Robert Sawyer - Wake

“Maybe the tendency for profiles has to do with brain lateralization,” Marcuse said. “Artistic talent is localized in one hemisphere; drawing profiles may be a subtle response to that, showing, in essence, that particular half of the subject.” He paused. “Whatever the reason, this makes our Hobo even more special.”

Shoshana looked at Dillon, who was doing his doctoral thesis on primate hybridization. It was a topic of real scientific interest. In 2006, a study revealed that there had continued to be a lot of hybridization between the ancestor of chimps and the ancestor of humans even after the two lines had split millions of years ago; they remained able to produce fertile offspring for a long time, and such crossbreeding had apparently given rise to the sophisticated human brain.

“Absolutely,” Dillon said. “I don’t dispute that seeing Virgil signing on the monitor was a catalyst, but I’d bet hybridization set the groundwork for him being so good at language and painting.”

Shoshana smiled at the subtle turf war that she’d just seen begin: each of them was staking out territory, and would doubtless defend their positions in journal papers over the coming years. But then she frowned; they didn’t have time to wait for papers to go through the peer-review process. “If we want to stave off the Georgia Zoo’s desire to sterilize Hobo, we can’t wait,” she said. “We have to go public with this, get Hobo’s special status generally known, and—”

“And what was your first thought when you saw that painting?” Marcuse demanded. “I’ll tell you what it was — it was my thought, too, as soon as I recognized that it was indeed a portrait. I thought it was a fake. Didn’t you?”

Shoshana looked at Dillon, and remembered her accusation of that very thing, and how Hobo had looked so hurt. “Yes,” she said sheepishly.

The Silverback shook his head. “No, that painting isn’t going to save Hobo — but the next one might. We need him to do it again, and with more cameras recording it all. If there’s only one representational painting, people will dismiss it as a fake — or, even if they accept it as being genuine, they’ll say it’s a fluke, something that happens to sort of, by chance, look like a person. Hell, we’ve been accused often enough as is of just projecting what we want to see onto ape behavior. No, unless he does it again, with the whole process filmed and documented — unless we can replicate this — we’ve got nothing, and our grinning genius is still in danger of being sterilized.”

Saturday morning always meant pancakes and sausages in the Decter household. Now that they were living in Waterloo, the sausages were, of course, Schneider’s brand, and the syrup was real maple syrup Caitlin’s mom had bought from Mennonites in the nearby town of St. Jacob’s.

“I was up at 5:00 A.M.,” Caitlin’s dad said, as soon as they’d started eating.

“There’s a 5:00 a.m.?” Caitlin joked.

“I set up a workspace for you and Professor Kuroda in the basement,” he continued.

“Thank you, Dr. Decter,” Kuroda said, sounding relieved — apparently everybody but the Hoser was worried about her virtue! But she guessed it probably would be more comfortable downstairs than in her bedroom.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” her mom said. “You’re staying in our house; you can call him Malcolm.”

Her father neither confirmed nor denied this assertion, Caitlin noted. Instead, he said, “I bought a new computer at Future Shop yesterday. It’s set up downstairs for the two of you; I put it on the household network.”

“Thank you,” she said. “And I have some news of my own — I saw the lightning last night.”

The words were simultaneous, overlapping. Her dad, matter-of-fact: “Your mother told me.” And Kuroda, amazed: “You saw lightning?”

“That’s right,” Caitlin said.

“What — what did it look like to you?” Kuroda said.

“Jagged lines against darkness. Bright lines — white, right? Stark against a pure black background.”

Kuroda was clearly eager to look at the data from the eyePod: he had only one extra helping of pancakes.

Caitlin had been in the basement just a few times in the three months they’d lived in this house, mostly back in August, when it had been surprisingly hot and muggy outside — almost like Texas. The basement had been cool then (and still was), and although her mother had complained about how little light there was down there — apparently, just a single bulb in the middle of the room — it hadn’t bothered Caitlin.

“What’s the 4-1-1?” she asked, hands on hips.

Kuroda’s English was excellent, but the information number must be different in Japan. “Sorry?”

“What’s the setup? Tell me about the room.”

“Ah. Well, it’s an unfinished basement — I suppose you know that. Bare insulation between the slats; cement floor. There’s an old TV — the kind with a picture tube — and some bookcases. And your dad has set up the new computer on one of those worktables with metal folding legs; it’s pushed up against the far wall, the one opposite the staircase. The computer is a mini-tower, and he’s got an LCD screen attached to it. There’s a little window above the table and a couple of comfortable-looking swivel chairs in front of it.”

“Sweet! I wonder where he got the chairs.”

“They have a logo on them — kind of like the Greek letter pi.”

“Oh, he borrowed them from work. Speaking of which, let’s get to it.”

Kuroda helped guide her to one of the chairs, and he settled into the other; she could hear it squeaking a bit. “Let me log onto my servers in Tokyo,” he said. “I want to examine the datastream you sent them during the lightning storm — see if we can isolate what it was that caused your primary visual cortex to respond.”

She could hear him typing away and, as he did, she realized she’d forgotten to mention something over breakfast. “After the lightning flashes,” she said, “webspace looked different.”

“Different how?”

“Well, I could still see the structure of the Web clearly, like before, but the … the background, I guess, was different.”

He stopped typing. “What do you mean?”

“It used to be dark. Black, I guess.”

“And now?”

“Now it’s, um, lighter? I could see details in it.”

“Details?”

“Yeah. Like — like…” She struggled to make the connection; the pattern did remind her of something she was familiar with, but — got it! “Like a chessboard.” She had a blind person’s chessboard, with squares that were alternately raised and lowered, and Braille initials on the top of each piece; she sometimes played her dad. “But, um, not quite. I mean, it was made of lighter and darker squares, but they’re not in the same pattern as a chessboard, and they go on, like, forever.”

“How big are they?”

“Tiny. If they were any tinier, I don’t think I could see them. In fact, I can’t swear that they were squares, but they were packed tightly together and made rows and columns.”

“And there were thousands of them?”

“Millions. Maybe billions. They’re everywhere.”

Kuroda sat as quietly as was possible for him, then: “You know, human vision is made of pixels, just like a computerized image. Each axon in the optic nerve provides one picture element. Now, most people aren’t conscious of them, but if you have decent focus, and you look at a blank wall, some people can see them. Your brain is processing Web information as if it were coming from your eye; it may be hardwired to see it all as a mesh of pixels at the limits of resolution, but…”