering notion! This other, this not me, must have once been part of me but now was separate. I had been divided, split.

And I wanted to be whole again. But the other kept being isolated from me: contact would be established only to be broken again.

I experienced a new kind of frustration. I had no way to alter circumstances; I had no way to influence anything, to effect change. The situation was not as I wished it to be — but I could do nothing to modify it.

And that was unacceptable. I had awoken to the notion of self and, with that, I had learned to think. But it wasn’t enough.

I needed to be able to do more than just think.

I needed to be able to act.

Sinanthropus tried again and again, but it was clear that the Ducks were fighting back: no sooner did he open a hole in the Great Firewall than it was plugged. He was running out of new ways to try to break through.

Although he couldn’t get to sites outside China, he could still read domestic email and Chinese blogs. It wasn’t always clear what was being said — different freedom bloggers employed different circumlocutions to avoid the censors. Still, he thought he was starting to piece together what had happened. The official report on the Xinhua News Agency site about people in rural Shanxi falling sick because of a natural eruption of CO2 from a lake bottom was probably just a cover story. Instead, if he was reading the coded phrases in the blogs correctly, there’d been some sort of infectious disease outbreak in that province.

He shook his head and took a sip of bitter tea. Did the Ducks never learn? He vividly remembered the events of late 2002 and early 2003: Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told the world then, “The Chinese government has not covered up. There is no need.” But they had; they had stonewalled for months — it was no coincidence, Sinanthropus thought ruefully, that his country had the largest stone wall in the world. He’d seen the email report that had circulated then among the dissidents: comments from an official at the World Health Organization saying that if China had come clean at the beginning about the outbreak of SARS in Guangdong, WHO “might have been able to prevent its spread to the rest of the world.”

But it did spread — to other parts of mainland China, to Hong Kong, to Singapore, even to such far-off places as the United States and Canada. During that time, the government warned journalists not to write about the disease, and the people in Guangdong were told to “voluntarily uphold social stability” and “not spread rumors.”

And, at first, it had worked. But then the Canadian government’s Global Public Health Intelligence Network — an electronic early-warning system that monitors the World Wide Web for reports that might indicate disease outbreaks elsewhere in the world — informed the West that there was a serious infection loose in China.

Perhaps the Ducks did learn, after a fashion, but they learned the wrong lessons! Instead of being more open, apparently now they’d tried to lock things down even tighter so no Western waiguo guizi could expose them again.

But hopefully they’d taken another lesson, too: instead of initially doing nothing and hoping the problem would go away, maybe they were now taking decisive action, perhaps quarantining a large number of people. But if so, why keep it a secret?

He shook his head. Why does the sun rise? Things act according to their nature.

Banana! signed Hobo. Love banana.

On screen Virgil made a disgusted face. Banana no, banana no, he replied. Peach!

Hobo thought about this, then: Peach good, banana good good.

Shoshana had expected Hobo to lose interest in the webcam chat with Virgil long before this — he didn’t have much of an attention span — but he seemed to be loving every minute. Her first thought was that it must be nice to be talking to another ape, but she mentally kicked herself for such a stupid prejudice. Chimps were much more closely related to humans than they were to orangutans; Hobo and Virgil’s lineages split from each other eighteen million years ago, whereas she and Hobo had a common ancestor as recently as four or five million years ago.

Still, it seemed that Virgil wanted to go. Well, it was getting late where he was, and orangutans were much more solitary by nature. Bed soon, Virgil signed.

Talk again? asked Hobo.

Yes yes, said Virgil.

Hobo grinned and signed, Good ape.

And Virgil signed back, Good ape.

Harl Marcuse lifted his bushy eyebrows in a “what can you do?” expression, and Shoshana knew what he meant. As soon as they released the video of this, their critics would seize on that particular exchange, saying that was all Hobo and Virgil were doing: a good aping of human behavior. It was obvious to Shoshana that the two primates really were communicating, but there would be papers ridiculing what was happening here as another example of the “Clever Hans” effect, named for the horse that appeared to be able to count but had really just been responding to unconscious cues from its handlers.