Robert Sawyer - Wake

Her mother laughed. “Well, no! I mean, we call it white, but it’s, um, I guess it’s more of a light pink with a little yellow, isn’t it?”

Caitlin looked at her hands again. The idea of mixing colors to get a different shade was still novel to her, but, yes, what her mother had said seemed more or less right: a light pink with a little yellow. “What about black people? I didn’t see any at school, and…”

“Well, they’re not really black, either,” her mother said. “They’re brown.”

“Oh, well, there are lots of brown people at school — like Bashira.”

“Well, yes, her skin is dark, but we wouldn’t actually say she’s black. At least in the States, we’d only use that term for people whose recent ancestors came from Africa or the Caribbean; Bashira was born in Pakistan, wasn’t she?”

“Lahore, yes,” said Caitlin. “I don’t suppose I should even ask if there’s really such a thing as a red Indian?”

Her mother laughed again. “No, you shouldn’t. And the term is ‘First Nations’ here in Canada.”

“Um, shouldn’t that be ‘First National’?”

“No, that’s a bank. They also call them ‘aboriginals’ here, I think.” Her mother moved along. “And this, of course, is your computer.”

Caitlin looked at it in wonder: that must be the monitor on the left, and the keyboard, and her Braille display, and on the floor next to the desk the CPU, and — and suddenly it hit her: yes, she had seen the Web, but now she wanted to see the Web!

“Show me,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Show me what the World Wide Web looks like.”

Her mother shook her head slightly. “That’s my Caitlin.” She reached her hand out and turned on the monitor.

“Okay,” her mom said. “That’s your Web browser, and that’s Google.”

Caitlin sat in the chair and loomed close to the screen, trying to make out the details. “Where?” she said.

Her mother leaned in and pointed. “That’s the Google logo, there.”

“Oh! Such nice colors!”

“And that’s where you type in what you’re searching for. Let’s put in — well, where your dad works.” Caitlin leaned to one side and her mother worked the keyboard, presumably typing “Perimeter Institute.”

A screen that was mostly white with blue and black text came up, and — ah, her mother was using the mouse. The screen changed. “Okay,” her mom said. “That’s the PI home page.”

Caitlin peered at it. “What does it say?”

Her mother sounded concerned. “Is it that blurry?”

Caitlin turned to face her. “Mom, I’ve never seen letters before — even if they weren’t blurry, I still couldn’t read them.”

“Oh, right! Oh, God! You’re such a bookworm, I forgot. Um, well, at the top it says, ‘Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics’ and there are a bunch of links, see? That one says ‘Scientific,’ and that one’s ‘Outreach,’ and ‘What’s New,’ and ‘About.’”

Caitlin was astonished. “So that’s what a Web page looks like. Um, so show me how the browser works.”

Her mother sounded perplexed — Caitlin guessed she’d never seen herself in the tech-support role. “Well, um, that’s the address bar. And the forward and back buttons…”

She demonstrated the bookmark list, and how to open tabs, and the refresh button, and the home button — which looked to Caitlin like what a house was supposed to look like. And then they started visiting different Web pages.

“See,” her mom said, “that’s a hyperlink. Some people underline them, to make them stand out, and some people just use different colors. See what happens when I click on it? Well, okay, what happens is the page it links to opens up, but if we go back” — she did something else with the mouse — “see, the link has changed color, to show that it’s one you’ve already visited.”

It was all so … so busy! Caitlin actually yearned for the simplicity of her screen reader and one-line Braille display; she was afraid she’d never find her way around all this.

“Now, let’s have a look at some streaming video,” her mom said. She leaned in and typed something on the keyboard. “Okay. Here’s CNN. Let’s pick a story…”

She moved the mouse pointer again, and—

“More now on the revelations coming out of China,” said the anchor. His voice gave away that he was male, and Caitlin could see that he had gray hair and “white” skin — a light pink with a little yellow.

“The Chinese president spoke on Beijing television today,” continued the anchor. The image changed, and although it was still blurry and indistinct, Caitlin could see it was now showing a different man with black hair and slightly darker skin. He said a few words in Chinese, and then the volume on his voice went down and a translator’s voice began speaking over him. Caitlin had heard such things on the news before but was surprised to see the president’s lips now moving out of sync with what he was saying. Of course, that made sense — but it had never occurred to her that it would happen.

“A government must often make difficult decisions,” the translator’s voice said. “And none are more difficult than those in times of crisis. We had to take swift and decisive action in the interior of Shanxi province, and the problem has been contained.”

Caitlin looked at her mother briefly; she was shaking her head in … disgust, perhaps?

The anchor’s voice again: “World leaders have been quick to condemn the actions of the Chinese government. The President was in North Dakota today, and had this to say…”

Caitlin watched the moving picture, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Of course, she recognized the US president’s voice — but the face was nothing like what she’d expected. “The American people are outraged by the decision taken by Beijing…”

Caitlin and her mother listened quietly to the rest of the report, and she realized for the first time that not everything she was going to see would be pretty.

As I’d noted, the datastream from the special point did not always follow the same path to its destination. I mulled over the significance of that for a while, and I finally got it.

It was a huge leap, a startling conceptual shift: the other entity’s location varied substantially in the realm in which it dwelled, and in order to send data to its intended destination, the entity passed it on to whatever intermediate point was physically closest to it at any given moment. Amazing!

Still, there was one particular intermediary to which the entity linked most frequently, and that point shot out links of its own to many other points, some of which it reconnected with time and again.

Perhaps these other points were special in some way. I touched many of them, but still, maddeningly, could make no sense of the data they poured forth; the only datastream I could interpret was the one from the special point, and even then, only some of the time. Oh, for a key to understand it all!

Caitlin was startled to hear the door open downstairs. She looked at her mother, and could see what must have been a startled expression on her face, too. “Malcolm?” her mom called out tentatively.

A single syllable: “Yes.”

Caitlin spun her chair around, got up, and followed her mom down the stairs — and there was her father! She closed the distance between them, trying to bring him into focus.

“How’d you get home?” her mom asked.

“Amir gave me a lift,” he said. Amir was Bashira’s father.

“Ah,” her mom said, apparently wondering whether Bashira had tipped off her own father. “Did he say anything … interesting?”