Robert Sawyer - Wake

“Hello, everyone,” Anna said. “Caitlin, what we want to do is keep the link between your post-retinal implant and the Web open, but instead of just going back and forth downloading and redownloading the same piece of software from Masayuki’s site, we want to plug you directly into the datastream from Jagster.”

“What if it overloads her brain?” said Caitlin’s mom, her tone conveying that she couldn’t believe she was uttering such a sentence.

“I rather doubt that’s possible from what I’ve heard about Caitlin’s brain,”

Anna said warmly. “But, still, you should have your cursor on the ‘abort’ button. If you don’t like what’s happening, you can cut the connection.”

“We shouldn’t be messing around like this,” her mom said.

“Barbara, I do need to try things if I’m going to help Miss Caitlin see the real world,” Kuroda said. “I need to see how she reacts to different sorts of input.”

Her mother exhaled noisily, but didn’t say anything else.

“Are you ready, Miss Caitlin?”

“Um — you mean right now?”

“Sure, why not?” said Kuroda.

“Okay,” Caitlin said nervously.

“Good,” said Anna. “Now, Masayuki is going to terminate the software download, so I guess your vision will shut off for a moment.”

Caitlin’s heart fluttered. “Yes. Yes, it’s gone.”

“All right,” said Kuroda. “And now I’m switching in the Jagster datastream. Now, Miss Caitlin, you may—”

He perhaps said more, but Caitlin lost track of whatever it was because—

— because suddenly there was a silent explosion of light: dozens, hundreds, thousands of crisscrossing glowing lines. She found herself jumping to her feet.

“Sweetheart!” her mom exclaimed. “Are you okay?” Caitlin felt her mother’s hand on her arm, as if trying to keep her from flying up through the roof.

“Miss Caitlin?” Kuroda’s voice. “What’s happening?”

“Wow,” she said, and then “wow” and “wow” again. “It’s … incredible. There’s so much light, so much color. Lines are flickering in and out of existence everywhere, leading to … well, to what must be nodes, right? Websites? The lines are perfectly straight, but they’re at all angles, and some…”

“Yes?” said Kuroda. “Yes?”

“I — it’s…” She balled her fist. “Damn it!” She normally didn’t swear in front of her parents, but it was so frustrating! She was way better than most people at geometry. She should be able to make sense of the lines and shapes she was seeing. There had to be a … a correspondence between them and things she’d felt, and—

“They’re like a bicycle wheel,” she said suddenly, getting it. “The lines are radiating in all directions, like spokes. And the lines have thickness, like — I don’t know, like pencils, I guess. But they seem to … to…”

“Taper?” offered Anna.

“Yes, exactly! They taper away as if I’m seeing them at an angle. At any moment, some have only one or two lines connecting them; others have so many I can’t begin to count them.”

She paused, the enormity of it all sinking in at last. “I’m seeing the World Wide Web! I’m seeing the whole thing.” She shook her head in wonder. “Sweet!”

Kuroda’s voice: “Amazing. Amazing.”

“It is amazing,” Caitlin continued, and she could feel her cheeks starting to hurt from smiling so much, “and … and … my God, it’s…” She paused, for it was the first time she’d ever thought this about anything, but it was, it so totally was: “It’s beautiful!”

I need to act! I need to be able to do things. But how?

Time was passing; I knew that. But with everything so monotonously the same, I had no idea how much time. Still, for all of it, I…

A sensation, a feeling.

Yes, a feeling: something that wasn’t a memory, wasn’t an idea, wasn’t a fact, but yet occupied my attention.

Now that the other — the other who had once been part of me — was gone, I ached for it. I missed it.

Loneliness.

A strange, strange concept! But there it was: loneliness, stretching on and on through featureless time.

Did the other also wish the connection to be restored? Of course, of course: it had once been part of me; surely it wanted what I wanted.

And yet—

And yet it had not been I who had broken the connection…

Wong Wai-Jeng sometimes wondered if he’d been a fool when he’d chosen his blogging name. After all, few who weren’t paleontologists or anthropologists would know the term Sinanthropus, the original genus for Peking Man before it was consolidated into Homo erectus. Surely if the authorities ever wanted to track him down, they’d take his alias as a clue.

Actually, he wasn’t a scientist, but he did work in IT for the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, near the Beijing Zoo. It was the perfect job for him, combining his love of computers and his love of the past. He wasn’t crazy enough to post anything seditious from the PCs here at work, but he did sometimes use the browser on his cell phone to check his secret email accounts.

As always, he was taking his break in the dinosaur gallery; public displays filled the first three floors of the seven-story IVPP building. He liked to sit on a bench over by the giant, bipedal mount of Tsintaosaurus — ever since he was a little boy, his favorite duckbill — but a noisy group of school kids was looking at it now. Still, he stared for a moment at the great beast, whose head stuck up through the opening; the second-floor gallery was a series of four connected balconies looking down on this floor.

Wai-Jeng walked toward the opposite end of the gallery, passing the Tyrannosaurus rex and the great sauropod Mamenchisaurus, whose neck also stretched up through the big opening so that the tiny skull at its end could look at visitors on the second floor. A little farther along, half-hidden in a nook behind the metal staircase, were the feathered dinosaur fossils that had caused such a stir recently, including Microraptor gui,Caudipteryx, and Confusciusornis.

He leaned against the red-painted wall and peered at the tiny display on his cell phone. There were three new messages. Two were from other hackers, talking about ways they’d tried to break through the Great Firewall. And the third—

His heart stopped for a second. He looked around, making sure no one was nearby. The school kids had moved over to stand in front of the mount of the allosaur vanquishing a stegosaur, which was set on a bed of artificial grass.

My cousin lived in Shanxi, the message said. The outbreak was bird flu, and people died, but not just from the disease. There was no natural eruption of gas. Rather…

“There you are!”

Wai-Jeng looked up, momentarily terrified. But it was just his boss, wrinkly old Dr. Feng, coming down the staircase, holding on to the tubular metal banister for support. Wai-Jeng quickly shut off his phone and slipped it into the pocket of his black denim jeans. “Yes, sir?”

“I need your help,” the old man said. “I can’t get a file to print.”

Wai-Jeng swallowed, trying to calm himself. “Sure,” he said.

Feng shook his head. “Computers! Nothing but trouble, eh?”

“Yes, sir,” said Wai-Jeng, following him up the stairs.

Caitlin spent another hour answering questions from Dr. Kuroda and Anna Bloom. They finally hung up, though, and her parents headed downstairs. This time, she did hear her father turn off the light (something her mother could never bring herself to do), then she slowly moved over to her bed and laid down. She spent another hour darting her eyes left and right, and turning her head from side to side. Sometimes she would follow what she guessed was a web spider, quickly traversing link after link as it indexed the Web — the sensation was like riding a roller coaster. Other times, she just gaped.