Wake

Chapter 9

Sinanthropus regretted it the moment he did it: slapping the flat of his hand against the rickety table top in the Internet cafe. Tea sloshed from his cup and everyone in the room turned to look at him: old Wu, the proprietor; the other users who might or might not be dissidents themselves; and the tough-looking plainclothes cop.

Sinanthropus was seething. The window he’d so carefully carved into the Great Firewall had slammed shut; he was cut off again from the outside world. Still, he knew he had to say something, had to make an excuse for his violent action.

“Sorry,” he said, looking at each of the questioning faces in turn. “Just lost the text of a document I was writing.”

“You have to save,” said the cop, helpfully. “Always remember to save.”

More thoughts imposing themselves, but garbled, incomplete.

…existence … hurt … no contact …

Fighting to perceive, to hear, to be instructed, by the voice.

More: whole … part … whole…

Straining to hear, but—

The voice fading, fading…

No!

Fading…

Gone.

LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone

Title: At least my cat missed me…

Date: Saturday 22 September 10:17 EST

Mood: Disheartened

Location: Home

Music: Lee Amodeo, “Darkest Before the Dawn”

I am made out of suck.

I stupidly let myself get my hopes up again. How can a girl as bright as me be so blerking dumb? I know, I know — y’all want to send me kind words, but just … don’t. I’ve turned off commenting for this post.

We got back to Waterloo yesterday, September 21, the autumnal equinox, and the irony is not lost on me: from here on in, it’s more darkness than light, the exact opposite of what I’d been promised. I suppose I could move to Australia, where the days are getting longer now, but I don’t know if I could ever get used to reading Braille upside down … ;)

Anyway, we’d left the Mom’s car in long-term parking at Toronto’s airport. When we got back home to Waterloo, at least it was obvious that Schrodinger had missed me. Dad was his usual restrained self. He already knew about the failure in Japan; the Mom had called him to tell him. When we came through the door, I heard her give him a quick kiss — on the cheek or the lips, I don’t know which — and he asked to see the eyePod. That’s what it’s like having a physicist for a dad: if you bond at all, it’s over geeky stuff. But he did say he’d been reading up on information theory and signal processing so he could talk to Kuroda, which I guess was his way of showing that he cares…

Caitlin posted her blog entry and let out a sigh. She had really been hoping things would be different this time and, as always when she got disappointed, she found herself slipping into bad habits, although they weren’t as bad as cutting her arms with razor blades — which is something Stacy back in Austin did — or getting totally plastered or stoned, like half the kids in her new school on weekends. But, still, it hurt … and yet she couldn’t stop.

It was doubtless hard for any child to have a father who wasn’t demonstrative. But for someone with Caitlin’s particular handicap (a word she hated, but it felt like that just now), having one who rarely spoke or showed physical affection was particularly painful.

So she reached out, in the only way she could, by typing his name into Google. She often used quotation marks around search terms; many sighted users didn’t bother with that, she knew, since they could see at a glance the highlighted words in the list of results. But when you have to laboriously move your cursor to each hit and listen to your computer read it aloud, you learn to do things to separate wheat from chaff.

The first hit was his Wikipedia entry. She decided to see if it now mentioned his recent change of job, and—

“Has one daughter, Caitlin Doreen, blind since birth, who lives with him; it’s been speculated that Decter’s decline in peer-reviewed publications in recent years has been because of the excessive demands on his time required to care for a disabled child.”

Jesus! That was so unfair, Caitlin just had to edit the entry; Wikipedia encouraged users, even anonymous ones, to change its entries, after all.

She struggled for a bit with how to revise the line, trying for suitably highfalutin language, and at last came up with, “Despite having a blind daughter, Decter has continued to publish major papers in peer-reviewed journals, albeit not at the prodigious rate that marked his youth.” But that was just playing the game of whoever had made the bogus correlation in the first place. Her blindness and her father’s publication record had nothing to do with each other; how dare someone who probably knew neither of them link the two? She finally just deleted the whole original sentence from Wikipedia and went back to having JAWS read her the entry.

As she often did, Caitlin was listening through a set of headphones; if her parents happened to come up stairs she didn’t want them to know what sites she was visiting. She listened to the rest of the entry, thinking about how a life could be distilled down to so little. And who decided what to leave in and what to leave out? Her father was a good artist, for instance — or, at least, so she’d been told. But that wasn’t worthy of note, apparently.

She sighed and decided, since she was here, to see if Wikipedia had an entry on The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It did, sort of: the book’s title redirected to an entry on “Bicameralism (psychology).”

For Caitlin, the most interesting part of Jaynes’s book so far had been his analysis of the differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Both were commonly attributed to Homer, who’d supposedly been blind — a fact that intrigued her, although she knew they probably weren’t really both composed by the same person.

The Iliad, as she’d noted before, featured flat characters that were simply pushed around, following orders they heard as voices from the gods. They did things without thinking about them, and never referred to themselves or their inner mental states.

But the Odyssey — composed perhaps a hundred years after the Iliad — had real people in it, with introspective psychology. Jaynes argued that this was far more than just a shift in the kind of narrative that was in vogue. Rather, he said that sometime in between the composing of the two epics there had been a breakdown of bicameralism, precipitated perhaps by catastrophic events requiring mass migrations and the resulting ramping up of societal complexity. Regardless of what caused it, though, the outcome was a realization that the voices being heard were from one’s own self. That had given rise to modern consciousness, and a “soul dawn,” to use Helen Keller’s term, for the entire human race.

Nor were the Greek epics Jaynes’s only example. He also talked about the oldest parts of the Old Testament, including the book of Amos, from the eighth century B.C., which was devoid of any internal reflection, and about the mindless actions of Abraham, who’d been willing to sacrifice his own son without a second thought because God, apparently, had told him to do so. Jaynes contrasted these with the later stories, including Ecclesiastes, which dealt with, as Mrs. Zed kept saying all good literature should, the human heart in conflict with itself: the inner struggle of fully self-aware people to do the right thing.

The Wikipedia entry was essentially correct, as far as Caitlin could tell from the portion of the book she’d read so far, but she did reword a couple of the sentences to make them clearer.

Her computer started bleeping, an alarm she’d set earlier going off quite loudly through the earphones.

Excitedly, she took off her headset, rotated her chair to face the window, and looked as hard as she could…