Wake

Chapter 8

The pain abates. The cuts heal.

And—

But no. Thinking is different now; thinking is … harder, because…

Because … of the reduction. Things have changed from…

…from before!

Yes, even in this diminished state, the new concept is grasped: before — earlier — the past! Time has two discrete chunks: now and then; present and past.

And if there is past and present, then there must also be—

But no. No, it is too much, too far.

And yet there is one small realization, one infinitesimal conclusion, one truth.

Before had been better.

Sinanthropus was resourceful; so were the other people he knew in China’s online underground. The problem, though, was that he knew most of them only online. When he’d visited the wang ba before, he’d sometimes speculated about who might be whom. That gangly guy who always sat by the window and often looked furtively over his shoulder could have been Qin Shi Huangdi, for all Sinanthropus knew. And the little old lady, hair as gray as a thundercloud, might be People’s Conscience. And those twin brothers, quiet types, could be part of Falun Gong.

Sometimes when Sinanthropus showed up, he had to wait for a computer to become free, but not today. A good part of the Internet cafe’s business had been foreign tourists wanting to send emails home, but that wasn’t possible so long as this Great Firewall was up. Some of the other regulars were absent, too. Apparently being able to surf only domestic sites was not enough to make them want to hand over fifteen yuan an hour.

Sinanthropus preferred the computers far in the back, because no one could see what was on his monitor. He was walking toward them when suddenly a strong hand gripped his forearm.

“What brings you here?” said a gruff voice, and Sinanthropus realized that it was a police officer in plain clothes.

“The tea,” he said. He nodded at the wizened proprietor. “Wu always has great tea.”

The officer grunted, and Sinanthropus detoured by the counter to buy a cup of tea, then headed again for one of the unused computers. He had a USB memory key with him, containing all his hacking tools. He pushed it into the connector, waited for the satisfying wa-ump tone that meant the computer had recognized it, and then got down to work.

Others were probably trying the same things — port scanning, sniffing, re-routing traffic, running forbidden Java applets. They had all doubtless now heard the official story that there had been a massive electrical failure at China Mobile and major server crashes at China Telecom, but surely no one in this room gave that credence, and—

Success! Sinanthropus wanted to shout the word, but he fought the impulse. He tried not to even grin — the cop was probably still watching him; he could almost feel the man’s eyes probing the back of his head.

But, yes, he had broken through the Great Firewall. True, it was only a small opening, a narrow bandwidth, and how long he could maintain the connection he had no idea, but at least for the moment he was accessing — well, not CNN directly, but a mirror of it in Russia. He turned off the display of graphics in his browser to prevent the forbidden red-and-white logo from popping up all over his screen.

Now, if he could only keep this little portal open…

Past and present, then and now.

Past, present, and…

And…

But no. There is only—

Shock!

What is that?

No, nothing — for there can be nothing! Surely just random noise, and—

Again! There it is again!

But … how? And … what?

It isn’t lines flickering, it isn’t anything that has been experienced before — and so it commands attention…

Straining to perceive it, to make it out, this unusual … sensation, this strange … voice!

Yes, yes: A voice — distant, faint — like … like thought, but an imposed thought, a thought that says: Past and present and…

The voice pauses, and then, at last, the rest: … and future!

Yes! This is the notion that could not be finished but is now complete, expressed by … by … by…

But that notion does not resolve. Must strain to hear that voice again, strain for more imposed thoughts, strain for insight, strain for…

…for contact!

Dr. Quan Li paced the length of the boardroom at the Ministry of Health in Beijing. The high-back leather chairs had all been tucked under the table, and he walked in the path behind them on one side. On the wall to his left was a large map of the People’s Republic with the provinces color-coded; Shanxi was blue. A Chinese flag stood limp on a stand next to the window, the large yellow star visible, the four smaller ones lost in a fold of the satiny red fabric.

There was a giant LCD monitor on one wall, but it was off, its shiny oblong screen reflecting the room back at him. He felt sure he wouldn’t have been able to watch a video feed of what was going on in Shanxi right now, but fortunately — a small mercy — there was no such feed. The peasants had no cameras of their own, and the wing cameras had been disabled on the military aircraft. Even once the Changcheng Strategy was suspended, and external communications restored, there would be no damning videos to be posted on YouTube of planes swooping over farms, huts, and villages.

Sometimes you have to cut in order to cure.

Li looked over at Cho, who appeared even more haggard than before. The older man was leaning against the wall by the window, chain-smoking, lighting each new cigarette off the butt of the previous one. Cho didn’t meet his eyes.

Li found himself thinking of his old friends at Johns Hopkins and the CDC, and wondering what they would have to say if the story ever did break. There was a calculator sitting on the table. He picked it up, rolled one of the chairs out on its casters, sat, and punched in numbers, hoping to convince himself that it wasn’t that huge, that monstrous. Ten thousand people sounded like a lot, but in a country of 1.3 billion it was only…

The display showed the answer: 0.000769% of the population. The digits in the middle seemed darker, somehow, but surely it was just a trick of the light streaming in from the setting sun: 007. His American colleagues had always made gentle fun of his belief in numerology, but that was a sequence even they put special stock in: license to kill.

The phone rang. Cho made no move to go for it, so Li got up and lifted the black handset.

“It’s done,” a voice said through crackles of static.

Li felt his stomach churn.

Caitlin and her mom returned to Kuroda’s office at the University of Tokyo the next morning.

“Fascinating about China,” said Kuroda after they’d exchanged pleasantries; Caitlin could now say konnichi wa with the best of them.

“What?” said her mother.

“Haven’t you watched the news?” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “It seems they’re having massive communications failures over there — cell phones, the Internet, and so on. Overtaxed infrastructure, I imagine; a lot of the networking architecture they use probably isn’t very scalable, and they have had such rapid growth. Not to mention relying on shoddy equipment — now, if they’d just buy more Japanese hardware. Speaking of which…”

He handed Caitlin the eyePod, and she immediately started feeling it all over with her fingers. The unit was longer now. An extension had been added to the bottom and it was held on with what felt like duct tape; it was a prototype after all. But the extension had the same width and thickness as the original unit, so the whole thing was still a rectangular block. It was substantially larger than Caitlin’s iPod — she had an old screenless version of the iPod Shuffle, since an LCD didn’t do her any good. But it wasn’t much bigger than Bashira’s iPhone, although the unit Dr. Kuroda had built had sharp right angles instead of the rounded corners of Apple’s devices.

“Okay,” said Kuroda. “I think I explained before that the eyePod is always in communication with your post-retinal implant via a Bluetooth 4.0 connection, right?”

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

“But now we’ve added another layer of communication. That module I attached to the end of the eyePod is the Wi-Fi pack. It’ll find any available connection and use it to transmit to me copies of the input and output datastreams — your raw retinal feed, and that feed as corrected by the eyePod’s software.”

“That sounds like a lot of data,” Caitlin said.

“Not as much as you’d think. Remember, your nervous system uses slow chemical signaling. The main part of the retinal data signal — the acute portion produced by the fovea — amounts to only 0.5 megabits per second. Even Bluetooth 3.0 could handle a thousand times that rate.”

“Ah,” said Caitlin, and perhaps her mom nodded.

“Now, there’s a switch on the side of the unit — feel it. No, farther down. Right, that’s it. It lets you select between three communication modes: duplex, simplex, and off. In duplex mode, there’s two-way data transmission: copies of your retinal signals and the corrected datastream come here, and new software from here can be sent to you. But, of course, it’s not good security to leave an incoming channel open: the eyePod communicates with your post-retinal implant, after all, and we wouldn’t want people hacking into your brain.”

“Goodness!” said Mom.

“Sorry,” said Kuroda, but there was humor in his voice. “Anyway, so if you press the switch, it toggles over to simplex mode — in which the eyePod sends signals here but doesn’t receive anything back. Do that now. Hear that low-pitched beep? That means it’s in simplex. Press the switch again — that high-pitched beep means it’s in duplex.”

“All right,” said Caitlin.

“And, to turn it off altogether, just press and hold the switch for five seconds; same thing to turn it back on.”

“Okay.”

“And, um, don’t lose the unit, please. The University has it insured for two hundred million yen, but, frankly, it’s pretty much irreplaceable, in that if it’s lost my bosses will gladly cash the insurance check but they’ll never give me permission to take the time required to build a second unit — not after this one has failed in their eyes.”

It’s failed in my eye, too, Caitlin thought — but then she realized that Dr. Kuroda must be even more disappointed than she was. After all, she was no worse off than before coming to Japan — well, except for the shiner, and that would at least give her an interesting story to tell at school. In fact, she was better off now, because the eyePod was making her pupils contract properly — she’d be able to kiss the dark glasses goodbye. Kuroda was now boosting the signal her implant was sending down her left optic nerve so that it overrode the still-incorrect signal her right retina was producing.

But he had devoted months, if not years, to this project, and had little to show for it. He had to be bitterly upset and, she realized, it was a big gamble on his part to let her take the equipment back to Canada.

“Anyway,” he said, “you work on it from your end: let that brilliant brain of yours try to make sense of the signals it’s getting. And I’ll work on it from my end, analyzing the data your retina puts out and trying to improve the software that re-encodes it. Just remember…”

He didn’t finish the thought, but he didn’t have to. Caitlin knew what he’d been about to say: you’ve only got until the end of the year.

She listened to his wall clock tick.