Robert Sawyer - Wake

He trailed off. After ten seconds she prodded him.

“But?”

“Well, I’m just thinking. You’ve described seeing circles, which we’ve taken to be websites, and lines connecting them, which we’ve assumed represent hyperlinks. And that’s it — that’s the World Wide Web, right? That’s all of it. So, what could make up the background to the Web? I mean, in human vision, the—”

“Don’t say that.”

“Pardon?”

“‘Human vision.’ Don’t say that. I’m human.”

A sharp intake of breath. “I’m so sorry, Miss Caitlin. May I say ‘normal’ vision?”

“Yes.”

“All right. In normal vision, the background is — well, it’s the distant reaches of the universe if you’re looking up at the night sky. But what would be the background for the Web?”

“Background radiation?” she suggested. “Like the cosmic microwave background?”

Kuroda was quiet for a moment. “How old are you again?”

“Hey,” she said, “my father is a physicist, you know.”

“Well, the cosmic microwave background is uniform to a fraction of a degree in all directions. But what you’re seeing is mottled in black and white, you say?”

“Yeah. And it keeps shifting.”

“Pardon?”

“Shifting. Changing. Didn’t I mention that?”

“No. What do you mean precisely?”

Something brushed against her legs — ah, Schrodinger! Caitlin scooped him up into her lap. “The dark squares switch to light, and the light ones to dark,” she said.

“How rapidly?”

“Oh, really fast. Makes the whole thing shimmer.”

The springs on Kuroda’s chair squeaked as he stood up. She heard him walking across the room and then walking back toward her, then repeating the process: pacing. “It can’t be…” he said at last.

“What?”

He ignored her question. “How clearly could you see the individual cells?”

She scratched Schrodinger behind the ears. “Cells?”

“Pixels. I mean pixels. How clearly could you see them?”

“It was really hard.”

“Can you try again? Can you put the eyePod in duplex mode now?”

She fumbled to get the device out of her pocket without sending Schrodinger to the floor. Once it was free, she pressed the switch; the eyePod made its usual high-pitched beep, which Schrodinger answered with a surprised meow, and—

And there it was, spreading out before her: the World Wide Web.

“Can you see the background now?” Kuroda asked.

“Yes, if I concentrate…”

He sounded surprised. “You’re squinting.”

She shrugged. “It helps. But, yeah, if I really try, I can focus on a small group — a few hundred squares on a side.”

“Okay. Do you have a Go board?”

“What?”

“Um, okay — do you have any money?”

She narrowed her eyes again, but this time in suspicion. “Fifty bucks, maybe, but…”

“No, no. Coins! Do you have coins?”

“In a jar on my dresser.” She was saving to go see Lee Amodeo with Bashira when she came to Centre in the Square.

“Great, great. Do you mind if I go get it?”

“I can do it. It’s my house.”

“No, you take the time to look at the Web, see if you can make out any more detail in the background. I’ll be right back.”

Kuroda could never sneak up on anyone. She heard the sounds of his return long before he actually arrived. She then heard a great jangling as he dumped the coins on their worktable, and more noise as he shuffled them around — perhaps sorting them. “All right. Here’s a bunch of coins. Can you arrange them in the pattern you’re seeing? Put one down for each light spot, and leave a coin-sized space for each dark spot.”

Caitlin shooed Schrodinger out of her lap, and swung her chair to face the table. “I told you. They keep changing.”

“Yes, yes, but…” He made a noisy sigh. “I wish there were some way to photograph it, or at least to slow down your perception, and—” His voice brightened. “And there is! Of course there is!”

She heard him moving about, then soft key clicks. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m halting your reception of the datastream from Jagster, and just passing on the last iteration of it over and over again, so it’ll keep coming down the pike without changing, sort of like—”

“A freeze-frame!” she said as the image ceased to move. She was delighted to be able to apply another concept she’d only ever read about before.

“Exactly. Now, can you make a pattern with the coins that matches what you’re seeing in a portion of the background?”

“A very small portion,” she said. And she started moving the coins around; he’d given her a bunch of dimes. After a moment, she pushed one off to a corner of the desk. “American,” she said; all those years of reading Braille made it easy to tell Queen Elizabeth from FDR.

She built up a grid of dimes and dime-sized empty spaces, counting the coins automatically as she deployed them. “Done,” she announced. “Eight dollars and ninety cents.”

“Completely random,” Kuroda said, sounding disappointed.

“No, it’s not. Not quite. See this group of five dimes here?” She had no trouble keeping track of the pattern she’d made, and touched the appropriate coins. “It’s the same as this group here, except turned ninety degrees to the right.”

“So it is,” he said, excitedly. “It looks like the letter L.”

“And this one’s the same, too,” she said, “turned upside down.”

“Excellent!”

“But what does it mean?” she asked.

“I’m not a hundred-percent sure,” he said. “Not yet. Here, focus your attention again on the same spot in your vision. I’m going to update the data going to your implant, just once … and done.”

“Okay. It’s completely different.”

“Can you make it for me with the coins?”

“I’m not even sure I’m looking at the same spot anymore,” she said. “But here goes.” She rearranged the dimes, and, just to underscore that not only the pattern but also the number of light and dark squares had changed, she added, “Six dollars and twenty cents.” She paused. “Ah! Three sets of that five-coin pattern this time.”

“And in different places,” he said.

“But what does it mean?”

“Well,” said Kuroda, “this may sound crazy, but I think they’re cellular automata.”

“Who in the what now?”

“Hey, I thought you were the daughter of a physicist,” he said, but his tone was one of gentle teasing.

She smiled. “Sue me. And besides, if they’re cellular, I’d need to be a biologist’s daughter, no?”

“No, no — they’re not biological cells; they’re cells in the computer-science sense of the word: a cell is the basic unit of storage in computer memory, holding a single unit of information.”

“Ah.”

“And an automaton is something that behaves or responds in a predictable, mechanical way. So cellular automata are patterns of information units that respond in a specific way to changes in their surroundings. For example, take a grid of black and white squares — each square is a cell, okay?”

“Yes.”

“And on a chessboard that goes on forever, each square has eight neighbors, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, suppose you say to each square something like, okay, if you’re already black and three or more of your neighbors are white, then turn white yourself. An instruction like that is called a rule. And if you keep applying the rule over and over again, strange things happen. I mean, yes, if you just focus on one individual square, all you’d see is it flipping back and forth between black and white. But if you look at the overall grid, patterns of squares can seem to move across it — cross shapes, maybe, or hollow squares, or L shapes like we have here, or clusters of cells that change shape in set stages and, after a fixed number of steps, return to their original shape, but have moved somewhere else in the process. It’s almost as though the shapes are alive.”