Wonder

fourteen

Wai-Jeng lay in his bed, flat on his back, after another mostly sleepless night.

“Good morning, Wai-Jeng.”

He turned his neck. It was a party official, his face crisscrossed with fine wrinkles, his hair silver and combed backward from his forehead. Wai-Jeng had seen him a few times during his stay. “Good morning,” he said, with no warmth.

“We have a proposition for you, my son,” the man said.

Wai-Jeng looked at him but said nothing.

“I’m told by my associates that your skills are… intriguing. And, as you know, our government—any government—must be vigilant against cyberterrorism; I’m sure you recall the incident with Google in 2010.”

Wai-Jeng nodded.

“And so the state would be grateful for your assistance. You may avoid jail—and all that entails—if you agree to help us.”

“I would rather die.”

The man didn’t say, “That can be arranged.” His silence said it for him.

At last, Wai-Jeng spoke again. “What would you have me do?”

“Join a government Internet-security team. Help to root out holes in our defenses, flaws in the Great Firewall. In other words, do what you’d been doing before but with official guidance, so that the holes can be fixed.”

“Why would I do such a thing?”

“Besides avoiding jail, you mean?”

Wai-Jeng gestured at his useless legs. “Jail me; I don’t care.”

The man lifted his arm, and his wrist became visible as his suit jacket slipped down; he was wearing an expensive-looking analog watch. “There are numerous rewards for being one of the Party faithful. A government job can come with much more than just the traditional iron rice bowl.”

Wai-Jeng looked again at his useless legs. “You can make up for this, you think?” he said. “Some money, some trinkets, and all will be well again? I’m twenty-eight! I can’t walk—I can‛t… I can’t even…”

“The State regrets what happened to you. The officers in question have been disciplined.”

Wai-Jeng exploded. “They don’t need to be disciplined—they need to be trained! You don’t move someone who might have a back injury!”

The man’s voice remained calm. “They have been given supplemental training, too—as, in fact, has the entire Beijing police force, because of your case.”

Wai-Jeng blinked. “Still…”

“Still,” agreed the man, “that does not make up for what happened to you. But we may have a solution.”

“What sort of solution is there for this?” he said, again pointing at his immobile legs.

“Have confidence, Wai-Jeng. Of course, if we are successful, your gratitude would be…” The man looked around the small hospital room, seeking a word, and then, apparently finding it, he locked his eyes on Wai-Jeng’s, and said, “Expected.”

I had two perspectives on the Decters’ living room just now. One was through Caitlin’s left eye, and the other was the webcam on Barb’s laptop, which they’d brought down here.

Although I could control the aim of neither, Caitlin’s perspective was constantly changing, making for much more varied visual stimulation.

I had learned to process vision by analyzing multiple views of the same scene—starting with news coverage on competing channels. But cameras behaved quite differently from eyes; the former had essentially the same resolution across the entire field of vision, whereas the latter had clarity only in the fovea. And as Caitlin’s eye skipped about with each saccade, bringing now one thing and now another into sharp focus, I learned much about what her unconscious brain was interested in.

At the moment, Malcolm, Caitlin, and Barbara were all seated on the long white leather couch, facing the wall-mounted television. The webcam, in turn, was facing them from the intervening glass-topped coffee table.

They were watching a recording of the interview Caitlin had given that morning; her father was seeing it now for the first time.

“What a disaster!” Barbara said, when it was done. She turned to look at her husband: the webcam view of her changed from full on to a profile; the view of her from Caitlin’s eye did the reverse.

“Indeed,” I said. I heard the synthesized voice separately through the webcam’s microphone and the mike on the BlackBerry affixed to the eyePod. “Although the reaction to the host’s antics has been decidedly mixed.”

Malcolm gestured at the wall-mounted TV. “During the interview, you said it was overwhelmingly negative.”

I had no way to vary the voice synthesizer’s tone—which was probably just as well, as I might otherwise have sounded a bit embarrassed. “A sampling error on my part for which I apologize. I was gauging the general response based on the reaction of those who had self-selected to contact me; they were mostly predisposed in my favor. But others are now speaking up. A column posted on the New York Times website has observed, and I quote, ‘It’s time someone said the obvious: we can’t accept this thing at face value.’ ”

Caitlin clenched her fists—something I could only see from the webcam’s perspective. “It’s so unfair.”

Malcolm looked at her. Shifting my attention rapidly between the webcam and Caitlin’s vision gave me a Picasso-like superimposition of his profile and his full face. “Regardless,” he said, “that implant compromises you. No matter what you say, people will accuse you of being his puppet.”

While they were speaking, I was, of course, attending to thousands of other conversations, as well as my own email—and I immediately shared the most recent message with them. “Some good has come from this,” I said. “I have just received a request from the office of the President of the United Nations General Assembly, asking me to speak to the General Assembly next week. Apparently, seeing you act as my public face made them realize that I could actually appear before the Assembly.”

“Well, you heard my dad,” Caitlin replied. “I’m compromised.” She said the adjective with a sneer. “So, what are you going to do?” asked Caitlin. “Just have an online chat with them?”

“No. As the UN official said, the General Assembly is not in the habit of taking conference calls. Both she and I believe the occasion calls for something more… dramatic.” To underscore that I was indeed developing a sense of the theatrical, I had paused before sending the final word. “We both think it’s appropriate that I be accompanied onstage there by someone.”

“But if I can’t speak for you, who will?”

“If I may be so bold,” I said. “I have a suggestion.”

“Who?”

I told them—and underestimated the impact it would have; it was three times longer than I’d guessed it would be before one of them spoke in response, and the response—perhaps not surprisingly from Barbara, who had a Ph.D. in economics—dealt with practicalities: “You’ll need money to pull that off.”

“Well, then,” said Caitlin with a grin, “fiat bux. Let there be money.”

here

Shoshana Glick parked her red Volvo on the driveway in front of the clapboard bungalow that housed the Marcuse Institute. She passed through the building so that Dr. Marcuse would know that she was onsite, then headed out the back door, walking in her shorts and T-shirt across the rolling grass to the little drawbridge over the circular moat. Crossing that, she stepped onto the artificial island that was Hobo’s home.

In the center of the dome-shaped island was a large gazebo, with wire screens over the windows to keep bugs out; Hobo’s painting easel was in there. Off to one side of the island was the eight-foot-tall statue of the Lawgiver from Planet of the Apes. Scattered about were palm trees. And loping along on all fours, coming toward her, was Hobo himself.

Once the distance between them was closed, he wrapped his long arms around her and gave her a hug. When that was over, he gave her ponytail a gentle, affectionate tug.

She no longer cringed when he did that. Yes, a few days ago, he had pulled so hard that her scalp had ended up bleeding, but his brief violent period seemed to have come to an end.

She moved her hands, signing, How you?

Pelican! he signed enthusiastically. Pelican!

Sho looked around, but he signed, No, no.

Ah, he’d seen a pelican earlier—Hobo had a fondness for the birds, and had once painted one perched atop the Lawgiver statue. She knew that any day that began with a pelican sighting for him was off to a good start.

Sho had a trio of Hershey’s kisses in her pocket and took them out. Hobo was adept at unwrapping them although it took him a full minute for each one. He had learned to roll the tinfoil into little balls that he put in the trash pail inside the gazebo. She gave him another hug, then headed back to the Institute. Dr. Marcuse and Dillon, the other grad student, were deep in conversation about AAAS politics, and so she settled in to check her email. Even though Webmind had eliminated spam, her message volume was creeping back up, thanks to the popularity of the videos of Hobo on YouTube, showing him painting portraits of her.

She’d given up in disgust, no longer looking at the YouTube pages associated with the videos, as too many of the comments were about her, not him, and most of them were crude:

Although there was one that Sho’s girlfriend Maxine liked for its simple sweetness; she said she might put it on a T-shirt:

Sho couldn’t keep up with the deluge of email—much of it in the same jerk-ass vein as the comments posted with the videos—and so she scanned the “From:” lines, checking for names she knew.

There was one from Juan Ortiz, her opposite number at the Feehan Primate Center in Miami. And one from the HR person at UCSD, which provided her (small!) monthly paycheck; the irony of dealing with Human Resources at an ape research facility was not lost on her. And there was one from—

Caitlin Decter. Why was that name familiar? She’d seen it somewhere before, and recently, too. The subject line was even more intriguing: “Hobo and Webmind.” She clicked on the message:

Right! thought Shoshana. That clip had gone viral, and several people had forwarded it to her home account. Man, that was brutal.

here

Hah! You got that right, sister…

Shoshana’s heart jumped, and she reread the sentence twice. “Webmind’s past relationship with Hobo”? What the hell was that about?

Astonished, Shoshana fumbled for her mouse and clicked on the reply button.