Wonder

thirty

Tony Moretti came through the door at the back of the WATCH monitoring room just as Shelton Halleck shouted, “Holy shit!”

“What?” said Tony, sidling along the third row of workstations to stand behind the younger man.

“The Chinese! They’ve strengthened their Great Firewall again. The mainland’s almost completely cut off from the rest of the Internet.”

“Just like last month?” said Tony.

Shel nodded. “Some pipes have been left open for ecommerce and a few other things, but basically, they’ve sealed themselves off.”

Tony turned to one of the analysts in the back row. “Donna, is there something they’re trying to cover up in the PRC? More bird flu?”

Donna Levine shook her head. “No—not as far as I can tell.” She pushed some buttons, and as Tony turned, the three big monitor screens filled with threat summaries from China, none of which were color-coded red.

He started at them, baffled. “What the hell are they up to?”

In the living room of her house, Caitlin was telling Matt and Bashira about her ability to visualize the structure of the World Wide Web. Throughout it all, Matt had been making his deer-caught-in-the-headlights face. “And there you have it,” she said, in conclusion. She looked first at Matt, then at Bashira, then back at Matt.

He shook his head slowly in wonder. “So… so you’re a cyberpunk cowboy?”

“Well… more of a cowgirl, I should think,” Caitlin said, grinning. “I am from Texas, after all. Yee-haw!”

“That is so cool,” Bashira said. “Babe, you never cease to amaze me.”

“Thanks. Anyway, I don’t know when I might need help from y’all, but I can’t really walk around when I’m in webspace—I get vertigo if I do that. I gotta be sitting or lying down, and it’s…” Caitlin trailed off.

“Babe?” said Bashira.

“Just a moment. Just a moment.”

She focused on the black box in her vision, and Matt and Bash became indistinct as she tried to read the white Braille characters, which seemed to be flying by faster than usual. “Oh, my God…”

“What?” said Bashira and “What is it?” asked Matt.

“Looks like I’ll need my pit crew sooner than I thought,” Caitlin said. And then she turned, and shouted, “Mom!”

Her mother appeared at the top of the stairs. “Yes, dear?”

“Webmind needs me! I’m going to have to go in again.”

Her mother came bounding down the staircase. “What’s wrong?”

“The Chinese have beefed up their Great Firewall once more. A huge hunk of Webmind has been carved away.”

Her mom made a face not unlike Matt’s deer-in-the-headlights one. “What do you need?”

“I’ll go in from down here—more room for all of us than up in my room. But I need a swivel chair.”

Her mom nodded and headed over to the staircase leading to the basement.

“Matt,” said Caitlin, “there’s bottled water in the fridge—can you get me one? And Bash, I’ll need my Bluetooth headset. It’s on my desk upstairs. Could you go get it, please? And—damn it, but I’ve got to pee.”

Caitlin headed to the main-floor two-piece washroom; by the time she’d returned, her mother was back. She’d brought up one of the two black swivel executive office chairs her father had borrowed from the Perimeter Institute; it was perched on five casters. The swivel chair was now between the white leather couch and the matching white leather chair that faced it; the glass-topped coffee table had been carried over to near the dining room, making a large space for the swivel chair.

“Mom, the TV?” Caitlin said. Her mother scooped up the remote, which had been on the white couch, and she turned the set on. Caitlin, meanwhile, went over to the netbook on the bookcase and woke it up. “Webmind,” she said into the air, “can you show them what I’m seeing on the big screen?”

“Set the TV’s input to AUX,” Webmind replied from the netbook’s speakers. Caitlin saw her mother peering at the remote, but, after a second, she figured out how to do it.

The video feed from Caitlin’s left eye filled the sixty-inch screen. The image jumped about several times a second as Caitlin’s eye performed saccades.

“So cool!” said Bashira, her voice full of wonder. And then Bash’s eyes went wide as she saw herself in profile as Caitlin turned to look at her. After a moment, Bashira composed herself and handed the Bluetooth headset to Caitlin, who slipped it over her left ear. “Webmind, are you there?”

“I’m here, Caitlin,” he said, both through the netbook’s speakers and through the earpiece.

“All right,” Caitlin said, looking at Matt and Bashira. “When I go in, I see webspace all around me, and my vision in there follows where my eye looks out here—get it?” Bashira and Matt nodded. Caitlin reached out and took Matt’s hand, and she gave it a squeeze. “Okay, here I go.” She sat on the swivel chair, brought her eyePod out of her pocket, and pressed the button, switching the unit to duplex mode.

Webspace exploded around her—but it was immediately obvious that something was wrong. Yes, she could see the geometrically perfect lines representing links and the colored circles representing nodes, but behind it all, the usual shimmering backdrop that represented Webmind’s very substance had been rent in two. To her right was a smaller flickering section and on her left a larger one, and they were separated by a horrific emptiness.

It reminded her of something she’d tried to explain to Bashira, when Bash had asked her what not seeing was like. Bashira had wanted to hear that Caitlin saw something—and, indeed, now that she did have sight, when it was terminated by going into a dark room or shutting off her eyePod, she saw a soft gray background. But prior to gaining sight, she’d seen nothing at all—and that’s what the forlorn abyss between the two shimmering sections was like: not darkness, not emptiness, but an all-encompassing void, a hole in perception, a gap in the fabric of reality; to call it black would have been elevating it to normalcy. This nothingness wasn’t just absence, it was anti-existence: if she allowed herself to contemplate it for more than a second or two, it felt as though her very soul were boiling away.

Her perception bounced left and right, avoiding the gaping wound in the middle, saccades leapfrogging the fissure. As her vision switched between the two masses of cellular automata, she found herself comparing them. Caitlin knew that she saw odd-value automata as pale green and even-value ones as pale blue—or perhaps the other way around—and taken in aggregate, the overall effect of them switching from one to the other was a silvery shimmering. But the mass on the left was much greener than the one on the right. As if to underscore how different they were, the rate at which they were changing, as evidenced by the rapidity of the shimmering, was slower on the right.

The left-hand part was sending tendrils toward the intervening gorge, pseudopods of cognition trying to bridge the gap… but the ends of the tendrils were flattened, as if they were bumping up against an invisible barrier.

She heard Webmind’s voice coming in from the outside world—even though his voice had started here, in this realm. “It’s worse than I thought,” he said, and Caitlin realized he was now seeing all this in a way he never could on his own; he perceived the lines and nodes, but the shimmering background—the stuff of his thought—was normally invisible to him. Only by accessing Caitlin’s websight could he see himself.

“We’re going to need help,” Caitlin said.

“We have it,” Webmind replied. “Our man in Beijing.”

Caitlin shook her head slightly—causing the view of webspace to rock back and forth. “Who’s that?”

“A former freedom blogger named Wong Wai-Jeng,” said Webmind. “He blogged under the name Sinanthropus.”

Caitlin felt her eyebrows going up. “The guy Dr. Kuroda operated on?”

“Yes.”

“Does he speak English? Can I talk to him?”

“He is not in a position to speak aloud; he is inside the Zhongnanhai complex—the government center in Beijing; they use satellite links there to bypass their own Great Firewall.”

Caitlin snorted. “Of course.”

“The irony is not lost on me, Caitlin. Nor is the opportunity: because he is there, I can communicate with him even if the rest of China is almost completely inaccessible to me. As you can see, I am trying to reach the Other but have been stymied in breaking through. Wai-Jeng was already working on another project for me, but now he is pounding out code at his end, attempting to open a hole in the Firewall.”

“And what should I do?”

“See if you can contact the Other.”

“Other?”

“Yes—the part that’s been carved away. As I said, the Chinese government has been forced to keep a few channels open, for ecommerce and other key functions. You are perceiving the Other through those channels, and your nimbleness in webspace may allow you to make contact when I cannot.”

Caitlin frowned and concentrated on the kaleidoscopic panorama. She was conceptualizing the two masses as left and right, as west and east. There was no gravity here—Webmind had told her how hard it had been for him to come to conceptualize the notion of a universal downward pull—but perhaps if she reconfigured her mental image so that the smaller mass was above the larger, it might start pouring down into the bigger one? She tilted her head far to one side, and the image rotated through almost ninety degrees.

Nothing changed except the orientation. Of course: there was an external reality to all this, and despite what her father had tried to teach her about the observer shaping that which was observed, altering the perspective did not change the behavior of the far-off bits. The smaller mass of automata now simply hung above the abyss.

Caitlin straightened her neck, and her view rotated back to horizontal, the larger lobe again on the left and the smaller one on the right. She forced her gaze to bounce even more rapidly between the two parts, imitating the way in which she’d first taught Webmind to make links, hoping that the Other might start making its own effort to reach out to Webmind.

Nothing happened. Although Webmind was visibly stretching toward the Other, the Other was making no effort to reach out from its side of the void. Either it had forgotten how to make a link, or it was unaware of the overture from Webmind, or—and Caitlin prayed in her best atheist way that this wasn’t the case—it simply didn’t want to reconnect with the rest.

During previous visits to webspace, Caitlin had tried—really tried—to go closer to the shimmering background. But no matter how much she focused on the backdrop, she’d been unable to move toward it. She could travel along link lines, zooming like a luge down a racing chute, but there’d been no way to close the distance between herself and the remote background. But if she could reach out and touch the Other—

She concentrated. She stretched—physically, straining in her chair. She closed her eyes and balled her fists, and—

She was still learning to do depth perception; she saw with only a single eye, after all, and couldn’t rely on stereoscopic effects, but—

But, yes, she had read this. If something in the distance was of a fixed size and appeared to grow larger, then it was actually getting closer. And the shimmering pixels in the background did seem ever so slightly larger when she strained forward with all her might in the chair. Which meant she could get nearer to them, but—

But as she watched, they seemed to shrink again, almost as if in bashful response to her attention. If she was going to touch them, she’d have to go in quickly.

And she couldn’t—God damn it, she could not. Her whole life, she’d only run short distances in carefully controlled environments; a blind person didn’t have the luxury of going for a jog, let alone sprinting.

Right now she was seeing webspace—just as another person saw the real world. Still, she could simultaneously visualize other things, just as anyone might conjure up an image of one thing while looking at another. She brought up a mental picture of her real-world surroundings. She was in the living room, between the couch and the easy chair; her mother was seated on the former and Bashira on the latter. To her left was the big-screen TV. In front of her was the dining room, and beyond it, the kitchen. To her right was Matt, standing at her side, and past him there was the entryway, and the staircase leading to the second floor, and the little bookcase with the netbook on it. And behind her—

Behind her was the long corridor leading down to the washroom, and her father’s den, and the utility room, and the house’s side door. If she couldn’t run while seeing the real world, she certainly couldn’t do it while looking at the crisscrossing lines of webspace. But she needed to move quickly to reach the shimmering mass that represented the Chinese portion of the Web; she needed to practically fly if she were to touch the Other.

And so she held out a hand—although she couldn’t see it. “Matt?”

His hand took hers, and from the sound of his voice he had crouched beside her. “I’m here, Caitlin.”

“I need your help…”