Wake Read online

  W A K E

  The first volume in an imaginative and provocative new trilogy that challenges the idea of what consciousness and “being” actually are.

  Caitlin Decter is a typical teen—smart, pretty, and wired—but she’s also blind. Still, she can surf the net with the best of them, following its complex paths clearly in her mind. When a researcher develops an implant that might help her regain her sight, she jumps at the chance, and the results are unexpected.

  Caitlin “sees,” but not just the way we do: for her, the World Wide Web is a riot of colors and shapes, its own dimension. While exploring it, she finds an “other” lurking there—and it finds her, seeing what she’s seeing and learning as she learns. And it’s getting smarter…

  Robert J. Sawyer, who has been called “the dean of Canadian science fiction,” has won all three of the world’s top science fiction awards. He lives in Mississauga, Ontario, with his wife, poet Carolyn Clink. Visit his website at www.sfwriter.com.

  BOOKS BY ROBERT J. SAWYER

  NOVELS

  Golden Fleece

  End of an Era

  The Terminal Experiment

  Starplex

  Frameshift

  Illegal Alien

  Factoring Humanity

  Flashforward

  Calculating God

  Mindscan

  Rollback

  The Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy

  Far-Seer

  Fossil Hunter

  Foreigner

  The Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy

  Hominids

  Humans

  Hybrids

  The WWW Trilogy

  Wake

  Watch (coming in 2010)

  Wonder (coming in 2011)

  COLLECTIONS

  Iterations

  (introduction by James Alan Gardner)

  Relativity

  (introduction by Mike Resnick)

  Identity Theft

  (introduction by Robert Charles Wilson)

  VIKING CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published in Canada by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2009.

  Simultaneously published in the United States by the Berkley Publishing Group.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  Copyright © SFWRITER.COM Inc., 2009

  This novel was serialized in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine, with installments in the November 2008, December 2008, combined January–February 2009, and March 2009 issues.

  Text design by Laura K. Corless.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  ISBN 978-0-670-06741-1

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request to the publisher.

  American Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data available

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  For

  PAT FORDE

  Great Writer

  Great Friend

  acknowledgments

  Huge thanks to my lovely wife Carolyn Clink; to Ginjer Buchanan at Penguin Group (USA)’s Ace imprint in New York; to Laura Shin, Nicole Winstanley, and David Davidar at Penguin Group (Canada) in Toronto; and to Stanley Schmidt at Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Many thanks to my agent Ralph Vicinanza and his associates Christopher Lotts and Eben Weiss, and to contract managers Lisa Rundle (Penguin Canada) and John Schline (Penguin USA), who all worked enormously hard structuring a complex publishing deal.

  Some great brainstorming for this book happened at Sci Foo Camp, sponsored by O’Reilly Media and held at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, in August 2006. Attending my session there were Greg Bear, Stuart Brand, Barry Bunin, Bill Cheswick, Esther Dyson, Sun Microsystems chief researcher John Gage, Sandeep Garg, Luc Moreau, Google cofounder Larry Page, Gavin Schmidt, and Alexander Tolley; I also got great feedback after the conference from Zack Booth Simpson of Mine-Control.

  Thanks to David Goforth, Ph.D., Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Laurentian University, and David Robinson, Ph.D., Department of Economics, Laurentian University, for numerous insightful suggestions. And thanks to anthropologist H. Lyn Miles, Ph.D., of the Chantek Foundation and ApeNet, who enculturated the orangutan Chantek. Thanks, too, to cognitive scientist David W. Nicholas, for many comments and stimulating discussions.

  Thanks to Betty Jean Reid and Carolyn Monaco of the Intervenor for Deaf-Blind Persons Program at George Brown College, Toronto, the first and largest program of its type in the world; to Patricia Grant, Executive Director and Outreach Intervenor Services Manager of the Canadian Helen Keller Centre, Toronto; to John A. Gardner, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Physics, Oregon State University, and founder of ViewPlus Technologies, Inc.; and to Justin Leiber, Ph.D., Philosophy Department, University of Houston, author of the paper “Helen Keller as Cognitive Scientist” (Philosophical Psychology, Vol. 9, No. 4, 1996).

  Very special thanks to my late deaf-blind friend Howard Miller (1966–2006), whom I first met online in 1992 and in person in 1994, and who touched my life and those of so many others in countless ways.

  Thanks to my most excellent ophthalmologist, Gerald I. Goldlist, M.D.; to Edmund R. Meskys; to Guido Dante Corona of IBM Research’s Human Ability and Accessibility Center, Austin, Texas; and to the following members of the Blindmath mailing list who read this novel in manuscript and offered feedback: Sina Bahram, Mr. Fatty Matty, Ken Perry, Lawrence Scadden, and Cindy Sheets. Thanks also to Bev Geddes of the Manitoba School for the Deaf.

  Thanks, too, to all the people who answered questions, let me bounce ideas off them, or otherwise provided input, including: R. Scott Bakker, Paul Bartel, Asbed Bedrossian, Barbara Berson, Ellen Bleaney, Ted Bleaney, Nomi S. Burstein, Linda C. Carson, David Livingstone Clink, Daniel Dern, Ron Friedman, Marcel Gagné, Shoshana Glick, Richard Gotlib, Peter Halasz, Elisabeth Hegerat, Birger Johansson, Al Katerinsky, Herb Kauderer, Shannon Kauderer, Fiona Kelleghan, Valerie King, Randy McCharles, Kirstin Morrell, Ryan Oakley, Heather Osborne, Ariel Reich, Alan B. Sawyer, Sally Tomasevic, Elizabeth Tren
holm, Hayden Trenholm, Robert Charles Wilson, and Ozan S. Yigit.

  Many thanks to the members of my writers’ group, the Senior Pajamas: Pat Forde, James Alan Gardner, and Suzanne Church. Thanks also to Danita Maslankowski, who organizes the twice-annual “Write-Off” retreat weekends for Calgary’s Imaginative Fiction Writers Association, at which much work was done on this book.

  The term introduced in the last chapter of this book was coined by Ben Goertzel, Ph.D., the author of Creating Internet Intelligence and currently the CEO and Chief Scientist of artificial-intelligence firm Novamente LLC (novamente.net); I’m using it here with his kind permission.

  A list of links to the specific Wikipedia entries I’ve briefly quoted can be found at sfwriter.com/wikicite.htm.

  For those interested in learning more about Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, in addition to reading his book please also visit the Julian Jaynes Society (of which I’m a member) at julianjaynes.org.

  A lot of this book was written during the three fabulous months my wife and I spent at the Berton House Writers’ Retreat. The childhood home of famed Canadian writer Pierre Berton, Berton House is located in Dawson City—the heart of the Klondike gold rush in Canada’s Yukon—right across the street from Robert Service’s cabin, and just a short distance from Jack London’s cabin. The retreat’s administrator is Elsa Franklin, and Dan Davidson and Suzanne Saito looked after us in Dawson.

  Finally, thanks to the 1,300-plus members of my online discussion group, who followed along with me as I created this novel. Feel free to join us at:

  www.groups.yahoo.com/group/robertjsawyer

  What a blind person needs

  is not a teacher

  but another self.

  —Helen Keller

  contents

  Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 / Chapter 12 / Chapter 13 / Chapter 14 / Chapter 15 / Chapter 16 / Chapter 17 / Chapter 18 / Chapter 19 / Chapter 20 / Chapter 21 / Chapter 22 / Chapter 23 / Chapter 24 / Chapter 25 / Chapter 26 / Chapter 27 / Chapter 28 / Chapter 29 / Chapter 30 / Chapter 31 / Chapter 32 / Chapter 33 / Chapter 34 / Chapter 35 / Chapter 36 / Chapter 37 / Chapter 38 / Chapter 39 / Chapter 40 / Chapter 41 / Chapter 42 / Chapter 43 / Chapter 44 / Chapter 45 / Chapter 46 / Chapter 47 / Chapter 48 / Chapter 49

  one

  Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light.

  Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound.

  Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others.

  But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn’t exist at all: awareness.

  Nothing more than that. Just awareness—a vague, ethereal sense of being.

  Being…but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future—only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception…

  Caitlin had kept a brave face throughout dinner, telling her parents that everything was fine—just peachy—but, God, it had been a terrifying day, filled with other students jostling her in the busy corridors, teachers referring to things on blackboards, and doubtless everyone looking at her. She’d never felt self-conscious at the TSB back in Austin, but she was on display now. Did the other girls wear earrings, too? Had these corduroy pants been the right choice? Yes, she loved the feel of the fabric and the sound they made, but here everything was about appearances.

  She was sitting at her bedroom desk, facing the open window. An evening breeze gently moved her shoulder-length hair, and she heard the outside world: a small dog barking, someone kicking a stone down the quiet residential street, and, way off, one of those annoying car alarms.

  She ran a finger over her watch: 7:49—seven and seven squared, the last time today there’d be a sequence like that. She swiveled to face her computer and opened LiveJournal.

  “Subject” was easy: “First day at the new school.” For “Current Location,” the default was “Home.” This strange house—hell, this strange country!—didn’t feel like that, but she let the proffered text stand.

  For “Mood,” there was a drop-down list, but it took forever for JAWS, the screen-reading software she used, to announce all the choices; she always just typed something in. After a moment’s reflection, she settled on “Confident.” She might be scared in real life, but online she was Calculass, and Calculass knew no fear.

  As for “Current Music,” she hadn’t started an MP3 yet…and so she let iTunes pick a song at random from her collection. She got it in three notes: Lee Amodeo, “Rocking My World.”

  Her index fingers stroked the comforting bumps on the F and J keys—Braille for the masses—while she thought about how to begin.

  Okay, she typed, ask me if my new school is noisy and crowded. Go ahead, ask. Why, thank you: yes, it is noisy and crowded. Eighteen hundred students! And the building is three stories tall. Actually, it’s three storeys tall, this being Canada and all. Hey, how do you find a Canadian in a crowded room? Start stepping on people’s feet and wait for someone to apologize to you. :)

  Caitlin faced the window again and tried to imagine the setting sun. It creeped her out that people could look in at her. She’d have kept the venetian blinds down all the time, but Schrödinger liked to stretch out on the sill.

  First day in tenth grade began with the Mom dropping me off and BrownGirl4 (luv ya, babe!) meeting me at the entrance. I’d walked the empty corridors of the school several times last week, getting my bearings, but it’s completely different now that the school is full of kids, so my folks are slipping BG4 a hundred bucks a week to escort me to our classes. The school managed to work it so we’re in all but one together. No way I could be in the same French class as her—je suis une beginneur, after all!

  Her computer chirped: new email. She issued the keyboard command to have JAWS read the message’s header.

  “To: Caitlin D.,” the computer announced. She only styled her name like that when posting to newsgroups, so whoever had sent this had gotten her address from NHL Player Stats Discuss or one of the other ones she frequented. “From: Gus Hastings.” Nobody she knew. “Subject: Improving your score.”

  She touched a key and JAWS began to read the body of the message. “Are you sad about tiny penis? If so—”

  Damn, her spam filter should have intercepted that. She ran her index finger along the refreshable display. Ah: the magic word had been spelled “peeeniz.” She deleted the message and was about to go back to LiveJournal when her instant messenger bleeped. “BrownGirl4 is now available,” announced the computer.

  She used alt-tab to switch to that window and typed, Hey, Bashira! Just updating my LJ.

  Although she had JAWS configured to use a female voice, it didn’t have Bashira’s lovely accent: “Say nice things about me.”

  Course, Caitlin typed. She and Bashira had been best friends for two months now, ever since Caitlin had moved here; she was the same age as Caitlin—fifteen—and her father worked with Caitlin’s dad at PI.

  “Going to mention that Trevor was giving you the eye?”

  Right! She went back to the blogging window and typed: BG4 and I got desks beside each other in home room, and she said this guy in the next row was totally checking me out. She paused, unsure how she felt about this, but then added, Go me!

  She didn’t want to use Trevor’s real name. Let’s give him a code name, cuz I think he just might figure in future blog entries. Hmmm, how ’bout…the Hoser! That’s Canadian slang, folks—google it! Anyway, BG4 says the Hoser is famous for hitting on new girls in town, and I am, of course, tres exotique, although I’m not the only American in that class. There’s this chick from Boston named—friends, I kid you not!—poor thing’s name is Sunshine! It is to puke. :P

  Caitlin disliked emoticons. They didn’t correspond to real facial expressions for her, and she’d had to memorize the se
quences of punctuation marks as if they were a code. She moved back to the instant messenger. So whatcha up to?

  “Not much. Helping one of my sisters with homework. Oh, she’s calling me. BRB.”

  Caitlin did like chat acronyms: Bashira would “be right back,” meaning, knowing her, that she was probably gone for at least half an hour. The computer made the door-closing sound that indicated Bashira had logged off. Caitlin returned to LiveJournal.

  Anyway, first period rocked because I am made out of awesome. Can you guess which subject it was? No points if you didn’t answer “math.” And, after only one day, I totally own that class. The teacher—let’s call him Mr. H, shall we?—was amazed that I could do things in my head the other kids need a calculator for.

  Her computer chirped again. She touched a key, and JAWS announced: “To: cddecter@…” An email address without her name attached; almost certainly spam. She hit delete before the screen reader got any further.

  After math, it was English. We’re doing a boring book about this angsty guy growing up on the plains of Manitoba. It’s got wheat in every scene. I asked the teacher—Mrs. Z, she is, and you could not have picked a more Canadian name, cuz she’s Mrs. Zed, not Mrs. Zee, see?—if all Canadian literature was like this, and she laughed and said, “Not all of it.” Oh what a joy English class is going to be!

  “BrownGirl4 is now available,” JAWS said.

  Caitlin hit alt-tab to switch windows, then: That was fast.

  “Yeah,” said the synthesized voice. “You’d be proud of me. It was an algebra problem, and I had no trouble with it.”

  Be there or B^2, Caitlin typed.

  “Heh heh. Oh, gotta go. Dad’s in one of his moods. See you”—which she’d no doubt typed as “CU.”

  Caitlin went back to her journal. Lunch was okay, but I swear to God I’ll never get used to Canadians. They put vinegar on French fries! And BG4 told me about this thing called poontang. Kidding, friends, kidding! It’s poutine: French fries with cheese curds and gravy thrown on top—it’s like they use fries as a freakin’ science lab up here. Guess they don’t have much money for real science, ’cept here in Waterloo, of course. And that’s mostly private mollah.