Robert Sawyer: Wake

“What’s that?” said Marcuse.

“Please take it, sir,” the man said, and, after a moment, Marcuse did just that. He opened the envelope, swapped his sunglasses for his reading glasses, and, squinting in the bright light, started to read. “Christ,” he said. “They can’t be serious! Listen, tell your people—”

But the bald man had already turned and was walking toward the bridge.

“What is it?” Dillon said moving close to Marcuse and trying to read the document, too. Shoshana could see they were legal papers of some sort.

“It’s a lawsuit,” Marcuse said. “From the Georgia Zoo. They’re seeking full custody of Hobo, and—” He was looking down, reading some more. “And, shit, shit, shit, they can’t! They fucking can’t!”

“What?” said Shoshana and Dillon simultaneously.

Hobo was cowering next to Shoshana’s legs; he didn’t like it when Dr. Marcuse got angry.

The Silverback was struggling to read in the bright sunlight. He thrust the papers at Shoshana. “Halfway down the page,” he said.

She looked down at the document through her mirrored shades. “‘Best interests of the animal…’ ‘Standard protocol in such cases to—’ ”

“Farther down,” snapped Marcuse.

“Ah, okay, um, oh — oh! ‘…and since the animal is exhibiting clear evidence of atypical behavior for a member of either P. troglodytes or P. paniscus, and in view of the extraordinary ecological urgency of preserving the bloodlines of endangered species, will immediately perform a dual…’” She struggled with the strange word: “‘orchiectomy.’” She looked up. “What’s that?”

“It’s castration,” Dillon said, sounding horrified. “They’re not just going to give him a vasectomy, they’re going to make sure that there’s nothing that can be undone later.”

Shoshana tasted bile at the back of her throat. Hobo could tell something was up. He was reaching toward her, hoping for a hug.

“But … but how can they?” Shoshana said. “I mean, why would they want to?”

Marcuse lifted his giant shoulders. “Who the hell knows?”

Dillon spread his arms a bit. “They’re frightened,” he said. “They’re scared. An accident occurred — years ago, when the bonobos and chimps were put together overnight at the Georgia Zoo — and now they’re seeing that something … we might as well say it: something more intelligent has unexpectedly arisen because of it.” He shook his head sadly. “Christ, we were naive to think the world would welcome anything like this with open arms.”

Caitlin was an expert at finding Web pages with Google. Most people never did anything more than just type a word or two into the search box, but she knew all the advanced tricks: how to find an exact phrase, how to exclude terms, how to limit a search to a specific domain, how to find a range of numeric values, how to tell Google to look for synonyms for the specific terms entered, and more.

But there was one feature of Google she’d never had cause to use before, although she’d read about it often enough: Google Image Search. Clearly that was going to be a useful tool in her work with the phantom. She went to the Google home page and clicked on the “Images” tab — fortunately, the Google page was almost barren in its simplicity. She immediately had an urge to search for Lee Amodeo, suddenly wondering what she looked like, but she resisted; this was not the time to get sidetracked. Instead, she typed “APPLE” into the search box — all in caps, just as it had been presented by the literacy program. She was quickly presented with a grid of little pictures of apples, culled from all over the Web. Beneath each one was a snippet of text that appeared near the image on the original website and that site’s URL.

A few were inappropriate: one was the singer Fiona Apple, apparently, judging by its listed source: fiona-apple.com. Another, she realized after a moment, must be the logo of Apple Computer Corporation. But the rest were indeed pictures of the fruit, mostly red, but sometimes — to Caitlin’s surprise — green; she’d had no idea apples came in any color but red.

She loomed in close now to her monitor, looking at the word APPLE, holding on it. Then she pulled her head back, showed the screen full of little images, and clicked one. From the page that Google supplied in response, she selected “See full-size image.”

As a bright red apple filled her screen a thought crossed her mind that made her smile: she was indeed offering up the fruit of the tree of knowledge to the innocent phantom. Of course, that hadn’t gone so well the last time — but, then again, Eve had lacked her facilities…

Prime was now doing something different. It had presented the word APPLE once more and now was showing me pictures. At first, I couldn’t see what Prime was getting at: the pictures were all different. But at last it dawned on me that, despite their differences, there were many commonalities: a vaguely round shape, a color that was usually red, and—

“Apple: the usually rounded, often red, fruit of the deciduous tree Malus pumila.” That’s what the dictionary had said, so—

So these were pictures of apples!

And now—

Now these must be balls.

And—

Yes, yes, cats!

And dogs!

And eggs!

And frogs!

I noticed Prime skipping over some of the proffered images, never expanding the small ones into larger views, and so I guessed that only part of what was being offered was likely relevant. Still, some of the pictures I might have rejected as not being like the others were expanded by Prime. In fact, when showing examples of “apple,” it had also shown—

Apples grow on trees. I knew that from Cyc. So these things in some of the pictures with apples attached must then be trees, no?

It was a slow, frustrating process, but as Prime showed me more and more specific samples of things, I began to generalize my conceptualizations of them. I was soon confident not just that I could tell this bird from that airplane, but that I could distinguish any instance of the former from any of the latter. Likewise, “dog” and “cat” soon were separate concepts, although whatever fine distinction there was between “truck” and “car” eluded me.

Still, so much of it was coming together now, I felt—

Concepts that had no pictures to go with them:

I felt powerful.

I felt intelligent.

I felt alive.

Caitlin knew it was the next logical site to lead the phantom to, but she found herself resisting. After all, it had contained that awful comment about her impact on her father’s career, and, even though she’d removed that, all previous versions of entries were stored forever and still could be accessed by anyone who clicked on the “history” tab.

Her stomach knotted a bit, but, well, if she was right about what was going on, about what was lurking out there, eventually the phantom would know everything.

The site was in her bookmark list, but—

But, actually, it was the English-language version of the site that she had bookmarked; the Web, of course, contained pages in many languages but — yes, she knew the stats — English was still by far the most common one, accounting for more content than the next three biggest languages combined. And the English version of this particular site was much larger than any of the others. No, rather than confuse matters, she’d stick with English for now, and so—

She took a deep breath, moved her cursor with the arrow keys, and hit enter.

There were many ways to navigate this site, but she needed one the phantom could manage on its own. A fragment of one of her favorite books came to mind: