Robert Sawyer - Wake

She heard the chair groan as he shifted in it.

“I remember when I first encountered cellular automata in Conway’s Game of Life as an undergrad,” he said. “What’s fascinating about all this is that they’re representations of data that are interpreted as being special by an observer. I mean, those L-shaped things — they’re called ‘spaceships,’ by the way, these patterns that retain their cohesion and fly across the grid — well, spaceships don’t really exist; nothing is actually moving and the spaceship you see on the right side of the grid is completely different in composition from the one you originally saw on the left side. And yet we think of it as the same one.”

“But what are they for?”

“Besides making undergrads go ‘ooooh,’ you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, in nature—”

“These occur in nature?”

“Yes, in lots of places. For instance, there’s a kind of snail that makes the pattern on its shell in direct response to a cellular-automata rule.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It has a row of spigots that spit out pigment, or not, based on what the neighboring spigots on either side are doing.”

“Cool!”

“Yes, it is. But what’s really cool is that there are cellular automata in brains.”

“Really?” she said again.

“Well, they’re in lots of kinds of cells, actually. But they’ve been studied particularly in neural tissue. The cytoskeletons of cells — their internal scaffolding — is made up of long strings called microtubules, and each component of a microtubule, a little piece of protein called a tubulin dimer, can be in one of two states. And those states go through permutations as though they were cellular automata.”

“Why would they do that?”

“No one knows. Some people, though, including — hey, maybe your father knows him? Roger Penrose? He’s a famous physicist, too, and he and his associate, a guy named Hameroff, think that those cellular automata are the actual cause of consciousness, of self-awareness.”

“Sweet! But why?”

“Well, Hameroff is an anesthesiologist, and he’s shown that when people are put under for surgery their tubulin dimers fall into a neutral state — instead of some being black, say, and some being white, they all sort of become gray. When they do that, consciousness goes off; when they start behaving as cellular automata again, consciousness comes back on.”

She made a mental note to Google this later. “But if the snail has spigots, and the brain has these whatchamacallits—”

“Tubulin dimers,” said Kuroda.

“Okay, well if these tubulin dimers are the actual things that are flipping in the brain, what’s flipping in the background of webspace?”

She imagined him shrugging; it would have gone naturally with his tone of voice. “Bits, I guess. You know: binary digits. By definition, they’re either on or off, or one or zero, or black or white, or however you want to visualize them. And maybe you’re visualizing them as squares of two different colors, just at the limit of your mental resolution.”

“But, um, the Web is supposed to pass on data unchanged,” she said. “A browser asks for a Web page, and an exact copy of it is sent from the server that hosts that page. There shouldn’t be any data changing.”

“No,” he said. “That’s puzzling.”

They sat in silence for a few moments, contemplating this. And then she heard her mother’s distinctive footsteps on the stairs, followed by her saying, “Hey, you two, anyone care for a mid-morning snack?”

Kuroda’s chair squeaked again as he heaved his bulk up from it. “I always think better on a full stomach.”

You must do a lot of thinking, Caitlin thought, and she smiled as they went upstairs.

As soon as Shoshana arrived at the Marcuse Institute on Saturday morning, she, Dillon, and the Silverback headed over to the island. Hobo was inside the gazebo, leaning against one of the wooden beams that made up its frame.

Hello, Hobo, signed Marcuse once they were all inside. His fingers were fat and some signs were a struggle for him.

Hello, doctor, Hobo signed back. Marcuse was the only one who required the ape to call him by an honorific instead of his first name. Still, it wasn’t as bad as William Lemmon, the ultimate supervisor of Roger Fouts’s work with Washoe in the 1970s; Lemmon used to make Washoe and his other ape charges kiss his ring when he arrived, as if he were pope of the chimps.

Picture of Shoshana good, Marcuse signed.

Hobo grinned, showing teeth. Hobo paint! Hobo paint!

Yes. Now will you paint … His hands froze in midair, and Shoshana wondered if he’d decided that he didn’t want to see himself caricatured by an ape. After a moment, he began signing again: Dillon?

Hobo turned an appraising set of eyes on the young grad student with the scraggly blond beard; he was wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans, which, Shoshana hoped, weren’t the same ones as yesterday. Maybe … maybe…

Dillon looked surprised to be conscripted for this duty, but he moved over to one of the two stools in the gazebo, sat on it, and struck a pose like Rodin’s Thinker. Shoshana smiled at the sight.

But Hobo threw his hands up over his head, made a pant-hoot, and ran on all fours out the gazebo’s door. Shoshana looked at Marcuse for permission, he nodded, and she took off after the ape, who was now cowering behind the yellow stone statue of the Lawgiver.

What’s wrong? Shoshana asked. She held her arms out to gather Hobo in a hug. What’s wrong?

Hobo looked back up at the gazebo, then at Shoshana. No people. No watch, he signed. There weren’t many things he was self-conscious about; indeed, it had taken a lot to convince him not to masturbate or defecate in front of visiting dignitaries. But his art was something he was uneasy about, at least while it was being created.

We go away, you paint Dillon?

Hobo was quiet for a moment. Paint Shoshana.

Again? Why?

Shoshana pretty.

She felt herself blushing.

Shoshana have ponytail, added Hobo.

She knew that getting him to paint someone other than her would be better. Otherwise, critics would argue that he’d just stumbled on a random combination of shapes that Marcuse, et al., had decided represented Shoshana, and he simply reproduced those same fixed shapes over and over again to get a reward — not unlike half the cartoonists in the world, Shoshana thought; the guy who drew The Family Circus seemed to have a repertoire of about eight things.

Fine, she signed. Paint me, then Dillon, okay?

Shoshana knew she was out-thinking the poor ape; he could, of course, paint her regardless of what she said. After a moment, he signed, Yes yes.

She held out her hand and he took it, intertwining his fingers with hers. They walked back up to the gazebo, the hot morning sun beating down on them.

“Hobo is going to paint another picture of me,” Shoshana announced once they’d passed through the screen door. Marcuse frowned. She switched to signing so Hobo could follow along. And after, Hobo will paint Dillon — right, Hobo?

Hobo lifted his shoulders. Maybe.

“All right,” Shoshana said, “everybody out, please. You know he doesn’t like an audience.”

Marcuse didn’t seem happy about taking orders from a subordinate, but he followed Dillon outside. Shoshana looked around the gazebo, double-checking that the additional cameras they’d set up last night could clearly see both Hobo and his canvas. Then she headed for the door, too. As she exited she glanced back, and, to her astonishment, saw Hobo stretching his long arms out in front of him, with fingers interlocked, as if warming up.

And then the artist got down to work.