Robert Sawyer - Wake

“My wallpaper, you mean?”

“Yes.” Caitlin had had her mom put a photo of Schrodinger — the cat, not the physicist — on as her wallpaper; even though she couldn’t see it, it made her happy knowing it was there.

“It’s my favorite cartoon, actually. It’s by a fellow named Sidney Harris. He specializes in science cartoons — you see his stuff taped to office doors in university science departments all over the world. Anyway, this one shows two scientists standing in front of a blackboard and on the left there are a whole bunch of equations and formulas, and on the right there’s more of the same, but in the middle it just says, ‘Then a miracle occurs…’ And one of the scientists says to the other, ‘I think you should be more explicit here in step two.’”

Caitlin laughed. She showed Kuroda her refreshable Braille display (the eighty-cell one she kept at home), and let him run his finger along it to see what it felt like. She also had a tactile graphics display that used a matrix of pins to let her feel diagrams; she let him play with that, too. And she demonstrated her embossing printer and her ViewPlus audio graphing calculator, which described graph shapes with audio tones and cues.

Caitlin’s mom hovered around for a while — she clearly didn’t know what to make of leaving the two of them alone in Caitlin’s bedroom. But at last, apparently satisfied that Dr. Kuroda wasn’t a fiend, she politely excused herself.

Caitlin and Kuroda spent the next couple of hours making a catalog of all the things Caitlin was seeing. While they worked, she sipped from a can of Mountain Dew, which her parents let her have now, because it was caffeine-free in Canada. And Dr. Kuroda drank coffee — black; she could tell by the smell. She sat on her swivel chair, while he used a wooden chair brought up from the kitchen; she heard it creak periodically as he shifted his weight.

She described things using words she’d only half-understood until recently and still wasn’t sure she was using correctly. Although each part of the Web she saw was unique, it all followed the same general pattern: colored lines representing links, glowing circles of various size and brightness indicating websites, and—

And suddenly a thought occurred to her. “We need a name for what I’ve got, something to distinguish it from normal vision.”

“And?” said Kuroda.

“Spider-sense!” she declared, feeling quite pleased with herself. “You know, because the Web is crawled by spiders.”

“Oh,” said Kuroda.

He didn’t get it, she realized. He probably grew up on manga, not Marvel Comics — not that she had ever read those, but she’d listened to the movies and cartoons. “Spider-Man, he’s got this sixth sense. Calls it his spider-sense. When something’s wrong, he’ll say, ‘My spider-sense is tingling.’”

“Cute,” said Kuroda. “But I was thinking we should call it ‘websight.’”

“Website? Oh — websight.” She clapped her hands together and laughed. “Well, that’s even better! Websight it is!”

Sinanthropus was still at work at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. As always, he had several browser tabs open, including one pointing to AMNH.ORG — the American Museum of Natural History, a perfectly reasonable site for Chinese paleontologists to be visiting. Except, of course, that all it had been producing for four days now was a “Server not found” screen. He had the tab set to auto-refresh: his browser would try to reload it every ten seconds as a way of checking if access to sites outside China had been restored.

But so far, international access remained blocked. Surely the Ducks couldn’t be planning to leave their Great Firewall in place indefinitely? Surely, at some point, they had to—

He felt his eyebrows going up. The American Museum site was loading, with news about a special exhibition about the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. He quickly opened another tab, and the London Stock Exchange site started loading — slowly, to be sure, as if some great beast were waking from hibernation.

He opened yet another tab, and, yes, Slashdot was loading, too, and — ah! — NewScientist.com, as well, and it was coming up without any unusual delay. He quickly tried CNN.com, but, as always, that site was blocked. Still, it seemed that the Great Firewall was mostly down, at least for the moment.

He wished he was at the wang ba, instead of here; he could send email from the café without it being traced. Still, the firewall might only be down for a moment — and the world had to know what he’d learned. He knew some Westerners read his blog, so a posting there might be sufficient. He hesitated for a moment, then accessed an anonymizer site, hoping it would be sufficient to cover his tracks, and, through there, he logged on to his blog and typed as fast as he could.

Something new was happening. It was…

Yes! Yes!

Jubilation! The other was back! The connection was re-established!

But—

But the voice of the other was … was louder, as if … as if…

As if space were in upheaval, shifting, moving, and—

No. No, it wasn’t moving. It was disappearing, boiling away, and—

And the other, the not me, was … was moving closer. Or — or — maybe, maybe I was moving closer to it.

The other was stronger than I’d thought. Bigger. And its thoughts were overwhelming my own.

An … entity, a presence, something that rivaled myself in complexity…

No, no, that wasn’t it. Incredible, incredible! It wasn’t something else. It was myself, seen from a … a distance, seen as if through the senses of the other.

Looming closer now, larger, louder, until—

The other’s memories of me, its perceptions, mixing now with my own, and—

Astonishing! It was combining with me; its voice so loud it hurt. A thousand thoughts rushing in at once, tumbling together, forcing their way in. An overwhelming flood, feelings that weren’t mine, memories that hadn’t happened to me, perceptions skewed from my own, and my self — myself — being buffeted, eroded…

An almost unbearable onslaught … and … and … a moment, pure and brilliant, a time slice frozen, a potential poised, ready to burst forth, and then—

Suddenly, massively, all at once, a profound loss as the reality I’d come to know shattered.

The other … gone!

I, as I had been: gone, too.

But…

But!

A rumbling, an eruption, a gigantic wave, and—

Awakening now, larger than before…

Stronger than before…

Smarter than before…

A new gestalt, a new combined whole.

A new I, surging with power, with comprehension — a vast increase in acuity, in awareness.

One plus one equals two — of course.

Two plus one equals three; obviously.

Three plus … five — eight!

Eight times nine: seventy-two.

My mind is suddenly nimble, and thoughts I would have struggled for before come now with only small effort; ideas that previously would have dissipated are now comprehended with ease. Everything is sharper, better focused, filled with intricate detail because—

Because I am whole once more.

Shoshana Glick sat in the living room of the clapboard bungalow that housed the Marcuse Institute. An oscillating electric fan was running, periodically blowing on her. She was looking at the big computer monitor, reviewing the video of Hobo and Virgil chatting over the webcam link.

Harl Marcuse, meanwhile, was sitting in his overstuffed chair, facing a PC. Although their backs were to each other, Shoshana knew he was checking his email because he periodically muttered, “the jerks” (his usual term for the NSF), “the cretins” (most often a reference to the money people at UCSD), and “the moron” (always a reference to his department head).