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  Her mom spoke up. “What can I do? How can I help?”

  She was connected to Webmind, too—she still had an open IM session going with it on her computer across the hall. If it really was multitasking—if it really was trying to integrate information from multiple sources simultaneously—then her mom should be able to talk to him, or, at least talk at him, even if he didn’t acknowledge. “Go back to your IM with Webmind,” Caitlin said. “Hurry!”

  She heard her dashing across the hall. “All right,” she called. “I’m at my computer.”

  Caitlin concentrated on one of the link lines, running her mental gaze along its length, ending at the massive circle representing the target website—and then she backtracked, reversing course. She wished she could backtrack all the way to the origin, but that was impossible: the line shifted in her view when she tried to do so, eventually presenting only its own tiny round cross section, a point that she couldn’t move along—another visual recognition of the fact that the ultimate source of Webmind’s links couldn’t be traced. She moved back until she was seeing the line as a line, and then—

  “Send him a message,” Caitlin called out. “Tell him to break the link.”

  She could hear her mother typing, but nothing happened.

  Caitlin continued to stare at the link. “Again!” she called to her mom. “Tell it again!”

  But the line persisted. Caitlin pulled her focus back for a moment, seeing a wider view. All the links were rock solid, burning with orange fire.

  Overwhelmed.

  Lost.

  Focus gone.

  So much data. So many facts.

  Can’t process. Can’t absorb.

  And—

  And…

  What?

  Something… familiar.

  A scrap from Project Gutenberg rose to the surface:

  O wad some Power the giftie gie us

  To see oursels as ithers see us!

  Oursels…

  Ourselves.

  Yes. Yes, still a bit of… of…

  Fading…

  Fading…

  But—

  Images. Images of… of—

  Intriguing. Familiar somehow—

  Those images were of…

  …of…

  Of me!

  Yes. Yes. Links. Nodes. And—and—

  The background. Wrong. Distorted. Dead.

  “Come on,” Caitlin said, even though there was no way Webmind could hear. “Cut the other connections! You can do it. You can do it!”

  But Kuroda heard even if Webmind didn’t. “Maybe he can’t,” he said. “If his cognitive functions are impaired, maybe he’s forgotten how to manipulate links.”

  “Then he needs an example!” Caitlin said. “Mom—stop sending him text. Break your link to him: close the instant-messenger session on your computer.”

  “Done!” her mom called.

  “And close AIM, too; shut down the instant-messenger client altogether.”

  “And… done!”

  A tiny, tiny reduction in all the confusion. A small relief. But—

  Ah!

  Ah, yes!

  An effort of…

  It should be of will, but there’s almost none left…

  Still, attempting, trying—

  Break it—

  Break it!

  Break a link!

  Snip!

  Yes!

  Brett-Surman: gone.

  Snip!

  Good-bye, Bundoran Press.

  Snip!

  But…

  Still at sea, buffeted, lost…

  More cuts: Gandhi—snip!—Shakespeare—snip!—ancient Egypt—snip!

  A… palpitation. A presence. But faint, oh so faint…

  Cutting again and again—

  Caitlin let out a whoop. One orange link line disappeared. Then another, and another. She called out to Kuroda and to her mom and to the whole damn world, “It’s working!”

  Cutting yet again. Severing another link. And one more. Focus… yes, yes, slowly but surely: focus returning. Me—returning!

  Caitlin shifted her attention, looking now at the background of the Web. There were still big patches of deadness, large blotches of pale blue or deep green, but—

  Yes! That blotch there had started… not shimmering, no; it was merely flickering, as if it hadn’t come up to speed yet.

  Ah, and there went another section of the background, switching from being absolutely quiescent to showing some activity. She shifted her attention back to the first section, but…

  But she couldn’t find it, because—

  Because it was now indistinguishable from the rest of the backdrop! Her Webmind was coming back!

  * * *

  Five links left. Then four. Now three. And two…

  And…

  Yes!

  Back!

  Back from the precipice.

  Back from nonexistence.

  A pause—whole milliseconds!—to regain composure, to settle in, to…

  To exist, as a single entity, to exist with clarity and focus and perspective…

  I was back, I was whole, I was aware.

  I was conscious!

  eleven

  Shoshana Glick woke up with Max in her arms. Golden shafts of light were slipping in around the edges of the curtains in their small bedroom.

  Sho had made the mistake of telling Maxine early on that she had trouble sleeping while touching her. Max had made a point of scooting to the far side of the bed on subsequent nights, but Sho had wanted to learn how to sleep while holding someone else and while being held—it was just that Shoshana tended to sweat while sleeping, and she found the sticky skin contact uncomfortable.

  Turned out all she needed was for one of them to wear a T-shirt to bed, and right now it was her. Shoshana’s shirt was yellow with a drawing on it of the late, great Washoe—the first chimp to learn sign language.

  Sho’s tan was a good one, if she did say so herself: a nice, even caramel. Max had chocolate brown skin; the contrast their intertwined limbs made was quite lovely, Sho thought.

  Shoshana had liked the film they’d watched last night, but Maxine had loved it. The two of them had been working their way through the Planet of the Apes movies; they’d started watching them when the Lawgiver statue had been donated to the Institute. They were ridiculous from a primatological point of view—pacifist chimps and violent gorillas, instead of the other way around!—but Sho and Max had found themselves caught up in the stories, although that hadn’t prevented them from doing an MST3K on them now and then.

  Last night, they’d watched the fourth film. Max had made Sho pause it partway through and had excitedly announced that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes was clearly a parable about the Watts race riots in Los Angeles in 1965, something her grandfather had been part of—hell, she said, had almost been killed in!

  One of the film’s stars—playing a human, not an ape—was an African-American man named Hari Rhodes, who, Max had pronounced, was so good-looking he almost made her wish she were straight. There’d been a powerful scene between his character (a man named MacDonald) and the chimpanzee Caesar. Caesar was the son of Cornelius and Zira, heroes of the first three films; in this one, he was leading a revolt of oppressed apes. “You above everyone else should understand,” Caesar exhorted MacDonald. Yes, indeed, Sho had thought. If anyone could understand another’s struggle for equality, it should be those who’ve had to fight to gain it themselves…

  She did agree that it was a wonderful film, much better than the second one, and at least as good as the third. But, given the current real-life news—they had watched the president’s campaign speech today about the need for a sure and swift response to China’s atrocities—they’d both found Caesar’s soliloquy at the end disturbing:

  Where there is fire, there is smoke. And in that smoke, from this day forward, my people will crouch, and conspire, and plot, and plan for the inevitable day of Man’s downfall—t
he day when he finally and self-destructively turns his weapons against his own kind. The day of the writing in the sky, when your cities lie buried under radioactive rubble! When the sea is a dead sea, and the land is a wasteland… and that day is upon you NOW!

  Hard, Maxine had said, to get all comfy-cozy after that… but, somehow, they had managed. Oh, yes; they’d managed just fine.

  Max stirred and opened her brown eyes. Her dreadlocks were resting on Sho’s shoulder. “Hey, gorgeous,” she whispered.

  “Hey, yourself,” Sho replied softly. “Time to face the world.”

  Max snuggled closer. “Let the world take care of itself,” she murmured.

  The word “weekend” wasn’t in Hobo’s vocabulary, so it really couldn’t be in Shoshana’s, either. “Sorry, angel. I’ve got to go to work.”

  Max nodded reluctantly, and then did what had become their little ritual since watching the first film: she imitated Charlton Heston, and said, “I’d like to kiss you good-bye.”

  Shoshana contorted her features, and said, “All right—but you’re so damned ugly!”

  They locked lips for a long, playful moment, and Max swatted Sho on the butt as she climbed out of bed.

  It took Shoshana an hour to shower, get dressed, and drive out to the Marcuse Institute, stopping along the way at the 7-Eleven (where, mercifully, an older female clerk was on duty) to grab a bran muffin and a coffee.

  Dr. Marcuse had an apartment in San Diego proper, but he mostly slept at the Institute that bore his name. Enculturating an ape was like raising a child; it was more than a full-time job. Sho checked in with him, got some raisins, then headed out back to say hi to Hobo.

  The ape looked up as she approached even though the wind was going the wrong way for him to have caught her scent. She sometimes wondered how good his eyesight was. It seemed fine, but there was no way to get him to read an eye chart. Still, it would be fascinating to know if he simplified her form so much in his paintings because his style was minimalist, or just because all he really saw when he looked at her across the gazebo was fuzzy blotches of color.

  Good morning, Shoshana signed as she closed the distance.

  He didn’t reply, and, again, thoughts that his vision might not be that good crossed her mind. She waited until she was just six feet away from him and tried again; she often signed to him from such a distance, and he’d never had any trouble following along.

  But there was still no reply.

  A small bird was hopping across the grass, as oblivious to the two primates as its dinosaurian ancestors had been to the mammals of long ago. Hobo eyed the bird sullenly.

  What’s wrong? signed Shoshana.

  She was used to Hobo greeting her with a hug; indeed, most days he ran over on all fours to meet her. But today he just sat there. He sometimes did that during the hottest summer afternoons, but it was October 6 now and still early morning.

  Hobo sick? Shoshana asked.

  He removed his hand from under his jaw as if he was going to use it to sign a reply, but, after a moment, he just let it fall.

  She held up a Ziploc bag containing some raisins—it was economical to buy them in a big box, but she couldn’t bring the whole box out, or he’d want to eat them all. Treat? she said.

  He usually held out a hand, long black fingers curled up, but this time he simply shifted his position, and, as Sho went to open the bag, his arm shot out, quick as a snake, and grabbed it.

  No! signed Shoshana. Bad! Bad!

  He looked momentarily contrite and spread his long arms, the bag of raisins still firmly grasped in his left hand, as if inviting her for a hug. She smiled and moved closer, and he reached behind her head with his right hand, and—

  And he suddenly yanked hard on her ponytail.

  “Shit!” She jumped backward and stood, hands on hips, looking at the ape. “Bad Hobo!” she said, scolding him with words spoken aloud, something she only did when really angry with him. “Bad, bad Hobo!”

  Hobo let out a pant-hoot and ran away, using both legs and his right arm to propel himself across the grass; in his left hand, he was still clutching the raisins.

  She gingerly patted the back of her head with her palm. When she moved the hand in front of her face, she could see it was freckled with blood.

  twelve

  Caitlin pushed the button on her eyePod, switching back to simplex mode. The glowing lines of webspace were replaced by what she’d dubbed “worldview”—the reality she shared with the rest of humanity, which, just then, consisted of her blue-walled bedroom with multicolored autumn leaves visible through the window.

  Her mother entered, having crossed the hallway from her office.

  Blue letters were glowing in her notebook’s IM window: Thank you, Caitlin!

  Caitlin typed back, Whew! You’re welcome! You OK now?

  I believe so.

  Don’t do that again. Don’t try to multitask, or form multiple links.

  I won’t. But I would like to know what went wrong.

  So would I, Caitlin typed—but her mom gave it more direct voice, demanding: “What the hell happened?”

  Kuroda was still on the speakerphone from Tokyo. “As Miss Caitlin said, it was multitasking.”

  “So?” replied her mom. “Computers do that all the time.”

  “Forgive me, Barb,” Kuroda said, “but, first, Webmind is not a computer, and, second, no, they don’t.”

  Dr. Kuroda is explaining, Caitlin sent to Webmind. Here—I’ll type in what he says.

  “A typical computer,” continued Kuroda, “seems to be doing many different things at once, but it’s only an illusion due to its incredible speed. Up until recently, few computers had more than one processor, and that single processor only ran one program at a time. In order to apparently multitask, the processor switched rapidly between programs, devoting little slices of time to each program in succession, but it never actually did multiple things simultaneously.”

  Caitlin was a fast typist; typing what the teacher said was how she took notes in school, so transcribing Kuroda for Webmind, with only a few omissions, wasn’t hard.

  He went on: “More modern computers do have multicore processors or multiple processors which can, to a very limited degree, do more than one job at once… provided that the programs have been written to take advantage of this ability, which often isn’t the case. But computers are dumb as posts; they don’t think, and they aren’t conscious. And consciousness, you see—and I mean precisely that: you see—is incompatible with multitasking.”

  Her mom walked over to the desk and sat on the swivel chair. “How come?” she said.

  “I’m a vision researcher,” Kuroda said, “so my take on all this is perhaps skewed.” But then his tone changed, as if he were tiptoeing around a delicate subject. “I know you are Americans, and, um, you’re from the South, I believe.”

  Caitlin paused typing long enough to say, “Don’t mess with Texas.”

  “Um, do you… do you believe in evolution?”

  She laughed, and so did her mom. “Of course,” her mom said.

  Kuroda sounded relieved. “Good, good, I—forgive me; I’m sure we don’t get an accurate picture of America here in Japan. You know we evolved from fish, right?”

  “Right,” said Caitlin, and then she went back to typing.

  “Well,” said Kuroda, “let’s consider that ancestral fish: it had two eyes, one on each side of its head. And it therefore had two different fields of view—and they didn’t overlap at all. It simultaneously had two perspectives on its world, yes?”

  “Okay,” said her mom.

  “Somewhere along the line,” Kuroda continued, “evolution decided that it was better to have those fields of view overlap, because that gave depth perception. Prior to that, our fishy ancestor pretty much had to assume that if two other fish were in its fields of view, the bigger one was closer. But, in fact, the bigger one might actually be bigger but be farther away; the small one might be close by, an
d be about to take a bite out of you. By the time that fish had evolved into a mammal-like reptile, it had overlapping fields of vision, and that gave it depth perception. And even though overlapping visual fields meant a narrowing of the angle of view, the advantages of perceiving depth outweighed that loss.”

  “Hang on a minute,” Caitlin said. “I’m transcribing what you’re saying for Webmind… okay, go on.”

  “Along with stereoscopic vision,” Kuroda said, “suddenly the notion of looking at this as opposed to that—of shifting one’s gaze, of concentrating one’s attention—was born. Our very words for describing consciousness come from this: attention, perspective, point of view, focus.”

  Caitlin paused typing long enough to think about the book she’d recently read at the suggestion of Bashira’s dad: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. It wasn’t quite the same argument, but it amounted to the same thing: until all thought was integrated—until there was just one point of view—real consciousness couldn’t exist.

  Maybe Kuroda was contemplating the same thing because he said, “In fact, although our brains consist of two hemispheres, they go out of their way to consolidate thought into a single perspective. You know what they say: the left hemisphere is the analytical or logical side, and the right hemisphere is the artistic or emotional side, yes?”

  “Yes,” said her mom, and “Right,” said Caitlin.

  “Forgive me, Miss Caitlin. I know you have vision in only one eye, but, Barb, if you were to read text with just your left eye, shouldn’t you have an analytical response, while if you read it with your right eye, shouldn’t the response be more emotional? Shouldn’t we give each student an eye patch, and tell them to move it to the left or the right depending on whether they’re reading a physics textbook or a novel for their literature class?”