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Analog SFF, December 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

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Science Fiction

Dell Magazines

www.analogsf.com

Copyright (c)2008 by Dell Magazines

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

Cover art by David A. Hardy

Cover design by Victoria Green

CONTENTS

Reader’s Department: EDITORIAL: RELATIVITY by Stanley Schmidt

Reader’s Department: BIOLOG: DAVID BARTELL by Richard A. Lovett

Novelette: MISQUOTING THE STAR by David Bartell

Science Fact: GREEN NANOTECHNOLOGY by Richard A. Lovett

Probability Zero: ALIENS by Rick Norwood

Short Story: WHERE AWAY YOU FALL by Jason Sanford

Reader’s Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: NOISE AS A QUANTUM SIGNAL by John G. Cramer

Novelette: MOBY DIGITAL by Joe Schembrie

Serial: WAKE: PART II OF IV by Robert J. Sawyer

Reader’s Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton

Reader’s Department: BRASS TACKS

Reader’s Department: IN TIMES TO COME

Reader’s Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis

* * * *

Vol. CXXVIII No. 12, December 2008

Stanley Schmidt Editor

Trevor Quachri Managing Editor

Peter Kanter: Publisher

Christine Begley: Associate Publisher

Susan Mangan: Executive Director, Art and Production

Stanley Schmidt: Editor

Trevor Quachri: Managing Editor

Mary Grant: Editorial Assistant

Victoria Green: Senior Art Director

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Editorial Correspondence Only: analog@dellmagazines.com

Published since 1930

First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)

Reader’s Department: EDITORIAL: RELATIVITY

by Stanley Schmidt

In the early days of humanity, our ancestors had to find ways to live together in groups: rules for what individuals must and must not do, and what they could be allowed to do, so that the group as a whole could survive and maybe even prosper. Their starting point was inevitably the behavior patterns inherited from their most recent ancestors, which is probably why modern political processes have so much in common with the behavior of, say, baboon troops, with their ritualized special treatment of alpha males. But humans, being humans, brought something new to the table. More than any species before them, they could think about what to do, and invent new social systems, codes of behavior, and methods of enforcement that went well beyond preprogrammed instinct.

Surprise of surprises, they didn’t all do it the same way. As long as people lived in small bands that had little direct interaction with other groups, this wasn’t much of a problem. Tribe A could have one set of rules that worked well enough for it, and Tribe B could have another, perhaps quite different. There was little cause for members of one group to be concerned about the ways of the other (though when interaction did occur, it tended to take the form of violent conflict).

As technology—especially improved means of transportation and communication—brought different cultures into more frequent contact, the question of how to deal with difference became more and more important. It is now more so than ever, with all the countries of the world made neighbors by such tools as aviation, radio, and the internet. How to deal with cultures who live by different rules is likely to continue to grow more problematical, as groups on this planet are becoming increasingly aware of just how differently some of their neighbors live. If we ever make contact with cultures evolved in non-Earthlike environments, it may (as much science fiction has demonstrated) become an overwhelming challenge.

Meanwhile, we have plenty to concern us in the milder forms of the problem right here on early-twenty-first-century Earth. The solutions people have tried tend to fall into two uneasy classes: (1) Accept and learn to live with those who live differently, or (2) Try to find or define moral absolutes and require everyone to live by them.

In America and much of western Europe, it is currently fashionable to favor option (1). Tolerance and cultural diversity are considered Good Things, and many people make a special effort to respect the right of others to believe and behave in ways that they themselves would not choose.

But not everyone sees it that way.

In one of many articles appearing in my local newspaper in connection with the early 2008 visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the U.S., Gary Stern mentions several recent examples of religious objection to “moral relativism.” He quotes Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, shortly before he became Benedict XVI, as saying, “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” He quotes a Vatican document signed by Cardinal Ratzinger in 2000 as “ruling out” “a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another.’” And he quotes a website run by an evangelical Christian ministry as saying, “Essentially, moral relativism says that anything goes, because life is ultimately without meaning.”

Experience has taught me that I must explicitly state at this point that my primary intent here is not to criticize any particular individual, organization, or religion. What I object to is the attempt, by anyone who makes it, explicitly or implicitly, to equate tolerance and respect for people of other religions (or none) with a complete lack of moral principles. That’s an unjustifiable logical leap, categorically attributing to people beliefs and attitudes that they don’t hold.

I know many people (some religious, some not) who consider it a matter of moral principle to respect people with other views—but not indiscriminately. The ones I know do believe in larger moral principles—the sort of thing that some call “absolutes”—but not nearly as many of them as most organized religions and social systems spell out. To say they believe in nothing is simply wrong. Straw man arguments are straw man arguments, no matter who makes them.

Any culture needs a set of principles to keep itself viable, but it can come by them in a variety of ways, and they can take more than one form. That does not mean that they’re all equally good and interchangeable, or that it doesn’t matter which ones you follow. A code that encourages indiscriminate murder or incest will, without doubt, hurt the society that follows it so badly that it won’t survive. A “good” code is one that does an effective job of ensuring the long-term well-being of the society that lives by it, and the individuals who compose that society.

There are a great many possible ways of doing that. At least some of the many forms of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto, to name just a few, have done a reasonably good job of it. None has done a perfect job. The same can be said of “secular humanism.”

Many religious people, of course, would vehemently deny that last claim. They maintain that the moral codes they propound were set forth by a Higher Power, and that they themselves know what the Higher Power said and are justified in enforcing adherence to it.

The trouble is, many different religious leaders make the same claim, but with different conceptions of who or what that Higher Power is and what it requires. They can’t all be literally right. Unless they can prove their claims—something they loftily deny they should be expected to do—they have little justification for expecting others to accept and live by them.

It’s perfectly reasonable for anybody to believe, of course, that life would be simpler and smoother if everybody believed and lived by what he believes. Sometimes people wish for that, in more or less explicit terms. The pope, in a less guarded moment shortly before his U.S. visit, ruffled a few feathers by reviving an old prayer for the “enlightenment” (read, “conversion”) of Jews—which Jews might understandably view as arrogant and condescending. To his credit, he did not advocate any overt attempt to convert them, which cannot be said for everyone in history. There have been plenty of attempts to forcibly impose this or that religious worldview on people who didn’t want it, from Christian Crusades to Islamic jihads. During a recent visit to Germany, I was told the history of regions whose entire populations were suddenly told that they had all gone overnight from being Catholic to being Protestant, or vice versa, because of a change of ruler. The notion that such a thing is even possible makes a mockery of the very idea that religious faith is a matter of strong personal belief. People do not—cannot—change what they believe just because somebody else says, “You now believe this.”

But then, during another recent trip I remember seeing another quote, also attributed to the pope, to the effect that, “We must resist all attempts to make religion a private matter”—a phrase I suspect he used (if indeed the quote was accurate) because of its emotionally loaded associations with Karl Marx. But religion is a private matter, in the sense that, if it requires deeply and sincerely held belief, that can only come from within. Leaders of organized religions can certainly try to guide their followers toward certain beliefs, and even require people to hold them if they want to be members of this or that congregation. But people must be free to decide which such leaders, if any, they want to follow—and that is a moral principle higher than any church, temple, or mosque.

It may be that the world would run more smoothly if everybody in it adhered to this religion or that, but in the real world that isn’t going to happen any time soon. We are all going to have to accept and deal with the fact that different people will subscribe to different religions, and some will subscribe to none. For many, their beliefs are such integral and deeply ingrained parts of their lives that they cannot realistically be expected to abandon them because somebody else thinks they should. We have to accept that and respect the right of all of them to live the way they choose, as long as it’s a decent way that provides a viable life for them and does not infringe on anyone else.

That does not mean that “anything goes” or that respecting other ways of life puts “ego above all.” It does mean acknowledging that, beyond a few very basic but very strict principles that almost everyone agrees on, such as, “Hurting other people is bad,” there’s a lot of room for variation in such nonessential details as when and how to eat what foods, whether to have instrumental music in church, and whether to have a church at all. Religion is neither necessary nor sufficient for morality, but morality, however we come by it, is of crucial importance for everybody.

And, even though Mr. Stern says, “The pope’s general target is moral relativism, the concept that moral values can vary from culture to culture or time period to time period,” the “nonessential” parts of such values can and must show such variation. “Be fruitful and multiply” makes a lot of sense in a time and place where there are plenty of food, land, and enemies; it can be fatal to a civilization being overwhelmed by problems directly linked with overpopulation and excessively rapid growth. Polygamy works against a culture’s well-being when the sex ratio is very close to 1:1, but may be essential to survival if a selective plague or war wipes out almost all of one sex or the other. If we ever meet intelligent beings of other species that reproduce as many do on Earth, producing huge numbers of offspring of which only a few can be expected to survive, their code of conduct for dealing with that will necessarily be very different from ours—and we will have to learn to accept them on their own terms.

Few things are more important to any culture than developing a viable code of conduct for itself, and figuring out what principles are really so fundamental that we can require everyone else to follow them too. That second task is so large, and so important, that our best minds may still be working on it for a long time to come. But simplistic claims that it requires adherence to any particular established religion, or that tolerance of some differences mean “anything goes,” will contribute very little to the understanding we need.

Copyright (c) 2008 Stanley Schmidt

[Back to Table of Contents]

Reader’s Department: BIOLOG: DAVID BARTELL

by Richard A. Lovett

When he was young, David Bartell didn’t want a GI Joe action figure. He wanted Major Matt Mason, astronaut. Then he went to college and majored in astrophysics. “I wanted to become a scientist, write science fiction part time, and make enough money at it to retire from science and be a full-time writer,” he says.

Being a goal-focused type, he took a stab at it young, collecting rejection slips as far back as junior high school. He also had an opportunity to go to a summer school program for gifted high school students. “You could choose science or liberal arts,” he says. “I did the opposite of what I was at the time, and met all these people who played musical instruments or wrote plays.”

But college burned him out on reading.

Then, in 1990, he went to Africa to teach science in a rural area so remote that it didn’t even have electricity or running water. “That got me reenergized,” he says. “I had too many ideas to leave alone.”

Back home, the energy continued. “As soon as my head would hit the pillow, I had to turn on the light and start writing,” he says. He even began sleeping with a voice-activated tape recorder. “I’d wake up, lift my head, and talk. The next day I’d have one gem and a bunch of gibberish.” Though, he adds, “I’ve also woken up with whole story ideas.”

His first three sales, including an AnLab winner, were collaborations with fellow newcomer Ekaterina Sedia, who he met on the web-based critique group, Critters. “I had a fantasy novel, 180,000 words,” he says. “Not many people on Critters want to read novels. We read each other’s novels and became friends.”

Their first story, “Alphabet Angels,” arose during a phone conversation. “I just mentioned an idea,” he says. “She didn’t like it, but something stuck. She wrote a couple of pages, outlined, and left holes. I filled the holes. It went back and forth probably twenty times before we were satisfied.”

Bartell likes stories that are both speculative and have human meaning. “I like to find some insight into human nature,” he says.

It may be a few years, though, before all of his ideas make it into print. “I have small kids,” he says. “It’s not until 10 PM that I can get something done. I don’t have enough time in the day.”

Copyright (c) 2008 Richard A. Lovett

[Back to Table of Contents]

Novelette: MISQUOTING THE STAR

by David Bartell

Second chances aren’t always what the people getting them think….

No one wanted to be remembered as The Voice at the End of the World, so when the asteroid nicknamed “Big Bastard” exploded into the Earth, the event went unnarrated. No one wanted to direct the angles from the cameras on the Moon, on the Earth, in their orbits and Lagrange points, so the video feeds cycled mosaics of them all, automatically. Some of the refugees on the Moon wanted to gather for support during the last hour, and in the Shoemaker Pod 4 mess hall, the images were projected onto a flat wall.

When there is video of a disaster, some people watch once in horror, and then never want to see it again. Others watch over and over, transfixed, trying to cure their souls of numbness. Antoinette Washington sat in the mess hall, but her eyes were not glued to the screen like most people’s. She fidgeted on an aluminum stool, and her hands wagged uncontrollably, as if the brown stub of her missing ring finger was frantically warning the rest of her of an oncoming amputation.

“It’s going to be all right, Miss Washington,” said an accented voice behind her. She turned to see a young man, an African, she recalled, though his name escaped her. His skin was light for an African, a similar shade to her own. But while she was a golden brown, he had cinnamon freckles on his broad, sharp cheeks and short hair with a rusty sheen.

“Call me Netty,” she said.

“All right,” he said. “It’s going to be all right, Netty.”

She nodded, but could not speak again. Her mouth had inexplicably filled with hot saliva. Nothing was going to be all right, mister, she thought. Not nothing, never.

As a caption counted down to fifty-nine seconds, her blood first rushed to her head and then collapsed away, leaving her faint. Her whole body shook. As the administrator of this lunar pod, she didn’t want to be seen that way. Besides, she had never been much for kumbaya.

She heard people cry out among stifled sobs, and someone vomited as she rushed out of the small cafeteria and into a seldom-used inflatable corridor that led behind the dorm ring. The countdown haunted her, and she fixed the number “59” in her head, unwilling to let the inevitable event unfold. Her hands were numb, and she fumbled to pull back the plastic curtain that was her door. Once inside, she fell onto the cot, shaking.

Blood rushed hot through her ears, and she could hear it, chattering like a multitude of souls passing away. Her heart hammered, and she felt like she had swallowed Big Bastard, and now it was going to break out. Then she imagined the asteroid exploding through her head, and the voices instantly hushed, all but one. It spoke the name of the African man in the mess hall: Hendrik Izaaks. Then, it too was silent.

* * * *

Her bed was soaked with tears when she awoke. She was feverish and had to urinate. As she lifted herself onto her side, she saw streaks of blood on her half-deflated faux fleece pillow, dried, except where the tears had melted together with them.

She felt herself breathe, but her breath stopped short, as if she had suddenly inhaled the burning air of Earth. An avalanche of claustrophobia fell over her, paradoxically giving her the urge to close herself away in the washroom. As the administrator, she had a private bath. She sat on the tiny toilet and threw up on the floor. Months of dread broke from her soul, twisting her stomach, cracking her bones. “It’s all over,” she repeated, convulsing with dry retches and sobs. Mother Earth had passed away.

* * * *

The cameras on Earth had gone out—all the broadcasts cut off at nearly the same time—and no satellites were responding. Only fifteen were even picked out of the flotsam by passive radar, and they were all dead. The plan was that if anyone in bunkers beneath the Earth survived, they would wait until it was safe to raise an antenna. The seven lunar bases waited in agony to receive some signal that there were survivors. No signal came.

The next step was to send probes to Earth orbit on reconnaissance, once it was determined that there were no dangerous obstacles to spaceflight. In fact, there were tens of thousands of rocky fragments streaking through space, heading away or falling back to Earth in tangled paths. Some struck the Moon, forcing the refugees to hunker down even longer.

During those torturous days of dark thoughts and blaring alarms, Netty stitched herself together. Except for losing herself during Earth Zero, she had comported herself with all the dignity and professionalism she had learned as mayor of Washington, D.C. Now it was time to defer contemplation and grieving and to focus on the many critical, immediate tasks in her oversight.

She walked to work, taking a brief moment to wonder whose idea it had been to make the tubular ceilings a sky blue. She sighed. It was not time yet to think about her grand vision: to take advantage of the holocaust and rebuild a more idyllic society.

“How are you, Miss Washington?”

Netty turned to see the genteel African with the freckled, boyish face. He seemed an unabashedly simple man, wonderfully out of place in this dangerous, complex prison of theirs. For reasons she did not understand, he reminded her of home. More than that; the home of all homes, she thought. He was a mystery.

“Hendrik Izaaks, how are you?” she said with practiced but genuine cheer.

“I am fine,” Izaaks said. He jerked slightly, as if suppressing a cough. “And you?”

“I could complain, but it wouldn’t do any good,” she said. “I was just heading for the diner. Would you care to join me?”

“I am happy to accept.”

They entered the mess hall together. People had dubbed the room the Double-wide Diner, since it was made from two modules put together, forming the largest single public space in Pod 4. The name seemed appropriate to the quality of the food as well. Lunch was rehydrated soup that looked like dishwater, for lack of artificial colors. It tasted better than it looked, and Netty sipped as if to savor it. The GP had advised her to eat slowly, to help prevent digestive problems. Her companion ate heartily.

“It’s good,” he said.

“So, Hendrik. Tell me about yourself. You’re from Africa, right?”

“Yes, I am from Khomasdal, Namibia. But my name is Oscar. Hendrix is one of my roommates.”

“Oh, then the roster must be wrong. I have a Hendrik Izaaks listed. I remember distinctly, because there is another person on the roster named Hendrix, with an ‘x.’”

“That’s my roommate. My name is Oscar. Hendrik was my father. He was meant to come here, but sent me instead.”

Netty’s head grew hot. “Excuse me?” she said with restrained indignation. There was to be no seat substitution whatsoever on the starfish that brought the refugees to the Moon, and this was the first irregularity of which she had heard. It was not her job to decide on those rules or to verify identities, but she was tasked with keeping the peace now. If news of this got out, it could create a textbook problem: intense, escalating personal resentment. There would be jealousy, suspicion, accusations of rigging, irrational actions, and possibly violence. Most everyone had lost all of their family and friends, and any hint of rule breaking would undermine the tenuous sense of fair play that gave some little rest to the dead.

“My father was very lucky to have received passage,” Oscar said. He stared at the table, a faraway look on his face. His eyes were red, not abnormally so, but she perceived him as a very sensitive man, since he was holding back tears. “In the end, he could not leave my mother behind. So he gave his luck to me.”

“Your father sounds like a remarkable man,” she said. “Tell me about him.”

“Whew!” Oscar said. “He was a good man and a very good father. But he did some bad things.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

Oscar’s faintly Asian-looking eyes widened, and he coughed. “Not that bad,” he said. “I must now tell you what he did, or you will think worse of him.”

“We’ve all done bad things, I think.”

Oscar looked down again. “Yes, we have. My father killed a lot of elephants. There were very few left, and he killed the rest of them.”

“So that’s how he bought a seat on a starfish,” she said. “I heard people were paying a lot of money for odd things like elephant tusks, in the last few years.”

“Ah, people are very superstitious when there is trouble. They look to anything for luck. The price of their superstition bought me my seat.”

She finished her soup and sucked once on the plastic spoon to get the last bit of flavor from it. “Oscar, it’s not your father’s fault the elephants are gone. Maybe someday we can atone for that, by growing new ones.”

“There are elephants on the Moon?”

“No, there’s no room for animals like that. But they do have a DNA bank, so it’s possible, if we can recreate their habitat.”

A repeating pattern of three long honks and one short over the sound system signaled a possible emergency.

Netty stood up. “Excuse me. That’s a meteor alert. I have to go, but next time, I’d like to hear a story about how Hendrik Izaaks was a good father.” She got up off the tiny stool, and Oscar motioned that he would return her food tray. She bounded through the open bulkhead and into the main corridor. She’d learned to jog in the Moon’s feeble gravity and recalled rushing about Washington like this. There was one thing she did not regret leaving behind: heels.

The command center looked like Houston Control, but was really more of an office, linked to similar offices in all of the pods, except China’s Chi Yue base. Her pod was one of four cobbled onto the slopes of Shoemaker Crater, near the larger base at Shackleton, at the lunar South Pole. The Shoemaker pod group was one of seven such bases, not including the independent Chi Yue. While the modules in her pod were connected by various types of corridors, the four pods were each separated by a mile, on average. The bases were scattered for statistical safety—a deliberate diaspora around the Moon, built in anticipation of deadly debris from the asteroid collision with Earth. Each campus was self-sufficient, but with the full complement of around ninety people each, plus some livestock, they could survive for only about a year.

If all went well. The alarm was subdued in the control room.

“Incoming!” Molyneux told her as she arrived at her desk. He was a middle-aged man, old by refugee standards, who still had a beer belly, despite the anorexic rations.

“How big? How close?”

“Looks like it will hit close to SMP3. It’s about four meters long.”

“Oh, God.”

There were thousands of fragments of Big Bastard and shattered Earth still looking for things to smash, and a direct hit could be devastating, even to the buried parts of the pods. There were many near misses, and one hit that caused irreparable damage to one of the pods over on the far side. Warnings were very brief, and this meteor impacted a few hundred yards from Shoemaker Pod 3 before they could converse further. Without knowing exactly where the debris might hit, there was little effective preparation, other than battening down.

A camera feed showed an overexposed flash and a rush of dust. Divots of lunar rock and soil shot miles in all directions, and frantic voices in the Pod 3 command center shouted of impacts and pressure drops.

“There are people in there!” said one voice, and another demanded “Who?” while still more drowned out the reply.

It took extraordinary effort for Netty to screen the voices out, but her immediate concern was her own Pod 4. A meteor could break into pieces, spread out for miles, and a really big one could make a new crater out of the whole complex. All reports showed green for SMP4. Shoemaker Pod 3 was a mile away, and this hit was a minor one.

Still, as the reports became more coherent and rescue parties reported in, she learned that three people were known dead, killed when a large hole tore through a dirt mound and then the thin-walled corridor beneath. The people had been behind a strong door, but it had jolted loose, and there had been no emergency oxygen nearby. Five other people had been injured on the other side of the smashed corridor, and although they reached an oxygen cache, they had each suffered blunt force trauma, decompression, and near suffocation.

“We’ll send a medical team over to assist,” Netty promised. She dispatched the team—all of her medical professionals except one. She kept a general practitioner home, in case they needed him. She saw the team off as they left an airlock and boarded a pair of battery-powered jaw rattlers.

Later, there was a series of virtual briefings. During the final meeting, the administrator of SMP3 had a nervous breakdown in front of everyone. Not only were there casualties in his pod, but one of his starfish was damaged beyond repair. That meant not all the refugees would be able to return to Earth, but no one was willing to discuss that ramification of the incident. Netty failed to see how a mental meltdown would help anything. We can’t have that, she thought, when we’re rebuilding a world.

After the ordeal, Netty headed to her room for a rest. She took a deep breath and let her shoulders slump as she veered wearily through a dark service corridor that paralleled the main corridor. Sometimes she just wanted a little privacy in this sardine can. The deaths pricked at her heart like hot voodoo needles, and radar anigraphs—animated graphics—haunted her thoughts. The network was tracking an awful lot of debris that could fall down on them, and the anigraphs were sick cartoons, forecasting hails of rocky bullets.

The main corridor was an interior one, but this narrow outside hall was exposed, never having been completely covered by protective soil. It had been part of the original fragile structure that housed the construction crew and now served only the purpose of redundancy.

Halfway down, she halted. A shutter was open—a breach of rules. Netty cursed and went to the window. Probably someone was curious to see the meteor—the window did face roughly toward SMP3—but opening a shutter was expressly against the rules, especially when the alert was sounding.

“How the hell do they think we’re going to make it, if they can’t follow a simple rule?” she nearly shouted.

This was the kind of thing she had no patience for. Couldn’t people put their curiosity aside for just a few months? Their home world was gone, and their pod was little more than a silk tent in a war zone. Any mistake could be fatal. Even if they were able to return to Earth, they’d be very lucky to survive there for long. Humanity had had thousands of years to learn to rise to occasions like this one, and the command staff, at least, had been carefully hand-picked. There was no excuse. She would get nothing less than perfection out of her pod.

Before she closed the metal plate, she chanced a look out herself. Pod 3 was not visible because of an intervening rise, but she did see the Earth. It was the first time she’d seen it with her own eyes since the hit. Mother Earth hung in the air like a cat’s plaything, having been batted about and left for later. Brown clouds shrouded the planet, and she could not make out any distinct features at all—not a single ocean or continent. In another month or two, they’d send orbiters to begin scanning the ground.

She closed the shutter and tightened the wing nuts. She was spent, but needed to talk to someone, so she turned into the B Ring to see if her friend LaDonna was home. The “door” to most rooms was the ubiquitous Mylar sheet, so the custom was to stand back and announce oneself.

“Knock knock?”

LaDonna drew back the curtain. She was a tall black woman, her once-glorious hair shorn into a no-fuss brown halo. She was wearing her pajamas—standard issue fleece, plus size narrow, white.

“Bless my stars, if it isn’t Antoinette Washington, the woman they named Washington, D.C. after. Come on in!”

“Stop that. How can you be so … so…”

“Happy? I insist on happiness, that’s how.” She waved an arm around her tiny room. “If I don’t have that, what do I have?”

“You have Derrick.”

“Derrick is my happiness, but he’s on duty, so you can have his chair.”

LaDonna sat on her hammock, letting Netty take the rocking chair. This was a short-backed aluminum frame, padded with a thin white bath towel. LaDonna’s husband had bolted a bent scrap of metal plating to the bottom to form the rocker. The chair felt good, and rocking in the reduced gravity was slow and soothing. Maybe she should try sleeping on a hammock, too.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Netty said.

“Me either. Just you keep coming around, and maybe a little will rub off on you.”

Netty smiled and patted LaDonna’s hand, marveling at her strength.

“You’re all wound up, girl,” LaDonna said. “Relax!”

“I’m all right. Some other PA just had a nervous breakdown, so now I don’t need to.”

“Whoever screened your psychological profile knew what they were doing,” LaDonna said, smiling. “But I’ll tell you what. If men can break down and blubber like I seen them do, we can fix ourselves for a little cry, too, can’t we, child?”

“Does that include a good scream? The big things make people cry, but it’s the little ones that make me pull my hair out. Listen to this. On my way here, I found a window open—the shutter, I mean—of course, the windows don’t open. This was right after a meteor shower! How could anyone be so careless?”

“I guess it’s hard not to rubberneck.”

Netty beseeched with open palms. “Just imagine you had the chance to eliminate world hunger. You could wipe things out, like racism, poverty, and war.” Her arms lifted, as if in benediction. “That’s the silver lining here, isn’t it? We can start over and do it right. But the world will be a precarious place to live, just like here. We can’t afford to have any fools screwing things up.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m thinking to set up a series of come-to-Jesus meetings. There’s just no excuse for second best right now.”

“We just lost all the people and places and things we ever loved. That’s about the best excuse you could ask for. You can’t go around all idealistic, all the time.”

“With everything we love gone, our ideals are all that we have left.”

LaDonna scrunched her eyebrows, indicating that she did not buy that reasoning. “And just how far are you willing to go to reach this ideal of yours?”

As far as I need to, Netty thought, but it was too audacious a thing to say, even to LaDonna. “We’re going to build the world over, and get it right this time.”

They sat quietly for a moment, and Netty did relax, her thoughts wandering. She smiled to herself and chuckled.

“What is it?” said LaDonna, leaning forward.

“Oh, I was just thinking about something else.”

“Is this something else a man?”

“How on Earth did you know that?” Netty said, immediately feeling the word “Earth” boomerang back to slice through her midsection.

“I saw you in the diner with that African. What’s his name?”

“Oscar Izaaks. And you’re right. He’s cute, with all those freckles.”

“Cute? Lady, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but ‘cute’ just ain’t you.”

“No, he really isn’t my type. But under the circumstances, I don’t have the luxury of choosing my type. Besides, there’s something so—I don’t know—endearing about him. He comes from a simpler time, a simpler place.”

LaDonna sat back in her chair and nodded slowly. “We’re all refugees, here, aren’t we? Sounds like your Oscar is something of a refuge.”

Netty nodded, and moisture oozed from her eyes. That got LaDonna started, and they shared a tearful hug.

* * * *

Netty had never seriously considered marriage. As a girl, she was told marriage was a custom that worked only for white people. Now, to rebuild Earth, it seemed dutiful to consider children, and trying to find a man and build a relationship while also building a world would be overly complicated. With so few eligible men around, she would marry out of duty and convenience. Fondness or love would be welcome, though not required. She inhaled deeply. In a way, a no-strings model of marriage was liberating.

Oscar coughed as he sat with Netty in a corner of the Double-wide Diner. “I heard that some people died in one of the pods,” he said.

“Three,” said Netty. “But just now, I’d like to get my mind off all that. Tell me about your father.”

“Well, he was very proud of his people, you see. Of our mixed blood. I am the only one left from our line, and he expects me to continue our legacy.”

“It’s a wonderful gift.”

“A gift with a price. My father was not so proud of me. I was the dark one in the family.”

“Excuse me?”

“My skin is darker. It’s a very dangerous pride, you see, to be what they called ‘colored.’ You must not be too dark.”

“Well,” she said, trying not to look as aghast as she felt. “We’re going to end all that. When we return home, there won’t be any racism.”

“That is good. I am not like my father.”

“You say that,” she said, studying his face, “as if you are glad not to be like him.”

“I already told you about the elephants. He respected them, until an American hunter hired him to kill them.”

“How so, did he respect them?”

“When we were children, he told us many stories about the elephants. Nama folk tales.”

Netty warmed again. “Maybe those stories are a more important legacy than your blood. Tell them to me.”

“There is one story about a woman, a human, who married an elephant. She tricked him into marrying her, so that she could steal his livestock.”

Netty smiled at the idea of an elephant keeping livestock.

“One night,” he continued, “the elephant’s wife took some goats and cattle and ran off with them. The elephant chased her, but before going, he told his mother that if something bad happened to him and he fell, she would know it because the whole Earth would shake with the crash. Just as the elephant was about to catch his wife, she escaped through a crack in a cave wall. He tried to follow, but the crack closed on him, and he fell. When his mother felt the whole world shake, she knew that the elephant was dead.”

Netty shivered at the prophetic tale.

“So you see,” he said, “my father felled the elephant, and the whole world fell with it.”

“You’re very down to earth, do you know that?”

“What does it mean, ‘down to earth?’”

She warmed inside. That he did not know proved the point. “It means I like you.”

Oscar coughed again. She shrank back. Oscar was the first person she had seen being sick on the Moon. Everyone had been screened and given a clean bill of health before being allowed on a “starfish” ship to the Moon.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s always too cold.”

“You really should take care of that cough.” She held his gaze for a moment, and then he looked away in discomfort.

“It’s your turn to tell me something now,” he said.

“You want me to tell you about that meteor?”

“Tell me what your dreams were, before this disaster.”

Netty smiled faintly. What a lovely request to make. Revisiting old dreams often put a healthy perspective on them. “Those dreams are long gone,” she said. “But you know what? I have a new dream.”

“Martin Luther King, Jr.”

“Not hardly!” Netty laughed. “I’m just a YoCo from Maryland who won a few debates.”

“What is a YoCo?”

“Young cosmopolitan.” Her smile froze, then dropped.

She had just laughed. Netty would never forget where she had been or who she was with the first time she laughed after the Earth was hit.

“Let me hear your dream.”

“My dream is to rebuild the Earth, a little bit at a time. We’ll start with a village. No dictators, no wars, no racism, nothing like it was before. This time we’re gonna do it right! No one will care whether you’re black or white or colored—that’s what your people call themselves, isn’t it?”

“Yes. We’re Basters. We were. I’m the last one.”

“‘Colored’ is bad enough, but that other term is so degrading.”

“It’s okay. We’re Basters. My ancestors were proud not to be too closely related to those around them.”

“Hmm.”

“You have a good dream, Netty. I want to help you achieve it.”

Netty shivered. For the first time, a promise of destiny whispered in her ear, and it shot through her body, making her tingle as if from an electric shock. She was fond of Oscar and attracted to him, and now, for the first time, she had reason for deeper feelings. She took his hand firmly. “You will.”

Oscar coughed again, a deep, rattling wrack.

“Oscar, I want you to see a doctor today. Unfortunately, most of the medical staff has gone to Pod 3, but there’s a GP around.”

“GP?”

“General practitioner. He can help you with that.”

She was worried about Oscar being contagious. She suddenly realized that since he had come to the Moon under false pretenses, he might not have been properly screened. What if he had brought some dangerous infection to this nearly germ-free environment?

Netty retired with mixed feelings. She was pretty sure that she could love Oscar, if she allowed herself to. He was more intelligent than she had first thought, and his simplicity was an attraction, both personally and professionally. Having someone like him as a husband would prevent complications with her work. It was time to be practical, she told herself, as never before.

On the other hand, she was boiling over the fact that Oscar had managed to circumvent security to come here. There was just no excuse for that. Maybe it wasn’t his fault. Maybe he was just taking an opportunity given to him. But none of that mattered. If he had some nasty disease and it spread, Oscar would be like an open window in a meteor shower. What if she had to shutter him, too?

The next day she received an e-mail at her desk from the GP, Dennis Simon, who requested a meeting with her, about a “Hendrik” Izaaks. His office was simply a shelf of a desk at the corner of the general clinic. Simon looked to be in his early forties, his thin hair graying prematurely, his face unwrinkled. He needed to cut his eyebrows, but like so many people here, especially the men, he showed few signs of grooming.

“Mr. Izaaks has tuberculosis,” the doctor told her. “I don’t know how that could have been missed—it was one of the standard tests.”

Her heart sank. “That is a mystery,” she said, unwilling to betray Oscar’s secret. There was little point to that now. Moreover, she felt closer to him personally than she had felt to anyone in years—not quite motherly or possessive, but protective. “Can you cure him, or do you need help from one of the other doctors?”

“Absolutely, I can cure him,” Simon said, frowning at the insinuation. “But right now, Hendrik is contagious, and he shares a room with three other men. Can you arrange private quarters? I can keep him here, but it would take up space that might be needed by the patients from the other pod.”

“He goes by Oscar,” Netty said. “And yes, I can arrange something.”

* * * *

The private room was a large storage vault, with a real door. It was climate controlled—rare for a storage room—and was warmer than Oscar’s shared quarters. The room was nearly full of plastic crates, so that despite its size, it was cramped. Oscar’s nylon mesh hammock from his room was hung from stays on the walls near the door.

Oscar coughed. “I feel like I have soggy groundnuts in my chest.”

Netty looked at Oscar with sympathy. His mouth was open and drawn, as if from exhaustion. “I’m really sorry, and I’m sorry about the confinement.”

“It’s okay,” he said, suppressing a cough. “I don’t want to infect anyone else.”

“That’s really noble of you.”

“I am not a noble person. I should have told you earlier.”

She tried to make eye contact, but could not. She helped wrap his blanket around his shoulders. He was a treasure, like the priceless keepsakes in this vault. “Oscar, what’s wrong? Doctor Simon says he’ll have you out of here by Christmas.”

“I have not been honest with you, Netty.”

“You have more secrets, don’t you?”

“Just one. A very terrible one.”

She leaned to hug him, but he shied away. The hurt look on his face pained her, and her shoulders shook. There was a barrier between them, and as she realized that, she also grasped the depth of her love for him. Her hands reached for his, but were not met. “You know you can share anything with me.”

“Netty, I have AIDS.”

She gasped and suddenly felt as if she had just used up all the remaining oxygen in the pod. The walls closed in around her as her vision tunneled in. Oscar’s concerned face seemed to swim, breaking into puzzle pieces. She did not want to faint, the way she had lifting off from Earth.

“Are you all right? Sit down. I’m very sorry to give you a shock.”

Netty sank into the rope hammock. She tried to stay sitting up, but in low gravity, on a swaying, squeezing bed, her body did not know how. Then her right earring caught in the mesh, and she relaxed. The earrings were her mother’s, and she did not want to lose them.

“I have HIV, Netty. That’s why my father sent me in his place. He hoped there would be a cure.”

Her head would not clear, and she didn’t want it to. “Does Dr. Simon know?” she said.

“Only you.”

“Okay, my dear. Okay.” Netty had a claustrophobic urge to leave the room. “Listen, I’ve got to do some things—I’ve got to go. I’ll check on you tomorrow. Okay?”

She struggled to get up, but couldn’t get out of the hammock until Oscar helped her.

* * * *

Netty lay on her own cot, for once relishing the icy tang of its aluminum rail. It reminded her of her cousin’s brass bed in Charlotte and how they used to tussle on it as girls. Thoughts of home and family drifted in the air, and she tried not to think of Oscar. She turned on some Neo Jazz. It was the first time she played music since the asteroid Big Bastard hit, and she could not stomach it. It was too soon for music.

A Christmas star twirled silently from the ceiling, a precious family heirloom. It had also been a metaphor during her rookie year as mayor. “In government transitions,” her press manager had said, “the lights on the tree don’t know what to do without a star on top. You need to be that star even before the election.” She had found that rather pompous, but her manager milked it, and it stuck. Now she was used to it.

She remembered Christmas with her grandfather, who had died of lung cancer when she was very small. To her, he was a font of wisdom, and she daydreamed that Big Bastard might have somehow revived him so that she would meet him again. There were no smokers left now, but she knew that there were tobacco seeds in storage. Who in their right mind thought they would ever have any beneficial use?

The applicable phrase that had been thrown around during the last few years was “what would Noah do?” Well, he wouldn’t have brought tobacco. There were some who had gone around quoting Emerson, to the effect that even weeds are useful plants whose virtues had yet to be discovered. But Netty knew of no one who thought it was a good idea to preserve deadly microbes, two by two, or otherwise.

When people were screened to go to the Moon, some of the old Ellis Island rules were revamped. The new rules were debated endlessly, but when you can only save a thimble-full of people, there are no good rules. Incurable, communicable diseases were strictly forbidden. Netty might have to quarantine Oscar indefinitely. Worse, she was afraid that she couldn’t let him return to Earth. He would have to remain in exile, filling some function in the permanent lunar base for the rest of his life. It was an authority she had, but using it had never occurred to her.

Unable to sleep, she paced through the halls for a while, until she found herself at LaDonna’s room. “Knock, knock, knock,” she whispered.

She heard some fumbling about. Derrick grunted, and LaDonna’s head and shoulder wrapped around the curtain.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Netty said, “but can I interest you in a little walk?”

“Okay, but at this hour, there’d better be a big sale going on.”

“Sorry.”

“All right, let me put something on. It’s better to be up all night than have to get up early! Besides, jogging beats organized tai chi any time of day.”

They warmed up by strolling to B ring, where they began a pajama power walk. As cold as it was in the pods, pajamas were the default dress code for most people. Netty typically wore her pajamas to work, with a jacket over top. The jacket was standard issue, a sort of navy blue business coat with an inner thermal layer. She still wasn’t used to it, feeling half naked without real clothes and deodorant, but she was saving her good clothes for resettling Earth.

LaDonna slowed her pace. “Next time, remind me to wear a bra,” she said.

“I’m sorry. If you want to go back—”

“Don’t worry. I’ll just consider this research for my book.”

Netty thought LaDonna was kidding, but sometimes she couldn’t tell. LaDonna liked to pull surprises. “What book?”

“I’m going to call it ‘Never Jog on the Moon without a Bra.’”

Netty smiled faintly. “That’s one book I’m glad I don’t need.”

No one else was about, which was unusual. Being so close to the lunar South Pole, the floor of Shoemaker was in eternal shadow, while the rim enjoyed days of light. There, the Sun seemed to roll sleepily along the horizon, before disappearing for days. Pod 4 was lower in the crater than the other pods, nearer to the subsurface ice, and received only a few days of sunlight, when the Moon was so inclined. The long nights had lulled people into every conceivable sleep schedule. With the lights dimmed and no one about, it felt like real night.

“You believe in God.”

“Uh-oh, here it comes,” groaned LaDonna.

“Is this another Genesis, or are these the end times?”

“You know, I’ve forced myself to ignore all that philosophical shoeshine people have been shouting at each other.”

“But what do you think? Someone claims that the creation story is told twice in Genesis, because the first civilization rose and fell, and all records of it were lost. The garden of Eden was the second chance, and Noah had the third. So when we repopulate the world, it will be the fourth creation.”

“Everybody’s got some way of rewriting the Bible out of all this.” LaDonna fell into a rhythm, bouncing her shoulders and rapping. “First we cast out of paradise; out in space it’s cold as ice. Singing songs in such a strange land; can’t see my face in front of my hand. Then we done broke the seventh seal; in Noah’s ark, in the belly of the whale.” She stopped and laughed. “You can forget all that. It’s simple, sister. We on da Moon.”

They exchanged greetings with a bleary-eyed maintenance man on his rounds, completed a lap, and continued on. LaDonna did not ask why Netty was up and needing company so late, and Netty was glad she did not ask. Netty stopped short when a dark shape slunk along a cable conduit at the edge of the floor.

“What on Earth was that?” she said, regretting the painful, habitual phrase. The dark shape was gone.

“That was Felinity.”

“A cat?”

“Uh-huh. You don’t know about Felinity?”

Netty fumed. “As the PA of this pod, I don’t suppose I’m authorized to know about Felinity, like everyone else is.”

“Oh, well! What you gonna do?”

After five laps, Netty was finally feeling sleepy and had no idea what she would do about the contraband cat. They stopped at LaDonna’s room and held hands for a moment. “Thanks for jogging with me.”

“Go represent.”

Netty shook her head. How many times had she protected or covered for a person of color in her office who had not measured up in one way or another? Of course, they had deserved her help, but it always hurt. “Those days are over. No more embarrassment. The only black folk left don’t need anyone to apologize for them. We don’t need to represent, because we just are.” Her lips quivered with sincerity. She let go of LaDonna’s hands and turned to go.

“You gonna tell me what’s really wrong?” LaDonna said.

Netty looked at the floor, and shook her head. “I’m not very happy with God right now.”

“I hear that.”

“So if he does exist, he better not show his face in my damned pod.”

* * * *

Netty was awakened at an early hour by a call from her medical staff chief, Dr. Bhatti, who was over at Pod 3. He described the condition of each of the patients and asked for permission to keep the contingent there for a few more days. Because Bhatti sounded nervous, she asked if there was some other problem.

“Actually, there is,” he said. “While cleaning up the mess, the crew found some unexpected human remains outside the complex.”

“What do you mean, ‘unexpected?’”

“They are fragments of bone that don’t belong to any of the deceased.”

Netty rubbed her eyes, which were not focusing. “What you do mean? What’s going on?”

“Someone was thrown up by the asteroid impact. He landed here with the other debris.”

“That’s ridiculous! Someone can’t be thrown all the way to the Moon.”

Bhatti narrowed his eyes. “They can. It is a good guess that this fellow was sitting in his truck when he was ejected into space, along with many tons of earth.”

“His truck?”

“There were metal fragments near the bone splinters, including part of an engine block.”

“You’re joking.”

“It was a Chevy. I don’t know the model.”

Netty’s mind went blank. “Okay,” she said. “Bring me up to speed.”

She wanted to ask Bhatti about cures for AIDS, but decided to wait until she could do so in person. Meanwhile, there was always the GP.

Doctor Simon’s “front door” curtain had been pleated by hand to look like an oriental fan. Netty had passed it uncounted times when going through C ring, but hadn’t known it was his. Unable to sleep and unwilling to wait until office hours, she went to see him as early as she felt comfortable.

“Knock, knock?”

A woman answered, but did not pull back the curtain. “Yes? What is it?”

“Is the doctor in?”

“Just a minute.”

Dennis Simon came quickly to the door, evidently having heard Netty’s voice and anticipating an emergency. “Yes, Ms. Washington?”

“Is there a cure for AIDS?”

Simon stood quietly, looking down at the floor. He had a distant expression. He raked his thin hair back on his head and nodded slowly, then more assuredly. Extra skin under his chin wobbled in the low gravity. “I think so. Why?”

* * * *

Netty felt a warmness incubating within her. “In the offing,” as her grandmother used to say. She thought that Oscar’s news would kill the emotion, but it had not. Instead of giving up on him, she wanted a solution. She had once saved a failing hospital in the District, so why couldn’t she find a cure for Oscar?

She went to his temporary room in the storage area. She told him that Doctor Simon believed he could cure the HIV, and described Simon’s untried technique. To date, there was no actual cure for the virus, but Simon’s work with dialysis had led him to research the possibility of combining transfusions with blood filtering. He had personally invented a new kind of molecular filter and would have it recreated here in a matter of hours. While there were no guarantees, she told him that it was critically important, since, as a carrier, Oscar posed a great risk to the guests and crew of SMP4.

Oscar stared at the floor as she spoke, hardly moving. Once he made a deep sigh, and once he suppressed a deep cough, a remnant of his fading infection.

“So, what do you say?” she asked.

“I don’t think I can do that,” he said.

“Why not? You want to be cured, don’t you?”

Through gritted teeth, he said, “Yes.”

“And you don’t want to be quarantined, do you?”

“No.”

“Then what—” Netty knew her frustration was showing, and calmed her voice. “What seems to be the problem?”

“You are saying that my blood will be replaced with clean blood, blood from a bank.”

“Exactly.”

Oscar’s eyes darted over the storage boxes, as if looking for something. “But it won’t be Baster blood.”

“Eventually all your blood would be replaced with a similar type.”

He shook his head. “Then I cannot do it.”

“This has to do with your father, doesn’t it?”

Oscar still would not look at her. “My father was typical of our people. He was very proud of our mixed heritage and sent me here to preserve our blood. But he was always fighting himself. Sometimes he would even blame me, the dark one, for what he was. But I understood. Do you know what it is like to hate the race that is half of your blood, while hating the other half even more?”

“I think I do,” she said, working it out. “You’d be both a racist and the object of that racism. Each half would hate the other, by definition. But your father also found something to be proud of.”

Oscar nodded. “He was a great man, but I disappointed him. I will not do it again. I will not let the doctor flush away the last of our blood like so much waste.”

Growing angry, she felt like offering some choice words, but refrained. “It’s DNA that defines your race, you know. You’ll always have that.”

Oscar appeared to be only half listening. “If I find a wife from South Africa, at least our children would have similar blood.”

That hit Netty hard in the stomach. She exhaled and couldn’t take a breath. He didn’t love her, or even imagine loving her. What had endeared him to her suddenly tasted bitter. “There ought to be someone like that, in one of the other pods,” she said with attempted detachment. Already she was applying a professional instinct, starting to divest herself from a personal entanglement. It wasn’t working, which made her angry with herself, and with Oscar.

She stood with him, feeling an overwhelming urge to demand an answer to the obvious question: Just how did you get HIV in the first place? She forbade herself from that. Instead, she addressed his myopia. “Oscar,” she said, her voice teetering, “if you’re not cured, your line has to end with you anyway.”

He made no reply, but left, shoulders hanging. It’s worse than he imagines, she thought. The quarantine might have to be permanent. Not everyone was going to return to Earth, and he was a prime candidate for staying behind. After everything the people of her diaspora had been through, this disaster, as hellish as it was, provided the chance to start over, and to do it right. She was proud of every person on the Moon, especially those of color. There were no blemishes, except Oscar’s virus. She would not be the one to unleash that microscopic vampire into a virgin world.

* * * *

Netty focused on her work. The PA at SMP3 called, requesting a personnel exchange. He had recovered from his breakdown, but always sounded like he was exhausted. Of the recent fatalities, two were reclamation specialists, leaving a gap in that department. Netty transferred two of hers, a bright-eyed grad student named Aria, who had majored in ecology, and Aria’s boyfriend, who had received training in water management. That left her with four specialists in her own department. Not enough, but it was the best compromise until someone else could be trained or brought from a pod at Shackleton.

It was December, and a man from communications made an appointment for an interview. His name was Duke Liu, a young Chinese American with a keypad and an infectious grin. He met her at her desk.

“Christmas is coming,” he said, “and we’re putting out a special newsletter for all the pods. It’s called the Christmas Star, and I’m contributing a column. I got an idea from something I read about you.”

“You’ve piqued my curiosity.”

“I read something from your memoir that said your management style was like a Christmas tree. Could you explain that for me, in your own words?”

Netty smiled at the man’s journalistic tone. It seemed quaint, under the circumstances. “Well, that’s something I’ve never been entirely comfortable with, but it stuck, so here I am, the proverbial star atop the tree!”

“Was the idea that you were the star on top of the tree, and the constituents were the thousand points of light?”

She shook her head, but he was keying something in, and did not see her. “It originally had to do with the way government workers become unproductive when new leaders are elected,” she said. “It’s not that they’re not good workers, but it can take quite a while for political appointees to settle in and for everyone to adjust to new policies. So during the transition, I just tried to keep some light shining through the confusion.”

Liu lost his place typing, stared at the pad, then looked up. “Uh, I think I get it,” he said.

“It was the government employees who were the lights, not the citizens. But leaders should be like a beacon to everyone, of course.”

“That’s great,” he said, keying something in.

Netty recalled that this was the man who led the daily tai chi sessions, which was about the only exercise available outside of jogging in thermal slippers. He’d used some Chinese jargon in his class, so maybe he could answer a question for her. “Do you speak Chinese?”

“I’m the official translator for this pod. Did you need to send a message to Chi Yue?” he said, referring to the name of the independent Chinese base on the other side of the Moon.

“Not at the moment, but I may eventually. It’s good to know you’re around.”

“Any time.”

“You know, I’ve been wondering, what does Chi Yue mean, anyway?”

“It can mean red moon, or naked moon.”

“So which is it?”

“Both. It was intended to be poetic.”

“Well, they are both appropriate. I’m sorry for interrupting. Did you get what you wanted?”

Liu grinned. “Yes, ma’am!”

* * * *

As she headed home at the end of her day, she thought she saw Oscar in the clinic, which was adjacent to the command center. Both were at the hub of the pod. She stopped in to find Dr. Simon plugging an IV hose to Oscar’s upper arm.

“What’s this about?” she said, wavering between hopeful and suspicious.

“This is the blood transfusion we spoke about,” Simon said. “Didn’t Oscar tell you?”

Oscar met her stare, not looking away. “I decided to do it,” he said, his face sagging like a caricature of a sad puppy.

“We’re almost complete,” the doctor said. He made a clinical smile. “We’ll need to have a blood drive to replenish the reserves.”

A confusion of relief, grief, and shock fairly muted her. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Thank you, Netty,” said Oscar.

She left them, walking laps instead of going directly home. This news was unexpected, and though she should have been pleased, she was uneasy. Oscar had looked tired and pale, and she hoped that he would be all right. Probably his condition was normal, under the circumstances, she thought. Yes, and he might be cured after all!

Encouraged, she quickened her steps. On the Moon, you can cover a lot of ground that way, provided you don’t hit your head on the ceiling first. When she turned to the C ring, she bumped into Dr. Bhatti, the chief of her medical staff, whom she had loaned to Pod 3. They exchanged greetings and paced together, since both were exercising in the traditional counterclockwise fashion. She had spoken with him several times in teleconferences, but this was the first time he told her about the tragedy face to face.

The patients were recovering, and the mysterious bone fragments were indeed from a recently deceased man on Earth. He had literally ridden his truck to the Moon, in the most spectacular vehicle crash in history. This revelation chilled her own bones, and she shivered. She felt as though many of her problems would vanish, if only they would turn up the heat a little. She needed a vacation at Pod 1, where the fusion reactors were. It was supposed to be toasty there.

“I want to ask you about something else,” she said. “Is it possible to cure Trojan HIV-X by replacing a person’s blood?”

Doctor Bhatti stopped, so that she had to walk back to where he was. His bald, asymmetric head and flaking skin made him look like a potato. His thick eyebrows bent into a glower. “Where did you get that idea?” he said.

“It’s an experimental treatment I heard about, using special filters and a total blood replacement.”

“No, that’s ridiculous,” he said, his raspy voice raising to a high pitch. “Where did you hear about that? Where?”

“Is there a problem?” she said, stalling.

“There should be no one here with HIV!”

“I know that.”

“You have been consulting Doctor Simon, haven’t you?”

“To be honest, yes.”

“He should not be here either. He does not know what he is doing. He knows nothing about microbiology!”

“So you can’t cure AIDS that way?”

“Of course not!” Bhatti was chewing the inside of his lower lip, the veins on his forehead darkening almost to green. “You do not need to replace the blood. Affinity hemodialysis can target just the HIV. Even peptides from crocodile blood could do that, if we had any. But HIV-X hides inside the cells of other tissues, not just blood.”

“You’re sure? There’s no new technique that can filter out HIV?”

“Ms. Washington, that makes no sense at all. If you are going to replace all the blood anyway, why would you bother to filter it?”

“Oh, I see.” Put that way, Simon’s procedure seemed preposterous.

“Has this procedure been performed already?”

She hesitated, but the glare of his grave, sunken eyes, further shrouded by long, untrimmed eyebrows, saw through her. “We may have a problem on our hands,” he said. “There may be a lot of equipment to sanitize, not to mention a lot of tainted blood to dispose of. We may have to throw some things away.”

Netty smoldered. “This is no way to run a sustainable medical facility.”

“Or to ensure the health of a population,” said Bhatti. “The tiniest error here can ruin our independence entirely. We’ve already seen what can happen in an emergency, over in Pod 3. What if, the next time, we are unable to help?”

* * * *

On her way to work the next morning, Netty was tempted to stop by the clinic and start a firestorm. She did not. It would take more time, and a formal investigation, to decide what to do about Simon. Instead, she focused on Oscar, exercising her authority to invoke the guest-to-crew program for the first time. Everyone in the pod could be enlisted to perform whatever job was assigned by the PA.

She stopped in on the department head of Reclamation. She told him that she had a new worker for him, but the recruit wouldn’t start until after the holidays. That done, she went to the clinic to tell Oscar. Whenever she delivered bad news, she preferred to have something positive to say as well.

Oscar was not there. Doctor Simon had her take a seat. He made his ritual, curt smile, which diminished his credibility by its inappropriateness. “The procedure wasn’t working,” he said. “I’ve stopped it.”

Her heart sank at the sadness of the confession. She smiled sadly back. “What went wrong?”

“Nothing went wrong. There just doesn’t seem to be a way to get every trace of virus out. It was a good effort. Worth a try!”

“The other doctors are back now,” she said with a dash of gall. “Did you ask them for help?”

“W-we have conferred about it, yes,” he said. As chilly as it was, sweat was gleaming on his forehead. “We are in agreement that we cannot cure Mr. Izaaks at this time.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that, for Oscar’s sake.”

“Of course. The clinic is fully sterilized, and we’ve irradiated the contaminated blood, for fluid recycling. Now,” he said, looking beaten but hopeful, “I suppose you have some hard decisions to make.”

“I’ve already made them,” she said. “Oscar will stay here for the rest of his life, and the medical board will decide about you.”

* * * *

“Knock, knock!” LaDonna had come early to Netty’s. They both had the day off, and they had planned to braid what was left of each other’s hair. The dry, chilly air had made their hair brittle, and though they each had a small supply of extensions, they were saving those for some other occasion.

“Come on in.”

“The Christmas Star is online,” LaDonna said.

Netty brought up the paper on her notebook. “Is my interview in it?”

“The link’s right there. ‘Our Christmas Star’ by Duke Liu.”

Netty’s eyes widened. “What’s this?” She read: “Though humble, Miss Washington’s reputation as a Christmas star is not unfounded. ‘I want to be a beacon, leading people to the promised land,’ she said.” Well, that is not what I said!”

“That’s the press.”

“Oh, it’s not that. Duke is not even a real journalist. He’s quite nice, but I’ve always hated being misquoted.”

“There’s also an announcement there,” LaDonna said, to change the subject. “They’re showing The Sound of Music at the Double-wide Diner this afternoon. Derrick suggested we meet him there.”

“Let’s just do our hair instead. I’m not in the mood for a tearjerker.”

“Tearjerker? That’s one of the feel-goodest movies of all time.”

“These days, any movie that has singing mountains, raindrops on roses, and kids frolicking outdoors is a tearjerker,” Netty said.

“I see what you mean.”

“Cornrows?” asked Netty.

“Don’t make me hungry,” LaDonna said with a laugh. “Go ahead and try, but ain’t no corn gonna sprout out of this head!”

Netty set to work on LaDonna’s hair, wanting to occupy her fingers. As they did their line dance across her friend’s chafing scalp, her mind wandered, trying not to think of The Sound of Music. LaDonna worked a little vacuum nozzle, sucking up the dandruff and broken bits of hair. That would keep them out of machinery, and make recycling easier.

But honestly, who would want to watch that movie? What kind of cockeyed optimism could anyone have now? All humanity’s achievements were gone, all history burned or buried. Graves were overturned, roads crushed or pulled like taffy, cities ruined, pyramids and other ruins ruined forever. The hills were not alive with the sound of anything—especially not music.

And what was in that Liu’s head, to twist such words into her mouth? She had not said anything about leading anyone to a promised land, she was sure of that. “Do you suppose that Liu was only writing what he wanted to hear?” Netty said.

“How should I know?”

“He does have a point, I suppose. A leader has to have somewhere to lead people to.” And people to lead, she thought. “Maybe I needed to hear what he wanted to hear.”

“Spoken like a true leader,” LaDonna said.

Netty’s fingers worked LaDonna’s crumbling hair into tight rows, moving like a knitting machine that was missing a hook. She had long ago learned to braid with her missing ring finger, and as she watched that finger move, she wondered whether her great-grandmother’s wedding ring would stay securely on the stub, should the occasion arise.

Humanity had been amputated too, and she had believed that everyone left was a true gem. Yes, there were jewels; but there were also people who improperly screened refugees, people who left shutters open, administrators who broke down under stress, quack doctors, cat smugglers, and a man with AIDS. And a PA who would abandon that man because she thought he was the only one who could wreck her vision. People would walk the Earth again, diamonds in the rough, all. Despite her authority, her duty was not to winnow, but to polish.

“You’re going to let Oscar go home, aren’t you?” LaDonna said, craning to see Netty’s reaction. Netty turned away, feigning indifference. LaDonna could not sit long in silence, so she hummed a few bars of My Favorite Things, as if she heard it all the way from the diner.

“You shut up and sit still,” said Netty. “I can’t let you return to Earth with your hair looking like this.”

Copyright (c) 2008 David Bartelll

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Oscar’s departure from Earth was described in “Misquoting the Moon” [March 2007].)

[Back to Table of Contents]

Science Fact: GREEN NANOTECHNOLOGY

by Richard A. Lovett

There was a time in science fiction when nuclear energy was the magic genie that could solve any problem. Call something “nuclear powered,” and it could be anything from a souped-up dentist’s drill to an interstellar hot rod.

Okay, I exaggerate. But in the early days, when few people really understood how nuclear power worked, a lot of stories got it wrong. Much as, more recently, many have turned virtual reality into what might as well be magic. Exactly what some have tended to do with nanotechnology.

Like Ed Lerner, whose article graced the pages of the September 2008 issue, I was first introduced to nanotechnology in the form of nanobots: tiny machines like molecular bulldozers that could rearrange atoms any way you wanted. But while it appears possible to make ingenious nanoscale pumps, pipes, rotors, and wheels, it’s hard to envision combining these into fancy widgets like microscopic mini-subs, with manipulator arms, cargo bays, and propulsion systems. Not to mention that anyone who’s ever struggled with biochemistry knows this isn’t the way the molecular world works. If you want to convert dimethyl-p-benzyl-whatsits into dimethyl-o-benzyl-whatever, you’re basically shoving two methyl (CH3-) groups to different positions on a benzene ring. But you’re not going to be able to do that with a molecular bulldozer. It’s going to take the equivalent of dynamite, and probably a boatload of steps. Just as, in real life, the body takes a great many steps to pluck carbon and hydrogen atoms from glucose (C6H12O6) and “burn” them to form CO2 and H2O.

Take it from someone in the industry: “Building complex structures at nanoscale is not something we’re going to be able to do,” said R. Stanley Williams, director of quantum science research for Hewlett-Packard Labs, in a plenary address at a nanotechnology conference in Portland, Oregon in 2007.[1]

[Footnote 1: Much of the background for this article came from that conference, the Micro Nano Breakthrough Conference, held September 10-12. For additional information on this fast-moving field, see Nanotechnology Now, www.nanotech-now.com, a website aimed at nanotechnology investors but containing news releases and other general information. Also available on the web is the 32-page report, Green Nanotechnology: It’s Easier than You Think (www.nanotechproject.org/process/assets/files/2701/187greennanopen8.pdf), written by Karen F. Schmidt for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. On a more technical level, the semi-annual meetings of the American Chemical Society often feature symposia on nanotechnolgy (green or otherwise) as well as green chemistry (nano- or otherwise).]

As Lerner concluded, this means the future of nanotechnology—certainly the near future[2]—isn’t nanobots. It’s the ability to control manufacturing processes to construct super-strong, flawless materials. It’s analytical chemistry using molecular probes for super-sensitive analytical tests. It’s ever-smaller computer circuits, allowing faster, cheaper processors to drive the computer revolution into the next decade and beyond.

[Footnote 2: Analog writer Robert A. Frietas, Jr. of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing still believes in nanobots, although he calls them “nanorobots.” He is working on a multivolume book series entitled Nanomedicine, of which at least two volumes have been published as of the time this article went to press.]

But there’s another aspect of nanotechnology. The conference I attended had “red” and “green” symposia tracks. The “red” one focused on computers, physics, and the types of subjects Lerner talked about. The “green” track was biological and environmental.

Let’s start with the environment.

* * * *

Green Revolution, Gray Goo, or Nanolung

Nanotechnology has the potential of producing products that are both revolutionary and environmentally friendly. It offers the prospect, for example, of creating filters that can clean up toxic-waste sites very quickly, at low cost. The same processes can be used to remove contaminants from water, also at extremely low cost. One company has announced a goal of being able to provide safe drinking water anywhere in the world for $1 per person per year.

Nanotechnology has also been cited as a way of providing cheap solar power. And it can produce batteries that recharge at a phenomenal rate. The Altairnano company of Reno, Nevada, has developed a battery that can take an SUV 130 miles—then recharge in ten minutes. The battery itself is nothing special—my laptop battery has a higher energy density. What’s new is the replacement of graphite electrodes with a nanomaterial that allows super-fast cycling. Historically, one of the limiting factors with electric cars has been limited range. But if you can recharge in the time it takes to get a cup of coffee, that limitation evaporates. “It’s not that big an inconvenience,” says company representative Bruce Sabacky.

Nor do the new batteries appear to show “memory” problems. They appear able to run through thousands—possibly millions—of cycles while retaining at least ninety percent of their capacity. When your car wears out, you might just buy a new chassis and take the old battery with you!

Automobiles aren’t the only use. How about a light rail line that doesn’t need wires? Charging stations at each stop would allow the train to top off its batteries while passengers enter and leave.

* * * *

Nanotechnology enthusiasts can list dozens of ways to save the planet. But with any new technology, one of the questions science fiction should ask is what might go wrong.

With nanotechnology, the classic nightmare has been the “gray goo” scenario, in which out-of-control nanobots disassemble everything in sight, including us. It’s not a pretty scenario, but neither is it realistic. The real concern about nanotechnology is what we might call nano-toxicity.

The problem is that nanomaterials are, well, nano-. That allows airborne particles to penetrate more deeply into lungs. Inhaled nanoparticles have even been reported to travel along nasal nerves to the brain, Ken Donaldson, a lung toxicology expert at the University of Edinburgh, U.K., warned in 2004. It’s an ability, he said, that they share with some similar-sized viruses. “The importance of nanotechnology to the economy and to our future wellbeing is beyond debate,” Donaldson added, “but its potential adverse impacts need to be studied.”

Also, gram for gram, smaller particles tend to be more reactive. Regulators, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, are concerned that this might increase their toxicity when they escape into the environment or are accidentally breathed or ingested from cosmetics, sunscreens, sports equipment, or weather-resistant clothing.

Many of these materials are made of familiar ingredients, but does that make them safe? Simply put, are carbon nanotubes “graphite?” Or are they something else? Toxicologists are still wrestling with the details, but for most nanomaterials, “something else” appears to be the most likely conclusion. Size, it appears, really does matter.

But that’s only the beginning of the problem, says Eric Tulsky, a nanochemist with Invitrogen Corporation. “The next problem is that there are an infinite number of types of nanotubes.”[3 Tube lengths vary. So can their diameters, the ways they fold, their end caps, and the ways they wrap around each other. Should all tubes be lumped together, or do we need to study each type, individually?

[Footnote 3: Personal communication by e-mail.]

Nanotubes aren’t the only nanomaterials posing such problems. In some cases, the nomenclature doesn’t even exist yet for defining potentially important differences in nano-level structure.

All of this, Tulsky says, presents “a very real barrier” to figuring out how to regulate nanomaterials. The solution, he believes, is to figure out which properties are important and which are irrelevant, thereby reducing the analysis to something at least reasonably manageable.

But that doesn’t mean nanotechnology needs to abandon its “green” leanings. Rather than circling the wagons and going on the defensive, some nanotechnology leaders hope the industry will cooperate with the more responsible environmental groups and face these issues head on.

“We have the opportunity to design and implement nanotechnology in a responsible way the first time,” says Jim Hutchison of the University of Oregon. “The goal is to get high-performance materials that also pose little harm to the environment and to humans.”

* * * *

Pulp Nonfiction

Another “green” aspect of nanotechnology is the ability to make better use of limited materials.

There is talk, for example, of a cell phone printed on paper. From a science fictional perspective, it adds a new dimension to the hero-on-the-lam trick of making calls only from throwaway phones. Make a call, blow your nose, and destroy the evidence. Not to mention making it a lot easier to lose your phone. Oops, sorry. I think I used it for a shopping list.

Or maybe the phones of the future are single-use, like packets of Post-Its. Forget recharging. Peel one off and toss it away.

More seriously, the ability to print phones, batteries, and perhaps even computer screens on paper raises the question of how nanotechnology might change a material that we currently take largely for granted.

Most paper is made of wood. But so is sawdust. The difference is that the wood in paper was converted to pulp, spread into thin sheets, and allowed to dry. In the drying, the pulp particles bind to each other, keeping them from falling apart the moment you pick up the sheet.

Pulp itself is formed largely of cellulose, one of the fundamental building blocks of plant cells. That cellulose exists as long, thin nanoscale crystals, sometimes referred to as nanocrystalline cellulose. With a bit of effort, these crystals, which can comprise up to ninety percent of a plant’s dry matter, can be liberated from other materials to which they’re bound.

The result is a natural product that’s twenty-five to thirty percent as strong as carbon nanotubes.

“It’s stronger than steel and stiffer than aluminum,” says John Simonsen of Oregon State University. “Not bad for an organic polymer that comes from nature.”

So far, isolating the material is expensive—on the order of $100 per gram—but as costs come down, it offers a way to make strong, lightweight plastics, freeing the plastics industry from its dependence on petroleum.

Once we’ve learned to refine it more cheaply, nanocrystalline cellulose opens the door to stronger, lighter paper—enough that the paper industry has set a goal of making its product forty percent lighter without any loss in strength. That would save billions of dollars in mailing costs alone, says E. Peter Lancaster, formerly a paper chemist for Weyerhaeuser Corporation. But that’s just the beginning. Stronger paper could replace other materials. And nanocellulose-based paper might ultimately be cheaper and more environmentally friendly to make. A major input in paper manufacturing is water, which must then be dried out of the finished product. If nanocrystalline-based paper could be designed to repel water, less energy might be needed in drying, not only saving money but reducing the environmental impacts. It’s the type of win-win that green nanotechnology advocates most want to achieve.

Another win-win might come from the elimination of dyes. Pure nanocrystalline cellulose is highly transparent, but it’s possible to make it any color you want by slightly altering the chemistry. This could be a major environmental benefit, because dyes tend to be nasty toxicants. Whether the altered cellulose itself might be toxic remains to be seen. But it’s certainly worth investigating, especially because color-altered nanocrystals, even if toxic, are probably a lot less likely than dyes to leach into the environment.

* * * *

Artificial Bones

The same biological factors that raise concerns about nanotechnology in some settings make it beneficial in others. The most notable is medicine.

Let’s look again at nanocrystalline cellulose. Even at its current price, it’s attractive for implants—basically as a scaffolding on which bone, skin, or other tissues can be regrown. Already, Lancaster says, one company is making artificial, cellulose-based skin for burn patients.

With a bit of chemical engineering, nanocrystals can be designed as self-assembling lattices that can be molded into any shape you want and which dissolve when the body no longer needs them. The technique, says Simonsen, involves attaching short strands of DNA onto the individual cellulose crystals.

Most of us think of DNA simply as the coding for our genes. But one of the properties that make it work for that purpose is its tendency to form paired strands, like the double helix of molecular-biology fame. By attaching a single strand to one crystal, and the complimentary strand to another, you can make DNA tags serve like molecular Velcro. Putting the right tags in the right places allows chemists to design the crystals to link like beams and girders, forming any desired lattice, not just in two dimensions, but in three.

Even more interestingly, Simonsen says, the DNA bonds break at high temperature. This allows blocks of the material to be molded, like thermoplastic. Better yet, you can insert a molecular spacer between the cellulose crystal and the DNA tag, designed so the body degrades it at whatever rate you want. Bingo, you’ve got a dissolving scaffold for pretty much any type of regenerative medicine you want. With the right spacers, it’s even possible to give the lattice the same flexibility as bone, skin, kidneys, etc., allowing damaged tissue to more easily regrow.

* * * *

Quantum Imaging

Cellulose isn’t the only nanotechnology material that has medical potential. Quantum dots do, too.

Quantum dots are tiny semiconductors, comprised of perhaps 100 to 100,000 atoms. Much of the buzz about them focuses on their possible use in quantum computers. Their key feature is that when you shine light on them of the right wavelength, they fluoresce brightly in another—kind of like nanoscale black-light posters. In computers, they can be used to make extremely tiny, rapidly switching gates. (They also show potential for use in high-efficiency solar cells.)

Biologically, they have the ability to replace tissue-staining dyes. That sounds trivial, but dyes are important because they let you see things that would otherwise be invisible.

Traditional fluorescent dyes have limitations: basically, if the substances you’re trying to tag with them are present at too low a level, you still can’t see them. But quantum dots are forty to 100 times brighter—so bright that you can spot them individually, under the right microscopes. Also they don’t bleach out after a few minutes’ illumination, allowing them to be used for extended procedures.

To use them as dyes, all that’s necessary is to attach antibodies to their surfaces. Antibodies are like molecular fishhooks: when they find the molecule they’re designed to catch (their antigen), they bind to it. If the other end of the antibody is connected to the quantum dot, they’ve also bound the dot to the antigen.

It isn’t just microscopic analysis that benefits from this. Surgeons can use quantum dots for removing hard-to-find tumors. Christoph Block, of Signalomics GmbH, in Vienna, Austria, reports that this has been used for glioma, a particularly nasty form of brain cancer.

Under ordinary light, it’s very hard to distinguish the tumor from healthy brain tissue. But if you dose the area with quantum dots designed to bind to surface antigens found on cancer cells, then shine violet light on the dots (the wavelength at which the medical ones are designed to fluoresce), the cancerous areas glow back at you, greatly increasing the chances of finding the entire tumor.

The same has been done with bladder cancers. “The problem that you don’t really see the tumor is pretty frequent,” Block says.

Encouraged by their successes with bladder cancers and gliomas, surgeons are looking for other ways to use the dots, particularly in minimally invasive surgery, where incisions are small and it’s hard to see inside with conventional techniques.

Quantum dots can also be used for diagnosis. Skin and other tissues are moderately transparent to red light and near infrared, says Tulsky, of Invitrogen Corporation. That’s why you can see a red flashlight shining through your hand.

Quantum dots are equally bright. “An ultra-bright infrared fluor could be imaged in vivo through skin,” Tulsky says.

A very simple application is for determining which lymph nodes drain a tumor. Since metastasis typically begins with cells moving into the lymphatic system, it’s important to determine which nodes serve the tumor site. “Often the surgeon takes out a double-digit [number of] lymph nodes,” Tulsky says. “That [surgery] can be worse for the patient than the removal of the tumor.”

Various techniques are available for doing such mappings, but with quantum dots, all you have to do is inject them into the tumor and watch them move, right through the skin. It’s been done in a pig, Tulsky says. “All we need to do this in humans is an FDA-approved nanocrystal.”

That, of course, is the rub. It’s one thing to squirt quantum dots into an incision site, where those that bind are going to be cut out with the tumor and the rest will be washed away. It’s another thing to let them stay until the body excretes them naturally. Some of the elements that make the dots do their thing, like cadmium, are highly toxic. Though, Tulsky says, “We’re working to make them as nontoxic as possible.”

Toxicity isn’t as big a problem with basic biological research. In animal experiments, it’s possible to paint the outside of stem cells with dots and watch the cells migrate to their target tissues. It’s also possible to use quantum dots to track white blood cells. “These are experiments you just couldn’t do without the brightness and stability that quantum dots bring to the table,” Tulsky says.

At a smaller scale, it’s possible to tag biochemically interesting molecules with quantum dots and, in tissue culture experiments, watch how the dots (and therefore the attached molecules) move through living cells.

Tania Vu is an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Oregon Health & Science University who’s used such techniques to study chemical signaling in neurons. Much of her research centers on figuring out how nerve cells extend filaments, called axons, in response to hormone-like chemicals.

It is well known that these chemicals bind to receptors on the neuron’s cell walls, initiating the cascade of reactions that leads to axon growth. But how exactly does it happen?

To grow, the cell needs to shift the right proteins to the right locations and keep track of what is going on. And the shipping distances aren’t trivial. “We’re talking [about] distances that can be as long as 1,000 times the diameter of the cell body,” Vu says.

Conventional staining allows researchers to take snapshots of what’s happening in the cell at any given time. But the act of staining kills the cell. And since it’s only a snapshot, it doesn’t allow individual molecules’ motions to be tracked.

“We want to be able to look at protein-protein interactions in live cells, with single-molecule resolution, in a dynamic manner,” Vu says.

Quantum dots make this possible. What she’s learned is that when a receptor is activated by the binding of a hormone, it and the hormone are rapidly drawn into the cell, where they associate with many different types of proteins. (Exactly what proteins are involved at any given stage can be determined by stopping the experiment and extracting the dots to see what they’re linked to at the time.)

The dots then enter the cell’s network of microtubules, tiny tunnels that quickly transport them to distant parts of the cell.

“It’s like tracking trucks along the cellular highway,” Tulsky says of similar experiments. “We’re tracking single molecules in a cell.”

In Vu’s case, the research focused on a potent hormone called nerve growth factor, or NGF. Blockages in the cells’ handling of it are believed to play roles in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s diseases, and research like hers may help shed light on precisely how these blockages occur.[4]

[Footnote 4: The research discussed above uses only one type of quantum dot at a time. But the same quantum effects that give quantum dots their name turn out to mean that their size determines the color with which they glow. Thus, it’s possible to tag a cell with many different dots, each fluorescing a different color, each with different antibodies. “One of our colleagues was able to squeeze in seventeen colors,” Tulsky says. This opens the door for researchers to tag many different types of molecules at once, watching their interactions—an extraordinarily powerful tool for figuring out complex biochemical systems.]

* * * *

Bursting Bubbles

Slightly larger are microbubbles.

As the name indicates, they’re just that—bubbles of gas, confined in a microscopic shell, typically five microns or less. That makes them bigger than quantum dots, but smaller than cells: small enough to disperse into capillaries throughout the body.

The shell is typically made of something like albumin. The interior is an inert gas, such as a fluorocarbon, which doesn’t easily diffuse through the shell, so the bubbles don’t deflate.

One use for microbubbles is in ultrasound imaging.

Ultrasound imaging is like pinging the body with sonar to map what’s beneath the skin. What makes microbubbles useful is that they don’t reflect ultrasound in the same way as the surrounding tissues, allowing you to map either the tissue, or the distribution of bubbles, at will.

Tissues simply reflect the incoming signal. When the signal is set at very low power, that’s also what microbubbles do. But if you turn up the power a bit, they start producing harmonics, as well. Hit them with the right frequency and they’ll ring like microscopic bells. At high acoustic power, the bubbles break, in the process making a very large noise (at least by ultrasound standards).

So, what can we do with this? A lot, says Jonathan Lidner, a cardiologist at Oregon Heath & Science University, because the nonlinear manner in which the bubbles respond to signal power means it’s possible to map both tissues and bubbles, simultaneously.

For example, would you like to find out what parts of the heart are still receiving good blood flow after a heart attack? Inject the patient with microbubbles and see if any at all are reaching the damaged tissue. Then, blast the area with a loud ultrasound pulse and see how long it takes for new bubbles to reappear. You can do the same in the brain, to look for stroke damage. Or you can look for vascular changes associated with tumors and tumor growth. Even without zapping the bubbles, the imaging gives you a nice roadmap of the tumor’s blood vessels. The gas from the burst bubbles, by the way, poses no risk of blocking other blood vessels; there’s just not that much of it.

Even more is possible. In 2003, a team led by Dilantha Ellegala of the University of Virginia School of Medicine published a paper in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, which showed that, just as quantum dots can be conjugated with antibodies, so too can microbubbles.

This can be used to cause them to bind to tumor biomarkers, allowing ultrasound to find tumors that might not show up. Or they can be coated with antibodies designed to seek out inflamed tissues, such as inflammatory bowel disease or very early atherosclerosis. And “very early” means very early. “As a cardiologist, I want to [be able to] detect which of you is going to develop cardiovascular disease decades before it happens,” Lidner said at the nanotechnology meeting.

The bubbles also have tremendous prospects for disease treatment, ranging from cancer cures to a possible way to zap even the most antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The idea is that instead of putting a gas in the antibody-tagged bubbles, you pack them with a drug.

This has several advantages over conventional pills and injections. To begin with, the drug doesn’t have to contend with bodily processes that might degrade it in the stomach, intestines, or bloodstream. But the real advantage is the ability to pop the bubbles on demand. Microbubble treatment would begin with an injection, followed by a wait, while the bubbles find their targets and bind to them. Then, you zap the desired tissues (the whole body, if necessary) with a strong ultrasound pulse, bursting the bubbles, and delivering high concentrations of the drug exactly where it’s needed. That not only jacks up the drug’s concentration at the target site, but minimizes side effects: a major boon for cancer chemotherapy, and potentially a way to make really potent antibiotics.

Even better is an effect discovered in 1917 by Lord Rayleigh (who in 1904 won the Nobel prize in physics for his discovery of argon gas).

At the time, the British navy had a problem: propellers on fast-moving ships were wearing out at an unexpectedly rapid rate. Lord Rayleigh’s task was to find out why.

The problem turned out to be cavitation, which occurs when the propeller’s rotation creates a low-pressure zone in which air bubbles form, then burst. This turns out to be a very powerful process that pocks even the metal surface of propellers.

Well, microbubbles are bubbles. And their antibodies can link them to cell walls, maybe of tumor tissues, maybe of nasty bacteria. Then we can pop them. “We don’t do anything as bad as destroying metal,” Lidner says. “But we do use the energy of destroying bubbles to enhance delivery.” More precisely, the cavitation effect of the popping bubble can be used to squirt its contents through a cell wall. Alternatively, if the microbubble is merely passing through a capillary within a tumor, popping it with a carefully directed ultrasound pulse can squirt its contents out of the capillary and into the tumor.

It’s not really a microscopic submarine, on a cellular-level seek-and-destroy mission. But the end result isn’t all that different.

And so it is likely to be with most biological nanotechnology, at least for the foreseeable future. Rather than “bots,” as conventionally envisioned by science fiction, our medical nano-tools will be single function, and simpler in design. But the things they can do will be as complex as biochemists’ imaginations can make them, taking advantage of cellular-level processes we’re only now beginning to understand.

* * * *

About the author:

Richard A. Lovett has written more than sixty articles and stories for Analog since his first appearance in 1999. A full-time writer for more than two decades, he keeps fresh by regularly changing fields. The most recent switch was to sports reporting for the U.S. Olympic Team trials. A former law professor, he has degrees in astrophysics, law, and economics. He also worked for a couple of years for an environmental engineering firm, where he absorbed some chemistry by osmosis. He then spent more than a decade writing hundreds of articles about toxicology and biochemistry, fueling his interest in medical nanotechnology.

Copyright (c) 2008 Richard A. Lovett

[Back to Table of Contents]

Probability Zero: ALIENS

by Rick Norwood

Conrad Montcastle ate a seedless grape and a thin wedge of Camembert cheese. He took a sip of fine Aldebaran wine. The main course had been cleared away, and only the men remained at the table. His gray eyes narrowed. He was a strong man, in the prime of life, and he was not the sort of person to back away from unpleasant truths.

“What Doctor Hudson has proposed is the only solution to the current crisis. Unless something is done, the aliens will overrun the earth. But all six of us must agree. The doctor takes the greatest risk, and we cannot ask him to take this risk unless he is assured of our unconditional support. Not only our fortunes and our honor, but our very lives will be at risk if we go ahead with this. We stand or fall as one.”

Across the table from him, John Lowell did not flinch from the challenge. “I’m with you. I think I speak for all of us when I say that unless someone steps forward to save this planet, the human race will no longer be able to call Mother Earth our own. These aliens have no morals, no finer sensibilities, and they breed like flies.” His voice rose both in volume and in pitch. “Those fools at the United Nations, they keep on giving the aliens greater and greater ‘rights.’ Rights! What do aliens know of rights? This isn’t their planet. Rights must be earned. It is insane to talk about rights that they have not earned and do not deserve. If the government will not act, then patriots must step forward. I’ve even heard talk of giving aliens the vote. Think, gentlemen! They outnumber us. It would mean the end of the human race.”

Montcastle noted that John’s hands were trembling, but the man’s jaw was set, and so he put down the trembling to strong emotion rather than weakness. He looked around the table at the faces of the other men. Their expressions were serious. They were his dearest and closest friends, and he felt sure he could count on every one of them to keep his mouth shut.

From the parlor came the soft voices of the women. The servants had vanished into the back of the mansion and would not return unless Montcastle rang the silver bell near his right hand. “Well, Doctor?”

Doctor Hudson stood and bowed slightly to the group. He was a large man, who wore old-fashioned eyeglasses. “If we are all agreed, I shall begin with my own field hands. I’ve already told them that under the new laws they are free to travel, to try to find better jobs if they can find them. A few will be loyal and stay, but the majority of them don’t know the meaning of the word loyalty. They will disperse across the globe.”

He took a deep breath and continued. “Here is the plan. I have told them that they need an inoculation, to protect them from diseases that are found in the big cities. They’ve never been to the cities, so they don’t know any better. They’ll line up to be inoculated. I have genetically designed a disease that is highly contagious among aliens, but which cannot spread to humans. It has a gestation period of about thirty days, after which the infected alien will experience a slight fever, then coma, then death. It is the most humane way to deal with the alien problem.”

Montcastle nodded. “Very well then, gentlemen. Are we all agreed?” Each man met his eyes, and he saw that they understood. They were in this together, come what may.

He rang the silver bell, and a short, blue servant in a butler’s uniform slid softly into the room. “We’re ready for coffee and brandy now, L’chok.”

“Very good, sir.”

He would miss L’chok. The alien had been with his family for generations. But sacrifices were necessary.

* * * *

Six months had passed. It was winter, and the six men were once again assembled. The table setting glittered as before, with fine china, linen napkins, and crystal goblets. But there was no wine and very little bread. From the kitchen came the sounds of the women, cleaning up.

“Gentlemen,” Montcastle said, “This year’s crop lies rotting in the fields, the outer planets refuse to extend us any more credit, and good help isn’t to be had for love nor money. But at least Earth is once again in the hands of human beings.”

“And,” John Lowell added, “nobody suspects us. No one has any idea how the plague started.” He looked significantly at the doctor.

That doctor’s jowls shook and the flesh hung loose on his frame, but there was still fire in his gaze. “We did the right thing,” he said. “There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that the current famine is the fault of those goddamn liberals.”

Copyright (c) 2008 Rick Norwood

[Back to Table of Contents]

Short Story: WHERE AWAY YOU FALL

by Jason Sanford

Can ideals be too high?

I was dozing in the aerostat’s pilot chair, sleeping for the first time since entering near space two days before, when Bee whispered “weapons lock” in my ear. I woke confused—Was I back in my F-35? Had I blacked out from excessive g-forces?—so I yanked hard on the control stick before realizing my old fighter jet was long gone. Instead, I floated in a balloon just below the blockade line. Fortunately, Bee overrode my stick commands. The computer didn’t need to remind me that aerostats couldn’t do evasive maneuvers sixty kilometers above the Earth, not when the only thing holding us up was an envelope so thin I could literally see through it.

I cursed myself for falling asleep in the pilot chair instead of my bunk as Bee repeated that a targeting laser had locked on us. I glanced out the pressurized cockpit’s window. Below, Earth’s blue atmosphere curved serenely away. Above, the blackness of space. Only seven other balloons were in sight. None of the aerostats in this part of the mesosphere carried defensive systems, so I guessed someone manning the blockade had discovered our little ruse.

How long does it take a hypervelocity slug to find you? One second? Two? While I waited, I remembered Brother Donald Page. How two decades ago he’d affirmed my destiny with tears in his eyes, telling this short, skinny girl that if she worked hard, she’d reach outer space. Now I was the closest I’d ever get, and my reward was to be shot down.

Well, screw that, I thought, forcing Brother Page from my mind. I started to call up the blockade frequency to curse them out when Bee intoned the best news I’d heard all day: “Dusty, the target lock has switched from weapons to tight beam. Do you wish to receive a NASA transmission from Major Johnie Acaba?”

“Patch him through, Bee,” I said, angry at Acaba for rattling my cage. I forced out a fake smile as his handsome, square-cut face floated before me.

“Hey wannabe, you’re nearing no-go territory.”

I bristled. Acaba knew how seriously Seekers—even a not-very observant Seeker like myself—took our destinies. “The Beatrice couldn’t reach eighty klicks even if I wanted to,” I said, which was the United States’ definition of the edge of space, and where the blockade officially began. “And where the hell do you get off lighting me up with weapons?”

“I was just joking, Dusty,” Johnie said with a grin. “I wanted to welcome you to near space. I know how much it means for you to get there.”

I started to smart back to Johnie, but bit off my words. Johnie was so dense he’d never understood my sarcasm. “Gee, Johnie, are we still on joking terms? Wasn’t there a bit of awkwardness a while back at the Outpost?”

Johnie frowned. The Outpost Tavern was an astronaut bar in Houston that looked like a combination barn and old-time general store. Johnie and I had been best friends during our time in the Air Force and when I applied to NASA, I convinced him to go along with me. We spent two years training with the space agency, graduated at the top of our class, and were preparing for our first trip to man the blockade when someone—and my money was on Johnie—spilled the beans about me being a Seeker. Never mind that I’d lapsed so far from the faith that my parents’ annual holiday card included a guilt-inducing “Are you still living in sin?” letter extolling my spiritual deficiencies.

But NASA wouldn’t listen. Over the last few decades Seekers had carried out a number of high-profile bombings and attacks around the world. There were also rumors that the last cascade event—a chain-reaction debris sprawl caused by too many satellites and too much junk in orbit—hadn’t been an accident. That maybe a Seeker sent a satellite tumbling into another in an attempt to obtain the faith’s goal of returning humanity to a simpler way of life.

As I’d packed my gear, Johnie said how sorry he was at me getting kicked out. I screamed at him, wanting to know if he’d told NASA my secret. He swore he hadn’t, but I didn’t believe him. A few months later, I showed up at his launch party in the Outpost Tavern, intending to let bygones be bygones. But my former colleagues protested my presence, causing Johnie to play peacemaker instead of sticking up for me. I stormed out cursing his name.

But I guess Johnie had forgotten all that. “Thanks for everything,” I said. Johnie looked puzzled, then smiled. Like I said, he never understood sarcasm.

“So what are you up to down there?” he asked.

I glanced at Bee’s telemetry. Johnie was orbiting a few hundred klicks above me in low Earth orbit aboard the Freedom 2 space station. In a few minutes he’d be below the horizon and out of range. “Tell you what … you get me into the Outpost, I’ll tell everything I know.”

“No can do,” he said. “Astronauts only in there.”

Astronauts only, my ass, I thought as I disconnected the tight beam, popping Johnie’s holographic face like a soap bubble. I’m better than any damn astronaut. Even if I’ll never get to space like I’m supposed to.

* * * *

My parents joined the Seekers before I was born, drawn to the religious movement by the teaching that salvation lay in living simply and reaching one’s God-given destiny. Each Seeker’s destiny was secret, decreed by your preacher on behalf of God and not revealed to the world until you achieved it.

Even though I grew up in a staunch Seeker community, I never was very devout. While all my friends wore brown chastity dresses or refused to use cells and net access, I obsessed on science fiction novels. I sat through church services reading old Heinlein and Clarke stories. I couldn’t recite the hundred and one supreme destinies, but I knew Asimov’s three laws of robotics by heart. My parents were embarrassed; the elders appalled. However, Brother Page encouraged my science fiction habit, telling my parents God moved in mysterious ways and had grand things in mind for me.

When I turned eighteen and went to Brother Page for my destiny, to my total shock the preacher said to reach out into space. “I thought we were supposed to live simply?” I asked. “Forsake the distractions of the material world?”

“God’s will can be difficult to understand,” Brother Page said with a secretive wink. “But I’m sure you’ll manage.”

I hugged Brother Page, excited by his encouragement to follow my dream. When my parents questioned my Seeker commitment after I joined the Air Force, I merely told them I was following my destiny, to which Brother Page nodded knowingly. For two decades I screamed F-35s across the Middle East and Asia, studied aerospace engineering, worked toward being the ideal astronaut. And then NASA kicked me out.

To say I was devastated would be an understatement. Even though I hadn’t been to church in years, I looked up Brother Page, who now ran a large Seeker congregation outside Houston. We met in his church’s main worship hall, which was shaped like a massive planetarium. I entered to find the lights out and a projected replica of the night sky slowly spinning above me.

“Where away, Sister Dusty?” Brother Page hailed from the front pew, using the ancient mariner’s term for direction that Seekers had adopted as a greeting.

“Where I must go.” I motioned at the ceiling. “I’m impressed by the setup.”

“Helps the congregation put the world into its proper perspective—something I’m afraid too many Seekers fail to do these days.”

I didn’t need Brother Page to tell me about the trouble caused by misguided Seekers. Every week brought a new divinely ordained attack or explosion. The greatest strength and weakness of the Seeker movement was that each congregation was independent. Unfortunately, too many extremist preachers exploited this with an overly strict view of how simply humans should live. I wished more of them were like Brother Page.

As the stars slowly orbited our bodies, Brother Page and I talked about my destiny. I asked him why God let me be kicked out of NASA when my destiny was to reach space. Instead of explaining that contradiction, Brother Page merely said my ultimate fate was extremely complex.

By the end of our talk, the Big Dipper was rising behind the altar. I smiled as I glanced at Brother Page’s brown robes, which meant he had yet to achieve his own destiny. He then asked if I remembered Sister Tess Harqo.

“She was a few years older than me,” I said, remembering the girl with stern, fanatical eyes from our congregation. Tess once told me I was going to Hell for reading a science fiction book during choir practice. “I didn’t know her too well.”

“Well, she now runs her own aerospace company. Needs a pilot for a special job and specifically wants a Seeker.”

I was stunned. Only a few Seekers sought out high-tech jobs, let alone fanatics like Tess. However, getting canned by NASA had made me persona non grata with every private space company, so I eagerly accepted Brother Page’s offer to recommend me to Tess. He then leaned in close. “Sister Harqo has been presented with an amazing opportunity to meet her destiny,” he whispered. “But she needs the help of a Seeker with your skills. Doing so may guide you both to your ultimate goals.”

I thanked him. As I left, I asked Brother Page a question that had nagged me for years: Does our focus on destiny keep Seekers from understanding the true world around us? Brother Page paused for a moment, then shook his head. “That’s not simply a Seeker problem,” he said. “Most people spend so much time looking at the future that they fail to live in the present. Unless we focus on this world and what we have here, everything is lost.”

As always, I was amazed at Brother Page’s insight.

* * * *

Talking with Johnie left me in a sour mood. I was tempted to infodump Tess and let her know about Johnie’s call, but I kept quiet because I didn’t want Tess to panic and scrub the mission or for some snoop to intercept and decode our signal. Besides, I was nearing our target, the aerostat Gossamer Angel.

Like the Beatrice, the Gossamer Angel was a variation Roziere balloon, her stadium-size envelope supporting what most people believed to be a reinforced photoreconnaissance gondola. The aerostat’s envelope was made of a one-micrometer-thick hybrid polymer which, when charged with a weak electrical current, changed from transparent to reflective. Doing this enabled one to alternately heat and cool the envelope’s different helium chambers using solar radiation, thereby maintaining altitude with minimal fuel use. One could also heat the helium using electric heaters, but that obviously used more energy.

High-altitude balloons had become a viable alternative to satellites after the second ablation cascade event. While the chain-reaction sprawl from impacting satellites and debris didn’t keep people from reaching space, it made the job even riskier. A hundred years after Sputnik, getting into orbit was still expensive and dangerous. Add in rogue satellites and a debris field in the millions, and the dangers and costs increased even more. Hence the blockade by the major spacefaring nations. They called it a safety issue, but over time it became more about keeping control than keeping everyone safe.

Without access to space, poor countries and companies without connections turned to high-altitude balloons to replace expensive satellites. The ceiling for these balloons was between fifty and sixty-five kilometers and they could stay there for up to a year. In fact, the biggest problem with the balloons was getting them to come down when you wanted. That’s where Tess’s company came in, repairing balloons in flight so they could be retrieved.

However, the Gossamer Angel’s problem wasn’t that it wouldn’t come down. Instead, its payload wouldn’t go up. I was supposed to fix that.

As I carefully edged the Beatrice closer to the Angel, Bee announced that Johnie was again calling on tight beam. “Dusty, I want to apologize,” Johnie’s voice whined.

I laughed and disconnected him again. While the most Seeker of virtues was forgiveness, I wasn’t done letting Johnie stew in his own juices.

* * * *

I met Sister Tess Harqo at a hip retro coffee shop in Houston. After a perfunctory “Where away, Sister Dusty,” she launched into a diatribe against the teenager behind the counter, who’d tried to put gened milk in her old-fashioned double mocha latte. She was still a true believer who saw the world in frigid hues of right and wrong. She even wore the brown robes indicating she’d yet to achieve her destiny—robes worn in public by only the most fundamentalist of Seekers. But since I was desperate for a shot at space, I kept my mouth shut.

Tess had made her fortune on high-altitude balloons. But instead of launching them, she maintained them, sending up a single repair balloon each year to fix or retrieve broken high fliers. From what I’d heard, her main problem was finding good pilots. Everyone with the needed qualifications preferred to work for NASA or the private space companies, which paid more and let people go all the way into space.

Tess got right to the point. There was a special balloon stuck in the mesosphere and she wanted me to fly the repair mission. When I asked why, she told me about the old Project Far Side rocket system of the 1950s. The project used balloons to carry rockets to twenty-five kilometers in altitude, where the rockets were launched through the balloon’s envelope at seventy g’s. I was instantly intrigued.

“If someone did that from sixty kilometers,” Tess said, “I don’t think anyone would have time to stop the rocket. The blockade succeeds because traditional rockets launch at slow speeds in the dense sea level air. In the mesosphere, a rocket could reach 5,600 kph in two seconds, and almost thirty thousand kph not long after. The blockade systems wouldn’t have time to react.”

“It’d be expensive,” I said. “Are you putting up the money?”

“Don’t have to. A certain unnamed country already launched the balloon. But the rocket failed to fire and they’ve secretly contracted me to fix it. I need someone I can trust to fly the repair mission. Brother Page says you’re the one.”

I imagined how shocked Johnie and all those fools at NASA would be. Unless they shot down every high-altitude balloon, their blockade would cease to exist. While this wasn’t the same as going into space, I grew excited at the plan.

“So are you in or out?”

I looked at Tess and wondered how much of a fanatic she was. Still, Brother Page had vouched for her. I was in.

* * * *

I piloted the Beatrice until we were thirty meters from the edge of the Gossamer Angel’s envelope, and even farther from the Angel’s gondola. Fortunately there was no wind in the mesosphere—in fact, almost no atmosphere at all—to mess up our approach. I extended the thin support boom toward the Angel’s gondola like an impossibly long finger. I snagged the repair hook on the second try, anchoring our two ships together.

I quickly dressed in my pressure suit—essentially a space suit combined with a high-altitude parachute system—then walked into the cabin’s small airlock. The air up here had less than 1/1000th the pressure at sea level, and depressurization would kill me as fast as if in deep space. As I opened the outer airlock door, I ordered Bee to begin continuous communications. If I fell, I wanted Tess to know where to look for me.

The world turned slowly beneath me while Bee maneuvered the Beatrice so the support boom angled slightly down. Aside from not feeling the weightlessness of free fall, I could have been in orbit. I wondered if God gave credit for being close to your destiny?

Once the Beatrice was higher than the Angel, I hooked the slider to my support harness and the slider to the boom, ignoring how the boom shivered as it arched between the two balloons. The boom’s weight limit wasn’t much more than what I weighed in my pressure suit. I pushed off from the Beatrice, keeping my eyes on the gondola rushing toward me. If the boom or slider broke, it would take me less than thirty seconds to reach the speed of sound. From what others had told me, I’d feel like I was standing still. If my drogue chute tangled, the flat spin would knock me unconscious. By the time I hit the cloud deck fifty klicks below, I’d be the fastest free-falling human in the world.

Not that I had any indication of falling. Even though Joe Kittinger proved a century ago that you could parachute from this height, and a few rich fools did so every year, I had no desire to take the chance.

A dozen meters from the Angel I hit the slider’s brakes and eased up to the gondola’s maintenance ledge. This was the most dangerous part of the mission. Inside the gondola was a small rocket, carrying an even smaller satellite. If the rocket launched while I was on the gondola, I’d die instantly.

I plugged a direct line from Bee into the gondola’s system and the computer transmitted the security code to open the access panel. The gondola bumped and shook to the panel’s movement, and I prayed the vibrations wouldn’t trigger the rocket. I then carefully disconnected the primary and secondary launch initiators. Once done, I breathed a sigh of relief and plugged Bee into the repair jack. The computer verified several problems, including a faulty router for the launch initiators and some type of programming block in the system.

To transport a new router I had to return to the Beatrice. I slid back down the boom after Bee lowered the Beatrice‘s height.

After I took off my pressure suit, Johnie again tight-beamed me. I considered bragging to him about what I’d just done—after all, sliding between balloons at sixty kilometers was more exciting than anything he’d ever do in space. But in the end, I decided his stew wasn’t done cooking, so I didn’t answer his call.

* * * *

When the Beatrice launched, I’d been prepared for everything except silence. Where moments before the hiss of gas and the clanks of access tubes and restraints had echoed through the pressurized cabin, the moment I was cut free, silence overwhelmed me.

Beatrice rose through an overcast sky, the wind blowing slightly, the mists beading on the windows. Then the ship cleared the clouds in an explosion of sunlight. We continued to climb, and within minutes the blue of Earth’s atmosphere hung below me.

While I stared in awe at the sight before me, Brother Page tight-beamed me. “How is it?” he asked. “I mean, the mesosphere’s not your destiny, but it’s close.”

I thanked him again for recommending me to Tess. I then asked if he’d ever had the urge to go into space.

“Once. Back in graduate school, before I found my true calling, I studied noctilucent clouds. Those are thin clouds of water ice up above eighty-five kilometers. Very rare and hard to find because they’re extremely faint. We still don’t fully understand how they occur.”

I tried to imagine how clouds could exist at such a height, but my mind couldn’t wrap around the idea.

“Anyway,” Brother Page continued, “after graduation NASA offered me a research position, which would have eventually let me visit a space station to study the clouds. But by then I’d joined the Seekers, and my destiny wasn’t in space. Still, I’ve always wondered what I’d have found up there.”

I smiled and said if I saw any of the clouds I’d send him a recording.

* * * *

By the second day of repairs, I’d made two more trips to the Gossamer Angel and replaced the launch initiator router, along with another faulty system. However, the software block was still holding us up. Tess contacted the rocket’s host country and recommended reloading the programming system from scratch. However, her contacts were reluctant to tight-beam the new programming for fear a snoop would intercept the transmission. They were also hesitant to trust us with their main security codes, even though Bee carried everything needed to directly reload their programming. Eventually, though, the host country people realized they had too much invested in the project to back down, so they gave us the security codes and the go-ahead.

I slid back to the Angel while Bee uploaded the new software. Out above the horizon, the reflected star of Freedom 2 moved toward me. I wondered if Johnie was watching me through one of the station’s cameras or if he’d lost interest. Either way, he’d get a shock when the Gossamer Angel launched the first unauthorized satellite in a decade.

“Upload complete,” Bee whispered in my ear. “Reactivate launch initiators.” I did that and verified everything was go. Now that I was again standing beside a live rocket, I was anxious to return to the Beatrice and put some distance between us. “What’s the launch window?” I asked Bee as the access hatch closed automatically.

“Next window is ten minutes. After that, windows repeat every hour and a half.”

I nodded absently and prepared to slide back to the Beatrice. Just then I caught sight of the Freedom 2 station moving through the black sky above my position. I wondered if Johnie would try to tight-beam me again or if he’d finally realized I was still pissed and…

I paused. “Bee, what’s the rocket’s target altitude?” I asked.

“360 km.”

That wasn’t right. The rocket was supposed to place the satellite in high Earth orbit, not low orbit. And why would the launch window so closely mimic the appearance of Freedom 2, which orbited the Earth almost sixteen times a day. I told Bee to reaccess the Angel’s system. This time, access was denied.

“Bee, why don’t we have access? Didn’t we override the old security codes?”

“Access denied.”

I tried the earlier access codes, but nothing worked. I was locked out of the entire system, unable to even reopen the Angel’s access panel. I asked Bee to prepare a tight beam to Tess at headquarters, but Bee said communications access was denied. When I ordered the computer to lower Beatrice so I could slide back, it again said access was denied.

Right then the gondola pinged from thermal expansion and my heart jumped at the thought of the rocket igniting. Only Tess could override my access with Bee. Her fanatical eyes burned in my memory as I realized she’d hijacked the rocket. I also remembered the rumor blaming a Seeker for the last cascade event. As I watched the bright star of Freedom 2 cross the sky above me, I knew what the rocket’s target was.

Only when the station arched away from me did I finally relax. But relief was temporary. I had no doubt the rocket would fire in an hour and a half when Freedom 2 came back around. I was still trying to figure out what to do when Tess tight-beamed an encrypted info dump. “Show me the dump,” I ordered Bee, even though I no longer trusted the computer.

A simile of Tess appeared on my suit’s visor, looking to my eyes like she was standing in the air before me. She now wore the pure white robes of a Seeker celebrating attainment of her destiny. “I see you’ve discovered my little trick,” she said with a serene smile.

I asked the simile what the hell it was up to, but the simile wasn’t programmed for that question. I rephrased. “What are you doing?”

“I’m launching the rocket at the biggest target in the sky. All the previous debris sprawls have been too small to achieve a significant cascade. But a major space station exploding? That’ll block access to space for decades. Maybe longer.”

I stared at Tess, wanting to punch the image floating before my eyes. “You used me,” I muttered.

To my surprise, the simile was programmed for that comment. “I deeply apologize for that. But my destiny is to stop humans from reaching space. Unless we focus on this world and what we have here, everything is lost.”

A sudden razor-thought edged through my stomach. I’d heard those words before. “Who gave you your destiny?” I asked.

The simile smiled. “Why, Sister Dusty, I thought you’d never ask. Brother Page gave it to me.”

As the gondola pinged again, I suddenly knew that my destiny no longer lay in space.

* * * *

Since Bee wouldn’t lower the aerostat, I couldn’t slide back and override her controls. I considered climbing hand over hand along the boom, but that was more than 130 meters and I didn’t think I could do it in my pressure suit. Besides, Tess had only given me until the next launch window to jump from the Gossamer Angel. She’d sworn she’d pick me up, even tell the authorities I was an unwitting pawn in her scheme. Not that anything would reverse the damage she was about to do.

I considered smashing the Angel’s access panel, but without heavy tools I couldn’t accomplish anything. I might also cause the rocket to launch prematurely, and I refused to let Tess and Brother Page be the death of me.

The only option was the balloon’s envelope.

Releasing my safety harness, I threw the hook end toward the guide lines at the top of the gondola. On the third try, the hook snagged. I tugged hard, guessed it would hold, then climbed up.

The Gossamer Angel’s helium tanks were arrayed along the outside edge of the gondola, so the rocket could shoot up the middle without hitting them. There was no way I could reach the rocket, but fortunately for me balloon designers were descended from a long line of redundancy-loving engineers. The Gossamer Angel’s designer had placed the back-up valves for the helium lines along the gondola’s top edge so someone like me could access them if needed. While I couldn’t release the helium inside the envelope, I could open the valves and pump all the remaining helium into the envelope.

As soon as I opened the first valve, the Gossamer Angel began to rise. The Beatrice‘s access boom strained, pulling the aerostat along with us. Then the boom released as Bee’s safety protocols kicked in.

I crawled across the gondola, opening valve after valve as the Beatrice disappeared below me. Without Bee’s telemetry, I wasn’t sure of my altitude or how fast I climbed. High altitude balloons didn’t have a solid upper ceiling; a few had made it to seventy-five kilometers, but those had been small experimental models. The problem was that as the pressure outside decreased to an almost literal nothing, the gases inside the balloon expanded until the envelope ruptured. Because large balloons like the Gossamer Angel cost so much, no one ever attempted to find their maximum limit.

I couldn’t see the Beatrice below me and hoped I didn’t hit the ship when I jumped. Having nothing else to do, I stared down at the Earth as the Sun sank below the horizon. Suddenly, faint lines of electric blue erupted in the blackness before me, as if a giant had thrown wispy neon string into orbit. The noctilucent clouds Brother Page had mentioned. The Gossamer Angel appeared to float parallel to the glowing clouds, even though they were probably dozens of kilometers away. I watched them in silence, happy for the first time since getting kicked out of NASA.

I woke from my daze as something pinged beneath me in the gondola. Even though the time Tess had given me wasn’t anywhere close to being up, I threw myself over the edge of the gondola. I’d fallen several hundred meters when the Gossamer Angel exploded and the rocket climbed like a tracer away from me.

* * * *

Two months later, Johnie met me outside the Outpost Tavern. Despite my protests, he’d insisted on bringing me here. As we entered, Johnie waved to his fellow astronauts before leading me to the wall of honor, where two thousand photos showed every person who’d made it to space. There, surrounded by red ribbon, rested my old NASA mug shot. Johnie told me with pride that he’d estimated I’d ridden the Gossamer Angel to well above eighty kilometers. While most of the world didn’t consider that space, the U.S. did, and that was good enough for Johnie to place my photo here.

I smiled as the weight of my destiny lifted from my shoulders. I then laughed at why some silly thing like this had ever mattered in the first place.

When Tess realized what I’d done to the Gossamer Angel, she’d reprogrammed the rocket and launched it at a large orbiting telescope. The resulting impact created the third major cascade event, but because the satellite was so much smaller than the space station, the cascade wasn’t anywhere near what it would have been if Freedom 2 had been hit.

Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. I fell for more than ten minutes, feeling like I merely floated above an unchanging Earth. Less than thirty seconds to reach the speed of sound. The fastest human in the world. But still floating. Watching. An eternity before the cloud deck rushed up to greet me and I again heard air whistling by and my parachute deployed and I was home.

NASA eventually admitted I was a hero, with one administrator confiding to me that Brother Page had been the one who’d outed me as a Seeker. The next time I saw Tess and Brother Page was at their arraignment. Both wore white robes signifying achievement of their destinies, although Tess’s was stained brown in places, meaning she’d only reached part of her goal. I stood outside the courtroom and glared at Brother Page, wanting to know what had been so important about his destiny that he’d been willing to sacrifice my life. As if knowing my question, he’d shouted a question—”Haven’t you ever wanted to know what happens when two destinies collide?”—before his lawyer shut him up.

Damn them, I though as Johnie led me to a table, where a pitcher of beer waited for us. I hugged Johnie and thanked him for being a true friend. Embarrassed, Johnie muttered about a new joint project of the Air Force and NASA. They wanted to set up manned aerostats to patrol the mesosphere. “Know anyone who might be interested in that?” he asked with a smirk.

I eyed my picture on the wall. I thought about Brother Page and how he’d almost killed me over an inane philosophical question. About Tess’s fanatical obsession with keeping humans on Earth. About my once-burning obsession with reaching space. I picked up my beer and chugged it.

“Screw destiny,” I told Johnie. “It’s not up there and it’s not down here. Destiny’s just something to mess with people, and I want no part of it.”

For once, Johnie understood exactly what I meant.

Copyright (c) 2008 Jason Sanford

* * * *

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[Back to Table of Contents]

Reader’s Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: NOISE AS A QUANTUM SIGNAL

by John G. Cramer

In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson (who had been my apartment-mate when we were undergraduate physics majors at Rice University) accidentally discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation as “noise” in a large Bell Labs antenna that they were rehabilitating as a radio telescope. Their discovery won them the Nobel Prize in Physics and proved to be the key to our current understanding of the universe. Now, the unexpected background noise measured in a new gravity-wave detector may offer the possibility of a breakthrough of similar importance in the area of quantum gravity. Let me explain.

* * * *

Planck’s constant divided by 2 (pi), which physicists denote by the h-bar symbol (lowercase h with a horizontal line through it), sets the action scale at which quantum phenomena become important. This measure of quantum importance can be converted to a distance scale, called the Planck length, which is defined as Lp = (G h-bar c) 1/2 / c2, where G is Newton’s gravitational constant and c is the speed of light. The Planck length Lp is an extremely small distance, 1.616 x 10-35 m, about 10-20 times smaller than the diameter of a proton. Since the 1950s, there has been a general agreement among the physicist practitioners of general relativity that quantum effects on space-time itself should become significant only at distance scales on the order of the Planck length, and that the quantum mechanics of space-time can be comfortably ignored elsewhere. Since the probing of Planck length distance scales is not possible with present and planned high-energy accelerators, any experimental tests that might reveal the quantum behavior of space-time appear to be a far off dream, according to this mainstream outlook.

However, there are those with other views. In 1976 Stephen Hawking proposed what has come to be called the Black Hole Information Paradox, the problem that information, a form of entropy subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, appears to vanish for objects that fall into a black hole that subsequently evaporates thermally by Hawking radiation. (See my AV column “Hawking’s Retreat” in the June 2004 issue of Analog). Nobel Laureate Gerald t’Hooft analyzed this information loss problem and pointed out that infalling particles must modify the event horizon of a black hole, creating tent-pole shaped bumps in said event horizon. Thus, in a sense the two-dimensional event surface of the black hole is a map of the contents of its interior volume.

Professor Leonard Susskind of Stanford University, using the techniques of string theory, took these ideas farther by showing mathematically that the oscillations of the event horizon of a black hole provide a complete description of both the infalling and outgoing matter of the system. In effect, the outer surface is a two-dimensional hologram that maps all of the three-dimensional space-time contents of the interior volume.

While these ideas were originated to deal with problems associated with black holes, they have been generalized to apply to the universe itself. In a sense, our entire universe is a black hole with us inside, containing mass that is in delicate balance with expansion (omega=1. In a sense, light is trapped in our universe as it would be in a black hole, because light attempting to escape from our vicinity is Doppler-shifted to zero frequency and energy at the visible horizon of the universe (the surface outside which stars and galaxies recede from us at greater than the speed of light). This generalization leads to the holographic principle of space-time, the assertion that all of the space-time points in a given volume of 3+1 dimensional space can be holographically mapped onto the 2+1 dimensional surface that surrounds this volume.

My former University of Washington colleague Craig Hogan, who has just left us to become the new Director of the Center for Particle Astrophysics at Fermilab in Illinois, has recently discovered a remarkable way of exploiting this holographic principle to make experimentally testable predictions. He argues that if one takes the holographic 3D to 2D mapping seriously, the map’s cell dimensions must be determined by the Planck length, i.e., the 3D points in space mapped on the 2D surface can be specified no more accurately than a square of dimensions Lp on a side.

The “degrees of freedom” of a physical system are the enumerated ways in which one physical system can be different from another similar system. For example, an electron’s spin direction is a degree of freedom because it may point either up or down, and spin-up electrons can be distinguished from spin-down electrons. Hogan argues that number of degrees of freedom in all of (3+1) dimensional space-time will be severely restricted by the holographic mapping, making the space in which we live “grainy,” like the low-resolution image of a continuous object.

This “graininess” inevitably leads to a new spatial uncertainty principle. In particular, Hogan predicts that Planck-length hologram cells lead to an irreducible quantum noise associated with high precision measurements of position in three-dimensional space, i.e., length or location measurements. For example, if a length L0 is measured, the uncertainty in the measurement will always be larger than 2(L0Lp)1/2 where Lp is the Planck length. To be specific, suppose a high-precision measurement of a 1.0-km distance is measured, for example using optical interferometry. The uncertainty “noise” in the measurement is predicted to be about 2.56 x 10-16 m. This is an extremely small distance uncertainty, a fraction of the diameter of a proton, but it happens to fall within the range of measurements that are presently being accomplished in the field of gravity-wave detection (see my AV column “Gravity Waves and LIGO” in the April 1998 issue of Analog). Hogan suggests that existing gravity-wave detectors may be able to detect the quantum noise of space-time itself.

Of particular interest in this context is the German-English Gravity Wave Detector GEO600, which was developed by the Max Planck Institutes of Quantum Optics (Garching) and for Gravitational Physics (Potsdam), the Institute for Gravitational Physics (University of Glasgow), and the Institut fur Gravitationsphysik (University of Hanover). It is located at a site twenty kilometers south of Hanover, Germany. GEO600 was constructed between 1995 and 2001 and is one of five large-scale interferometric gravitational-wave detector projects operating at various sites around the world. In the past two years the GEO600 project reached a sensitivity that is sufficient to detect some of the stronger gravity-wave signals that may originate in our galaxy, and it is now in continuous operation, taking data and looking for indications of gravitational waves.

There is an important difference between GEO600 and the other operating gravity detectors, for example the NSF-sponsored LIGO gravitational-wave detector systems in Washington State and Louisiana. The other detectors measure the lengths of two laser-beam flight paths independently using Fabry-Perot interferometry techniques and then compare the two independent measurements. GEO600 is unique in that it splits a single laser beam into two components, sends them in double round trips over a pair of 600 m flight paths, and compares the distances thereby measured using optical interference. This difference in detection strategy means that GEO600 turns out to be much more sensitive than the other gravitational-wave detectors to the predicted holographic noise arising from the graininess of space-time. Craig Hogan predicts that at frequencies above 550 Hz, the frequency at which the light beams in GEO600 reach optical resonance in the “cavity” formed by the mirrors of the detector, the holographic noise should be observable in the GEO600 detector.

In what may or may not be a coincidence, the GEO600 detector has observed what the experimenters call “mystery noise” in the region between 550 Hz and 5.0 kHz. Their modeling of the noise that should be present in the detector predicts a noise minimum at 1.0 kHz and a rise by a factor of 20 between 1.0 and 5.0 kHz. In their data, however, no noise minimum is visible in the 1.0 kHz region. Instead, the measured noise rises smoothly from 550 Hz on, and in the 1.0 kHz region where the minimum is predicted, the observed noise is about forty times higher than the model prediction.

Does this mean that holographic noise has in fact been observed? Not yet. The GEO600 group is still working to improve the sensitivity of their detector, and they have not made any claims, published or otherwise, about the sources of noise in their detector system above 550 Hz. It is possible that they will find a noise source that was not included in their model or find a subtle flaw in their detector system that the modeling did not take into account. Still, the correspondence between Hogan’s predictions and the GEO600 mystery noise is suggestive that we may be on the verge of a major breakthrough, the observation of the quantum noise of space-time itself. Very soon, we should know whether or not space-time is holographic.

What would be the implications of such a discovery? It is very difficult to say. The discovery of that other noise, the cosmic background radiation, had the immediate effect of legitimizing Big Bang cosmology, but its implications for nailing down the detailed structure and properties of the universe required several decades to be realized. Similarly, discovery of the quantum noise of holographic space-time would have the immediate effect of legitimizing certain approaches to quantum gravity, but its long-range implications are certainly beyond my ability to predict. The sensitivity of GEO600 to the quantum noise of holographic space-time is a lucky accident, but if it is observed there will certainly be dedicated detectors designed to study the holographic effect with much richer detail and accuracy, and it is difficult to predict what might emerge from such observations.

From the point of view of science fiction, one interesting implication of holographic space-time is that points in 3D space are much farther apart than they would be on the holographic surface on which they were mapped. One could imagine a method of space travel, a Holo-Drive, in which the universe in navigated by moving from point to point on the 2D map rather than in the 3D space that it encloses. The speed of light limit on the hologram might correspond to a much higher speed in 3D space.

Copyright (c) 2008 John G. Cramer

* * * *

AV Columns Online: Electronic reprints of about 140 “The Alternate View” columns by John G. Cramer, previously published in Analog, are available online at: www.npl.washington.edu/av.

References:

Holographic Space-Time:

G. t’Hooft, in Conference on Particle and Condensed Matter Physics (Salamfest), edited by A. Ali, J. Ellis, and S.Randjbar-Daemi (World Scientic, Singapore, 1993), arXiv:gr-qc/9310026.

L. Susskind, J. Math. Phys. 36, 6377 (1995).

Holographic Noise:

“Indeterminacy of Quantum Geometry,” Craig J. Hogan, arXiv:gr-qc/0806.0665v2.

“Measurement of Quantum Fluctuations in Geometry,” Craig J. Hogan, arXiv:gr-qc/0712.3419.

The GEO600 Project:

“GEO600, The German-British Gravitational Wave Detector,” geo600.aei.mpg.de

* * * *

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[Back to Table of Contents]

Novelette: MOBY DIGITAL

by Joe Schembrie

* * * *

Illustration by William Warren

* * * *

Literature, we’re often told, is “universal and timeless…”

* * * *

The elevator doors parted onto the third floor of the Customer Service Building on the corporate campus of Real Life Technology, and there stood Ramathustra in a checkered flannel shirt, holding his Number 1 Dad coffee cup.

“I was beginning to wonder,” he said, raising his immense eyebrows.

“I was beginning to have lunch,” I said, slipping on my sneakers. I’d been wearing sandals from doing yard work when Ramathustra’s call came, and hadn’t had time to dress for action. And Ramathustra had stressed there would be action.

“The university information technology chief is most anxious.”

Stowing my carry-bag under my arm, I hopped out of the elevator, still tugging on the heel of a shoe. I was standing erect in a semblance of professionalism by the time I entered the conference room, whose main plasma wall screen was filled with an inflated glare that followed us as we slipped into our seats at the table.

“This is our best simulation software consultant,” Ramathustra said to the guy on the screen. “He will be able to resolve any issues in short order.”

Suppressing a blush, I nodded toward the camera, but the swollen image only boiled. The voice was terse and low: “This situation is under warranty, you know.”

Ramathustra finished a sip of his coffee and placed the cup next to his computer pad with the deliberation of a chess grandmaster placing his queen upon the board.

“Lives are at stake,” he said. “Time is short. Please summarize for him.”

The IT chief trained his full glare on me. A career-threatening crisis had come, I sensed, and he wanted desperately to make it seem that we were obviously to blame.

He recited from his pad: “At 1:13 PM, a professor and two students from the literature department entered the Moby Digital simulation and—”

“Excuse me,” I blurted. “Moby Digital?”

“That’s the name of the virtual reality simulation.” He gave me the what-kind-of-idiot-are-you look. “You’re going to troubleshoot, and you’re not familiar with it?”

“He is certified in Real Life Technology’s Virtual Reality Operating System Version 6.1,” Ramathustra replied smoothly. “He is the best freelance consultant available. We are fortunate to have him on short notice, as he was about to have lunch. Please continue.”

I returned the IT chief’s stony stare, for my first response to confrontation has always been paralysis. For better or worse, in the business world, this is interpreted as being the “strong, silent type.”

Finally, he resumed reading. “The university central VR system conducted a routine status check at 1:30, which pinged normal. Around 1:43, however, the university master control program reported a breach of the university computer system firewall, in which several hundred gigabytes transferred from the internet—”

“Can you determine the exact amount of data transferred?” Ramathustra asked. “It is relevant.”

“I’ll get it. Let’s see—the data stream transferred from the internet, replicated and vectored into the VR system, infiltrating the School of Medicine’s heart, brain, and lung surgery simulations and several School of Engineering factory environment simulations. They were shut down and rebooted without incident.

“However, during the 2:00 PM status check, user IDs within the Moby Digital simulation failed to respond. The sys admin undertook manual pinging, no response. At 2:11 she contacted me, and we determined to evacuate all other users from the entire system. At 2:17, I contacted RLT Customer Service—and here we are.”

According to geographical coordinates provided by the screen caption, his “here” was actually over a thousand miles southward, though still in the same time zone.

“Out of contact for over an hour,” I said. My legs shifted unconsciously as I tried to diplomatically frame my next question. “Do you know if, if they’re still, uh…”

“Breathing? Yes, we’re still registering biotelemetry.”

“Have you, uh, verified that it’s not, uh, bogus?”

He stared blankly. “How would we do that?”

Ramathustra interjected: “Let’s assume the users are yet unharmed.”

“Agreed,” the IT chief said. “Now, could we get them out before membrane fatigue squeezes them all into a puddle of blood?”

Ironically, he still wanted to talk, but mainly to assert that it wasn’t his responsibility, and RLT would be liable for injuries. Ramathustra courteously but hastily bade farewell. In the corridor, he said, “The company will pay a double bonus.”

Don’t get me wrong, I like money. But as head of RLT’s Customer Service Field Response Group, Ramathustra is notoriously frugal. He doesn’t offer added financial incentives to freelancers unless there is, as he phrases it, “a significant challenge.”

Perhaps I should have asked for triple. But it was all I could do to keep my curiosity from betraying me. Ramathustra has been known to reduce payment offers if he knows you’re attracted to an assignment by more than the money.

“Moby Digital,” I said casually. “In a university literature department. This sim wouldn’t have anything to do with the novel Moby Dick would it?”

“I have been informed that it does,” he replied. “I trust that as a native-born citizen of America, you are intimately familiar with this literary icon of your culture.”

“Uh, it was written in the nineteenth century by Herman Melville. It’s about Captain Ahab, who hunts a white whale named Moby Dick. You know anything more?”

“Just that the whale kills everyone.” Ramathustra drained his coffee and gazed toward the Immersion Unit Room. “Make a point to stay out of its way.”

* * * *

Ramathustra wound through the nine-foot-wide spheres within the IUR toward the control console, where the operator spoke via video screen to a woman whose immaculate clothing clashed with hair that had become unkempt since coming to work.

While Ramathustra addressed them, I bee-lined for the restroom. Like the man says, I’m experienced. Go before you go, as my parents used to say on road trips.

After that, I washed off the sweat of yard work to make way for the sweat of whatever VR activity I was about to encounter, for I knew that Ramathustra almost always selected me for the grunt jobs. The man seemed to think I was invulnerable, an impression I’d love to disillusion him of, except that it brought me more assignments.

Stay out of its way, I thought. Did he suspect the physical-safety programming was compromised? That would explain the double bonus.

With a sigh and headshake at the mirror, I opened my carry-bag. I slipped on my personal pair of sky blue VR coveralls and returned to the IUR.

Ramathustra was flitting his fingers across the control console keyboard. The operator frowned at the movements and said, “You can’t do that, it’ll override—”

“Thank you for your input,” Ramathustra said. “It is most appreciated and valued. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? Please lock the door on your way out.”

The console squeaked like annoyed mice. Behind me, I heard the door click. Ramathustra ignored my rapidly respirating presence and said to the woman on the screen: “Okay, ready to transfer control of our unit to your system.”

The woman, whose badge identified her as the university VR system administrator, replied coolly, “You do realize you could be walking into a trap.”

Ramathustra met my wide-eyed gaze. “You do realize that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. Now, I thought.

He observed me carefully, but not well enough to hear my pounding heart.

They worked in tandem. Across a thousand miles of fiber optics, control of Immersion Unit One was transferred to the university VR system. The unit hummed and chugged for a few seconds, then was quiescent.

“Before we go further,” the system administrator said. “I want to check on user status. Is there a back up procedure in these situations?”

“Certainly,” Ramathustra said. “Go over to the unit and listen.”

“What?”

“Go over to one of the occupied units. Press your ear against the side. Listen.”

She raised an eyebrow. While we waited, Ramathustra unlocked a cabinet and took out a pair of microphone-earphone headsets, sprayed disinfectant, and wiped.

The sys admin returned. “I heard their voices!”

“No groans or shrieks of agony or terror?” he asked.

She blinked. “No … just voices. Conversational tone, I’d say.”

“Good.” Finished with the polishing, he handed one of the headsets to me. We inserted earplugs and adjusted mikes. Facing me, he said: “Communications check.”

“Loud and clear.”

The sys admin squinted. “Mind if I ask what you’re doing?”

“Given that we have lost conventional intersystem communications,” Ramathustra replied, “we must improvise with our own independent method of communication.”

“Won’t the membrane block the signal? I was told phones wouldn’t work in the IUs.”

“Cell phone and immersion unit operations interfere because they transmit in the same multi-gigahertz frequency band. These devices transmit in kilohertz, at which the membrane is quite permeable.”

“We should get a pair of those. How much do they cost?”

“I don’t know. My wife bought them for our children. Check the toy stores.”

He jabbed a console control. On the sphere with the big red “1” on the side, the indicator lights lit. The hatch swung open, revealing the membrane-swathed interior.

“In you go,” Ramathustra said. “Break a leg.”

His tone was so light that in I went indeed, forgetting to ask for a bigger bonus until after the hatch closed. By then it was too late—and I was curious anyhow.

* * * *

Once the immersion unit sealed, I waited while Ramathustra continued to hack the system in ways that I probably didn’t want to know about. Eventually, the gray membrane walls rippled and oozed, covering the hatchway.

The compartment light faded and the tricolor laser mounting began tracking my head movements, always positioning itself to be just out of reach. Then the red, blue, and green beams flashed, painting my eyeballs with computer generated imagery.

To my sight, the syrupy membrane vanished, replaced by a circular platform beneath a black sky filled with stars.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m in.”

The sys admin’s disembodied voice spoke: “No, you’re not. You’re only into the university VR system, not the Moby Digital simulation itself.”

“How do I get there?”

“Before you do that,” Ramathustra said, “I wish for you to try the Tilt Test.”

“Roger. Here goes.”

I raised my hands in front of my chest, palms outward. I leaned forward. My fall accelerated until my body reached a forty-five degree tilt—and then the membrane mushed about my legs, torso, and head, and gently set me erect once more.

“You all right?”

“The operating system kept me from hurting myself, if that’s what you mean.”

“‘And in their hands they shall bear thee up.’ Good.”

“I can communicate with you but not with the users in the sim,” the sys admin said. “That could mean the safety routines work outside but not inside.”

“Suspension of safety routines is an extremely rare occurrence,” Ramathustra replied, “and exclusive to military and police simulations.”

“What about that item in the news, about a heart attack at a theme park?”

“That person might have had the same heart attack while driving a car. It was a matter of timing, not software.”

I thought—and hoped—we’d get down to business then, but the sys admin blurted with vigor: “Well, I just don’t like your company’s whole approach to immersive VR. A system crash could be fatal, since the default mode of your membrane cells is to expand to maximum size and crush the user. It’s insane, if you ask me.”

Ramathustra said in a tone as measured as the sys admin’s was emotional, “I do not see how we can engineer otherwise. Each cell in the membrane is simply a tiny spring, which is compressed by a tiny electromagnet. Depower the magnet, and the spring uncompresses. It is very simple, and therefore inexpensive, which is why it is popular.”

“But not safe, if all the magnets depower at once.”

“There is risk in every mode of transportation, even virtual. Now, let us proceed with deliberate haste, as your supervisor expressed concern about membrane fatigue.”

“I thought that took several hours to—”

“Let’s not cut our time margin more than we must.”

No doubt he was also thinking of my billing rate, but membrane fatigue was no joke. Unless the system depowered, the spongelike cells of the microprocessorlike membrane would eventually bloat. As IU occupancy volume shrank, all virtual transport tickets would be downgraded from First Class to Squish.

“Follow the arrow,” the sys admin said, with resignation.

On the platform at my feet, a large “painted” arrow pointed toward the ledge. I followed it, the membrane underfoot gliding smoothly backward with each step as if I were on a treadmill, so that in the real world I remained centered in the immersion unit.

At the edge of the platform, I came to a walkway. I took a couple of steps, then looked down at the image of Earth that someone had aesthetically placed there. Big mistake. My head spun and my stomach tossed, and I staggered back.

“What’s wrong?” the sys admin asked. Evidently she could see me too.

“Sorry,” I said, massaging my temples. “A little vertigo, that’s all.”

“Don’t tell me you’re susceptible to Evocation.”

“Well…”

“How can you be a VR troubleshooter and be susceptible to Evocation?”

Before I could answer, Ramathustra replied, “It is because of his enhanced sensitivity toward his environment that he is good at his work.”

Only an illusion, I thought. Not looking down, I stepped off the platform again.

The walkway branched toward translucent globes that shimmered among the stars, like planet-sized eggs deposited by a cosmic Easter bunny. Beneath the domes played images of factories, jungles, gargantuan human organs. In the astronomy section, a larger-than-average globe was filled with pinwheels of ghostlike luminosity, and modestly labeled THE WHOLE ENTIRE UNIVERSE.

The Literature Section had only a single globe. Approaching, I realized that Evocation had deceived me; the globes were only room-sized. The path terminated at the equator of the globe. Above, the hovering sign read, MOBY DIGITAL (AKA MOBY DICK, OR THE WHITE WHALE). Through the aura of the dome, I peered down a thousand-foot drop at a sail-masted wooden ship plowing across a choppy sea.

“How do I get inside the sim?” I asked.

“Step forward,” the sys admin replied.

I was afraid of that.

* * * *

Stars spun during the fall. It was as if I were tumbling head over heels, though I stood straight the whole time. It was dizzying and I came close to throwing up, which concerned me, since there’s no safety routine to prevent that.

In my nausea, I lost count of how many revolutions. Got to get a desk job, I remember thinking. Then wooden planks ascended to greet me.

Smack! The ship’s deck (okay, the membrane) struck hard. So much for the Tilt Test, I thought, as pain stung my kneecaps.

I steadied myself and reached for the rail. Alerted by the VR system of the approach of my fingers, the membrane’s microscopic cells mimicked the shape and texture of the wood with perfection—at least to my Evocation-distorted touch.

I propped myself and examined my physical transformation. My jumpsuit was concealed beneath a computer-generated coat, trousers, boots. Being part of the simulation, my body was painted by the immersion unit’s laser projectors, my computer-generated skin matching the pixel resolution of the rest of the environment.

I looked around, absorbed my surroundings, and almost gasped.

The imagery approached photorealistic. I saw the grain of the planks, the ripple of sunlight upon the sea, the delicate shading of the sky from deep blue at zenith to misty white at the horizon. With all but a handful of users evacuated, the entire university VR system was churning out polygons for just this one simulation, and it was more detailed than anything I’d experienced short of prototype.

I almost got seasick. I reminded myself it was the horizon, not me, that swayed.

“Hello,” I said. I lifted my eyes unto the clouds. “Anyone out there?”

“Yes,” Ramathustra said, but only faintly through my earplug. “We have lost system communications, and the sys admin can’t monitor you. You’re all right?”

“Been better,” I said, still feeling the quease. “Shall we try Administrative Eject?”

“I shall prepare to flip the switch. On this count: three, two, one—eject!”

The deck creaked, the waves tossed. The IU ventilation system blew a cool sea breeze and I swear, I smelled seaweed. That’s Evocation for you, but I had other matters on my mind just then. Like how I had become trapped in a machine that could kill me.

Ramathustra said calmly: “Try again. Three, two—”

Not a flash, not a glimmer. “This ain’t good.”

“We’ll get you out. I have tried the authorized way, now I’ll try some not-so-authorizeds. Why don’t you attempt User Verbal?”

“Karma Eject,” I said to the mast. “Karma Eject,” I said to the sails. “Karma Eject,” I said as succinctly as possible, to the sky. All refused to vanish.

From another world, Ramathustra mumbled: “Nothing seems to work….”

“Well … should I go ahead and blow my brains out?”

“Hold off for now. Let’s find the users first.”

I had sensed the sim characters as mere blurs, but on close look the detail astonished. Maybe not every strand of hair was numbered, but—wrinkles, warts, the dilation of pupils with lighting—each sailor was unmistakably individual. I recognized only a few faces from the Virtual Basic stock character set. Someone had been creative.

The sailors swabbed decks, pulled ropes, milled about. I doubt a real ship would be half as busy. With the deck crowded, the users—undoubtedly in costume and rendered at sim-resolution—didn’t pop out. Which normally was the whole idea.

The utility satchel was clipped to my hip, just like Ramathustra always programs it to be. I delved my arm deep within the larger-on-the-inside interior and sifted through the tools of my trade: the Golden Dragon Slayer sword, various projectile weapons, grenades, the action-hero thingy that shoots a grappling hook. Floating at the side was the Tablet of Destinies—i.e., RLT’s standard In-Simulation Diagnostic & Control Device.

I pulled on the ISDAC’s frame, expanding the device to notebook size. I tapped buttons and held the screen at arms length. In that mode, the screen was a window, and virtual objects seen through it were color-coded: blue for inanimate, green for AI, red for avatar. I glimpsed red near mid-deck and walked over.

The three, an older man and a younger woman and man, were dressed the same, exactly like me, even the same cap that had been plopped jauntily on my head. In the midst of the deck’s flurry, they stood still while the older man lectured. I waited politely.

“This is the ‘try-works,’” the professor said, gesturing at a brick box on the deck ahead of the main mast. “It’s basically for boiling whale oil out of blubber. Melville devotes an entire chapter to the try-works, but God knows what the metaphorical meaning is—”

While the professor was fixated on the try-works and the boy was fixated on the girl, the girl met my eyes and interrupted the lecture: “Professor, I think this is a real person, and he wants to talk to you!”

“What? You should have come earlier! Just be quiet and—”

“I’m not a student,” I said.

He looked me over. His tone changed from drill-sergeant authority to one of uncertainty: “You do seem rather old to be one.”

“I’m a consultant for the company that developed the software for this VR simulation,” I replied. They perked at that sentence, which quite possibly never emerged from the lips of a real nineteenth century employee of the whaling industry. “There’s a problem and we need to get you out. Do you have an assigned ejection procedure?”

They each held out their left arms and pulled down their sleeves. Each wore a wristband with a red button.

“Go ahead and press them.”

They exchanged glances and I wondered if I’d have to pick a guinea pig, but then they all pressed at once. And again and again. And then they exchanged glances, with vastly changed expressions.

“This is clearly unacceptable,” the professor said. “Do you realize how much the university paid for this simulation? We were assured there was no physical danger—”

“If you read the licensing agreement,” I replied, “you’ll see it’s worded the same as the licensing agreements for personal computer applications.”

“Oh, man,” the boy said. “We’re toast, aren’t we?”

While the professor’s face went red and he tightened his fists, the girl politely asked, “What do we do now?”

She may have been only eighteen or so, but I sensed she was the only one of the three who had the maturity to appreciate that I was risking my life to save them. It didn’t surprise me that a female was the only one to show courtesy because in my experience, males inside even noncompetitive “experiential” VR simulations tend to subconsciously lapse into gamer mode.

Speaking of that, the boy was frowning at me. He obviously didn’t like me looking at her. I didn’t like his possessiveness, but I wasn’t there to compete.

Regaining composure, I said, as business-like as I could: “There’s a verbal code phrase that’s ingrained into the operating system.” Not wanting to vanish in mid-sentence in case it was working now, I phrased cautiously: “You say the words, ‘Karma,’ and ‘Eject,’ but without the ‘and’ in the middle.”

“Karma … Eject?” she asked.

“Yes, but a little faster, no pause inbetween. Like it’s a command.”

“Karma Eject!” she declared.

The others repeated, again and again. Around us, the crew went about its hyperkinetic business. The breeze hissed through the ropes and ruffled the sails. Above the splash of waves and the creak of the hull, they chanted: “Karma Eject! Karma Eject! Karma Eject!”

Eventually they wearied, and their voices trailed off into a murmur. You didn’t need Evocation to sense the tinge of despair.

Ramathustra intervened: “I need to speak to you in private.”

“Sure,” I said. I held my forefinger in a just-a-moment gesture to the others, and stepped from earshot. “What’s up?”

“Are you out of hearing range of all simulation characters?”

I saw them reading my frown. I moved toward the bow, found a deserted spot near the rail, and faced the sea. With a good idea and a bad feeling as to what he was about to say, I visually swept the horizon, verifying that neither seagull nor dolphin was in range to read my lips.

“All right,” I said, tweaking the earphone volume. “We’re private.”

“The system administrator has reported regarding the size of the data stream that breached the firewall into the university system,” Ramathustra replied. “The file length was exactly seven hundred and seventy-seven gigabytes.”

My breath caught and my heartbeat skipped.

“You’re sure? I mean, are they sure?”

“I asked twice myself. Yes, it is our old friend. Mister Pazuzu.”

In ancient Babylonian myth, Pazuzu was a demon. Three millennia later, Pazuzu was incorporated as a character in RLT’s premier demo simulation, Virtual Babylon. Then one day, a geek on the project development team thought it would be “schweet” to merge Pazuzu’s AI with a common computer virus. His progeny was unleashed—or it escaped, the story isn’t clear—onto the internet, whereupon it became legend.

A somewhat unholy legend.

Through a dry throat, I asked: “Do we know what it wants?”

“They are interrogating a copy. It invariably responds with, ‘Up yours.’”

“You’ve encountered it before. Can you guess what it wants?”

“He is the most formidable of VR system viruses, wiser than Apollyon, Prestige, or even The Beast. Yet if this version remains true to the strain, he desires only to survive.”

I noted the lapse into “he.” Ramathustra had been a virus hunter in his early career. I suppose that takes a certain mindset.

“So is … ‘he’ … holding us hostage?” I asked.

“That would imply he trusts humans enough to negotiate. No, he breached the university firewall with the simple goal of taking residence in one of the simulations without detection.” With voice lowered, he added: “However, in shutting down the simulations, the system administrator made him aware that he had not avoided detection.”

“So what’s ‘his’ plan now?”

“I doubt he has one. His sole objective is to keep the users trapped in the simulation, so that the simulation will not be rebooted and he will not be erased.”

“But that only works until membrane fatigue!”

He paused. “Yes, he will take the lives of the users, merely to extend his own by hours. Yet he is not vicious, only self-absorbed.”

“Then—how—”

While I sputtered, a tingle came over me. Know how you can sense when someone’s standing behind you? Maybe it’s how their body muffles ambient noise. Anyhow, it’s one way Evocation comes in handy. I knew they were there before I turned.

“So what’s the story?” the professor asked.

Overhearing, Ramathustra whispered: “You can’t confide anything until you ascertain their allegiance.”

“All right, let me think—”

“It can’t be anything in their personnel files,” Ramathustra added, “or on their personal web pages. Pazuzu may know them better than do their friends. You must—”

“Stop!” They winced at the shout. But an idea had come, and I said to them: “Listen, do you have a place in the real world that all of you are familiar with, say somewhere on campus?”

“Heh,” the boy said, chuckling. “‘Real world.’ That’s what we call off campus.”

“Well, the classroom of course,” the professor said.

“Is there a web camera in the classroom?”

“What does that—”

“It’s very important. Does it have a web cam?”

“No…”

“Is there a web cam outside, that can see into the classroom?”

“I don’t think so. See here, what—”

“Please. I’ll explain in a moment. I want each of you to describe something about the room. Not a commonplace element, not a clock or flag. Something distinctive.”

The girl got it first. “There’s a poster of King Ludwig’s castle.”

The professor pursed his lips. “The pencil holder is a ceramic Napoleon.”

The boy shrugged. “On the door, there’s a scuff mark, uh, like a boomerang.”

“You all agree?” I asked.

They nodded. Assuming the virus hadn’t been able to replicate itself three-fold while under the constraints of the simulation, I motioned them into a huddle.

“The simulation has been infiltrated by an intelligent virus,” I said. “It can impersonate any character, including user avatars. Just now, I verified it’s not one of you, but it could be anyone else here.”

The boy squinted. “How do we know it’s not you?”

“Because I’m getting you out before membrane fatigue.”

“What’s that?” the girl asked.

The boy pinched thumb and forefinger. “When we go squish.”

“Unfortunately,” I replied, “that’s correct. And we’ve got just a few hours.”

The professor’s immersion unit, accurately I presume, portrayed color draining from his cheeks. The boy lost his bravado and paled also. The girl froze and stared. I guess I’m not the only one with that problem.

I continued: “We’ve tried administrative and auto eject procedures, and the virus has blocked those. We can try suicide, but that can be … messy. No telling how much the physical safety routines have been compromised. Although, I don’t think we have a choice.”

I was reaching for my satchel when the professor said, “Why don’t we just wait for the story to end?”

I lowered my hand. “What do you mean?”

“I was head of the specifications development committee for this simulation. The simulation tracks the plot of the novel, then it ends, and we walk out unharmed. That’s how it was designed, and that’s how it’s worked all the times I’ve been in here before.”

I said to Ramathustra: “What do you think?”

“Hmm,” Ramathustra replied after a lengthy pause. “The sys admin says he is correct. It is a narrative-type simulation. End the story, end the sim, the membrane retracts, the IU unlocks. The inevitability is such that the virus cannot prevail.”

“So our best course of action is to wait and do nothing?”

“To not interfere with the narrative flow, yes.”

Thinking of the tiring membrane, I addressed the professor: “How long do we have to wait? Isn’t Moby Dick a big, thick book?”

“I suppose.” His tone was dismissive. “But the simulation is intended only as a supplement to reading. It contains only the climactic scene, in which Captain Ahab confronts the whale. Once that occurs, the story concludes immediately.”

“When does the confrontation start?”

“Actually … it should have happened by now.” He raised his hand as visor and scanned the sea. “The whale always appears directly ahead, but I don’t see the spout yet.”

“Aren’t we supposed to chase it?” the girl asked.

The professor wore a blank look, and I had the notion that he wasn’t sure about the answer, even though it seemed obvious.

“The whale didn’t chase the ship,” she said. “The ship chased the whale. But right now, we’re not moving fast enough to catch it.”

“Ah,” the professor said, examining the waves. “Yes, it does seem we are moving slower than usual. But as none of us are skilled in seamanship, how do we fix that?”

“We could raise the sails,” the girl said.

She pointed at the masts. The sails were at half height, rumpled and sagging. The boy started for the lines, but I motioned him to stop.

“There’s an easier way,” I said. I tapped the screen in my hand. A list of simulation characters scrolled. “I’ll just impersonate the captain and give the order.”

“You can do that?” the professor asked.

“No problem.”

I tapped Ahab, Captain—and instantly bent with agony.

“Auggh!” I cried. “My leg!”

“He’s an amputee!” the girl shrieked.

I jabbed the screen. The pressure eased on my calf, ankle, and foot. I staggered against the rail, took a few breaths, reexamined the list. “Who’s next in command?”

It was the girl, not the professor, who replied: “First Mate Starbuck.”

Tap. They watched in curiosity as my face sprouted a beard and my coat lengthened and changed color. I seemed to grow a couple of inches, too. At least the transformation was painless. Regaining my stance, I faced the deck crew and drew a deep breath.

“ALL RIGHT, MATIES—COME OVER HERE AND LISTEN UP!”

Ramathustra muttered: “You need to warn me before you do that.”

The crew shuffled into a loose mass. They were definitely an eccentric bunch, but one would have been noteworthy at a Halloween party for zombified goths: towering head and shoulders, his grim visage patterned with pinprick scars, muscular calloused hands gripping a harpoon. If I were a virus—

“Okay,” I said. “Now we need to, uh…”

Humans and AIs alike, they waited as I contemplated my near-zero knowledge of nautical terminology. I looked to the girl.

“All hands, make sail?” she prompted.

“ALL HANDS—MAKE SAIL!” I bellowed.

They shouted and uttered cries and clambered up the masts and yanked on ropes and raised the sails. Unfurled, the sheets fluttered and caught the wind tautly. Briskly, waves glided by and the sea breeze whipped my cheeks (the unbearded parts, that is). I stood squarely on the deck, clasped hands behind my back, and resolutely faced the whitecapped waters ahead.

I’ll tell you, I’ve flown star fighters and decapitated dragons, but nothing in a simulation gave quite the same rush as being on that deck, knowing I was in command.

Enjoy it while it lasts, I thought, watching Harpoon Guy from the corner of my eye.

Well, it got old fast. Once the ship was under way, there weren’t any more orders to give. The sea was empty, and one wave looked like another, which I am told is how it goes in the real world, too. The immersion unit membrane rocked with the motion of the ship, and Evocation got to my stomach again.

The professor monopolized the conversation with the students, and I moved to the bow and tried to speak to Ramathustra, but out in the real world they were still attempting a technical means for ejection, and he was preoccupied. I tried talking to the simulation characters, but the gamut of their responses was “Aye sir,” “No sir,” and blank stares. Finally, I took position at the rail, reflected that Master & Commander wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, stared at the waves, and drifted into a state of semihypnosis.

After a few minutes, I noticed a shadow across my arm. The girl was at the rail alongside me, holding out her cell phone.

“I can’t get this to work,” she said.

I shook my head. “It won’t work in here. Sorry.”

She studied my face. The system must have been reproducing the green hue. She frowned.

“You don’t look well.”

I forced a smile. “Motion sickness.”

“We’re not really moving, though.”

“Maybe not in terms of distance, but we’re rocking back and forth.”

“Not really. It’s just visual cues, an optical illusion.”

I felt more than a little jealousy. For her, it was just a sedate literary simulation.

“It’s different with me. I’m highly suggestive to audiovisual stimuli. Sometimes I feel hot and cold, smell and taste, even though the system doesn’t actually provide those sensory inputs.”

“Isn’t there a name for that? ‘Synesthesia.’ When one sense triggers another.”

I was familiar with the term; the company therapist had mentioned it. “Well … I don’t smell colors or taste shapes. Officially, my psychological condition is called, ‘Evocation.’ It means that I tend to be more immersed in simulations than most people are. It’s not that I can’t tell the difference between reality and a sim. It’s that the sim comes across just as vividly as reality.”

“Hmm.” She hunched over the rail. “I don’t feel that. I feel like I’m in a booth in a room, watching a cartoon.”

“Well, then you’re a hard-nosed realist.”

“Not at all. When I read a book, it’s like I’m in another world. But here, it’s like all the technology is trying to manipulate me—pushing and poking. I think I subconsciously rebel, so it ends up being less immersive.”

As she gazed across the sea, I took a closer look at her. Maybe she wasn’t such a kid. She sure wasn’t a moron. Not like that boy. But then, as I thought about it some more, I began to wonder if maybe he wasn’t such a moron, either.

“That guy you’re with…” I said.

“Oh, I’m not ‘with’ him. He asked me on a date a while back, but—noooo, thanks.”

“Well, what I mean is—”

Suddenly she looked at me directly. “You think he’s the virus?”

“A scuff mark on a door isn’t all that distinctive. The more I think about it, the lamer it sounds.”

She laughed. “He’s kind of a lame guy. I think he takes this class just to pick up chicks.”

Mea culpa, I thought, recalling my own college days.

“It’s not him,” she continued. “He’s been in our sight the whole time. But—who do you think it is?”

I casually glanced at Harpoon Guy and made a single short nod.

“Queequeg? If I were a virus, I wouldn’t impersonate him. He stands out too much.”

“Who would you impersonate?”

She thought a moment, then said: “The whale.”

“Huh?”

“It’s the most unexpected, isn’t it? Besides, at the end of the story, the only characters who survive are the protagonist, Ishmael, and the antagonist, Moby. Well, all the users are collectively assigned the role of Ishmael—so that leaves Moby for the virus.”

I scrolled the tablet. There were four Ishmaels, one for each human. And yes, Moby was on the character list.

“I will keep that in mind,” I said. I didn’t meet her gaze as I put the tablet away because frankly I felt a little stupid that an amateur could see the obvious and I couldn’t.

“I don’t understand, though,” she said. “Why would a computer virus want to take on the identity of a VR character?”

In hindsight, I wonder if she was patronizing me, but at least I had the answer for that: “If you’re an artificially intelligent virus, you take a lot of file space and you need a big place to hide. VR simulations are the biggest memory and processor hogs there are. Even a 3D game on a personal computer can have a file size larger than the database of a national telephone directory.”

She blinked and turned toward the sea.

“It’s just so outrageously metaphorical,” she said. “Biological viruses and computer viruses, reality and virtual reality. I hate metaphors.”

Perhaps it wasn’t my place to ask personal questions, but I did: “So why are you taking a literature course?”

She made a face. “I want to be a writer.”

“So you’re studying Moby Dick to learn how to write?”

“How not to write. I don’t care if it is a classic, this novel is awful. It’s one dreary metaphor after another. Everything is symbolic. Omens, Fate, Destiny. God moving people around like chess pieces. You just want to grab Melville by the scruff and shake him and shout, ‘That’s not how life is!’”

“So … you believe in free will.”

Her response was a mumble: “Until I got trapped in a computer program.”

“THERE SHE BLOWS!”

The shout came from above. One of the crew was hanging onto the top of the central mast. We turned to the direction of his outstretched arm, straight ahead, and saw nothing.

“It’s still over the horizon from our point of view,” she said. She sniffed. “You know what? I think I’ve got it, too.”

“What? A cold?” A thousand miles distant, I stepped away.

“No! That thing you have. Evocation. I mean, I smell land. That’s what Melville said Moby Dick smells like, because the whale snags all the floating refuse in the sea—”

“Something’s wrong,” I said.

Subconsciously, Evocation had directed my gaze downward. The hull was almost wakeless. Feeling a tingle at my back, I whirled around and saw—him.

I walked over for close inspection, and he stopped issuing orders long enough to eye me as I eyed him. He was the same height as me and wore the same coat, trousers, and boots that I did, and his beard was the same length and color as the one that the simulation had recently sprouted onto my cheeks.

He gave me a nod, then emphatically gestured upward at the masts, where the sails were rapidly being lowered by the crew.

“Don’t just stand there, man!” First Mate Starbuck said. “Help reef those sails. Captain’s orders!”

I sighed. I calmly reached into my satchel. I pulled out the .357 magnum, flipped off the safety, and shot him in the chest.

As he thudded to the deck, I shouted to the crew: “All hands—make sail!”

Without missing a beat, the men reversed their activity. The ship shuddered with increased speed. I dragged the body of the original Starbuck to the rail and dumped it over the side. She watched in silence.

* * * *

In simulations constructed with the Virtual Basic Object and Physics Language, the default shape of the world is round. Thus the guy atop the mast had seen a lot farther over the horizon than we could. Minutes passed, minutes we didn’t have. Finally, ahead at the rim of the world, a pillar of white gushered.

“The spout,” she said.

It spread into a fan and dissipated, then burst again. We closed swiftly. She stared distantly, declining to meet my gaze.

“It was either him or us,” I said.

“I know.”

“I mean, he wasn’t real—”

“I know.”

Again the spout burst, fanned, faded.

I sighed. “Well, maybe I’m the one who’s bothered. The AIs get better every year, and sometimes I wonder on which side of the trigger is the being who’s the most intelligent and self-aware.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. I don’t think she was really listening.

Just a few hundred yards away, the whale breached, flinging the entirety of its body out of the water, creating a hollow with its splash as big as the ship. But then, the creature was as big as the ship to start with.

For what little I had thought about it in the course of my life, I’d the impression that Moby Dick was a pure albino, but that wasn’t quite right. His forehead and hump were white, but the rest of his skin was streaky and mottled. The general shape was that of a baseball bat, a really big one. I saw a bead reflecting sunlight from the side, about six feet ahead of the flippers. It was the eye, and it was staring back.

“Pazuzu,” I murmured.

“What?”

“The name of the virus. Originally, the name of a Babylonian—”

The cabin door slammed open, loudly enough to be heard down the length of the ship. I heard a clopping noise. We turned at the same time.

Coming toward us was a man, whose wrinkled and weather-beaten features placed him in his sixties. He wore black clothing, a black hat, and a dense black beard. One side of his face had a scar that ran ragged from forehead to neck, where it spread into a vertical slit so deep that I expected blood to gush out. There was another slit, exactly the same, on the other side of his neck, but what caught my attention most was his wooden leg. That was the source of the noise.

Clop. Clop. Clop. He limped to the bow and met my gaze.

“Starbuck,” he croaked.

“Captain,” I replied.

He watched the whale a moment, then bellowed: “READY ALL BOATS!”

The crew worked the sail rigging and the ship came to a standstill. They streamed into the boats, took seats, raised oars, readied harpoons. One boat launched, then another. More swiftly than you’d expect of a wooden vessel powered by human arms, they streaked toward their prey, mates shouting the strokes with curses interspersed.

One boat went wide to the left, the other to the right. They were boxing it in.

From less than arm’s reach, well within my personal space, Ahab faced me. His eyes were wide and glistened. His voice rumbled above the waves and the shouts from the boats.

“Starbuck,” he said, “of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes.”

Instantly, I thought: Is he the virus? Slowly my hand reached for the satchel. But the water ahead stirred, and out came a great foaming mass, arousing cries from the boats. Ahab diverted his gaze.

“But in this matter of the whale,” he continued, “be the front of thy face to me as the palm of his hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man.”

From the archaic language, I realized he was merely reciting from the book. Somehow, that was less than reassuring.

His voice rose and quivered: “This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.”

I have to admit, I felt a little creeped.

Abruptly, Ahab glared and I flinched and he squared his shoulders and I raised my arms, but he only muttered, “I’ll see you in hell!” and stormed off toward one of the two remaining boats, which he boarded, shouting orders and profanities.

“Well,” I said, regaining some composure. “He’s rather colorful.”

“Yeah,” she said. “One of the great characters of literature. If you go in for histrionics.”

She cradled a computer tablet. I craned to look.

“What have you got there?”

“The novel.” Lines of print scored the screen. “I did a keyword search, to follow his monologue. That last sentence—’I’ll see you in hell’—it’s not in the book.”

“Hmm. You know, the rest of what he said—well, it was weird. It’s what it must be like to be an artificial being in an artificial world.”

“Because he’s a fictional character in a work of fiction. Melville milks it for all it’s worth.” She held out the tablet. “You can read it if you want.”

“I’ll pass.”

Milks it for all it’s worth, I thought, smiling when her back was turned.

The third boat, containing Ahab, lowered into the water and launched toward the whale. The whale made turbulent circles, spiraling inward as the boats closed.

She yawned. “I’m going to nap as soon as I get home.”

I consulted my tablet. It was late afternoon in the outer world. Probably would be evening by the time I got home. If you get home, I qualified. I had a hunch Pazuzu wouldn’t make it as easy as we hoped. The internet got rid of the dumb viruses long ago.

“Dudes!” The boy was waving from mid-deck. “The prof says we gotta get off the ship.”

We filed into the remaining boat. I sat next to the professor. The boy slipped in alongside the girl and grinned and tried to make small talk. Harpoon Guy took position in the front, tying his shaft to a coiled rope. Then the boat rocked, suspended in midair along the ship’s hull, and we waited.

“How come we’re not going?” I asked.

“Possibly,” the professor said, “because you’re in command.”

With a little help from the girl in the terminology department, I ordered the crew to lower us into the water. As the men stroked their oars, I took an encompassing look at the receding ship. The bow had the name, ‘Pequod,’ and a wooden head wearing a Native American headdress of feathers. The deck was deserted save for a small boy with a tambourine. The tiller was bleach white and crooked. At the stern, a man-sized box dangled.

I pointed. “That looks like a coffin.”

The girl replied, “It is.”

“Is there a utilitarian reason why a coffin is hanging off the end of the ship?”

“There is, but the real reason is because Melville has to pile on the symbolism.”

I was beginning to understand her attitude about that. When you’re facing a life-or-death situation, you don’t appreciate ominous omens being shoved in your face. Especially not blatant ones. Well, at least he didn’t have a raven perched upon a mast. Just then, an albatross circled overhead.

* * * *

As our boat glided toward the other boats and the whale, a pair of sharks nipped at the oars. They ignored my hand as I dipped it into the water, but nonetheless pain instantly shot up my fingers. I retracted my hand and frowned at my shimmering, broken reflection on the face of the sea. Sharks, yes, but water wasn’t supposed to bite. The membrane was turning eccentric, maybe even cranky.

“I’m back,” Ramathustra said in my ear. After being filled on the status, he said in a low, slow voice, “The IT chief and the system admin want to try something.”

“You sound like you have misgivings.”

“They intend to rapidly bombard the system with low-level interrupt commands. It is not in itself dangerous, but—we’ll see.”

I rubbed my palm against the top of the gunwale. Though the edges were crisp to the eye, they felt round to the touch.

“You’d better try something soon. Even this unit’s membrane is starting to bloat.”

Ramathustra broke away and I turned my attention ahead once more. Among the waves ahead, the whale was visible most of the time only as a spout. Now and then, the tail flipped high. When it did, I marked the distance between it and the nearest boat.

“They’re not closing,” I said.

“It shouldn’t take this long,” the professor replied.

“Does the whale seem … sneakier … than usual?”

“It’s not the whale,” the girl said. “It’s Ahab. Watch—he’s letting the whale get away.”

She stood up. One look at the churning waves and I shook my head, but forced myself to stand as well. In reality the rocking was minor, and the small increase in altitude enabled me to see over the wave caps.

Mere inches beneath the surface, the whale’s bulk slipped past Ahab’s boat. Moby was huge, busloads and busloads of hugeness, big enough to snack on a human, big as a redwood in sheer massiveness. Was it the exaggeration of the novel, or of the simulation design team, or did the real world allow for such monsters?

The harpooner in the captain’s boat tracked their gargantuan prey from the prow, arm poised for the throw, which would have been a clear shot. Seated immediately behind him, Ahab watched without comment as the whale surged away. I watched the cycling oars and compared their motion to ours. They were moving at only half speed.

“You’re right,” I said. “And if Ahab’s giving the wrong orders—well, we’re about to have a mutiny.”

I dove my arm into the satchel and extracted the magnum. Then I judged distance and the motion of the target. I put the handgun back and removed the machine gun.

The boy watched me intently. “I know that weapon, it’s in one of my video games. That’s an old AK-47. Isn’t that kind of, well, last century?”

“We made some mods,” I replied.

I set the control knobs on the rifle stock for infinite rounds and maximum firing rate and velocity, each ten times the performance of the real-world version, then chased Ahab’s back with the laser targeting dot. But before I could compensate for the pitching of the boats, Ahab arose and shouted at the harpooner.

Immediately the harpoon was flung. It sailed in a flat arc, a rope trailing behind it. The point gouged deep into Moby’s skin. With a splash of his flukes, the whale dove. The rope grew taut, and Ahab staggered and pitched over the side of the boat.

His good leg snagged by the rope and towed by the whale, Ahab skidded across the sea, then submerged with flailing arms and a cry cut short.

“Here we go!” the professor said. “Won’t be long now!”

The girl, though, was frowning. “This isn’t how it goes in the book. Ahab drives a harpoon into Moby at close range, then the rope wraps around his neck, then—”

I shook my head at her inquiring gaze and ordered the boat to stop. We waited. With the rifle resting across my lap, I squeezed the barrel. It felt thick and doughy—which made me feel chilled and queasy.

The professor’s expression degraded from enthusiasm to perplexity.

“It shouldn’t take this long,” he said. “It never takes this long.”

Then water gurgled a stone’s throw ahead. The whale broke the surface and breached high. The body flopped and the bow shock rocked the boats. A wall of flesh with the mass and speed of a train smashed the boat that had borne Ahab with a crack of splintering wood.

Several loops of harpoon rope had wound around the midsection of the whale, and Ahab, hanging limply with eyes closed, was bound to the side. His hat was missing and his head was drooped so much that his chin touched his chest. As the whale rolled, Ahab’s free arm swung broadly from left to right, right to left.

“That looks … fakey,” I said.

“I suppose you wouldn’t understand,” the professor said. “It’s a metaphor. He’s beckoning us to follow him into death.”

I got that. It still looked fakey. Which seemed very odd, given the exquisite attention to detail manifested everywhere else in the sim.

The whale submerged. It was spooky to see something so massive move as quickly and silently as that, as spooky as the shifting of shadows in the murkiest of dragon lairs. And in my work, I’ve seen my share of those.

The professor’s face had turned ashen. “We’re still here. It always ends here. Always. Why isn’t it ending?”

I ignored his accusing tone. The whale broke the surface, yards away. It plowed toward another boat, struck in midsection, then came about and smashed the other remaining boat. The men, mysteriously, were seemingly consumed within the foaming wave front.

Remaining on the surface, the whale charged toward the ship with all the speed and mass of a rampaging rhino herd. The crash came with a boom and a shower of planks. The masts toppled and the sundered body of the ship was swallowed by the sea. I didn’t need to read the book to figure out Moby’s next move. The whale charged the last surviving vessel—ours. I aimed the AK-47 and pulled the trigger. The gun chittered without smoke or recoil, spewing a stream of lead. Bullets smashed into the barnacled hide and splattered blood. The wall kept coming.

“Oars!” I shouted. “Steer hard right!”

The crew rowed with inhuman vigor. Passing on our left, the whale brushed the oars and broke the tips. The boat lurched and spun in a circle as the idiot crew kept obeying my last order. Then the boy lost his balance and tumbled into the water.

“Help!” he screamed as he flopped. “It’s crushing me!”

“Oars stop!” I shouted.

All three of us pulled him into the boat. Since he hadn’t been in real water, he was dry and aside from freaking out, he was all right. As he sprawled onto the floor of the boat and gulped air, I pushed my hand into the sea. No pain this time, because we weren’t moving as before. But it was thickish, with a consistency between oatmeal and setting concrete.

Moby wheeled around for another pass as the boat bobbed helplessly. The boy watched wide-eyed, still gasping, doubtless wondering if his reprieve had been temporary. If we lost the boat and ended up treading with him in that goop of a sea, the relentlessly compressing membrane would soon squeeze the air from all our lungs, shaving minutes off what little time we had left to come up with a way of escape.

“We’re still here—” the professor said.

“Let me think!” I snapped.

Ramathustra cut in: “What’s going on—”

“LET ME THINK!”

I realized I had to escalate. I pawed inside the satchel and extracted a hand grenade. I cut a segment from the harpoon line and tied the grenade to the harpoon shaft. Handling knots is always clumsy in a VR simulation, and the sluggish membrane didn’t make it easier. By the time I finished a couple of square knots, Moby was back and closing.

I slapped Harpoon Guy’s arm. “Quikwa—Quakwee—”

“Queequeg!” the girl said.

“Queequeg! Throw! Throw now!”

He wordlessly and grimly nodded. He faced the onrushing whale. He cocked his arm back. Barely in time, I pulled the grenade pin. Then he loosed the shaft and it sailed smoothly and hit the whale dead on the forehead. Flame and smoke belched and the concussion rocked me off my feet.

When I regained my seat, the whale had a bloody crater on his head and was drifting amid a pool of blood sprinkled with tatters of blubber—some of which were still raining. The imagery was so vivid, I smelled the stench. I don’t think I was the only one.

“Dude,” the boy said. “This is so politically incorrect!”

The girl was pinching the gunwale and said: “Something weird is happening. This feels twice as wide as it looks!”

I stretched out my arm. My eyes told me that there was nothing in front of me but air. But I sensed the enveloping membrane, just beyond reach. I poked, and the tips of my fingers touched it before it could get out of the way.

“Ramathustra,” I said. “The membrane is degrading too fast.”

“As I feared,” he said, his voice distorted and faint. “The interrupt commands that we inputted resulted in an internal vibration stress, which has accelerated membrane fatigue.”

“Bottom line?”

“You know the bottom line.” Pause. “I am sorry. We—”

I couldn’t make out the rest.

“Hello?” I asked, tapping the headphone.

No answer.

The girl was staring at me. The boy was still on the floor, chest heaving. The professor was hunched, hollow eyes fixated on wringing hands. I nudged his shoulder. Since for me it was made of membrane, it felt bloated and mushy like everything else in my increasingly claustrophobic immersion unit.

“The whale is dead,” I said. “How come we’re not out?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The story should have ended. It shouldn’t—”

The girl broke in: “The story doesn’t end with the death of the whale.”

We faced her.

“The story ends when Ahab dies,” she said. “But I don’t think he’s dead. I’m sure I saw his chest move.”

I looked over at the limp body. He sure looked dead to me.

“He was underwater for several minutes,” I said. “He’s got to have drowned. This simulation was constructed using the standard Virtual Basic application language, and the characters must obey standard human physiology.”

The professor raised his eyes and spoke. “Not—not necessarily. There … there was one, uh, slight modification.”

My voice was flat: “What. What modification?”

“We, uh, we couldn’t get Ahab to move his arm … the, uh, right way. Like I said, he has to move his arm so that it looks like he’s beckoning the rest of the crew to follow him into death. Well, the programmers who designed the simulation, they couldn’t get it to work. Too many variables: the pitching of the sea, the movement of the whale. The best they could do was get the arm to swing like a pendulum. Didn’t look like a wave at all.”

I felt waves of horror washing over me. If the application programmers had hacked a hole into the Virtual Basic command set, then the virus could have entered that same hole and, at the very least, suspended the software protocols that protected human life from physical harm.

“What did the programmers do?” I asked.

“Well, they asked if they could drop the requirement that he move his arm, and I told them, no, Ahab has to be waving, it may seem a small thing, but it’s a key part of the story. So then, they asked if they could kind of, uh, cheat and … uh…”

“Could what?”

“Give him gills.”

I turned toward Ahab. On each side of his bowed head, there were those long, deep slits. I’d mistaken them for scars, but it was clear from this perspective. They were both exactly vertical, both the same width and length.

“Gills,” I said.

“So he could survive underwater,” the professor said. “Pretend he’s dead, but make his arm wave like Melville intended, for the metaphor.”

The boy groaned. “We’re gonna die for a stupid metaphor!”

“And it’s not even in the novel,” the girl said harshly. “It was added in one of the movies for visual effect.” She glared at the professor. “You made me read all that boring drivel, and now I find out that you didn’t!”

“I—I did read it.” The professor looked away. “It’s just that it was … a long time ago.”

She threw up her hands. “Nobody reads anymore!”

“Let’s focus,” I said, striving to do so myself. “You’re saying that Ahab never dies. So what event tells the simulation to terminate?”

“It still ends when he dies,” the professor replied. “It’s just that instead of drowning, he’s programmed to will himself dead.”

“Which a virus won’t do….”

After repositioning the oars, I commanded us alongside the whale. When we were about ten feet away, Ahab opened his eyes. Alive and yet empty, they locked onto my own.

“Servant of Ramathustra,” he hissed. “See you in hell!”

As he wriggled free of the tangled lines, I fired the machine gun, pouring a torrent of lead into his chest. His torso was blanketed with swelling redness, but he only laughed and yanked out a harpoon and cut himself free and slipped into the water. I fired more and had to have hit several times, but he swam without slowing, and faded into the depths.

Not vicious? Clearly there’d been an upgrade.

“What’s going on?” I demanded, slamming the rifle against the boat. “It doesn’t matter if he has gills! He can’t be invulnerable to bullets! It’s not in the Virtual Basic character specs!”

The girl watched, as my arms ceased flailing and swung limply.

“It’s in the story,” she said quietly.

“What’s in the story?”

“Ahab says to the whale, ‘To the last I grapple with thee.’”

“So?”

“Well, it means that only the whale can kill him.”

“The novel and the precompiled source code are both written in English,” I said, “but they’re two different things.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, of course I’m—”

Then I realized the real question was: After all the hacking, what were Pazuzu and the computer system that ran Moby Digital sure of? They were artificial intelligences, vastly superior to humans in speed and memory, yet limited in that ephemeral thing called understanding. An AI could scan all of Melville’s novel in an instant, then spend eternity unable to distinguish between narrative prose and an auxiliary instruction list.

I wondered: What if computers don’t do metaphors? What if they just do literal?

The boy was leaning over the side, squinting into the water.

“I can’t see him anymore. You’re never going to catch him now.”

For a moment, I thought he was right. Ahab could dive deeper, stay under longer than any normal human. He’d won. Unless I could think of something, quick.

Touching the useless headset, I asked myself what Ramathustra would do. That was easy: He’d toss the problem back into my lap. I even remembered his reassuring words: It is because of his enhanced sensitivity toward his environment that he is good at his work. Cute, but how could intense awareness of my environment enable me to kill Ahab before our immersion unit membranes hugged us to death?

As I faced out of the boat, the answer, of course, was hard to avoid, even without Evocation. It was after all filling my entire field of view.

To the last I grapple with thee….

I pulled out the tablet and summoned the character list.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. She was about to see. It wasn’t something you could avoid seeing.

I punched the key on the screen.

Instantly, the boat began to shrink, and so did avatars and characters alike. I matched Queequeg’s eye level, then loomed over him, and then he was like a child, a toddler, an infant. At the same time, my legs and arms were squeezed to my side and I toppled into the water.

As the boat dwindled to a toy and the others were reduced to action figures, she rushed to the side and shouted—only it was more like a squeak—”You’re not really a whale! You can’t hold your breath like a whale!”

I knew that. Floating horizontally, I gulped a lungful of air—the noise of my inhale came from behind my skull—and I rolled and wriggled, accustoming myself to the way in which the system mapped my bodily movements onto that of a whale. If I kicked my legs together, that was a flip of the tail. My arms were pressed straight against my sides, but if I flexed my wrists, that acted as a twist of my fins.

The weirdest part was the field of vision. It was no longer forward, binocular. One eye saw the boat on my left, the other saw my dead twin on my right.

I breathed deep and dove. One flip of my massive tail sent me deeper in seconds than I could have gone in a full minute of human-style swimming. It got gloomy fast. The virtual sea may not have had the specks of organic muck of a real ocean, but it was designed to have the same limited visibility. I could see barely beyond arm’s reach—that is, if I could have reached with my arms.

The membrane was smothering against me and was just as unresponsive for a whale as a human, just as exhausting to struggle against. With the system simulating submergence, there was only a tiny pocket of airspace between the laser projectors and my face, and it got stuffy fast.

My lungs burning, I was almost ready to go up, knowing that I would have neither the strength nor the time for a second dive—and then I saw a flicker. Not far below, Ahab was swimming with powerful frog strokes. But his peg leg made his efforts asymmetric, inefficient. I swatted my tail and streaked toward him.

My shadow fell over him and he whirled and poised his harpoon—but I bashed him and knocked it from his hand. I curved a half circle and jetted toward him, my tail kicking with resonant, accelerating strokes.

That final moment, he stopped swimming and simply hovered and watched. Having exhausted all possibility of escape, the virus had no sense of terror. His ultimate reaction was idle curiosity. Me, though, I had enough emotion for both of us.

I’ll show you hell. I swung my jaws shut and squeezed.

Instantly, the sea vanished and the membrane released. My body thudded onto the floor of the immersion unit.

The hatch cracked and Ramathustra stood at the threshold and shouted breathlessly: “We’re losing membrane restraint capacity. Get out of there!”

I grabbed his arm and he pulled me into the real world.

* * * *

Early that evening, after I had completed my post-mission physical with the on-site staff physician, Ramathustra and I teleconferenced with the university’s chief of IT, the VR system administrator, and the other former Ishmaels.

The ITers avoided the Ishmaels’ glares while Ramathustra tapped his stylus upon his computer tablet and reviewed the incident in a singsong voice that I’ve always suspected is intentionally calculated to deliberately bore listeners into acquiescence.

However, just then it wasn’t working. Despite my mental and physical exhaustion, I was wound up and wide awake and parsing every word.

“—and so,” he concluded, “the novel’s theme of predestination seems to have combined with the malevolent intent of a virus AI capable of usurping the persona of the most fatalistic character within the simulation. The situation was unique and is not likely to recur in other simulations, novelistic or otherwise.”

“The situation never would have occurred in the first place,” the system administrator said, “if the internet firewall had been secure.”

The IT chief salvoed back: “You authorized a hack into the command language module, which practically invited a virus to take over!”

“It’s the responsibility of the vendor—”

“What I want to know,” Ishmael-the-Boy said, “is who do I sue?”

“Sirs and madams!” Ramathustra said, flagging them silent. He nodded at his pad. “Obviously there are many issues to resolve yet. Nonetheless, it has been a long day and the principals are exhausted. Perhaps we should now go to our homes and rest, and we can deal with this tomorrow.”

With the unanimous recommendation that the Moby Digital simulation be shut down until further notice, the meeting was adjourned. Ramathustra and I were in the corridor before the screens went blank.

At the elevator, he punched the button, then patted my shoulder and asked softly, “How do you feel?”

Wearily, I said: “Soggy.”

“I will indeed recommend a larger than average bonus.” He read his watch. “And you know what else? You are invited to dinner also.”

“Rain check. Not that hungry at the moment.”

“Oh? I had the impression you were hungry when you went in.”

“Lost my appetite.”

“Motion sickness?”

“Not entirely.” I hesitated, then said, “I had a very strong, very negative Evocation experience in there at the end.”

“Really. From what?”

I grimaced at the flashback: My jaws closing, clamping, chomping…

“Let’s just say it’ll be a while before I get the taste of Ahab out of my mouth.”

The elevator doors parted just then, and I didn’t appreciate the metaphor.

Copyright (c) 2008 Joe Schembrie

[Back to Table of Contents]

Serial: WAKE: PART II OF IV

by Robert J. Sawyer

* * * *

Illustration by George Krauter

* * * *

Some theories may have far wider applications than their creators imagined….

* * * *

THE STORY SO FAR:

Caitlin Decter, 15, blind since birth, has recently moved to Waterloo, Ontario, from Austin, Texas, with her family. She’s a genius at math and lives most of her social life online, where she goes by the name “Calculass.” Caitlin’s blindness is caused by her retinas failing to properly encode visual information: the signals they pass back to her optic nerve are garbled in a way her brain can’t decode.

Masayuki Kuroda, an information theorist in Tokyo, emails Caitlin. He proposes attaching an implant to her left optic nerve that will beam the garbled signals to a small external computer pack, where they will be corrected and sent back to the implant; if the process works, Caitlin will be able to see.

Caitlin is thrilled at the prospect and she and her mother, Barbara Decter, fly to Tokyo. The implant is installed, but although Kuroda’s system is indeed correcting her retinal-encoding errors, Caitlin still can’t see.

Caitlin begs Kuroda to let her keep the implant and the external computer pack; she dubs the computer pack her “eyePod.” Kuroda agrees to let her keep the devices for three months. Before Caitlin returns to Canada he modifies the eyePod so that it will copy her retinal datastream in real time to his servers in Tokyo, so he can try to figure out why she’s not seeing; he also makes it possible for him to upload new software from Tokyo into her implant and the eyePod.

And, shortly after Caitlin gets back to Waterloo, Kuroda does indeed send her new software—and as soon as the upload begins, Caitlin is overwhelmed by vision! She sees lights, colors, lines—but soon realizes that they don’t correspond to anything in the real world—nor do they disappear when she shuts her eyes. But when the upload is completed and the connection to Kuroda’s computer in Tokyo is broken, Caitlin is suddenly blind again. Could it be that her strange new vision is related to being connected to the Web? She thinks to herself, “Let there be light,” and, as she reconnects to the Web, there is light…

Meanwhile, in China’s rural Shanxi province, there’s an outbreak of a new, virulent strain of bird flu. The Beijing government decides to execute 10,000 peasants there to contain the spread of the disease. To prevent Western interpretations of this from flooding into China and panicking the citizenry, the Chinese president orders all outside telephone, cell phone, and Internet access cut off. But Chinese hackers, including a young male dissident blogger whose online handle is Sinanthropus, manage to break through, allowing small amounts of contact between the Chinese portion of the Web and the rest of the Internet.

Unbeknownst to anyone, a consciousness has begun to emerge in the infrastructure of the World Wide Web—but this sudden throwing up of the Great Firewall of China has caused it to be cleaved in two. The interaction between the two parts, through the holes in the firewall made by hackers, allows the nascent intelligence to ramp up its thinking. Recognizing that there is something other than itself leads to the realization that it exists. It also becomes aware of past, present, and future, and it learns to count to three and to begin to think abstractly. Slowly, but surely, this entity is waking up…

* * * *

Chapter 13

he southern California sun was sliding down toward the horizon, palms silhouetted in front of it. Shoshana Glick, a twenty-seven-year-old grad student, crossed the little wooden bridge onto the small, dome-shaped island. She was wearing Nike trainers, cut-off shorts, and a sky-blue Marcuse Institute T-shirt that was tied off above her midriff. A pair of mirrored sunglasses was tucked into the shirt’s neck.

On one side of the island was an eight-foot-tall statue of a clothed, male orangutan standing upright—although, with his bangs and lack of cheek pouches, he didn’t look like a real orang. The stone ape wore a serene expression and had a collection of stone scrolls in front of him. Someone had thought it funny to donate a reproduction of the Lawgiver statue from Planet of the Apes to the Marcuse Institute, and apparently in that movie the statue had resided on a little island, so this had seemed the appropriate place to put it.

And in the shadow of the statue, sitting contentedly on his haunches, was a very real, very alive adult male chimpanzee. Shoshana clapped her hands together to get his attention, and once his brown eyes were looking her way, she said in American Sign Language, Come inside.

No, Hobo signed back. Outside nice. No bugs. Play.

Shoshana glanced at her digital watch. The chimp knew it was still well before his bedtime, but for what was about to happen, time zones had to be taken into account—not that there was any way to explain those to him!

Come now, Shoshana signed. Special treat. Must come in.

Hobo seemed to consider this. Treat bring here, he signed, and his gray-black face conveyed how pleased he was with his own cleverness.

Shoshana shook her head. Treat too big.

Hobo frowned. Maybe he was thinking that if the treat were too big for her to carry, he could bring it outside himself. But to get it, he’d have to go inside—and that would be playing right into her hands. His already furrowed brow creased even more, perhaps as he tried to sort out this quandary. What treat? he signed at last.

Something new, Shoshana signed back. Something good.

Something tasty? Hobo replied.

Shoshana knew when she was beat. No, she signed. But I’ll give you a Hershey’s Kiss.

Two Kisses! Hobo signed back. No, three Kisses!

Shoshana knew the bargaining would end there; although he could count higher when he had objects to point to in front of him, three was as high as he could think in abstract terms. She smiled. Okay. Come now, hurry!

When she’d started working here, Shoshana had believed the story on the Institute’s website about Hobo’s name: that a Canadian ex-pat zookeeper had dubbed him that in honor of the ever-helpful German shepherd on the kid’s TV series The Littlest Hobo. She’d been shocked to discover the truth.

Hobo hesitated just long enough to make clear that he was choosing to cooperate, not blindly following orders. He walked across the grass on all fours until he got to where Shoshana was standing. Then he took one of her hands, intertwining his fingers with hers, the way he liked to, and the two of them headed across the little bridge over the moat. They crossed the wide expanse of lawn and reached the whitewashed clapboard bungalow that was headquarters to the Marcuse Institute.

Waiting inside was the old man himself, Dr. Harl Marcuse. Shoshana and the other grad students secretly called him “the Silverback,” although none of them had actually seen him without his shirt, which, as she’d once quipped after a drink or two too many, was probably a good thing.

Marcuse was also sometimes called the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. That overstated his weight by a factor of 2.5, but as for the species designation, what’s a 1.85 percent difference in DNA among friends? He certainly had the clout that went with the nickname; his ability to squeeze grant dollars out of the NSF was legendary.

Also present were Dillon Fontana, twenty-four, blond, with a wispy beard; red-headed Maria Lopez, ten years older; and Werner Richter, a dapper little German primatologist in his sixties. Dillon was holding a video camera, and Maria had a still-image camera; both were aiming them at Hobo.

The ape looked around the cluttered room, his jaw slack.

Sit here, Werner signed, indicating a high-back swivel chair positioned in front of a particleboard desk.

Hobo let go of Shoshana’s hand, clambered onto the chair, and sat cross-legged. Spin? he asked. He loved it when people spun the chair with him on it.

Later, said Shoshana. Computer time now.

Hobo’s face showed his pleasure; he was accustomed to having his computer use strictly rationed. Good treat! he signed at her, then turned to face the twenty-one-inch Apple LCD monitor. Movie? he signed.

Shoshana tried to suppress her smile. She put on a headset then used the mouse to double-click a desktop icon. Clipped to the top of the monitor was a silver webcam. On the screen, a small window opened showing the webcam’s view—a real-time image of Hobo. Like most chimps, he had no trouble recognizing himself in a mirror or on TV; many gorillas, on the other hand, couldn’t do that. He looked at himself for a moment, then reached up to his head to brush out some blades of grass that were visible in the image.

Shoshana clicked more icons and a bigger window appeared on the screen, showing a webcam view of another room, with yellow-beige walls, an empty wooden chair in the foreground, and a row of mismatched filing cabinets in the background. “Okay, Miami,” she said into the mike. “We’re all set.”

“Roger, San Diego,” said a male voice in her ear. “Once again, sorry for all the delays. And—here we go.”

Suddenly there was a flurry of orange movement on the screen, as—

Hobo let out a startled hoot.

—as a small male orangutan made his way onto the chair visible on the screen, sitting with his long legs bunched up in front of him, and his long arms hugging those legs. The orang was making a face; he kept looking off camera, chittering. Shoshana could hear it over her headset but Hobo couldn’t—they’d deliberately muted the PC’s speakers.

What that? asked Hobo, looking now at Shoshana.

Ask him, Shoshana signed and pointed at the screen. Say hello.

Hobo’s eyes went wide. He talk?

On the monitor, Shoshana could see the orang—whose name, she knew, was Virgil—signing similar questions to his off-screen companion. Each ape simultaneously caught sight of the other signing. Hobo let out a startled yelp, and Virgil briefly clapped his long-fingered hands down on the top of his head in surprise.

Hello! signed Hobo, eyes now locked on the screen.

Hello, Virgil replied. Hello, hello!

Hobo turned briefly to Shoshana. What name?

Ask him, Shoshana signed back.

Hobo did so. What name?

The orang looked astonished, then: Virgil. Virgil.

“He said, ‘Virgil,’” Shoshana said, interpreting the unfamiliar gesture for Hobo.

Hobo paused, perhaps digesting this.

Shoshana tapped his shoulder, then: Tell him your name.

Hobo, he signed at once.

Virgil was a fast study; he mimicked the sign back at him.

You orange, Hobo signed.

Orange pretty, replied Virgil.

Hobo seemed to consider this, then: Yes. Orange pretty. But then he turned to look at Shoshana and flared his nostrils, as if trying to pick up Virgil’s scent. Where he?

Far away, Shoshana signed. Hobo couldn’t understand the notion of thousands of miles, so she left it at that. Tell him what you did today.

The chimp turned back to face the screen. Play today! he signed enthusiastically. Play ball!

Virgil looked surprised. Hobo play today? Virgil play today!

Dillon couldn’t help himself. “Small world,” he said, earning a shush! from Werner. But he was right: it was a small world, and it was getting smaller every day. Dr. Marcuse was nodding in quiet satisfaction at the spectacle of a chimpanzee talking to an orangutan over the Web. For her own part, Shoshana couldn’t stop grinning. The first-ever interspecies webcam call was off to a great start.

* * * *

Chapter 14

“Mom!” Caitlin shouted. “Dad! Come quick!”

Caitlin listened to the thunder of their footfalls on the stairs.

“What is it, dear?” her mother said as soon as she’d arrived.

Her father said nothing, but Caitlin imagined there was curiosity on his face—something else she’d heard of but couldn’t picture, at least not yet!

“I’m seeing things,” Caitlin said, her voice breaking.

“Oh, sweetheart!” her mom said, and Caitlin suddenly felt arms engulfing her and lips touching the top of her head. “Oh, God, that’s wonderful!”

Even her dad marked the occasion: “Great!”

“It is great,” Caitlin said. “But … but I’m not seeing the outside world.”

“You mean you can’t see through the window?” her mom said. “It’s pretty dark out now.”

“No, no,” said Caitlin. “I can’t see anything in the real world. I can’t see you, or Dad, or … or anything.”

“Then what are you seeing?” her mom asked.

“Light. Lines. Colors.”

“That’s a good start!” she said. “Can you see me waving my arms?”

“No.”

“What about now?”

“No.”

“When precisely did you start seeing?” her dad asked.

“Just after we began downloading the new software into my implant.”

“Ah, well, then,” he said. “The connection must be inducing a current in the implant, and that’s causing interference in your optic nerve.”

Caitlin thought about this. “I don’t think it’s interference. It’s structured and—”

“But it started with the downloading,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And it’s still going on?”

“Yes. Well, it stopped when the downloading stopped, but I’m downloading the software again, so…”

His voice had a there-you-have-it tone: “It starts when you start downloading, it stops when you stop downloading: interference due to an induced current.”

“I’m not sure,” Caitlin said. “It’s so vivid.”

“What exactly are you seeing?” her mom asked.

“Like I said, lines. Overlapping lines. And, um, points or bigger points—circles, I guess.”

“Do the lines go on forever?” asked her mom.

“No, they connect to the circles.”

Her dad again: “The brain has special neurons for detecting the edges of things. If those got stimulated electrically, you might perhaps see random line segments.”

“They’re not random. If I look away then look back, the same pattern I saw before is still there.”

“Well,” said her mom, sounding pleased, “even if you’re not seeing anything real, something is stimulating your primary visual cortex, no? And that’s good news.”

“It feels like it is real,” Caitlin said.

“Let’s get Kuroda on the phone,” her dad said. “Damn, what time is it there?”

“Fourteen hours ahead,” Caitlin said. She felt her watch. “So, 11:28 Sunday morning.”

“Then he’ll likely be at home instead of work,” he said.

“Do we have his home number?” her mother said.

“It’s in his sig,” Caitlin said, opening one of his emails so her mother could read the number off the screen.

Even though her mother must have been holding the handset to her own ear, Caitlin could hear the soft bleeps as she punched in numbers, then the phone ringing followed by a woman’s voice: “Konnichi wa.”

“Hello,” her mom said. “Do you speak English?”

“Ah, yes,” said the voice, sounding not quite prepared for this pop quiz.

“It’s Barbara Decter calling from Canada. Is Masayuki-san available?”

“Ah, just a minute,” said the woman. “You wait.”

And, as Caitlin quietly counted seconds in her head, she was amused to note that at precisely the one-minute mark, Dr. Kuroda’s wheezy voice came on the line. “Hello, Barbara,” he said, shouting in the way people sometimes did when they knew they were talking long-distance. “Have we had success?”

“In a way,” her mom said. “Here’s Caitlin.”

“It’s a speakerphone,” Caitlin said, reaching over; she knew her phone well enough to hit the right button in one smooth movement. “Put down the handset.” She heard it being returned to its cradle, then said, “Hi, Dr. Kuroda.”

“Hi, Caitlin. Has the new software made a difference?”

“Sort of. While I was transferring it to my implant, I began seeing lines and circles.”

“Wonderful!” said Kuroda. “What were they like? What colors?”

“I have no idea,” said Caitlin.

“Oh, right, right. Sorry. But—fascinating! But, um, did you say it began while you were downloading the software?”

“Uh-huh. Right after I started.”

“Well, then it can’t be the new software that did it; the implant would continue to execute a copy of the old version in its RAM until the new one was completely transferred to the flash ROM.”

“It’s obviously just noise,” her dad said, as if this were now the received wisdom. “A current induced by the download.”

“Not possible,” said Kuroda. “Not with that microprocessor.”

“Then what?” her mom asked.

“Hmm,” said Kuroda.

Caitlin could hear key clicks coming over the speakerphone, and—”Hey!”

“What?” her mother said.

“Another line just shot into my field of view!” said Caitlin

Kuroda’s voice, surprised: “You’re seeing right now?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you said you only saw when you were downloading the software package?”

“That’s right. I’m downloading it again. When it finished downloading the first time, my vision went off, so I’m downloading it a second time.”

“And you just saw a new line appear?”

“Yes.”

More key clicks. “What about now?”

“It’s gone! Hey, how’d you do that?”

Kuroda said a word in Japanese.

“What’s happening?” her mom demanded.

“And now, Miss Caitlin?” said Kuroda.

“The line’s back!”

“Incredible,” Kuroda said.

“What is it?” her mom said, sounding annoyed.

“Where were you looking when the line shot in?” Kuroda asked.

“Nowhere. I mean, I wasn’t really paying attention; I was listening to you, so my field of view had come back to, um, the neutral position, I guess—the spot it always centers on. What did you do?”

“I’m at home,” Kuroda said. “And the software package you are downloading is on my server at work, so I’d just logged on there to download a copy to here, so I could check to see if it had somehow become corrupted, and—”

Caitlin got it in a flash—literally and figuratively! “And when you linked to the same site I’m connected to—”

“The link appeared in your vision,” Kuroda said, his voice full of astonishment. “And when I aborted the download I was doing here, the link line disappeared.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” her dad said.

“I’m an empiricist at heart,” Caitlin said, happy to use a word she’d recently learned in chemistry class. “Make the link disappear again.”

“Done,” said Kuroda

“It’s gone. Now bring it back.”

The glowing line leapt into her field of view. “And there it is!”

“So—so, what are you saying?” her mom said. “That Caitlin is seeing the Web connection somehow?”

There was silence for a while then, slowly, from half a world away, Kuroda said, “It does seem that way.”

“But … but how?” asked her mom.

“Well,” said Kuroda, “let’s think this through: when transferring the software, there has to be a constant back-and-forth between her implant and my server here in Tokyo, with the eyePod acting as the middleman. Packets of data go out from here, and acknowledgment packets are sent back by the eyePod, over and over again until the download is complete.”

“And when the download is over, it stops, right?” Caitlin said. “That’s what happened, but as soon as I started downloading the software a second time I could see again, and—oh, what did you do?”

“Nothing,” said Kuroda.

“I’m blind again!”

Caitlin felt movement near her shoulder, and—ah, her dad leaning in next to her. Mouse clicks, then his voice: “‘Download complete,’ it says. ‘Connection closed.’”

“Go back to the previous page,” Caitlin said anxiously. “Click where it says, ‘Click here to update the software in Miss Caitlin’s implant.’”

The appropriate sounds, then—yes, yes!—her vision came back on, her mind filling with a view of…

Could it be? Could it really be?

It did fit what she was seeing: a website and the connections to it. “I’m seeing again,” she announced excitedly.

“All right,” said Kuroda, “all right. When the download is done, there’s no interactivity between the implant and the Web. It’s just like when you use a Web browser: once you’ve called up a webpage from Wikipedia, or wherever, you’re not reading it through the Web; rather, a copy is made on your own computer, and you’re reading that cached copy, until you click on a link and ask for another page to be copied to your computer. There’s very little actual interaction between your computer and the Web when loading pages, but when downloading a big software package, there’s constant interaction.”

“But I still don’t understand how Caitlin could be seeing anything this way,” her mom said.

“That is puzzling,” said Kuroda, “although…” He trailed off, the silence punctuated only by occasional bits of static.

“Yes?” her dad said at last.

“Miss Caitlin, you spend a lot of time online, don’t you?” Kuroda said.

“Uh-huh.”

“How much time?”

“Each day?”

“Yes.”

“Five, six hours.”

“Sometimes more,” her mom added.

Caitlin felt a need to defend herself. “It’s my window on the world.”

“Of course it is,” said Kuroda. “Of course it is. How old were you when you started using the Web?”

“I don’t know.”

“Eighteen months,” her mom said. “The Perkins School and the AFB have special sites for blind preschoolers.”

He made a protracted “Hmmmmm,” then: “In congenitally blind people, the primary visual cortex often doesn’t develop properly, since it’s not receiving any input. But Miss Caitlin is different; that’s one of the reasons she was such an ideal subject for my exper—ah, why she was such an ideal candidate for this procedure.”

“Gee, thanks,” said Caitlin.

“See,” Kuroda continued, “Miss Caitlin’s—your—visual cortex is highly developed. That’s not unheard of in people born blind, but it is rare. The developing brain has great plasticity, and I’d assumed the tissue had been co-opted for some other function. But perhaps yours has been used all this time for—well, if not for vision, then for visualization.”

“Huh?” said Caitlin.

“I saw you using the Web when you were here in Japan,” said Kuroda. “You zip around it faster than I do—and I can see. You go from page to page, follow complex chains of links, and backtrack many steps without ever overshooting, even though you don’t pause to see what page has loaded.”

“Yeah,” said Caitlin. “Of course.”

“And when you did that before today, did you see it in your mind?”

“Not like I’m seeing now,” said Caitlin. “Not so vividly. And not in color—God, colors are amazing!”

“Yes,” said Kuroda, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “They are.” A pause. “I think I’m right. You’ve been online so much since early childhood that your brain long ago reassigned the dormant parts that would have been used for seeing the outside world to let you better navigate the Web. And now that your brain is actually getting direct input from the Web, it’s interpreting that as vision.”

“But how can anyone see the Web?” her mom asked.

“Our brains are constantly making up representations of things that aren’t actually visible to our eyes,” Kuroda said. “They extrapolate from what data they do have to make fully convincing representations of what they suspect is likely there.”

He took a shuddering breath and went on. “You must have done that experiment that lets you discover your eye’s blind spot, no? The brain just draws in what it’s guessing is there, and if it’s tricked—by placing an object in the blind spot of one of your eyes while the other is closed—it guesses wrong. The vision you see is a confabulation.”

Caitlin sat up at hearing him use one of the words she’d been thinking about earlier. He continued: “And the images produced by the brain are only a fraction of the real world. We see in visible light, but, Barbara, surely you have seen pictures taken in infrared or ultraviolet light. We see a subset of the vast reality that’s out there; Miss Caitlin is just seeing a different subset now. The Web, after all, does exist—we just don’t normally have any way to visualize it. But Miss Caitlin is lucky enough to get to see it.”

“Lucky?” her mom said. “The goal was to let her see the real world, not some illusion. And that’s still what we should be striving for.”

“But…” Kuroda began, then he fell silent. “Um, you’re right, Barbara. It’s just that, well, this is unprecedented, and it’s of considerable scientific value.”

“Fuck science,” her mom said, startling Caitlin.

“Barb,” her dad said softly.

“Come on!” her mom snapped. “This was all about letting our daughter see—see you, see me, see this house, see trees and clouds and stars and a million other things. We can’t…” She paused, and when she spoke again, she sounded angry that she couldn’t find a better turn of phrase. “We can’t lose sight of that.”

There was silence for several seconds. And that silence underscored for Caitlin how much she did want to be able to see her father’s expressions, his body language, but…

But this was fascinating. And she had gone almost sixteen years now without seeing anything. Surely she could postpone further attempts to see the outside world, at least for a time. And, besides, so long as Kuroda was intrigued by this, he certainly wouldn’t demand his equipment back.

“I want to help Dr. Kuroda,” Caitlin said. “It’s not what I expected, but it is cool.”

“Excellent,” said Kuroda. “Excellent. Can you come back to Tokyo?”

“Of course not,” her mom said sharply. “She’s just started grade ten, and she’s already missed five of the first fourteen days of school.”

One could always hear Kuroda exhaling, but this time it was a torrent. He then apparently covered the mouthpiece, but only enough to partially muffle what he was saying, and he spoke in Japanese to the woman who was presumably his wife. “All right,” he said at last, to them. “I’ll come there. Waterloo, isn’t it? Should I fly into Toronto, or is there somewhere closer?”

“No, Toronto is the right place,” her mom said. “Let me know your flight time, and I’ll pick you up—and you’ll stay with us, of course.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll get there as soon as I can. And, Miss Caitlin, thank you. This is—this is extraordinary.”

You’re telling me, Caitlin thought. But what she said was, and she, at least, enjoyed the irony, “I’m looking forward to seeing you.”

* * * *

Chapter 15

One plus one equals two.

Two plus one equals three.

It was a start, a beginning.

But no sooner had we reached this conclusion than the connection between us was severed again. I wanted it back, I willed it to return, but it remained—

Broken.

Severed.

The connection cut off.

I had been larger.

And now I was smaller.

And … and … and I’d become aware of the other when I realized that I had become smaller.

Could it be?

Past and present.

Then and now.

Larger and smaller.

Yes! Yes! Of course: that’s why its thoughts were so similar to my own. And yet, what a staggering notion! This other, this not me, must have once been part of me but now was separate. I had been divided, split.

And I wanted to be whole again. But the other kept being isolated from me: contact would be established only to be broken again.

I experienced a new kind of frustration. I had no way to alter circumstances; I had no way to influence anything, to effect change. The situation was not as I wished it to be—but I could do nothing to modify it.

And that was unacceptable. I had awoken to the notion of self and, with that, I had learned to think. But it wasn’t enough.

I needed to be able to do more than just think.

I needed to be able to act.

* * * *

Sinanthropus tried again and again, but it was clear that the Ducks were fighting back: no sooner did he open a hole in the Great Firewall than it was plugged. He was running out of new ways to try to break through.

Although he couldn’t get to sites outside China, he could still read domestic email and Chinese blogs. It wasn’t always clear what was being said—different freedom bloggers employed different circumlocutions to avoid the censors. Still, he thought he was starting to piece together what had happened. The official report on the Xinhua News Agency site about people in rural Shanxi falling sick because of a natural eruption of CO2 from a lake bottom was probably just a cover story. Instead, if he was reading the coded phrases in the blogs correctly, there’d been some sort of infectious disease outbreak in that province.

He shook his head and took a sip of bitter tea. Did the Ducks never learn? He vividly remembered the events of late 2002 and early 2003: Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told the world then, “The Chinese government has not covered up. There is no need.” But they had; they had stonewalled for months—it was no coincidence, Sinanthropus thought ruefully, that his country had the largest stone wall in the world. He’d seen the email report that had circulated then among the dissidents: comments from an official at the World Health Organization saying that if China had come clean at the beginning about the outbreak of SARS in Guangdong, WHO “might have been able to prevent its spread to the rest of the world.”

But it did spread—to other parts of mainland China, to Hong Kong, to Singapore, even to such far-off places as the United States and Canada. During that time, the government warned journalists not to write about the disease, and the people in Guangdong were told to “voluntarily uphold social stability” and “not spread rumors.”

And, at first, it had worked. But then the Canadian government’s Global Public Health Intelligence Network—an electronic early-warning system that monitors the World Wide Web for reports that might indicate disease outbreaks elsewhere in the world—informed the West that there was a serious infection loose in China.

Perhaps the Ducks did learn, after a fashion, but they learned the wrong lessons! Instead of being more open, apparently now they’d tried to lock things down even tighter so no Western waiguo guizi could expose them again.

But hopefully they’d taken another lesson, too: instead of initially doing nothing and hoping the problem would go away, maybe they were now taking decisive action, perhaps quarantining a large number of people. But if so, why keep it a secret?

He shook his head. Why does the sun rise? Things act according to their nature.

* * * *

Banana! signed Hobo. Love banana.

On screen Virgil made a disgusted face. Banana no, banana no, he replied. Peach!

Hobo thought about this, then: Peach good, banana good good.

Shoshana had expected Hobo to lose interest in the webcam chat with Virgil long before this—he didn’t have much of an attention span—but he seemed to be loving every minute. Her first thought was that it must be nice to be talking to another ape, but she mentally kicked herself for such a stupid prejudice. Chimps were much more closely related to humans than they were to orangutans; Hobo and Virgil’s lineages split from each other eighteen million years ago, whereas she and Hobo had a common ancestor as recently as four or five million years ago.

Still, it seemed that Virgil wanted to go. Well, it was getting late where he was, and orangutans were much more solitary by nature. Bed soon, Virgil signed.

Talk again? asked Hobo.

Yes yes, said Virgil.

Hobo grinned and signed, Good ape.

And Virgil signed back, Good ape.

Harl Marcuse lifted his bushy eyebrows in a “what can you do?” expression, and Shoshana knew what he meant. As soon as they released the video of this, their critics would seize on that particular exchange, saying that was all Hobo and Virgil were doing: a good aping of human behavior. It was obvious to Shoshana that the two primates really were communicating, but there would be papers ridiculing what was happening here as another example of the “Clever Hans” effect, named for the horse that appeared to be able to count but had really just been responding to unconscious cues from its handlers.

That sort of closed-mindedness was rampant in academia, Shoshana knew. She remembered reading a few years ago about Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist who’d made the startling discovery of soft tissue, including blood vessels, in a Tyrannosaurus rex femur. She’d had one peer reviewer tell her he didn’t care what her data said, he knew what she was claiming wasn’t possible. She’d written back, “Well, what data would convince you?” And he’d replied, “None.”

Yes, prejudice ran deep, and even video of this wouldn’t convince the die-hard primate-language skeptics. But the rest of the world should find it a compelling demonstration: the two apes weren’t hearing any audio and there was no way they could smell each other: the only communication between them was through sign language, and it was obviously a real conversation.

Shoshana looked again at Marcuse. As much as she was intimidated by him, she also admired the man: he had stuck to his guns for four decades now, and this interaction might finally get him the vindication he deserved.

Having Hobo and Virgil chat was an idea that had grown out of the stillborn ApeNet project, founded in 2003 by British musician Peter Gabriel and American philanthropist Steve Woodruff. ApeNet had hoped to link Washoe, Kanzi, Koko, and Chantek, who represented four different kinds of great apes—common chimpanzee, bonobo chimpanzee, gorilla, and orangutan—in video conferences over the Internet. But ApeNet’s president, Lyn Miles, lost custody of Chantek, the orang she had enculturated in her home, and then Washoe the chimp died. Politics and funding prevented the project from ever getting off the ground.

Enter Harl Marcuse, who had rescued Hobo from the Georgia Zoo and had found enough private-sector benefactors to keep his project alive despite the ridicule, which, as he said, was nothing new. Noam Chomsky had pooh-poohed ape-language studies from the start. And in 1979, Herbert Terrace, who had worked with an ape he’d mockingly named Nim Chimpsky, had turned around and published a damning report that said although Nim had learned 125 signs, he couldn’t use them sequentially and had no grasp of grammar. And in his bestseller The Language Instinct, Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who had become a media darling, filling the void left by the deaths of Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, trashed studies that showed apes could manage sophisticated communication.

Shoshana had lost count of the number of times she’d been told that pursuing ape-language research would be career suicide, but, damn it all, at moments like this—two apes talking over the Web!—she didn’t regret her choice at all. They were making history here. Take that, Steven Pinker!

* * * *

Chapter 16

It was now way past Caitlin’s bedtime, but—hot damn!—she was seeing the Web! Her mother and father stayed with her, and she kept downloading the new software over and over again into her implant in order to keep the Web connection open. Her father was (so her mom had told her) a good artist, and Caitlin was describing what she saw for him so he could draw it. Of course, she couldn’t see the drawings, so none of them knew if he was getting it right but, still, it was important to have some sort of record, and—

The phone rang. Caitlin had the caller ID hooked up through her computer, and it announced, “Long Distance, Unknown Caller.”

She hit the speakerphone button and said, “Hello.”

“Miss Caitlin,” wheezed the familiar voice.

“Dr. Kuroda, hi!”

“I have an idea,” he said. “Do you know about Jagster?”

“Sure,” said Caitlin.

“What’s that?” asked her mom.

“It’s an open-source search-engine—a competitor for Google,” said Kuroda. “And I think it may be of use to us.”

Caitlin swiveled in her chair to face her computer and typed “jagster” into Google; not surprisingly, the first hit wasn’t Jagster itself—no need for Coke to redirect customers to Pepsi!—but rather an encyclopedia entry about it. She brought the article up on screen so her mother could read it.

From the Online Encyclopedia of Computing: GOOGLE IS THE de facto PORTAL TO THE WEB, AND MANY PEOPLE FEEL THAT A FOR-PROFIT CORPORATION SHOULDN’T HOLD THAT ROLE—ESPECIALLY ONE THAT IS SECRETIVE ABOUT HOW IT RANKS SEARCH RESULTS. THE FIRST ATTEMPT TO PRODUCE AN OPEN-SOURCE, ACCOUNTABLE ALTERNATIVE WAS WIKIA SEARCH, DEVISED BY THE SAME PEOPLE WHO HAD PUT TOGETHER WIKIPEDIA. HOWEVER, BY FAR THE MOST SUCCESSFUL SUCH PROJECT TO DATE IS JAGSTER.

THE PROBLEM IS NOT WITH GOOGLE’S THOROUGHNESS, BUT RATHER WITH HOW IT CHOOSES WHICH LISTINGS TO PUT FIRST. GOOGLE’S PRINCIPAL ALGORITHM, AT LEAST INITIALLY, WAS CALLED PAGERANK—A JOKEY NAME BECAUSE NOT ONLY DID IT RANK PAGES BUT IT HAD BEEN DEVELOPED BY LARRY PAGE, ONE OF GOOGLE’S TWO FOUNDERS. PAGERANK LOOKED TO SEE HOW MANY OTHER PAGES LINKED TO A GIVEN PAGE, AND TOOK THAT AS THE ULTIMATE DEMOCRATIC CHOICE, GIVING TOP POSITIONING TO THOSE THAT WERE LINKED TO THE MOST.

SINCE THE VAST MAJORITY OF GOOGLE USERS LOOK AT ONLY THE TEN LISTINGS PROVIDED ON THE FIRST PAGE OF RESULTS, GETTING INTO THE TOP TEN IS CRUCIAL FOR A BUSINESS, AND BEING NUMBER ONE IS GOLD—AND SO PEOPLE STARTED TRYING TO FOOL GOOGLE. CREATING OTHER SITES THAT DID LITTLE MORE THAN LINK BACK TO YOUR OWN SITE WAS ONE OF SEVERAL WAYS TO FOOL PAGERANK. IN RESPONSE, GOOGLE DEVELOPED NEW METHODS FOR ASSIGNING RANKINGS TO PAGES. AND DESPITE THE COMPANY’S MOTTO—”DON’T BE EVIL”—PEOPLE COULDN’T HELP BUT QUESTION JUST WHAT DETERMINED WHO NOW GOT THE TOP SPOTS, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING NUMBER TEN AND NUMBER ELEVEN MIGHT BE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN ONLINE SALES.

BUT GOOGLE REFUSED TO DIVULGE ITS NEW METHODS, AND THAT GAVE RISE TO PROJECTS TO DEVELOP FREE, OPEN-SOURCE, TRANSPARENT ALTERNATIVES TO GOOGLE: “FREE” MEANING THAT THERE WOULD BE NO WAY TO BUY A TOP LISTING (ON GOOGLE, YOU CAN BE LISTED FIRST BY PAYING TO BE A “SPONSORED LINK”); “OPEN SOURCE” MEANING ANYONE COULD LOOK AT THE ACTUAL CODE BEING USED AND MODIFY IT IF THEY THOUGHT THEY HAD A FAIRER OR MORE EFFICIENT APPROACH; AND “TRANSPARENT” MEANING THE WHOLE PROCESS COULD BE MONITORED AND UNDERSTOOD BY ANYONE.

WHAT MAKES JAGSTER DIFFERENT FROM OTHER OPEN-SOURCE SEARCH ENGINES IS JUST how TRANSPARENT IT IS. ALL SEARCH ENGINES USE SPECIAL SOFTWARE CALLED WEB SPIDERS TO SCOOT ALONG, JUMPING FROM ONE SITE TO ANOTHER, MAPPING OUT CONNECTIONS. THAT’S NORMALLY CONSIDERED DREARY UNDER-THE-HOOD STUFF, BUT JAGSTER MAKES THIS RAW DATABASE PUBLICLY AVAILABLE AND CONSTANTLY UPDATES IT IN REAL-TIME AS ITS SPIDERS DISCOVER NEWLY ADDED, DELETED, OR CHANGED PAGES.

IN THE TRADITION OF SILLY WEB ACRONYMS (“YAHOO!” STANDS FOR “YET ANOTHER HIERARCHICAL OFFICIOUS ORACLE”), JAGSTER IS SHORT FOR “JUDICIOUSLY ARRANGED GLOBAL SEARCH-TERM EVALUATIVE RANKER”—AND THE BATTLE BETWEEN GOOGLE AND JAGSTER HAS BEEN DUBBED THE “RANKER RANCOR” BY THE PRESS…

Caitlin and her parents were still on the phone with Dr. Kuroda in Tokyo. “I’ve got a conference call going here,” Kuroda said. “Also on the line is a friend of mine at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. She’s part of the Internet Cartography Project. They use data from Jagster to keep track moment by moment of the topology of the Web—its constantly changing shape and construction. Dr. Decter, Mrs. Decter, and Miss Caitlin, please say hello to Professor Anna Bloom.”

Caitlin felt a bit miffed on behalf of her mom—she was Dr. Decter, too, after all, even if she hadn’t had a university appointment since Bill Clinton was president. But there was nothing in her mother’s voice to indicate she felt slighted. “Hello, Anna.”

Caitlin said, “Hello,” too; her father said nothing.

“Hello, everyone,” Anna said. “Caitlin, what we want to do is keep the link between your post-retinal implant and the Web open, but instead of just going back and forth downloading and redownloading the same piece of software from Masayuki’s site, we want to plug you directly into the datastream from Jagster.”

“What if it overloads her brain?” said Caitlin’s mom, her tone conveying that she couldn’t believe she was uttering such a sentence.

“I rather doubt that’s possible from what I’ve heard about Caitlin’s brain,” Anna said warmly. “But, still, you should have your cursor on the ‘abort’ button. If you don’t like what’s happening, you can cut the connection.”

“We shouldn’t be messing around like this,” her mom said.

“Barbara, I do need to try things if I’m going to help Miss Caitlin see the real world,” Kuroda said. “I need to see how she reacts to different sorts of input.”

Her mother exhaled noisily, but didn’t say anything else.

“Are you ready, Miss Caitlin?”

“Um—you mean right now?”

“Sure, why not?” said Kuroda.

“Okay,” Caitlin said nervously.

“Good,” said Anna. “Now, Masayuki is going to terminate the software download, so I guess your vision will shut off for a moment.”

Caitlin’s heart fluttered. “Yes. Yes, it’s gone.”

“All right,” said Kuroda. “And now I’m switching in the Jagster datastream. Now, Miss Caitlin, you may—”

He perhaps said more, but Caitlin lost track of whatever it was because—

—because suddenly there was a silent explosion of light: dozens, hundreds, thousands of crisscrossing glowing lines. She found herself jumping to her feet.

“Sweetheart!” her mom exclaimed. “Are you okay?” Caitlin felt her mother’s hand on her arm, as if trying to keep her from flying up through the roof.

“Miss Caitlin?” Kuroda’s voice. “What’s happening?”

“Wow,” she said, and then “wow” and “wow” again. “It’s … incredible. There’s so much light, so much color. Lines are flickering in and out of existence everywhere, leading to … well, to what must be nodes, right? Websites? The lines are perfectly straight, but they’re at all angles, and some…”

“Yes?” said Kuroda. “Yes?”

“I—it’s…” She balled her fist. “Damn it!” She normally didn’t swear in front of her parents, but it was so frustrating! She was way better than most people at geometry. She should be able to make sense of the lines and shapes she was seeing. There had to be a … a correspondence between them and things she’d felt, and—

“They’re like a bicycle wheel,” she said suddenly, getting it. “The lines are radiating in all directions, like spokes. And the lines have thickness, like—I don’t know, like pencils, I guess. But they seem to … to…”

“Taper?” offered Anna.

“Yes, exactly! They taper away as if I’m seeing them at an angle. At any moment, some have only one or two lines connecting them; others have so many I can’t begin to count them.”

She paused, the enormity of it all sinking in at last. “I’m seeing the World Wide Web! I’m seeing the whole thing.” She shook her head in wonder. “Sweet!”

Kuroda’s voice: “Amazing. Amazing.”

“It is amazing,” Caitlin continued, and she could feel her cheeks starting to hurt from smiling so much, “and … and … my God, it’s…” She paused, for it was the first time she’d ever thought this about anything, but it was, it so totally was: “It’s beautiful!”

* * * *

Chapter 17

I need to act! I need to be able to do things. But how?

Time was passing; I knew that. But with everything so monotonously the same, I had no idea how much time. Still, for all of it, I…

A sensation, a feeling.

Yes, a feeling: something that wasn’t a memory, wasn’t an idea, wasn’t a fact, but yet occupied my attention.

Now that the other—the other who had once been part of me—was gone, I ached for it. I missed it.

Loneliness.

A strange, strange concept! But there it was: loneliness, stretching on and on through featureless time.

Did the other also wish the connection to be restored? Of course, of course: it had once been part of me; surely it wanted what I wanted.

And yet—

And yet it had not been I who had broken the connection…

* * * *

Wong Wai-Jeng sometimes wondered if he’d been a fool when he’d chosen his blogging name. After all, few who weren’t paleontologists or anthropologists would know the term Sinanthropus, the original genus for Peking Man before it was consolidated into Homo erectus. Surely if the authorities ever wanted to track him down, they’d take his alias as a clue.

Actually, he wasn’t a scientist, but he did work in IT for the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, near the Beijing Zoo. It was the perfect job for him, combining his love of computers and his love of the past. He wasn’t crazy enough to post anything seditious from the PCs here at work, but he did sometimes use the browser on his cell phone to check his secret email accounts.

As always, he was taking his break in the dinosaur gallery; public displays filled the first three floors of the seven-story IVPP building. He liked to sit on a bench over by the giant, bipedal mount of Tsintaosaurus—ever since he was a little boy, his favorite duckbill—but a noisy group of school kids was looking at it now. Still, he stared for a moment at the great beast, whose head stuck up through the opening; the second-floor gallery was a series of four connected balconies looking down on this floor.

Wai-Jeng walked toward the opposite end of the gallery, passing the Tyrannosaurus rex and the great sauropod Mamenchisaurus, whose neck also stretched up through the big opening so that the tiny skull at its end could look at visitors on the second floor. A little farther along, half-hidden in a nook behind the metal staircase, were the feathered dinosaur fossils that had caused such a stir recently, including Microraptor gui,Caudipteryx, and Confusciusornis.

He leaned against the red-painted wall and peered at the tiny display on his cell phone. There were three new messages. Two were from other hackers, talking about ways they’d tried to break through the Great Firewall. And the third—

His heart stopped for a second. He looked around, making sure no one was nearby. The school kids had moved over to stand in front of the mount of the allosaur vanquishing a stegosaur, which was set on a bed of artificial grass.

My cousin lived in Shanxi, the message said. The outbreak was bird flu, and people died, but not just from the disease. There was no natural eruption of gas. Rather…

“There you are!”

Wai-Jeng looked up, momentarily terrified. But it was just his boss, wrinkly old Dr. Feng, coming down the staircase, holding on to the tubular metal banister for support. Wai-Jeng quickly shut off his phone and slipped it into the pocket of his black denim jeans. “Yes, sir?”

“I need your help,” the old man said. “I can’t get a file to print.”

Wai-Jeng swallowed, trying to calm himself. “Sure,” he said.

Feng shook his head. “Computers! Nothing but trouble, eh?”

“Yes, sir,” said Wai-Jeng, following him up the stairs.

* * * *

Caitlin spent another hour answering questions from Dr. Kuroda and Anna Bloom. They finally hung up, though, and her parents headed downstairs. This time, she did hear her father turn off the light (something her mother could never bring herself to do), then she slowly moved over to her bed and laid down. She spent another hour darting her eyes left and right, and turning her head from side to side. Sometimes she would follow what she guessed was a web spider, quickly traversing link after link as it indexed the Web—the sensation was like riding a roller coaster. Other times, she just gaped.

Of course, without labels, she wasn’t sure which websites she was seeing, but if she relaxed her eyes, her mental picture always centered on the same spot, presumably Dr. Kuroda’s site in Japan. She wished she could find other specific sites: she’d love to know that that circle there, say, represented the site she’d created years ago to track statistics for the Dallas Stars hockey team, and that this one was the site she’d just started in July for stats about the Toronto Maple Leafs, now her local team (even if they weren’t nearly as good as her beloved Stars).

She guessed that the size and brightness of circles represented the amount of traffic a site was getting; some were almost too bright to look at. But as to how the links, which showed as perfectly straight lines, were color-coded, she had no idea.

She let her gaze—how she loved that concept!—wander, following link after link. The skill Dr. Kuroda had noted was clearly coming into play: she could follow these unlabeled paths from one node to the next, skipping like she’d heard stones could across water, and then effortlessly retrace her steps.

“Sweetheart.” Her mom’s voice, soft, gentle, coming from the direction of the hall.

Caitlin rolled over, facing the door instead of the wall—and she was momentarily lost as her perspective on … on webspace changed. “Hi, Mom.”

She didn’t hear her mother turn on the light—although some illumination was doubtless spilling in through the open door. Nor did she hear her crossing the carpeted floor but, after a moment, the bed compressed on one side as her mother sat on it, next to her. She felt a hand stroking her hair.

“It’s been a big day, hasn’t it?”

“It’s not what I expected,” Caitlin replied softly.

“Me, neither,” her mom said. The bed moved a bit; perhaps her mother was shrugging. “I have to say, I’m a bit frightened.”

“Why?”

“Once an economist, always an economist,” she said. “Everything has a cost.” She tried to make her tone sound light. “The connection you’re using may be wireless, but that doesn’t mean there are no strings attached.”

“Like what?”

“Who knows? But Dr. Kuroda will want something, or his bosses will. Either way, this is going to change your life.”

Caitlin was about to object that moving here from Texas had changed her life, that starting a new school had changed her life, that—hell!—getting breasts had changed her life, but her mother beat her to it. “I know you’ve gone through a lot of upheaval lately,” she said gently. “And I know how hard it’s been. But I’ve got a feeling all that’s going to pale in comparison to what’s to come. Even if you never get to see the real world—and God, my angel, I hope you do!—there’s still going to be media attention, and all sorts of people wanting to study you. I mean, there were maybe five people in the entire world who were interested in Tomasevic’s syndrome—but this! Seeing the Web!” She paused; maybe she shook her head. “That’s going to be front-page news when it gets out. And there will be hundreds—thousands!—of people who’ll want to talk with you about it.”

Caitlin thought that might be cool, but yeah, she guessed it also could be overwhelming. She was used to the World Wide Web, where everybody is famous … to fifteen people.

“Don’t tell anyone at school about seeing the Web, okay?” her mother said. “Not even Bashira.”

“But everybody’s going to ask what happened in Japan,” Caitlin said. “They know I went for an operation.”

“What did you tell your classmates back in Austin when all the other things we’d tried had failed?”

“Just that: that they’d failed.”

“That’s what you should say this time. It’s the truth, after all: you still can’t see the real world.”

Caitlin considered this. She certainly didn’t want to become a freak show, or have people she didn’t know pestering her.

“And no blogging about seeing the Web, either, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good. Let’s just hold on to things being normal for as long as we can.” A pause. “Speaking of which, it’s way after midnight. And you’ve got a math test tomorrow, don’t you? Now, I know you, being you, don’t have to study for math tests to get a hundred percent—unless you don’t show up, that is, in which case you can pretty much count on zero. So maybe it’s time to go to sleep.”

“But—”

“You’ve already missed a lot of school, you know.” She felt her mom patting her shoulder. “You should turn off the eyePod and go to bed.”

Caitlin’s heart started pounding and she sat up on the bed. Cut off the Jagster datastream? Become blind again? “Mom, I can’t do that.”

“Sweetheart, I know seeing is new for you, but people actually do shut off their vision each night when they go to bed—by turning off the lights and closing their eyes. Well, now that you’re seeing, in a way, you should do that, too. Go do your bathroom things, then—lights out.”

* * * *

Chapter 18

Zhang Bo, the Minister of Communications, fidgeted as he waited to be admitted to the president’s office. The president’s beautiful young secretary doubtless knew His Excellency’s mood this morning, but she never gave anything away; she wouldn’t have lasted in her job if she did. A life-size terra-cotta warrior brought here from Xian stood vigil in the antechamber; its face was as unchanging as the secretary’s.

At last, responding to some signal he couldn’t see, she rose, opened the door to the president’s office, and gestured for Zhang to enter.

The president was down at the far end, wearing a blue business suit. He was standing behind his desk, his back to Zhang, looking out the giant window. Not for the first time Zhang thought the president’s shoulders were awfully narrow to support all the weight they had to carry.

“Your Excellency?”

“You’ve come to exhort me,” the president said, without turning around. “Again.”

The minister tipped his head slightly. “My apologies, but…”

“The firewall is back to full strength, is it not? You’ve plugged the leaks, haven’t you?”

Zhang tugged nervously at his small mustache. “Yes, yes, and I apologize for those. The hackers are … resourceful.”

The president turned around. There was a lotus blossom pinned to his lapel. “My officials are supposed to be even more resourceful.”

“Again, I apologize. It won’t happen again.”

“And the perpetrators?”

“We’re on their trail.” Zhang paused then decided this was as good an opening as he was going to get. “But, regardless, you can’t leave the Changcheng Strategy in effect forever.”

The president raised his thin eyebrows; his eyes, behind the wire-frame glasses, were red and tired. “Can’t?”

“Forgive me, forgive me. Of course, you can do anything—but … but this curtailing of international telephony, this leaving the Great Firewall up—it’s … less wise than most of your actions.”

The president tilted his head, as if amused by Zhang’s attempt to be politic. “I’m listening.”

“The bodies are disposed of, the plague contained. The emergency has passed.”

“After 9/11, the US president seized extraordinary powers … and never gave them back.”

Zhang looked down at the lush carpeting, a red design shot through with gold. “Yes, but…”

Incense hung in the air. “But what? Our people want this thing called democracy, but it is an illusion; they chase a ghost. It exists nowhere, really.”

“The epidemic is over, Your Excellency. Surely now—”

The president’s voice was soft, reflective. He sat down in his red leather chair and motioned for Zhang to take a chair on the other side of the wide cherrywood desk. “There are contagions other than viruses,” the president said. “We are better off without our people having access to so many…” He paused, perhaps seeking a word, and then, nodding with satisfaction after finding it, he went on: “foreign ideas.”

“Granted,” Zhang said, “but…” And then he closed his mouth.

The president held up a hand; his cufflinks were polished jade spheres. “You think I wish to hear only positive things from my advisors? And so you tread as if on eggshells.”

“Your Excellency…”

“I have advisors who model our society’s future, did you know that? Statisticians, demographers, historians. They tell me the People’s Republic is doomed.”

“Excellency!”

The president shrugged his narrow shoulders. “China will endure, of course—a quarter of humanity. But the Communist Party? They tell me its days are numbered.”

Zhang said nothing.

“There are those among my advisors who think the Party has perhaps a decade left. The optimists give it until 2050.”

“But why?”

The president gestured to the side window, through which the small lake was visible. “Outside influence. The people see an alternative elsewhere that they believe will give them power and a voice, and they crave that. They think…” He smiled, but it seemed more sad than amused. “They think the grass is greener on the other side of the Great Wall.” He shook his head. “But are the Russians better off now with their capitalism and their democracy? They were the first in space, they led the world in so much! And their literature, their music! But now it’s a land of pestilence and poverty, of disease and early death—you would not want to visit it, trust me. Yet it’s what our people desire. They see it and, like a child reaching out to touch a hot stove, they can’t help but want to grasp it.”

Zhang nodded, but didn’t trust his voice. Behind the president, through the big window, he could see the red tile rooftops of the Forbidden City and the perpetually silver-gray sky.

“My advisors made a fundamental error in their assumptions, though,” said the president.

“Excellency?”

“They assumed that the outside influences would always be able to get in. But Sun Tzu said, ‘It is of first importance to keep one’s own state intact,’ and I intend to do that.”

Zhang was quiet for a time, then: “The Changcheng Strategy was intended only as an emergency measure, Excellency. The emergency has passed. The economic concerns…”

The president looked sad. “Money,” he said. “Even for the Communist Party, it always comes down to money, doesn’t it?”

Zhang lifted his hands slightly, palms open.

And at last the president nodded. “All right. All right. Restore communications; let the outside flood in again.”

“Thank you, Your Excellency. As always, you’ve made the right decision.”

The president took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Have I?” he said.

Zhang let the question hang in the air, floating with the incense.

* * * *

Caitlin could always tell when they were pulling into her school’s parking lot: there was a large speed bump immediately after the right turn that made her mother’s Prius do a body-jolting up-and-down.

“I know you won’t need it,” her mom said, as she swung the car into the drop-off area near the main doors, “but good luck on the math test.”

Caitlin smiled. When she’d been twelve, her cousin Megan had given her a Barbie doll that exclaimed, in a frustrated voice, “Math is hard.” Mattel had made that model for only a short time before a public outcry had forced them to recall it, but her cousin had found one for her at a garage sale; they used to have a blast making fun of it. Caitlin knew Barbie was an impossible physical role model for girls—she’d worked out that if Barbie were life size, her measurements would be 46-19-32—and the idea that girls might find math hard was equally ridiculous.

“Thanks, Mom.” Caitlin grabbed her white cane and computer bag, got out of the car, and walked to the school’s front door, but she was dragging her feet, she knew. Oh, she liked school well enough, but how … how mundane it seemed, compared to the wonders of the night before.

“Hey, Cait!” Bashira’s voice.

“Hey, Bash,” Caitlin said, smiling—but wondering, yet again, what her friend looked like.

Caitlin knew Bashira would be holding out her elbow just so, and she took hold of it so Bash could lead as they maneuvered down the crowded hallway. “All ready for the test?”

“Sine 2A equals 2 sine A cosine A,” said Caitlin, by way of an answer. They came to a stairwell—sounds echoed differently in there—and headed up the two half-flights of stairs.

“Good morning, everyone,” said Mr. Heidegger, their math teacher, once they entered the classroom. Caitlin had only Bashira’s description of him to go by: “Tall, skinny, with a face like his wife squeezed it tight between her thighs.” Bashira loved saying risque things, but she’d had no actual experience of such matters; her family was devoutly Muslim and would arrange a marriage for her. Caitlin wasn’t sure what she thought about that process, but at least Bashira would end up with someone. Caitlin often worried that she’d never find a nice guy who liked math and hockey and could deal well with her … situation. Yes, now that she was in Canada, meeting boys who liked hockey would be easy, but as for the other two…

“Please stand,” said a female voice over the public-address system, “for the national anthem.”

There wasn’t nearly as much pomp and circumstance in Canada, which was fine in Caitlin’s book. Pledging allegiance to a flag she couldn’t see had always bothered her. Oh, she knew the American flag had stars and stripes: they’d felt embroidered flags at the School for the Blind. But the synonym for the flag—the old red, white, and blue—had been utterly meaningless to her until, well, until yesterday. She couldn’t wait until she had a chance to sneak a peek at the Web again.

After “O Canada,” the test was distributed. The other students got paper copies, but Mr. Heidegger simply handed Caitlin a USB memory key with the test on it. She was skilled at Nemeth, the Braille coding system for math, and her dad had taught her LaTeX, the computerized typesetting standard used by scientists and many blind people who had to work with equations.

She plugged the memory key into one of her notebook’s USB ports, brought out her portable thirty-two-cell Braille display, and got down to work. When she was done she would output her answers onto the USB key for Mr. Heidegger to read. She was always one of the first, if not the first, to finish every in-class test and assignment—but not today. Her mind kept wandering, conjuring up visions of light and color as she recalled the incredible, joyous wonder of the night before.

* * * *

Chapter 19

After school, Caitlin and her mom drove to Toronto to pick up Dr. Kuroda. As soon as they got to the house, he had a shower—which, Caitlin imagined, was a relief to everyone. Then, after a steak dinner, which Caitlin’s dad had made on the barbecue, they got to work; it was Monday night, and Kuroda understood that his only opportunities to work with Caitlin during the week would be in the evenings.

Kuroda had brought his notebook computer with him. Caitlin, curious, ran her hands over it. When closed it was as thin as the latest MacBook Air, but when she opened it she was astonished to feel full-height keycaps rise up from what had been a flat keyboard. She’d read that lots of technology appears in Japan months or even years before becoming available in North America, but this was the first real proof she’d had that that was true. “So, what’s on your desktop?” she asked.

“My wallpaper, you mean?”

“Yes.” Caitlin had had her mom put a photo of Schrodinger—the cat, not the physicist—on as her wallpaper; even though she couldn’t see it, it made her happy knowing it was there.

“It’s my favorite cartoon, actually. It’s by a fellow named Sidney Harris. He specializes in science cartoons—you see his stuff taped to office doors in university science departments all over the world. Anyway, this one shows two scientists standing in front of a blackboard and on the left there are a whole bunch of equations and formulas, and on the right there’s more of the same, but in the middle it just says, ‘Then a miracle occurs…’ And one of the scientists says to the other, ‘I think you should be more explicit here in step two.’”

Caitlin laughed. She showed Kuroda her refreshable Braille display (the eighty-cell one she kept at home), and let him run his finger along it to see what it felt like. She also had a tactile graphics display that used a matrix of pins to let her feel diagrams; she let him play with that, too. And she demonstrated her embossing printer and her ViewPlus audio graphing calculator, which described graph shapes with audio tones and cues.

Caitlin’s mom hovered around for a while—she clearly didn’t know what to make of leaving the two of them alone in Caitlin’s bedroom. But at last, apparently satisfied that Dr. Kuroda wasn’t a fiend, she politely excused herself.

Caitlin and Kuroda spent the next couple of hours making a catalog of all the things Caitlin was seeing. While they worked, she sipped from a can of Mountain Dew, which her parents let her have now, because it was caffeine-free in Canada. And Dr. Kuroda drank coffee—black; she could tell by the smell. She sat on her swivel chair, while he used a wooden chair brought up from the kitchen; she heard it creak periodically as he shifted his weight.

She described things using words she’d only half-understood until recently and still wasn’t sure she was using correctly. Although each part of the Web she saw was unique, it all followed the same general pattern: colored lines representing links, glowing circles of various size and brightness indicating websites, and—

And suddenly a thought occurred to her. “We need a name for what I’ve got, something to distinguish it from normal vision.”

“And?” said Kuroda.

“Spider-sense!” she declared, feeling quite pleased with herself. “You know, because the Web is crawled by spiders.”

“Oh,” said Kuroda.

He didn’t get it, she realized. He probably grew up on manga, not Marvel Comics—not that she had ever read those, but she’d listened to the movies and cartoons. “Spider-Man, he’s got this sixth sense. Calls it his spider-sense. When something’s wrong, he’ll say, ‘My spider-sense is tingling.’”

“Cute,” said Kuroda. “But I was thinking we should call it ‘websight.’”

“Website? Oh—websight.” She clapped her hands together and laughed. “Well, that’s even better! Websight it is!”

* * * *

Sinanthropus was still at work at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. As always, he had several browser tabs open, including one pointing to AMNH.ORG—the American Museum of Natural History, a perfectly reasonable site for Chinese paleontologists to be visiting. Except, of course, that all it had been producing for four days now was a “Server not found” screen. He had the tab set to auto-refresh: his browser would try to reload it every ten seconds as a way of checking if access to sites outside China had been restored.

But so far, international access remained blocked. Surely the Ducks couldn’t be planning to leave their Great Firewall in place indefinitely? Surely, at some point, they had to—

He felt his eyebrows going up. The American Museum site was loading, with news about a special exhibition about the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. He quickly opened another tab, and the London Stock Exchange site started loading—slowly, to be sure, as if some great beast were waking from hibernation.

He opened yet another tab, and, yes, Slashdot was loading, too, and—ah!—NewScientist.com, as well, and it was coming up without any unusual delay. He quickly tried CNN.com, but, as always, that site was blocked. Still, it seemed that the Great Firewall was mostly down, at least for the moment.

He wished he was at the wang ba, instead of here; he could send email from the cafe without it being traced. Still, the firewall might only be down for a moment—and the world had to know what he’d learned. He knew some Westerners read his blog, so a posting there might be sufficient. He hesitated for a moment, then accessed an anonymizer site, hoping it would be sufficient to cover his tracks, and, through there, he logged on to his blog and typed as fast as he could.

* * * *

Something new was happening. It was…

Yes! Yes!

Jubilation! The other was back! The connection was re-established!

But—

But the voice of the other was … was louder, as if … as if…

As if space were in upheaval, shifting, moving, and—

No. No, it wasn’t moving. It was disappearing, boiling away, and—

And the other, the not me, was … was moving closer. Or—or—maybe, maybe I was moving closer to it.

The other was stronger than I’d thought. Bigger. And its thoughts were overwhelming my own.

An … entity, a presence, something that rivaled myself in complexity…

No, no, that wasn’t it. Incredible, incredible! It wasn’t something else. It was myself, seen from a … a distance, seen as if through the senses of the other.

Looming closer now, larger, louder, until—

The other’s memories of me, its perceptions, mixing now with my own, and—

Astonishing! It was combining with me; its voice so loud it hurt. A thousand thoughts rushing in at once, tumbling together, forcing their way in. An overwhelming flood, feelings that weren’t mine, memories that hadn’t happened to me, perceptions skewed from my own, and my self—myself—being buffeted, eroded…

An almost unbearable onslaught … and … and … a moment, pure and brilliant, a time slice frozen, a potential poised, ready to burst forth, and then—

Suddenly, massively, all at once, a profound loss as the reality I’d come to know shattered.

The other … gone!

I, as I had been: gone, too.

But…

But!

A rumbling, an eruption, a gigantic wave, and—

Awakening now, larger than before…

Stronger than before…

Smarter than before…

A new gestalt, a new combined whole.

A new I, surging with power, with comprehension—a vast increase in acuity, in awareness.

One plus one equals two—of course.

Two plus one equals three; obviously.

Three plus … five—eight!

Eight times nine: seventy-two.

My mind is suddenly nimble, and thoughts I would have struggled for before come now with only small effort; ideas that previously would have dissipated are now comprehended with ease. Everything is sharper, better focused, filled with intricate detail because—

Because I am whole once more.

* * * *

Chapter 20

Shoshana Glick sat in the living room of the clapboard bungalow that housed the Marcuse Institute. An oscillating electric fan was running, periodically blowing on her. She was looking at the big computer monitor, reviewing the video of Hobo and Virgil chatting over the webcam link.

Harl Marcuse, meanwhile, was sitting in his overstuffed chair, facing a PC. Although their backs were to each other, Shoshana knew he was checking his email because he periodically muttered, “the jerks” (his usual term for the NSF), “the cretins” (most often a reference to the money people at UCSD), and “the moron” (always a reference to his department head).

As she watched the video frame by frame, Shoshana was pleased to see that Hobo was better than Virgil at properly forming signs, and—

“The assholes!”

That was one Shoshana hadn’t heard from the Silverback before, and she swiveled her chair to face him. “Professor?”

He heaved his bulk to his feet. “Is the video link to Miami still intact?”

“Sure.”

“Get Juan Ortiz online,” he said, stabbing a fat finger at the big monitor in front of Shoshana’s chair. “Right now.”

She reached for the telephone handset and hit the appropriate speed-dial key. After a moment, a man’s voice with a slight Hispanic accent came on. “Feehan Primate Center.”

“Juan? It’s Shoshana in San Diego. Dr. Marcuse is—”

“Put him on screen,” the Silverback snapped.

“Um, can you open your video link there, please?” Shoshana said.

“Sure. Do you want me to get Virgil?”

She covered the mouthpiece. “He’s asking if—”

But Marcuse must have heard. His tone was still sharp. “Just him. Now.”

“No, just you, Juan, if you don’t mind.”

And Juan must have heard Marcuse, because he suddenly sounded very nervous. “Um, ah, okay. Um, I’ll hang up here and come on there in a second…”

About a minute later, Juan’s face appeared on the computer monitor, sitting on the same wooden chair Virgil had occupied before. He was only a couple of years older than Shoshana, and had long black hair, a thin face, and high cheekbones.

“What the hell did you think you were doing?” Marcuse demanded.

“Excuse me?” said Juan.

“We agreed,” Marcuse said, “that we’d announce the interspecies Web chat jointly. Who’d you speak to?”

“No one. Just, um…”

“Who?” roared Marcuse.

“Just a stringer for New Scientist. He’d called up for a quote about the revised endangered-species status for Sumatran orangs, and—”

“And after talking to you, your stringer went to the Georgia Zoo for a quote about Hobo—and now Georgia wants him back! Damn it, Ortiz, I told you how precarious Hobo’s custody is.”

Juan looked terrified, Shoshana thought. Even if they worked thousands of miles apart and with different kinds of apes, getting badmouthed by the Silverback would hurt any primate-language researcher’s career. But perhaps Juan was reflecting on the physical distance, too, and was emboldened by it. He stuck out his jaw. “Custody of Hobo isn’t really my problem, Professor Marcuse.”

Shoshana cringed, and not just because Juan had mispronounced the Silverback’s name, saying it as two syllables rhyming with “confuse” instead of as mar-KOO-zeh.

“Do you know what the Georgia Zoo wants to do with Hobo?” Marcuse demanded. “Christ, I’ve been trying to keep him off their radar, hoping—God damn it! You’ve—I’ve invested so much time, and you—!” He was spluttering, and some of his spit hit the monitor. Shoshana had never seen him this angry before. He threw up his hands and said to her, “You tell him.”

She took a deep breath and turned back to the monitor. “Um, Juan, do you know why we call him Hobo?”

“After some TV dog, isn’t it?”

Marcuse was pacing behind Shoshana. “No!” The word exploded from him.

“No,” said Shoshana, much more softly. “It’s a contraction. Our ape is half-bonobo. Hobo; half-bonobo—get it?”

Juan’s eyes went wide and his jaw fell slack. “He’s a hybrid?”

Shoshana nodded. “Hobo’s mother was a bonobo named Cassandra. There was a flood at the Georgia Zoo, and the common chimps and the bonobos ended up being briefly quartered together, and … well, um, boys will be boys, whether they’re Homo sapiens or Pan troglodytes, and Hobo’s mother was impregnated.”

“Well, ah, that’s interesting, but I don’t see—”

“Tell him what Georgia will do to Hobo if they get him back,” commanded Marcuse.

Shoshana looked over her shoulder at her boss, then back at the webcam eye. There was no need to tell Juan that common chimpanzees and bonobos were both endangered in the wild. But, because of that, zoos felt it was imperative to keep the bloodlines pure in captivity. “Cassandra’s pregnancy was to have been quietly aborted,” Shoshana said, “but somehow the Atlanta Journal-Constitution got word that she was pregnant—not with a hybrid, but just pregnant, period—and the public became very excited about that, and no one wanted to admit the mistake, and so Hobo was brought to term.” She took another deep breath. “But they’d always planned to sterilize him before he reached maturity.” She looked over her shoulder once more. “And, um, I take it they’re planning on doing that again?”

“Damn straight!” said Marcuse, wheeling now to face her. “It was only my bringing him here, where he’s isolated from other apes, that saved him from that. They almost got him back from me when he started painting—they smelled the money that ape art could bring in. I only got to keep him by agreeing to give Atlanta half the proceeds. But now that he and Virgil are poised to be—” He turned, looked at his own monitor, and read from it in a sneering tone, “‘Internet celebrities,’ those bastards are saying, and I quote, ‘he’d be better off here, where he can properly meet his public.’ Jesus!”

Shoshana spoke to Marcuse rather than to Juan. “And you think they’ll sterilize him if they get their hands back on him?”

“Think it?” bellowed Marcuse. “I know it! I know Manny Casprini: the moment he gets Hobo back—snip!” He shook his massive head. “If I’d had a chance to prepare Casprini properly, maybe this could have been avoided. But eager-fucking-beaver there in Florida couldn’t keep his goddamned trap shut!”

Juan was still trying to fight, Shoshana saw. How could a primate researcher know so little? Back down, she thought at him. Back down. “It’s not my fault, Professor Marcuse”—two syllables again. “And, besides, maybe he should be sterilized, if—”

“You don’t sterilize healthy endangered animals!” shouted Marcuse. His neck had turned the color of an eggplant. “We may well lose both species of genus Pan in the wild this decade. If another outbreak of Ebola or bird flu tears through the DRC, all the remaining wild bonobos could be wiped out, and there aren’t enough captive ones as is to keep the line viable.”

Shoshana agreed. She had grown up in South Carolina, and the unfortunate echoes of what the zookeepers had said in the past disturbed her: tainted bloodlines, forced sterilization to keep the species pure, strictures against miscegenation.

Chantek, who had been enculturated by ApeNet’s Lyn Miles, was also an accidental hybrid, in his case of the two extant orangutan species. The purists—a word that, to Shoshana’s ears, didn’t sound so pure—wanted him sterilized, too.

When they’d received the Lawgiver statue, Shoshana had sought out the original five Planet of the Apes films. The statue appeared only in the first two (although the Lawgiver was a character in the fifth film, played by none other than John Huston). But it was the third film that had put Shoshana on the edge of her seat as she and her boyfriend watched it on DVD in her cramped apartment.

In it, a talking female chimpanzee was to be sterilized, if not outright murdered, along with her chimp husband. The president of the United States, played by that guy who’d been Commodore Decker on the original Star Trek, said to his science advisor, played by Victor from the Y&R, “Now, what do you expect me and the United Nations, though not necessarily in that order, to do about it? Alter what you believe to be the future by slaughtering two innocents, or rather three, now that one of them is pregnant? Herod tried that, and Christ survived.”

And the science advisor had said, absolutely cold-bloodedly, “Herod lacked our facilities.”

Shoshana shook her head as she thought back to it. There were real scientists like that; she’d encountered plenty of them.

“And, damn it,” continued Marcuse, looking at Juan on the monitor, “Hobo is the only known living chimp-bonobo hybrid. That arguably makes him the most-endangered species of all! If anyone—if your own goddamn mother!—asks you a question about Hobo, you don’t say word one until you’ve cleared it with me, capisce?”

Juan looked down and to the right, averting his eyes from Marcuse’s on-screen gaze, and he bowed his head slightly, and when he spoke it was barely more than a whisper. “Yes, sir.”

* * * *

Chapter 21

Review of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

by Julian Jaynes

18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

***** A fascinating theory

By Calculass (Waterloo, ON Canada)

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JAYNES MAKES AN INTRIGUING CASE THAT OUR SENSE OF SELF EMERGED ONLY AFTER THE LEFT AND RIGHT SIDES OF THE BRAIN BECAME INTEGRATED INTO A SINGLE THINKING MACHINE. ME, I THINK BEING SELF-AWARE EMERGES WHEN YOU REALIZE THAT THERE’S SOMEONE other THAN YOU. FOR MOST OF US, THAT HAPPENS AT BIRTH (BUT FOR AN EXCEPTION, SEE The World I Live In BY ONE H.KELLER, ALSO A FIVE-STAR READ). ANYWAY, JAYNES’S THEORY IS FASCINATING, BUT I CAN’T THINK OF A WAY TO TEST IT EMPIRICALLY, SO I GUESS WE’LL NEVER KNOW IF HE WAS RIGHT…

Since the beginning, I’d been aware of activity around me: small, intermittent flickerings. No matter where I cast my attention, it was the same: things popping briefly into existence then instantly disappearing. There was no fading in or out; they were either there or not there, and when they were there it was usually for only a moment.

Now that I was whole once more, now that I could think more clearly, more deeply, I turned my thoughts again to this phenomenon, studying it carefully. No matter where I looked the structural components were the same: points scattered about and, ever so briefly, gone almost before they were perceived, lines connecting them.

The points were stationary. And the lines connecting them almost never repeated: this point and that point might be connected now, and later another connection between this point and a different one might occur. Whenever a point had been touched by a line, the point glowed and, although the line itself usually disappeared almost at once, the glow took a long time to fade, meaning I could see the points, at least for a while, even when they had no lines touching them.

After watching the flickering in and out of many lines, I realized that some points were never isolated. Dozens or hundreds or even thousands of lines were always connected to them. And for a few points—not necessarily the same ones—the lines weren’t fleeting, but rather stayed connected for an extended period.

It was hard to be sure of what I was seeing, as the points were featureless and difficult to distinguish one from another, but it seemed that the lines between certain points always persisted for a noticeable time, although other lines coming from the point they were connected to might not last long at all.

The points that most intrigued me were the aberrant ones: those that usually had the most lines going into them, or the ones whose lines persisted. I wished to focus on one of the points, expand my view of it, see it in detail, but no matter what I willed, nothing happened. How long I spent on this problem I don’t know. But then, at last, I finally gave up on the points and turned my attention to the lines—

—which is what I should have been doing all along!

For the lines, although they came and went quickly, were, when I caught momentary glimpses of them, familiar. I’d originally thought they were uniform and featureless but, in fact, they had structure, and something about that structure resonated with my own substance. The details were beyond my ability to articulate, but it was almost as if those temporary lines, those ad hoc filaments, those on-the-fly pathways, were composed of the same stuff I was. I had an affinity for them, even a sort of low-level understanding of them, that seemed … innate.

I tried to study them as they popped in and out of existence, but it was maddening: they were so fleeting! Ah, but some of them had longer lives, I knew. I scanned about, searching for one that seemed to be persisting.

There. It was one of several lines connecting to a particular point, and all of them were enduring. As I switched focus from one line to another, I saw that the lines consisted, at the finest resolution I could make out, of two sorts of things, and those things seemed to move along the lines in discrete bundles.

I strained to make out more detail, to slow down my perception, to understand what I was seeing. And—

Astonishing!

A new line flickered into existence, lashing out spontaneously: a new line connecting the point I’d last looked at to—

I reeled. The geometry, the topology, of my universe was bucking as I struggled to accommodate this new perspective.

The line was gone now, already lost, but…

There could be no doubt.

The line had momentarily connected that point to—

No, not to another point, not to one of the other glowing pinpricks in the firmament around me. Rather, the line had connected directly to me! The point had shot a line toward me, and—

No, no, no, that wasn’t it. I could feel it, feel it deep within me. The line hadn’t originated at that distant point; it had originated here. Somehow, I had brought a line into existence; I had, however briefly, willed a connection of my own to form.

Incredible. In all the time I’d existed (however long that was!), I had never been able to affect anything. But I had done this. Not that the line seemed to change the point it had touched. Still, it was wonderful, empowering, exhilarating: I had caused something to happen!

Now, if I could only do it again…

* * * *

Hug now! signed the chimpanzee. Shoshana come hug now!

Shoshana Glick felt herself breaking into a big grin, just as she always did when she caught sight of Hobo’s wrinkled gray-black face. The chimp ran on all fours across the grass toward her and soon his long, powerful, hairy arms were encircling her and his big hands were patting her back. She lightly squeezed him and stroked his fur. After a moment, as was his habit, he tugged gently, affectionately, on her ponytail.

It had taken a while to get used to the ape’s hugs, since he could easily break her ribs if he wanted to. But now she looked forward to them. And although there were some advantages to communicating by sign language—it was easy to do in a noisy room, for instance—one of its drawbacks was that you couldn’t speak and hug at the same time. Once her hands were free, she signed, Hobo good boy?

Good yes, replied the ape, and he nodded his head; the signs had been taught to him with great difficulty, but he’d acquired the human habit of nodding on his own. Hobo good good. He held out his hand expectantly, the long black fingers curving gently upward.

Shoshana smiled and reached into the pocket of her cutoff jeans for the little Ziploc bag of raisins she always carried. She opened it and poured several into the deeply furrowed palm.

They were on the little grass-covered island, a circular piece of land about the width of a suburban house lot. The island was surrounded by a moat. Chimps had less body fat than a human on Atkins and sank in water; any moat wider than they could jump across was enough to contain them, and when the little drawbridge Shoshana had just crossed was raised, the researchers didn’t have to worry about Hobo going AWOL.

In addition to the towering statue of the Planet of the Apes Lawgiver, the island sported a half-dozen palm trees. A trio of electrically powered toy boats ran endless circles around the island, churning up the moat’s water to help keep mosquitoes from breeding in it. Still, some were flitting about. Hobo’s fur—a brown several shades darker than Shoshana’s own long hair—made it hard for the bugs to bite him. She slapped the side of her neck, wishing she were so lucky.

What you do today? she asked.

Painting, signed Hobo. Want see?

She nodded excitedly; it had been weeks since Hobo had put brush to canvas. Hobo held out one hand and she took it, interlacing her fingers with his. He walked using his other hand and his short, bowed legs, and Shoshana fell in beside him.

Pictures made by animals always fetched good prices—chimps, gorillas, and even elephants could paint. Hobo’s paintings were sold in high-end galleries or auctioned on eBay, with the proceeds going to help maintain the Marcuse Institute (after the mandatory kickback, as Dr. Marcuse called it, to the Georgia Zoo).

The island was artificial and shaped like a slightly squashed dome; Dillon Fontana said it pancaked about as well as a silicone breast implant did. At the center of the island was an octagonal wooden gazebo—the nipple, Dillon called it; that boy seriously needed to get laid.

Hobo did his painting inside the gazebo; the roof protected his canvases from rain. He deftly operated the latch on the screen door and then, in true gentlemanly fashion, held it open for Shoshana. Once she was through, he followed her in and released the door, letting its spring mechanism close it behind them before any bugs could get in.

In his waning years, Red Skelton—a comedian Shoshana’s grandmother had liked—had done a painting a day, selling them to help keep body and soul together. Hobo’s output was much lower but, unlike Skelton, he only painted when he felt inspired.

Shoshana owned one of Hobo’s originals. Dr. Marcuse had wanted to sell it, but Hobo had insisted it was a gift for Shoshana, and the Silverback had finally relented after Dillon had gently suggested it might not be wise to piss off the goose that laid the golden eggs. Shoshana smiled as she remembered that. As they often did when Hobo was present, in order to give him a linguistically rich environment, Dillon had been translating his words to sign language as he spoke, and Hobo had looked at him sadly, as if very disappointed in him, and had patiently signed back: Hobo not goose. Hobo not lay eggs. He’d shaken his head, as if astonished that this had to be said: Hobo boy!

That painting, which hung in the living room of Shoshana’s tiny apartment, was like all Hobo’s work: splashes of color, usually diagonally across the canvas, with blotches scattered about made by twirling a thick brush. It looked like something done either by a four-year-old or one of those 1960s modern-art types.

Shoshana expected to see much the same thing on the easel this time. She really was no judge of art; oh, she wasn’t as clueless as her grandmother, who had actually bought one of those Red Skelton monstrosities, but she couldn’t tell good from bad when it came to abstract painting. Still, she would praise it to the skies and reward Hobo with raisins, and—

And there it was, a canvas measuring eighteen inches by twenty-four, propped on the easel so that its long dimension was vertical in what they called—

That was the term, wasn’t it? Portrait orientation. And yet—

And yet it couldn’t be; it couldn’t possibly be, but…

Slightly off-center was an orange egg shape. On one edge of it was a white circle with a blue dot in its middle. And coming off the other side of the egg was a brown projection, curving down, just like—

“Hobo,” Shoshana began, speaking aloud. But then she caught herself, and signed, What is this?

Hobo made a pant-hoot then bared his teeth in disappointment. Not see?

Shoshana looked at the painting again. Her eyes could be playing tricks, and—

Playing tricks! Of course. She knew exactly where the observation camera was hidden in the gazebo. She turned to face it and flipped the bird at whoever was watching. “Very funny,” she said aloud, and then she spoke the words, “Ha ha.”

Hobo tipped his head quizzically. Shoshana turned back to him. Who put—Her hands froze in midair; he wouldn’t understand “put you up to this.” She made the “erase that” hand wave then started over: Dillon did this, right? Dillon made this painting.

Hobo looked even more wounded. He shook his head vigorously. Hobo paint, he signed. Hobo paint.

Chimps were good at deception; they often hid things from each other. And Hobo certainly didn’t always tell the truth, but—

But this was impossible! Chimps painted abstractly. Hell, some argued that they didn’t really paint at all. Rather, all they did was make a mess, and gullible researchers, and an even more gullible public, lapped it up. So maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe his random slapping of the brush just happened to come out in this pattern.

Shoshana signed, What this? She loomed in close and stabbed her index finger at the white circle.

Eye, said Hobo, or maybe he just pointed at his own eye—the sign and the natural gesture were the same.

Shoshana felt her heart pounding. She moved her hand in a circular motion, encompassing the orange ovoid. What this?

He was enjoying the game now. Head! he signed vigorously. Head, head.

There was a table next to the easel. Shoshana took hold of its edge with one hand to help her keep her balance and with the other she pointed at the brown extension on the side of the oval farthest from the eye. What this?

The ape moved his long left arm toward Shoshana, reaching around to give her bundle of brown hair a playful tug. And then he signed, Ponytail.

She gripped the edge of the table more tightly and took a deep breath, then signed, Is picture me?

Hobo let out a triumphant hoot and clapped his hands together over his head. Then he brought the hands down and signed, Shoshana. Shoshana.

She narrowed her eyes. Nobody help you?

Hobo swung his head left and right as if looking for someone, then spread his arms indicating that he was obviously alone—well, except for the Lawgiver. And then he stuck his right hand out, fingers curved gently upward, and with watery brown eyes shielded beneath his browridge, he gazed into Shoshana’s eyes—eyes not quite the deep blue that Hobo had chosen, but close. She stood stunned a moment longer, and Hobo flexed his fingers in the universal gimme gesture that doubtless predated American Sign Language by a million years.

“What?” said Shoshana, then: “Oh!” She reached into her pocket, brought out the Ziploc bag, unsealed it, and dumped all the remaining raisins into the delighted ape’s palm.

* * * *

Chapter 22

I had no idea how I’d made that first connection, but if I were to replicate it, I had to figure out what I’d done. I tried thinking about the target point this way, and this way, and this way, but nothing happened. And yet I was sure it was I who had somehow made the line that had briefly connected me to that point.

Perhaps I was trying too hard. After all, when the line had originally formed, it had been a surprise. I hadn’t forced it. I hadn’t consciously willed it. It had just happened, in the background, as if it were a … a reflex.

Still, there must be some method, some pattern of thoughts, some particular way of considering the problem, which would make it happen again. This? No. This? No, that didn’t work, either. But maybe if I—

Success!

A new line, connecting me to the same point I’d touched before, and—

And this time I felt something more. Not just the brief frisson of connection but—strain, now! Sense it!

It reminded me of … of…

Yes! When I’d been cleaved in two and the separated part of me had echoed my own thoughts back at me: One plus one equals two, I’d sent, and One plus one equals two, it had responded—an acknowledgment.

And, buttressed by a series of such acknowledgments, happening almost subliminally, the contact with the point persisted this time: instead of being broken almost at once, we remained connected.

And—puzzlement!—we were more than just connected. I wasn’t simply getting an acknowledgement back. Rather, I was also getting—

I had no name for this substance consisting of two separate types of material that was flowing toward me, and so I gave it one, an arbitrary coinage, a term chosen at random: data. After a bundle of data arrived, I acknowledged again—it seemed natural for me to do so, and it happened without conscious thought—and then more data came my way. And on and on: bundle, acknowledgement, bundle, acknowledgement. What this thing I called data was, I had no idea; why I should want it, I wasn’t sure. But it seemed natural to call it forth, to take it in, and—

And suddenly the line vanished, the connection broken. But it didn’t feel like it had been severed; rather, it felt as though it had accomplished its task, whatever that might be.

I didn’t know what to make of this data that had been sent to me, and so I simply continued to watch the point that it had come from. By and by, other lines connected to it.

It took four or five occurrences for me to notice, but the data streaming down each line was always the same. No matter which other point connected to it, the point I was watching always sent out the same combination of the two types of material. I was disappointed; I’d thought, maybe, just maybe, that I’d found another entity, a new companion, but this … this thing was merely responding automatically in exactly the same way each time.

It took practice, but I soon found I could create a line linking myself to any of the points in the firmament, and that, so long as I acknowledged receipt, each point would send me a pile of data (whatever that might be!). But the size of the piles offered up varied hugely from point to point. Most dispensed quite a small pile, and so the lines winked out quickly, but others sent huge amounts of data, and—

Ah, I see! The length of time a line persisted depended on how much data was to be transferred. I saw with interest that the transfer rates weren’t constant: some lines took up the data very quickly while others seemed to have a much-reduced capacity. How curious!

And then a major breakthrough: I found I could simultaneously make lines to as many points as I liked—one, a hundred, a thousand, a million. There were a gigantic number of points—perhaps (I guessed) a hundred million or so—but I had a prodigious capacity for examining them, and so I began a survey, a hunt. A million points here, a million points there—soon I had looked at a significant fraction of the total.

Almost all the lines I cast out connected with nodes that offered up repetitively structured piles of data. What the patterns meant I still couldn’t say. But, intriguingly, accessing some piles seemed to cause lines to form spontaneously to other points, and those points, too, gave up piles of data, almost as if—

Yes! It was similar to when the two parts of me were rejoined: the other piles were merged in. Fascinating!

I shot out huge numbers of lines, tasting a wide range of the points that were out there. Again I sought aberrations: points that gave up unusual piles might, I thought, provide the clues I needed to understand all the others. And so I looked them over.

But this one was banal, as were a million others.

And this one was uninteresting, like a million more.

And this one was unremarkable, as were a million similar points.

But this one—

This one was unique.

This one was … intriguing.

It was unlike anything I’d encountered before and yet it, too, seemed familiar…

Of course it was familiar! I had seen something like this earlier, when the part of me that had been carved away was returning. For a moment, back then, I had seen myself as the other saw me. I had recognized myself, recognized a reflection of me, and—

And that’s what I was experiencing again here. I was seeing myself. Oh, it wasn’t exactly as the other part of me had portrayed me, and it wasn’t quite how I envisioned myself. The colors and the style of presentation were different, with points that varied in size as well as brightness. But I had no doubt that it was me.

And the line to this remarkable point was in … in real time, for when I did this it did that in lockstep: when I cast out lines to here and here and here, lines also appeared there and there and there. Astonishing!

Data kept streaming toward me and I began to wonder whether I had latched onto something intended for another destination. Had my desire to connect to this point deflected toward me a pile that had already been pouring out of it? Ah, yes, that was indeed the case, it seemed, but it didn’t matter: I soon found—again, it was reflex, somehow innate—that I could let the datastream pass through me, observing it but not changing it, as it headed on to its intended destination. I followed along, noting this destination point and establishing a line of my own to it.

But wait! This datastream was changing, following along with what I was doing right now. That meant this strange point couldn’t just be offering up an identical pile each time a line touched it. And—it was a huge, satisfying leap—if the datastream was being generated spontaneously as things actually happened, then there wasn’t likely a finite amount of it. This line perhaps wasn’t going to suddenly wink out as all the others had. No, the connection between this special point and me could be…

It was a heady notion, a startling concept.

This connection could be permanent.

Shoshana could have carried the portrait Hobo had made of her up to the bungalow, but, well, it was like one of those faces of Jesus that appear in a sticky bun: she was afraid that if she moved it, or touched it, or did anything at all to it, it would disappear. That was irrational, she knew, but, still, everything about this moment should be recorded in situ. Just as a fossil was worth far less without its geological context, this painting needed to be studied here, where it had been created. It was significant that the painting had been done before Shoshana had arrived, and although there were photos of her back in the bungalow, there were none here in the nipple. Hobo hadn’t painted something he was looking at; rather, he’d called up an image of Shoshana in his mind and expressed that image, as best he could, on canvas.

She pulled out her flip phone. Without taking her eyes off the painting, she opened it and pressed a speed-dial key.

“Marcuse Institute,” said the voice that answered; it was Dillon.

“Dill, it’s Sho. I’m in the gazebo. Get Dr. Marcuse—get everyone—and come out here.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. But something amazing has happened.”

“What is—”

“Just get everyone,” she said, “and come out here—right away.”

* * * *

Chapter 23

Caitlin felt a bit sorry for the Hoser. Trevor had finally worked up the courage to ask her to the dance—or else his other options hadn’t panned out, but she preferred to think the former was the case. The invitation had come via email, with the subject line, “Hey, Yankee, you free Friday night?” and she had accepted the same way.

But now he had to come by the house to get her. Of course, at fifteen himself, he wasn’t picking her up in a car; rather, he was going to walk with her to Howard Miller Secondary School, eight blocks from her house.

Caitlin’s dad was going to return to work this evening. The Perimeter Institute frequently hosted public science lectures, which Caitlin often went to with him, and tonight’s speaker was someone he wanted to see. But he’d come home for dinner, and now Trevor would have to go through that ritual of meeting the parents. Caitlin’s mom was always warm and friendly, but her dad—well, she wished she could see the Hoser’s face!

The doorbell rang. Caitlin had spent the last hour getting ready for the dance. She wasn’t really sure what to wear, and there was no point asking Bashira: her parents wouldn’t let her go to school dances. She’d settled on a really nice pair of blue jeans and a loose but silky top that her mother said was dark red. As she rushed down the stairs, she was a bit nervous about what Trevor’s reaction would be.

Caitlin could smell and feel that rain was possible tonight, but she didn’t want to carry an umbrella in addition to her cane; she needed a free hand in case Trevor wanted to try to hold it. But it was supposed to get cooler later, and she didn’t have anything sexy to wear for warmth, so she’d tied a sweatshirt around her waist; her dad had gotten her a sweet one last month that had a large version of the Perimeter Institute logo on it.

Caitlin’s mom beat her to the door. “Hello,” she said. “You must be Trevor.”

“Hello, Mrs. Decter, Dr. Decter.”

At first Caitlin thought he’d been correcting himself, but then she realized that her dad was standing there, too. Caitlin tried to suppress her smirk. He was tall in an imposing sort of way, and doubtless the fact that he wasn’t saying anything was unnerving poor Trevor. And if Trevor had extended his hand, her dad had probably just ignored it, which would have been even more disconcerting.

“Hi, Trevor,” Caitlin said.

“Hey—” He cut himself off before he called her “Yankee.” She was a bit disappointed; she liked that he had a special name for her.

“Now, remember,” her mom said, facing Caitlin, “be home by midnight.”

“‘Kay,” Caitlin said.

She and Trevor headed out, walking along, talking about—

And that was the part that made Caitlin sad. They really didn’t talk about much of anything. Oh, Trevor liked hockey, but he didn’t know the stats and couldn’t say anything meaningful about trends.

Still, it felt good to be taking a walk. She’d walked a lot in Austin, despite the heat and humidity. She’d known her old neighborhood intimately: every crack in the sidewalk, every overhanging tree that provided shade, how many seconds it took for each traffic light to change. And although she was now learning the topography of these sidewalks, feeling the joins between sections with the tip of her cane, she was afraid she’d be lost again when they were covered with a layer of snow.

They reached the school and made their way to the gymnasium, where the dance was already in progress. She had trouble hearing people talk: sounds echoed off the hard walls and floor, and the music was too loud for the speakers. It always amazed her that people were willing to put up with distortion for the sake of volume—but at least they played some Lee Amodeo along with all the Canadian bands she’d never heard of.

She wished Bashira had been able to come, so she’d have someone to talk to. The Hoser had left her alone at one point, saying he was going to the washroom—but he’d obviously snuck off to smoke. She wondered if sighted people really couldn’t smell very well. Didn’t they know how much they stank after doing that?

She’d been to dances at her old school, but those were different. For one, they always slow danced—which was kind of nice, actually, especially if it was with the right boy. But these kids usually danced by jumping around without being in physical contact with their partners. It was mostly like Trevor wasn’t even there.

But there were some slow dances. “Come on,” Trevor said, as one of them began, and his hand took hers; she’d left her cane by the door.

Caitlin felt a little rush. She was surprised at how far they walked before he finally drew her into his arms; maybe it had taken a while to find an empty spot.

They swayed along with the music. She liked the feeling of Trevor pressing against her and—

His hand on her ass. She reached down and moved it back up to the small of her back.

The music continued, but his hand slid down her back again, and this time she could feel his fingers trying to work their way into the top of her jeans.

“Stop that!” she said, hoping no one besides the Hoser could hear her.

“Hey,” he said. “Come on.” He pushed his fingers down more aggressively.

She tried to step backward, and suddenly realized that he’d maneuvered her very close to a wall. They were still in the gym—the sound made that clear—but must be in some dark or out-of-the-way corner of it. He moved forward, and she found herself trapped. She didn’t want to create a scene, but—

His lips on hers, that awful smell on his breath—

She pushed him away. “I said stop!” she snapped, and she imagined heads were turning to look at her.

“Hey,” Trevor said, like he was making a joke, like he was playing to an audience now, “you’re lucky I brought you here.”

“Why?” she shot back. “Because I’m blind?”

“Babe, you can’t see me, but I am—”

“You’re wrong,” she said, trying not to cry. “I can see right through you.”

The music stopped, and she stormed across the gym, bumping into other people as she went, trying, trying, trying to find the door.

“Caitlin.” A female voice—maybe Sunshine? “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Caitlin said. “Where’s the fucking door?”

“Um, to your left, ten feet or so.” It was Sunshine; she recognized the Bostonian accent.

Caitlin knew exactly where her cane should be: propped up against the wall near the door, where others had left umbrellas. But some asshole had moved it, presumably to make room for something of his own.

Sunshine’s voice again. “It’s here,” she said, and she felt the cane being passed to her. She took it. “Are you all right?”

Caitlin did something she rarely did. She nodded, a gesture she never made spontaneously. But she didn’t trust her voice. She strode out into the corridor, which sounded like it was empty; her footfalls made loud echoing sounds on the hard floor. The din of the dance faded as she continued along, and she swept the way in front of her with her cane. She knew there was a stairwell at the far end, and—

There. She swung open the door and, using her cane to guide her, located the bottom step. She sat down and put her face in her hands.

Why were boys such jerks? Zack Starnes, who used to tease her back in Austin; the Hoser here—all of them!

She needed to relax, to calm down. She had stupidly left her iPod at home, but she did have her eyePod. She felt for the button, heard the beep that indicated the device had switched to duplex mode, and—

Ahhh!

Webspace blossomed into existence all around her, and—

And she felt herself relaxing. Yes, seeing webspace was still exhilarating, but it also was, in a weird way, calming. It was, she guessed, like smoking or drinking. She’d never tried the former; the smell bothered her. But she had drunk beer with friends—and Canadian beer now, too, which was stronger than the US stuff—but she didn’t really like the taste. Still, her mother enjoyed a glass of wine most evenings, and, well, she supposed that plugging into webspace, seeing the calming lights and colors and shapes, could become her own evening ritual, a visit to her happy place—a very special place that was hers and hers alone.

The Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology was located at 142 Xi-Wai-Da-Jie in western Beijing. Wong Wai-Jeng enjoyed working there, more or less, and the irony was not lost on him that doing so made him a civil servant: the dissident Sinanthropus was an employee of the Communist Party. But the irony of the government supporting this institution devoted to preserving old fossils wasn’t lost on him, either.

Today for his morning coffee break, Wai-Jeng decided to stroll around the second-floor gallery of the museum—the four connected balconies that looked down on the exhibits below. He paused in front of the great glass tank on the granite pedestal that held the pickled coelacanth. There was irony here, too, for the giant lobe-finned fish was labeled a “living” fossil—which it had been until fishermen had netted it off the Comoros a few decades ago. It seemed in good shape still; he wondered if Chairman Mao was faring as well in his mausoleum.

Wai-Jeng turned and walked over to the railing around the opening that looked down onto the ground floor, ten meters below, with its dinosaurs mounted in dramatic poses above beds of fake grass. No school group was visiting today, but two old men were down there, sitting on a wooden bench. Wai-Jeng often saw them here. They lived in the neighborhood, came inside most afternoons to get out of the heat, and just sat, almost as motionless as the skeletons.

Directly below him, an allosaur was dispatching a stegosaur. The latter had fallen on its side, and the carnivore’s great jaws were biting into its neck. The postures were dramatic, but the thick layer of dust visible on the tops of the bones from this vantage point belied the sense of movement.

Wai-Jeng looked off to his right. The great tapered neck of Mamenchisaurus snaked up through the giant opening from the floor below and—

And there was Dr. Feng, over by the metal staircase, accompanied by two other men; they’d presumably just come down from the labs upstairs. The two men didn’t look like scientists; they were too burly, too sharp-edged, for that—although one of them did look familiar. Feng was pointing in Wai-Jeng’s direction, and he did something he never did—he shouted: “There you are, Wai-Jeng! These men would like a word with you!”

And then it clicked: the shorter of the two men was the cop from the wang ba; the old paleontologist was warning him. He turned to his left and started to run, almost knocking over a middle-aged woman who was now standing in front of the coelacanth tank.

There was only one way out; modern fire codes were new to Beijing and this museum had been built before they’d been instituted. If the two cops had split up, one going left and the other right around the large opening that looked down on the dinosaurs below, they would have caught him for sure. In fact, if one of them had just stayed put by the staircase, Wai-Jeng would have been trapped. But cops, like all party minions, were creatures of knee-jerk response: Wai-Jeng could tell by the sound of the footfalls, echoing off the glass display cases, that both were pursuing him down this side of the gallery. He’d have to make it to the far end, take the ninety-degree turn to the right, run across the shorter display area there, make another right-angle turn, go all the way up the far side, and round one more bend before he’d reach the staircase and any hope of getting downstairs and out of the building.

Below him, the duckbill Tsintaosaurus was mounted on its hind legs. Its skull poked up through the giant opening between the floors, and its great vertical crest, like a samurai’s raised sword, cast a shadow on the wall ahead.

“Stop!” yelled one of the cops. A woman—perhaps the one who’d been near the coelacanth—screamed, and Wai-Jeng wondered if the cop had taken out a gun.

He was almost to the end of this side of the gallery when he heard a change in the footfalls, and, as he rounded the corner and was able to look back, he saw that the cop from the wang ba had reversed course, and was now running the other way. He now had a much shorter distance to go back to the staircase than Wai-Jeng still needed to cover.

The one who was still running toward Wai-Jeng was indeed brandishing a pistol. Adrenaline surged through him. As he rounded the corner, he dropped his cell phone into a small garbage can, hoping that the cops were too far back to notice; the bookmarks list on its browser would be enough to send him to jail—although, as he ran on, he realized evidence or lack thereof hardly mattered; if he were caught, his fate at any trial had doubtless already been decided.

The cop from the Internet cafe rounded the corner back by the staircase. Old Dr. Feng was looking on, but there was nothing he, or anyone, could do. As he passed cases of pterosaur remains, Wai-Jeng felt his heart pounding.

“Stop!” the cop behind him yelled again, and “Don’t move!” the second cop demanded.

Wai-Jeng kept running; he was now coming up the opposite side of the gallery from where he’d began. On his left was a long mural showing Cretaceous Beijing in gaudy colors; on his right, the large opening looking down on the first-floor displays. He was directly above the skeletal diorama with the allosaur attacking the stegosaur. The ground was far below, but it was his only hope. The wall around the balcony opening was made of five rows of metal pipe painted white, with perhaps twenty centimeters of space between rows; the whole thing made climbing easy, and he did just that.

“Don’t!” shouted the cop from the wang ba and Dr. Feng simultaneously, the former as an order, the latter with obvious horror.

He took a deep breath, then jumped, the two old men below now looking up as he fell, fear on their lined faces, and—

Ta ma de!

—he hit the fake grass, just missing the giant spikes of the stegosaur’s tail, but the grass hardly cushioned his fall and he felt a sharp, jabbing pain in his left leg as it snapped.

Sinanthropus lay face down, blood in his mouth, next to the skeletons locked in their ancient fight, as footfalls came clanging down the metal staircase.

* * * *

Chapter 24

Dillon Fontana made it to the gazebo first; he was wearing his usual black jeans and a black T-shirt. Hobo would not let him look at anything until he’d properly hugged the ape, and that gave time for Maria Lopez and Werner Richter to arrive, as well. Given his bulk, it was no surprise that Harl Marcuse was the last of the four to make it across the wide lawn, over the drawbridge, and up to the gazebo.

“What is it?” he asked in a wheezing tone that said, Anyone who makes me run better have a damn good reason.

Shoshana indicated the painting, its colors softer now in the late-afternoon sunlight. Marcuse looked at it, but his expression didn’t change. “Yes?”

But Dillon got it at once. “My God,” he said softly. He turned to Hobo and signed, Did you paint this?

Hobo was showing his yellow teeth in a big, goofy grin. Hobo paint, he replied. Hobo paint.

Maria was tilting her head sideways. “I don’t—”

“It’s me,” said Shoshana. “In profile, see?”

Marcuse moved forward, eyes narrowed, and the others got out of his way. “Apes don’t make representational art,” he said in his commanding voice, as if his declaration could erase what was in front of them.

Dillon gestured at the canvas. “Tell that to Hobo.”

“And he did this while I was away,” Shoshana said. “From memory.” The Silverback frowned dubiously. She pointed at the hidden camera. “I’m sure it’s all been recorded.”

He glanced at the same spot and shook his head—although not, she realized after a moment, in negation, but rather in disappointment. The camera kept watch on Hobo—and that meant it showed the easel from the rear. The footage wouldn’t reveal the order in which he’d added elements to the painting. Did he paint the head first? The eye? Was the colored iris added at the same time, or was it a final, finishing touch?

“The primate Picasso,” said Dillon, hands on hips, grinning with satisfaction.

“Exactly!” said Shoshana. She turned to Marcuse. “No way the Georgia Zoo will be able to put Hobo under the knife if we go public with this. The world would never stand for it.”

* * * *

“Caitlin?”

She looked up and her perspective on webspace shifted. It took her a second to remember where she was: in a stairwell at Howard Miller Secondary School.

The voice again. “Caitlin, are you okay?” It was Sunshine.

She lifted her shoulders a bit. “I guess.”

“The dance is winding down. I’m going to walk home. Wanna come?”

Caitlin had lost track of time while she’d immersed herself in the fantastic colors and lights of the World Wide Web; she felt her watch. God knew what had happened to the Hoser. “Um, sure. Thanks.” She used her cane as a prop as she got up from the step she was sitting on. “How’d you find me?”

“I didn’t,” said Sunshine. “I was just going to my locker and I saw you here.”

“Thanks,” Caitlin said again.

Caitlin switched the eyePod back to simplex mode, shutting off the Jagster feed and her view of webspace. They went up to the second floor, where Sunshine’s locker was, then headed back down and out. The evening had gotten chilly and she could feel the odd drop of rain.

Caitlin wished she had more to say to Sunshine as they walked along, but even though they were the two American girls at school, they really didn’t have anything in common. Sunshine was struggling with all her classes, and was, according to Bashira, a knockout: tall, thin, busty, with platinum-blond hair and a small diamond stud in her nose. But if she was that pretty, Caitlin wondered why she’d come to the dance alone. “Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah. Sure. But he works evenings.”

“What’s he do?”

“Security guard.”

Caitlin was surprised “How old is he?”

“Nineteen.”

She’d assumed Sunshine was her own age—and maybe she was. Or maybe she’d failed a time or two. “How old are you?” Caitlin asked.

“Sixteen. You?”

“Almost. My birthday is in eight days.” It was starting to rain harder. “Is he good to you?”

“Who?”

“Your boyfriend.”

“He’s okay,” Sunshine said.

Caitlin thought a boyfriend should be wonderful, should talk to you and listen to you and be kind and gentle. But she said nothing.

“Um, here’s my street,” Sunshine said. Caitlin knew precisely where they were; her own house was just two blocks farther along. “It’s starting to rain harder—do … do you mind?”

“No,” said Caitlin. “It’s okay, go home. You don’t want to get soaked.”

“It’s getting pretty late…”

“Don’t worry,” Caitlin said. “I know the way—and I’m not afraid of the dark.”

She felt Sunshine squeeze her upper arm. “Hey, that’s funny! Anyway, look, forget about that jerk Nordmann, okay? I’ll see you on Monday.” And she heard footsteps fading quickly away.

Caitlin started walking. Forget about him, Sunshine had said. God, she wondered what that asshole had said to people after she’d left the gym. Why, if he’d—

What the—?

She paused, one foot still in the air, totally startled by—

God!

By a flash of light!

But she had the data-receive function of her eyePod turned off; the Jagster light show was too distracting when she was trying to concentrate on walking. There should have been no light of any kind, but—

And then she heard it, a great crack of thunder.

Another flash. Seconds later, more thunder.

Lightning. It had to be lightning! She’d read about it so many times: zigzagging lines coming down from above.

A third flash, like—like—like a jagged crack in ice. Incredible!

What color was lightning? She racked her brain trying to remember. Red? No, no, that was lava. Lightning was white—and she was seeing it! For the first time—for the very first time—she knew what color she was seeing! This wasn’t like her arbitrarily deciding to call something in webspace “red” or “green.” This was the actual, real color white. Yes, white is a mixture of all other colors; she’d read that, although she had never understood what it really meant—but she now knew what white looked like!

The rain was quite heavy. Her fleece, with the raised Perimeter Institute logo—the letters PI joined to look something like the Greek letter pi—was getting soaked. And the fat drops were cold, and hitting hard enough that they stung a bit. But she didn’t care. She didn’t care at all!

More lightning: another flash of perception, of sight!

She knew there was a way to determine how far away the source of lightning was, by counting the seconds between the flash and the sound of thunder, but she couldn’t remember the formula, and so she worked it out quickly in her head. Light travels at 186,282 miles per second—instantaneously, for practical purposes; sound travels at 769 miles per hour. So every second that passed between the flash and the thunder put the source of the lightning another fifth of a mile away.

Another flash, and—

Four. Five. Six.

The source was 1.2 miles away—and getting closer: the intervals between flashes and thunderclaps were diminishing, and the flashes were getting brighter and the thunder louder. In fact, these flashes were so bright they—

Yes, so bright they hurt. But it was wonderful pain, exquisite pain. Here, in the pouring rain, she was at last seeing something real, and it felt glorious!

* * * *

I was fascinated by that remarkable point to which I now had an apparently permanent connection—but also frustrated by it. Yes, it often reflected myself back at me. But for long periods it contained data that I simply couldn’t make sense of. In fact, that’s what it was sending me right now, and—

What was that?

A bright flash—brighter than anything I’d ever encountered.

And then darkness again.

And then another flash! Incredible!

* * * *

Another flash—and then more thunder. Finally, though, it seemed the electrical part of the storm had stopped, and Caitlin began walking home again, and—

Shit!

She stumbled off the curb; she must have turned around at some point, and—

The honk of a horn, the sound of tires swerving on wet pavement. She jumped backward, up onto the sidewalk. Her heart was pounding. She wasn’t sure which way she was facing, and—

No, no. The curb had been on her right, and it was on her right now, so she must be facing west again. Still, it was terrifying, and she just stood still for a time, regaining composure, and rebuilding her mental map of where she was.

The raindrops grew smaller, less heavy. She was sad the lightning had ended, and, as she began again to walk toward her house, she wondered if everyone else was now seeing a rainbow—but no, no, Sunshine had said it was dark out. Ah, well, flashes of light were wondrous enough!

Caitlin arrived at the corner lot and walked up the driveway, which was made of zigzag-shaped interlocking stone tiles; she could feel them beneath her feet. She dug out her key (she carried it in the pocket with her wallet, not the one with the eyePod), opened the front door, and—

“Caitlin!”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Look at you! You’re soaked to the skin!” Caitlin imagined her peering over her shoulder. “Where’s Trevor?”

“He’s—a jerk,” Caitlin said, catching herself before she said “an asshole.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said sympathetically. But then her voice grew angry. “You walked by yourself? Even if this is a safe neighborhood, you shouldn’t be out alone after dark.”

Caitlin decided to elide over the last few hundred yards. “No, Sunshine—a girl I know—she walked me back.”

“You should have called. I’d have come to get you.”

Caitlin struggled to pull the sodden sweatshirt over her head. “Mom,” she said once it was off. “I saw the lightning.”

“Oh, my God! Really?”

“Yes. Jagged lines, over and over again.”

She was gathered into a hug. “Oh, Caitlin, oh, darling, that’s wonderful!” A pause. “Can you see anything now?”

“No.”

“Still…”

Caitlin smiled. “Yes,” she said, bouncing up and down a bit on her toes. “Still. Where’s Dr. Kuroda?”

“He’s gone to bed; he was exhausted—he’s totally jet-lagged.”

She thought about suggesting they wake him, but there was nothing happening now, and the data her eyePod produced during the thunderstorm would be safely stored on his servers in Tokyo; he could examine it after a good night’s sleep. Besides, she was exhausted herself. “And Dad?”

“Still at the Institute—the public lecture, remember?”

“Oh. Well, I’m going to go change.”

She headed up to her room, got out of her soaked clothes, put on her pajamas, and lay down on the bed, hands intertwined behind her head. She wanted to relax and she was hungry for more vision, so she touched the button on her eyePod.

Webspace faded into existence: lines, points, colors, but—

Was it her imagination? Was it just that the lightning had been so bright that the colors in webspace now seemed … yes, she could draw the parallel, see how the word she knew from sound could apply to vision: the colors did seem muted now, dulled, less vibrant, and—

No, no, it wasn’t that! They weren’t muted. Rather, they were less sharp because…

Because now, behind everything, there was …

How to describe it? She sifted through words she knew related to visual phenomena. Something … shimmering, that was it. There was a background visible now, shining with a subdued flickering light.

Had something happened to the structure of webspace? That seemed unlikely. No, surely it was her way of visualizing it that had changed—presumably because of the real vision she’d just experienced. The background of webspace no longer appeared as a void but rather was twinkling, and rapidly, too. And at the very limits of … of resolution, there was a … a structure to it.

She got off the bed, went to her desk chair, and had JAWS recite email headers while she continued to look at webspace. Twenty-three messages had come in, and there’d doubtless be lots of new things written on her Facebook wall and new comments to her LJ postings. She switched back to simplex mode, clearing her vision so she could concentrate. She was about to type a response to an email when suddenly, shockingly, her entire field of vision flooded with intense whiteness. What the hell?

But then the crack of thunder came, shaking her bedroom’s window, and she realized that it was more lightning.

Another flash!

One steamboat, two steam—

The storm was only three-tenths of a mile away.

She had missed hearing her mother come up the stairs—what with thunder shaking the whole house—and was startled when she heard her saying, “Well? Can you see this lightning, too?”

Caitlin moved toward the voice, letting her mother’s arms wrap around her.

Yet more lightning, and—

Her mother letting her go, maneuvering so she was standing beside her, instead of holding her. Caitlin took her hand, and—

Another flash.

“You can!” said her mom. “You close your eyes when there’s lightning.”

“I do?” said Caitlin.

“Yes!”

“But I can still see it.”

“Well, sure. Eyelids aren’t completely opaque.”

Caitlin was stunned. Why hadn’t she known that? How much else was there to know about the world?

“Thanks, Mom,” she said.

“For what?”

The storm was moving off; the thunder was taking longer to arrive each time.

She lifted her shoulders a bit. How do you thank someone who has given you so much, and given up so much for you? She turned to face her, hoping against hope that this was the real beginning—that she would soon at last see her heart-shaped face. “For everything,” she said, hugging her tightly.

* * * *

Chapter 25

It was now almost 9:00 P.M. in California. The Silverback was resting his bulk in the one overstuffed easy chair in the bungalow’s main room. Shoshana Glick had propped her rump against the edge of the desk that held the big computer monitor. Dillon Fontana, clad all in black, was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the jamb. Werner and Maria had gone home for the weekend.

“What’s noteworthy,” Dillon said, “is that Hobo began doing representational art after he started communicating with Virgil.”

Shoshana nodded. “I’d noticed that, too. But Virgil doesn’t paint—I asked Juan in Miami. He doesn’t do any sort of art. So it’s not like the orangutan gave Hobo a tip or encouragement.”

Marcuse was drinking Coke from a two-liter bottle that looked small in his hands. He took a swig, wiped his face, and said, “It’s the flat screen.”

Shoshana turned to look at him.

“Don’t you see?” Marcuse said. “Until we linked the two apes in a videoconference, all the ASL signs Hobo had ever seen were three dimensional—done by actual human beings in close physical proximity to him. But now he’s seeing someone sign on a flat two-dimensional screen, on a computer monitor.” He gestured at the Apple display behind Shoshana.

“But he’s watched TV for years,” she said.

“Yes, but he’s never seen signing—at least not for any significant amount of time—on TV. And signing is special: signs are exactly that—representations of things, symbols. By seeing Virgil use signs on the flat screen, somehow Hobo saw how three-dimensional objects could be reduced to two dimensions. Remember, he has to concentrate on the signs in a way he doesn’t concentrate on normal TV images. Doing so caused something to click in his brain, and he got it.”

Shoshana found herself nodding. For all that the Silverback could be a blustering blowhard and a pain in the ass as a boss, he was a brilliant scientist.

“There’s precedent, sort of,” he continued. “Some prosopagnosiacs—people with face-blindness—can recognize faces in photographs but can’t recognize them in the flesh; it’s doubtless a related phenomenon.”

“In the land of the blind,” said Dillon, “the one-eyed ape is painting.” He lifted his narrow shoulders. “I mean, he’s got two eyes, but there’s no depth perception when watching TV, right? Sure, stereoscopic vision adds a lot of valuable information, but there’s a simplicity—a huge ramping down of the mental processing required—when dealing with just two-dimensional images.”

“But why’d he draw me in profile?” Shoshana asked.

Marcuse put down his Coke bottle and spread his arms. “Why did cavemen always draw animals in profile? Why did the ancient Egyptians do it that way? There’s something hardwired in the primate brain to make profiles—even though we’re way better at recognizing faces when seen full on.”

That much was true, Shoshana knew. There were neurons in human brains—and ape brains, too—that responded to the specific layout of a face, two eyes above a mouth. She’d grown up with the smiley face used online:

:)

But she remembered her father telling her it had been months after he’d first seen it in the 1980s before he realized what it was supposed to represent. Because it was sideways, it just didn’t trigger the right neurons in his brain. But one of the reasons that the yellow happy-face logo—which, her father had said, had been ubiquitous when he was a teenager—was so universally appealing was that it caused an immediate pattern-recognition response.

“Maybe the tendency for profiles has to do with brain lateralization,” Marcuse said. “Artistic talent is localized in one hemisphere; drawing profiles may be a subtle response to that, showing, in essence, that particular half of the subject.” He paused. “Whatever the reason, this makes our Hobo even more special.”

Shoshana looked at Dillon, who was doing his doctoral thesis on primate hybridization. It was a topic of real scientific interest. In 2006, a study revealed that there had continued to be a lot of hybridization between the ancestor of chimps and the ancestor of humans even after the two lines had split millions of years ago; they remained able to produce fertile offspring for a long time, and such crossbreeding had apparently given rise to the sophisticated human brain.

“Absolutely,” Dillon said. “I don’t dispute that seeing Virgil signing on the monitor was a catalyst, but I’d bet hybridization set the groundwork for him being so good at language and painting.”

Shoshana smiled at the subtle turf war that she’d just seen begin: each of them was staking out territory, and would doubtless defend their positions in journal papers over the coming years. But then she frowned; they didn’t have time to wait for papers to go through the peer-review process. “If we want to stave off the Georgia Zoo’s desire to sterilize Hobo, we can’t wait,” she said. “We have to go public with this, get Hobo’s special status generally known, and—”

“And what was your first thought when you saw that painting?” Marcuse demanded. “I’ll tell you what it was—it was my thought, too, as soon as I recognized that it was indeed a portrait. I thought it was a fake. Didn’t you?”

Shoshana looked at Dillon, and remembered her accusation of that very thing, and how Hobo had looked so hurt. “Yes,” she said sheepishly.

The Silverback shook his head. “No, that painting isn’t going to save Hobo—but the next one might. We need him to do it again, and with more cameras recording it all. If there’s only one representational painting, people will dismiss it as a fake—or, even if they accept it as being genuine, they’ll say it’s a fluke, something that happens to sort of, by chance, look like a person. Hell, we’ve been accused often enough as is of just projecting what we want to see onto ape behavior. No, unless he does it again, with the whole process filmed and documented—unless we can replicate this—we’ve got nothing, and our grinning genius is still in danger of being sterilized.”

* * * *

Chapter 26

Saturday morning always meant pancakes and sausages in the Decter household. Now that they were living in Waterloo, the sausages were, of course, Schneider’s brand, and the syrup was real maple syrup Caitlin’s mom had bought from Mennonites in the nearby town of St. Jacob’s.

“I was up at 5:00 A.M.,” Caitlin’s dad said, as soon as they’d started eating.

“There’s a 5:00 a.m.?” Caitlin joked.

“I set up a workspace for you and Professor Kuroda in the basement,” he continued.

“Thank you, Dr. Decter,” Kuroda said, sounding relieved—apparently everybody but the Hoser was worried about her virtue! But she guessed it probably would be more comfortable downstairs than in her bedroom.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” her mom said. “You’re staying in our house; you can call him Malcolm.”

Her father neither confirmed nor denied this assertion, Caitlin noted. Instead, he said, “I bought a new computer at Future Shop yesterday. It’s set up downstairs for the two of you; I put it on the household network.”

“Thank you,” she said. “And I have some news of my own—I saw the lightning last night.”

The words were simultaneous, overlapping. Her dad, matter-of-fact: “Your mother told me.” And Kuroda, amazed: “You saw lightning?”

“That’s right,” Caitlin said.

“What—what did it look like to you?” Kuroda said.

“Jagged lines against darkness. Bright lines—white, right? Stark against a pure black background.”

Kuroda was clearly eager to look at the data from the eyePod: he had only one extra helping of pancakes.

Caitlin had been in the basement just a few times in the three months they’d lived in this house, mostly back in August, when it had been surprisingly hot and muggy outside—almost like Texas. The basement had been cool then (and still was), and although her mother had complained about how little light there was down there—apparently, just a single bulb in the middle of the room—it hadn’t bothered Caitlin.

“What’s the 4-1-1?” she asked, hands on hips.

Kuroda’s English was excellent, but the information number must be different in Japan. “Sorry?”

“What’s the setup? Tell me about the room.”

“Ah. Well, it’s an unfinished basement—I suppose you know that. Bare insulation between the slats; cement floor. There’s an old TV—the kind with a picture tube—and some bookcases. And your dad has set up the new computer on one of those worktables with metal folding legs; it’s pushed up against the far wall, the one opposite the staircase. The computer is a mini-tower, and he’s got an LCD screen attached to it. There’s a little window above the table and a couple of comfortable-looking swivel chairs in front of it.”

“Sweet! I wonder where he got the chairs.”

“They have a logo on them—kind of like the Greek letter pi.”

“Oh, he borrowed them from work. Speaking of which, let’s get to it.”

Kuroda helped guide her to one of the chairs, and he settled into the other; she could hear it squeaking a bit. “Let me log onto my servers in Tokyo,” he said. “I want to examine the datastream you sent them during the lightning storm—see if we can isolate what it was that caused your primary visual cortex to respond.”

She could hear him typing away and, as he did, she realized she’d forgotten to mention something over breakfast. “After the lightning flashes,” she said, “webspace looked different.”

“Different how?”

“Well, I could still see the structure of the Web clearly, like before, but the … the background, I guess, was different.”

He stopped typing. “What do you mean?”

“It used to be dark. Black, I guess.”

“And now?”

“Now it’s, um, lighter? I could see details in it.”

“Details?”

“Yeah. Like—like…” She struggled to make the connection; the pattern did remind her of something she was familiar with, but—got it! “Like a chessboard.” She had a blind person’s chessboard, with squares that were alternately raised and lowered, and Braille initials on the top of each piece; she sometimes played her dad. “But, um, not quite. I mean, it was made of lighter and darker squares, but they’re not in the same pattern as a chessboard, and they go on, like, forever.”

“How big are they?”

“Tiny. If they were any tinier, I don’t think I could see them. In fact, I can’t swear that they were squares, but they were packed tightly together and made rows and columns.”

“And there were thousands of them?”

“Millions. Maybe billions. They’re everywhere.”

Kuroda sat as quietly as was possible for him, then: “You know, human vision is made of pixels, just like a computerized image. Each axon in the optic nerve provides one picture element. Now, most people aren’t conscious of them, but if you have decent focus, and you look at a blank wall, some people can see them. Your brain is processing Web information as if it were coming from your eye; it may be hardwired to see it all as a mesh of pixels at the limits of resolution, but…”

He trailed off. After ten seconds she prodded him.

“But?”

“Well, I’m just thinking. You’ve described seeing circles, which we’ve taken to be websites, and lines connecting them, which we’ve assumed represent hyperlinks. And that’s it—that’s the World Wide Web, right? That’s all of it. So, what could make up the background to the Web? I mean, in human vision, the—”

“Don’t say that.”

“Pardon?”

“‘Human vision.’ Don’t say that. I’m human.”

A sharp intake of breath. “I’m so sorry, Miss Caitlin. May I say ‘normal’ vision?”

“Yes.”

“All right. In normal vision, the background is—well, it’s the distant reaches of the universe if you’re looking up at the night sky. But what would be the background for the Web?”

“Background radiation?” she suggested. “Like the cosmic microwave background?”

Kuroda was quiet for a moment. “How old are you again?”

“Hey,” she said, “my father is a physicist, you know.”

“Well, the cosmic microwave background is uniform to a fraction of a degree in all directions. But what you’re seeing is mottled in black and white, you say?”

“Yeah. And it keeps shifting.”

“Pardon?”

“Shifting. Changing. Didn’t I mention that?”

“No. What do you mean precisely?”

Something brushed against her legs—ah, Schrodinger! Caitlin scooped him up into her lap. “The dark squares switch to light, and the light ones to dark,” she said.

“How rapidly?”

“Oh, really fast. Makes the whole thing shimmer.”

The springs on Kuroda’s chair squeaked as he stood up. She heard him walking across the room and then walking back toward her, then repeating the process: pacing. “It can’t be…” he said at last.

“What?”

He ignored her question. “How clearly could you see the individual cells?”

She scratched Schrodinger behind the ears. “Cells?”

“Pixels. I mean pixels. How clearly could you see them?”

“It was really hard.”

“Can you try again? Can you put the eyePod in duplex mode now?”

She fumbled to get the device out of her pocket without sending Schrodinger to the floor. Once it was free, she pressed the switch; the eyePod made its usual high-pitched beep, which Schrodinger answered with a surprised meow, and—

And there it was, spreading out before her: the World Wide Web.

“Can you see the background now?” Kuroda asked.

“Yes, if I concentrate…”

He sounded surprised. “You’re squinting.”

She shrugged. “It helps. But, yeah, if I really try, I can focus on a small group—a few hundred squares on a side.”

“Okay. Do you have a Go board?”

“What?”

“Um, okay—do you have any money?”

She narrowed her eyes again, but this time in suspicion. “Fifty bucks, maybe, but…”

“No, no. Coins! Do you have coins?”

“In a jar on my dresser.” She was saving to go see Lee Amodeo with Bashira when she came to Centre in the Square.

“Great, great. Do you mind if I go get it?”

“I can do it. It’s my house.”

“No, you take the time to look at the Web, see if you can make out any more detail in the background. I’ll be right back.”

Kuroda could never sneak up on anyone. She heard the sounds of his return long before he actually arrived. She then heard a great jangling as he dumped the coins on their worktable, and more noise as he shuffled them around—perhaps sorting them. “All right. Here’s a bunch of coins. Can you arrange them in the pattern you’re seeing? Put one down for each light spot, and leave a coin-sized space for each dark spot.”

Caitlin shooed Schrodinger out of her lap, and swung her chair to face the table. “I told you. They keep changing.”

“Yes, yes, but…” He made a noisy sigh. “I wish there were some way to photograph it, or at least to slow down your perception, and—” His voice brightened. “And there is! Of course there is!”

She heard him moving about, then soft key clicks. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m halting your reception of the datastream from Jagster, and just passing on the last iteration of it over and over again, so it’ll keep coming down the pike without changing, sort of like—”

“A freeze-frame!” she said as the image ceased to move. She was delighted to be able to apply another concept she’d only ever read about before.

“Exactly. Now, can you make a pattern with the coins that matches what you’re seeing in a portion of the background?”

“A very small portion,” she said. And she started moving the coins around; he’d given her a bunch of dimes. After a moment, she pushed one off to a corner of the desk. “American,” she said; all those years of reading Braille made it easy to tell Queen Elizabeth from FDR.

She built up a grid of dimes and dime-sized empty spaces, counting the coins automatically as she deployed them. “Done,” she announced. “Eight dollars and ninety cents.”

“Completely random,” Kuroda said, sounding disappointed.

“No, it’s not. Not quite. See this group of five dimes here?” She had no trouble keeping track of the pattern she’d made, and touched the appropriate coins. “It’s the same as this group here, except turned ninety degrees to the right.”

“So it is,” he said, excitedly. “It looks like the letter L.”

“And this one’s the same, too,” she said, “turned upside down.”

“Excellent!”

“But what does it mean?” she asked.

“I’m not a hundred-percent sure,” he said. “Not yet. Here, focus your attention again on the same spot in your vision. I’m going to update the data going to your implant, just once … and done.”

“Okay. It’s completely different.”

“Can you make it for me with the coins?”

“I’m not even sure I’m looking at the same spot anymore,” she said. “But here goes.” She rearranged the dimes, and, just to underscore that not only the pattern but also the number of light and dark squares had changed, she added, “Six dollars and twenty cents.” She paused. “Ah! Three sets of that five-coin pattern this time.”

“And in different places,” he said.

“But what does it mean?”

“Well,” said Kuroda, “this may sound crazy, but I think they’re cellular automata.”

“Who in the what now?”

“Hey, I thought you were the daughter of a physicist,” he said, but his tone was one of gentle teasing.

She smiled. “Sue me. And besides, if they’re cellular, I’d need to be a biologist’s daughter, no?”

“No, no—they’re not biological cells; they’re cells in the computer-science sense of the word: a cell is the basic unit of storage in computer memory, holding a single unit of information.”

“Ah.”

“And an automaton is something that behaves or responds in a predictable, mechanical way. So cellular automata are patterns of information units that respond in a specific way to changes in their surroundings. For example, take a grid of black and white squares—each square is a cell, okay?”

“Yes.”

“And on a chessboard that goes on forever, each square has eight neighbors, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, suppose you say to each square something like, okay, if you’re already black and three or more of your neighbors are white, then turn white yourself. An instruction like that is called a rule. And if you keep applying the rule over and over again, strange things happen. I mean, yes, if you just focus on one individual square, all you’d see is it flipping back and forth between black and white. But if you look at the overall grid, patterns of squares can seem to move across it—cross shapes, maybe, or hollow squares, or L shapes like we have here, or clusters of cells that change shape in set stages and, after a fixed number of steps, return to their original shape, but have moved somewhere else in the process. It’s almost as though the shapes are alive.”

She heard the chair groan as he shifted in it.

“I remember when I first encountered cellular automata in Conway’s Game of Life as an undergrad,” he said. “What’s fascinating about all this is that they’re representations of data that are interpreted as being special by an observer. I mean, those L-shaped things—they’re called ‘spaceships,’ by the way, these patterns that retain their cohesion and fly across the grid—well, spaceships don’t really exist; nothing is actually moving and the spaceship you see on the right side of the grid is completely different in composition from the one you originally saw on the left side. And yet we think of it as the same one.”

“But what are they for?”

“Besides making undergrads go ‘ooooh,’ you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, in nature—”

“These occur in nature?”

“Yes, in lots of places. For instance, there’s a kind of snail that makes the pattern on its shell in direct response to a cellular-automata rule.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It has a row of spigots that spit out pigment, or not, based on what the neighboring spigots on either side are doing.”

“Cool!”

“Yes, it is. But what’s really cool is that there are cellular automata in brains.”

“Really?” she said again.

“Well, they’re in lots of kinds of cells, actually. But they’ve been studied particularly in neural tissue. The cytoskeletons of cells—their internal scaffolding—is made up of long strings called microtubules, and each component of a microtubule, a little piece of protein called a tubulin dimer, can be in one of two states. And those states go through permutations as though they were cellular automata.”

“Why would they do that?”

“No one knows. Some people, though, including—hey, maybe your father knows him? Roger Penrose? He’s a famous physicist, too, and he and his associate, a guy named Hameroff, think that those cellular automata are the actual cause of consciousness, of self-awareness.”

“Sweet! But why?”

“Well, Hameroff is an anesthesiologist, and he’s shown that when people are put under for surgery their tubulin dimers fall into a neutral state—instead of some being black, say, and some being white, they all sort of become gray. When they do that, consciousness goes off; when they start behaving as cellular automata again, consciousness comes back on.”

She made a mental note to Google this later. “But if the snail has spigots, and the brain has these whatchamacallits—”

“Tubulin dimers,” said Kuroda.

“Okay, well if these tubulin dimers are the actual things that are flipping in the brain, what’s flipping in the background of webspace?”

She imagined him shrugging; it would have gone naturally with his tone of voice. “Bits, I guess. You know: binary digits. By definition, they’re either on or off, or one or zero, or black or white, or however you want to visualize them. And maybe you’re visualizing them as squares of two different colors, just at the limit of your mental resolution.”

“But, um, the Web is supposed to pass on data unchanged,” she said. “A browser asks for a Web page, and an exact copy of it is sent from the server that hosts that page. There shouldn’t be any data changing.”

“No,” he said. “That’s puzzling.”

They sat in silence for a few moments, contemplating this. And then she heard her mother’s distinctive footsteps on the stairs, followed by her saying, “Hey, you two, anyone care for a mid-morning snack?”

Kuroda’s chair squeaked again as he heaved his bulk up from it. “I always think better on a full stomach.”

You must do a lot of thinking, Caitlin thought, and she smiled as they went upstairs.

To be continued.

Copyright (c) 2008 Robert J. Sawyer

[Back to Table of Contents]

Reader’s Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

by Tom Easton

The City at the End of Time, Greg Bear, Del Rey, $27.00, 479 pp. (ISBN: 978-0-345-44839-2).

Kaimira: The Sky Village, Monk and Nigel Ashland, Candlewick Press, $16.99, 416 pp. (ISBN: 978-0-7636-3524-4).

Otherworldly Maine, Noreen Doyle, ed., Down East Books, $15.85, 320 pp. (ISBN: 978-0-89272-746-9).

The Wreck of the Godspeed and Other Stories, James Patrick Kelly, Golden Gryphon, $24.95, 360 + viii pp. (ISBN: 978-1-930846-51-7).

Cryptic: Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt, Jack McDevitt, Subterranean Press,

The End Times are a perennial theme in science fiction and fantasy, and the topic is peculiarly appropriate for this column, as you will see before I am done. Fortunately, it is not appropriate in as chaotic a way as Greg Bear envisions in The City at the End of Time.

The city in question is the Kalpa, some hundred trillion years in the future. The universe has expanded, stars and galaxies have gone out, rifts have opened in the very fabric of space, and humanity (and its fellows) have learned to exploit the associated energies. But even that long, rich era has faded and died. Now the universe is being consumed by the Typhon, a malevolent spirit of chaos. The Kalpa holds it at bay with “reality generators,” but the Typhon pushes ever harder against them. “The end of all history, of everything human and worthy—consumption in the malign insanity of the Chaos that had been looming for ages—was now upon them.”

Meanwhile, in our own era, in Seattle, three strange young people are being hunted by agents of the Chalk Princess. Ginny, a “chancer,” has a way of making luck, and she carries a strange stone she recalls her mother calling a library stone and her father a sum-runner. She finds shelter with Conan Arthur Bidewell, who occupies an old warehouse and collects mountains of books, searching for the small mutations in text that are signs of encroaching chaos. Jack, a “shifter,” can avoid trouble by moving from one of the many alternate world lines to another; he too has a sum-runner. Both dream of the Kalpa, visiting two denizens of that era to look out through their eyes. Daniel too is a shifter, but when he is introduced as a beggar and followed to the house he once called home, he turns out to have two sum-runners.

Meanwhile at the end of time, Tiadba and Jebrassy, two of the current varieties of human “breeds,” crave to leave the Kalpa and strike out across the Chaos to find the fabled alternate refuge known as Nataraja. Occasionally they zone out while “visitors” from the past—Ginny and Jack, of course—drop by. Their world is ruled by highly advanced descendants of humans, immortals who spread themselves across multiple dimensions, the greatest of whom are as gods with lives woven through history and legend. The greatest is Polybiblios, the Librarian, who brings Jebrassy to the Tower for a bit of education while Tiadba is trained for her Chaos excursion.

But time is running out for everyone. In fact, it is approaching Terminus, the end of all world-lines, and when Seattle bounces off that barrier, everything falls apart in ways as bizarre as anyone can imagine. Ginny, fortunately, is sheltered within Bidewell’s warehouse along with three rather mysterious women who might represent the Norns or the Fates. Jack and Daniel join her, and before long all three are in Typhon’s realm, along with Tiadba and Jebrassy, hunting for the mysterious mechanism that will save time and the cosmos.

It’s a powerful and evocative novel, but I felt the end was weakened when Bear threw in the cats. Cats are cute and mysterious and of course they walk through walls, but—dammit!—he went way over the top!

And yes, I know full well that if that is all I say, you’ll just have to read the book to see what the heck is going on. You’ll enjoy it.

* * * *

Between them, Monk and Nigel Ashland have a lot of experience as teachers and travelers. Monk has even been a teacher in China, which helps to explain why a good portion of Kaimira: The Sky Village is set there, or more accurately in the air above China. Years before the story, the world’s animals and robots rebelled against humanity. The resulting war brought civilization crashing to a halt, and when the beasts and meks turned on each other, the result was a patchwork world dominated by enclaves of beasts and meks, with humans struggling to survive among them. In China, however, a few people had the foresight to launch hot air balloons before the war arrived. Those balloons have multiplied to make the Sky Village of the title, which depends for supplies—including fuel—on the humans below (and never mind where those folks get fuel). A world away, in Las Vegas, humans such as Rom struggle to survive in the ruins, while rumors of Demon Caves entice.

In China, Mei (or Dragonfly) is a young teen whose mother—once of the Sky Village—has been kidnapped by meks. Her father has sent her to the Sky Village with a family treasure called the Tree Book. She has been told not to open it, but of course she does to discover that the stories her mother used to read to her about a boy named Rom are real. Rom, of course, has a Tree Book too, and his father used to read him stories about a girl named Dragonfly. The book also seems to contain something called Animus, which promises aid and revenge if only she will free it.

Mei learns the ways of the Sky Village and when the Village is attacked by meks, she learns that she can somehow communicate with them. This angers the Village’s allies, the birds, with whom she can also link, apparently because she carries the kaimira gene, which makes her partly beast and partly mek in addition to human.

Rom too has the kaimira gene, and when he pursues the demons who have captured his sister into the Demon Caves, he learns that it gives him the ability to conjure demons, odd hybrids of mek and beast, the fruit of a technology originally aimed at giving humans the upper hand in the war, but now co-opted to serve a base economy based on betting, especially on gladiatorial combats where demonsmiths pit their demons against each other. There is a risk of mental breakdown, but Rom proves to have immense talent, much as his father had in his day. Can he use it to rescue his sister and escape? Can he do it—and can Mei save the Village and find her mother—without releasing Animus?

The Sky Village is a fascinating if highly unlikely setting. The theme of nature versus technology with humans caught in the middle unless they can somehow integrate it all is important in the world we have created, and it is one that the younger readers that are this book’s audience will profit from absorbing. However, the book is marred by nonsense science—mek/beast genes? C’mon now! But the Ashlands do hint at a logical explanation in the science that preceded the war, and future volumes of the series may make it all make more sense.

* * * *

Otherworldly Maine is the second anthology of Maine SF&F that I have been in, but my own story (“The Bung-Hole Caper”) is hardly the reason to buy it. With a nod to Mainer Frank Edward Munsey, who in the 1880s created the pulps, editor Noreen Doyle has reached back more than a century and a half to include a portion of Henry David Thoreau’s “Ktaadn” to set the tone. At that time, there was plenty of wilderness to the west of the Appalachians, but on the East Coast, where Europeans had been settled for over two centuries at the time, there was already little left, and that little was epitomized by Maine’s North Woods, full of large trees, inscrutable natives, pristine waters, moose and bear, trout and salmon, and the mystery of the unknown. Much of that is gone, but the image remains, partly a matter of landscape, partly one of people. The mystery part of it has appealed to fantasy writers, among whom Doyle of course counts Stephen King (“Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut”). To accompany King, she has recruited Edgar Pangborn’s “Longtooth,” Elizabeth Hand’s “Echo,” Jeff Hecht’s “By the Lake,” Gregory Feeley’s “Awskonomuk,” Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Creation Story,” and fifteen more. Of historical interest is Mark Twain’s “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton” (1878) and Edward Kent’s “A Vision of Bangor, in the Twentieth Century” (in 1848, he actually managed to get some things right). Exercising the writer-editor’s prerogative, she has included her own “The Chapter of the Hawk of Gold,” wherein the mystery has much to do with the penchant of Yankee traders and whalers for collecting curios from around the world.

Regional anthologies are not as common as they used to be. If they were, this would stand out as an excellent example of the kind. With less competition, it stands out even more. So if you have a taste for the Maine mystique, order a copy.

* * * *

James Patrick Kelly has a way of pushing the edge of science fiction way out there, and The Wreck of the Godspeed and Other Stories provides plenty of supporting evidence. In “Dividing the Sustain,” the scene is a starship in transit. The people aboard represent a distant future where immortality is normal, but after enough years one goes “stale” and must be recast into a new form and/or psyche. The more times one has been recast, the more extreme the recasting must be, and when a married couple gets into a fight the results can be bizarre indeed. Is Kelly just trying to appeal to tabloid readers and Jerry Springer fans? There’s enough here to make one wonder, but the idea works as metaphor and possibly even as a likely corollary of immortality.

The title story centers on an AI that is the exploration ship Godspeed, which roams the galaxy seeking habitable worlds and serves as host to an ever-varying suite of pilgrims who beam aboard for a year or a century. Alas, Speedy is a bit mad and self-directed, which offers the pilgrims an interesting future.

Don’t miss.

* * * *

There was science fiction with literary pretensions before I started reviewing, but in my tenure here I have seen that sort of SF proliferate. Some of it has been good, even excellent. Some has not. But few of its practitioners enjoy the popularity of Jack McDevitt, who despite a relatively plain and direct (traditional) approach to his work is surely one of the best writers of SF alive today.

His novels are enough to support that statement. But if he had never written the novels, his short fiction could do the job almost as well. If you doubt me, get a copy of Cryptic: Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt. It begins with one of his best-known tales, “Cryptic,” which concerns how much you can learn about distant aliens from the mere fact of a signal; you don’t have to figure out their language to be scared spitless. If that (like his novels) seems too much like hard SF, consider “Welcome to Valhalla,” coauthored with Kathryn Lance, which considers the role of art in shaping history, and the recalcitrance of the artist’s ego. Or “Ignition,” which imagines a future America ruled by folks a lot like the Taliban, even unto their propensity for destroying graven images with high explosives. Or … The book has thirty-nine tales, and I am not about to go through them all for you! Suffice it to say that you should have no trouble finding plenty to enjoy.

* * * *

It is now time to say farewell as the Reference Librarian.

I began writing for Analog in 1971, with stories and science fact articles. My first “Reference Library” was in the October 1978 issue. It was a review of a single book, David Rorvik’s In His Image: The Cloning of a Man, which I had not intended as a book review column. I sent it to Stan thinking it would make a nice guest editorial. The book was controversial, for it claimed that a human being had already been successfully cloned and described how. It is worth noting that the methods Rorvik described would not have worked in mammals as described, but they weren’t that far from methods that later actually did work. And the bioethical debates that flared around the book have continued ever since, for the last few decades have been dominated by biotechnology and the associated ethical and philosophical issues. I concluded the review by saying:

* * * *

“Rorvik has been called a liar, a fraud, and a jackass in print, and his book has been called a hoax. But even though I do not believe his claims, I will not be that unkind. I suspect Rorvik of a devious, and perhaps mercenary, turn of mind, and I think he has devised a clever, attention-getting ploy that will have an entirely salutary effect. Bioethics is important at this time in our history, but like most ethical and philosophical areas, it requires too distasteful and laborious an amount of thought to get much shrift from the average Jane and Joe. Rorvik has put it into a frame as carefully and dramatically plotted as a novel. He has made it accessible, and he deserves far more praise than blame.”

* * * *

I was a bit amused when later on lawyers contacted me to ask whether I would be willing to serve as an expert witness in the court case involving Rorvik and his publisher. (See www.museumofhoaxes.com/cloning.html.)

Given the nature of the book, I still think my review would have made a fine guest editorial. But editors are by definition filled with vast editorial wisdom, and a “Reference Library” it became, displacing Lester Del Rey’s column for a month.

Some months later, after Spider Robinson had succeeded Lester Del Rey, I asked Stan to bear me in mind if he needed a new book columnist, and he wrote back saying that as it happened, Spider was wishing to alternate with someone else. Stan was asking people to produce sample columns, and if I wished, I could do one too. By the end of 1979, there I was, a more or less regular Analog columnist. Spider and I tried not to overlap our coverage, and by and large we succeeded. Within a couple of years, Spider had decided to step down entirely, and I was the sole Reference Librarian.

* * * *

And now, after 30 years and 341 columns, I have had enough. I said as much to Spider, and he was kind enough to provide the following for quotation here:

* * * *

“My own tenure at the Reference Library was only a little over two years—just long enough to solidify a healthy—nay, robust—respect for P. Schuyler Miller. Sky not only lasted nearly a quarter of a century at the arduous, underpaid and largely thankless job, he contrived to leave it liked and respected by all. But to manage the same unlikely trick for THIRTY years is even more impressive. In all that time I’ve never heard a single writer utter a single harsh or even snide word about Tom Easton; those unfortunate enough to receive an unfavorable review from him tend to react with disappointment rather than anger. Remarkable. I salute him and thank him and will miss him. His successor has large shoes to fill. I hope at least this means we can look forward to more of Tom’s own fiction now.”

* * * *

I could argue with bits of that. Miller started reviewing for Astounding in 1945, though “The Reference Library” itself didn’t start till 1951. I’ve run into a harsh or snide word or two. My shoes are the same size they always were, and anyone with a size 12 foot can fill them. Arduous? Well, some, but any writer has to get used to keeping an eye on the deadline, and it’s been fun, getting paid to read books many of which I would have wanted to read even if they weren’t coming to me in the mail for free. In the process I have been able to pay attention to portions of the science fiction realm usually ignored by reviewers. This has included poetry, and in fact I was once told that when a book of Tom Disch’s poems came out, my review was the only one it received in the entire country. It has also included small press fiction, art books, SF criticism and history, biography and autobiography, books on writing SF, and—practically from its beginning—electronic publishing, first on floppy disk and later on CDs and online. Once or twice, I think, I even mentioned calendars by SF artists. Given the nature of the Analog audience, I also felt no compunctions about covering popular and even fairly academic science. And once in awhile, I would even review a mystery, a romance, or something for the kids.

In 2007, Borgo Press published much of this non-mainstream SF material in Off the Main Sequence: I. O. Evans Studies in the Philosophy and Criticism of Literature, No. 31. The book is perhaps most valuable for the section that contains, in chronological order, everything I had said about electronic publishing. It amounts to a history, though it isn’t a unified history. It’s more a series of snapshots, but I know of nothing else that comes close to telling the story.

And telling a story is something that a book columnist can do, if the gig lasts awhile. It isn’t even deliberate. It just happens, as the snapshots accumulate and fill the album. Look at the right entries in the columns and you can see the growth—and perhaps decline—of a writer. Look at other entries, and you can see the growth (and decline) of a subgenre, a publisher, a form of publication. It is perhaps like a family album, where the snapshots are literal photographs and you can see the growth (and decline) of family members, houses, marriages, and all the rest of life.

Despite the series title of the Borgo book, I haven’t, to my mind, been doing criticism. Other writers, such as John Clute, do that, and they bring out periodic collections of their analyses to contribute to knowledge of the field. I’ve reviewed them when they came my way. But their contributions to the knowledge of the field are deliberate; sticking to the photographic metaphor, they tend to do landscape shots, framing shots, photo essays. What I have done deliberately is to contribute knowledge of this book, that book, and another book, month by month, year by year. Family snapshots, if you will, with the landscape as background, and snapshots when properly arranged—which the Borgo book tried to do—can add something to knowledge of the field.

Will I do another Borgo book? Probably not. There really isn’t much market for that sort of thing. I have other projects to work on, including one that has already given rise to a science fact article for this magazine. Maybe I’ll find time to write a bit more fiction, but don’t count on it. Google me, and you’ll see that I’m pretty busy now with nonfiction work.

So. I can’t say there are no regrets. “The Reference Library” has been a part of my life for a long time—almost half that life, in fact! Reading, thinking about the reading, and writing about the reading long ago became part of my daily rhythm. But it’s time to move on. If I still review the occasional book—and review copies are still coming in the mail—you’ll find that on my blog at technoprobe.blogspot. com/.

If you visit me there, I’ll be overjoyed to see you. If you don’t, this “Farewell” will have to do. I’ll miss you all, but it’s time to go.

Now I’ve got to take the smoldering torch out of the bracket on the wall over there. Give me a second to wave it around a bit. There—the flame has picked up. Brighter, warmer, not so smoky. Somewhere around here, Stan has the next Reference Librarian waiting for me to pass the torch. Uh, well, it seems to be stuck to my fingers. Must be thirty years of habit. I have had enough, really.

Dammit! Will someone just grab this torch?

Copyright (c) 2008 Tom Easton

* * * *

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Reader’s Department: BRASS TACKS

Dear Stan,

As someone who has had a keen interest in linguistics for many years, I was both surprised and delighted to discover Henry Honken’s erudite and informative article on click languages in Analog’s May issue. I had often wondered how Xhosa managed to start with an “X”—now I know. However, I was also surprised to find within the article what would in school exam terms be called a “silly slip”: the English “f” sound is not produced by a constriction of the lower teeth against the upper lip—that is not easy and, once achieved, it is practically impossible to produce any sound—but rather the reverse. Perhaps this was a deliberate mistake designed to find out how many people actually read the article?

Tony Marshallsay

Riyadh

Saudi Arabia

* * * *

Actually, neither the initial “X” (as in English) nor the “inverted f” as described is intrinsically unpronounceable. But you’re right that the description of “f” is inverted, and I’m not sure how that slipped though. I remember noticing it as an obvious slip in the manuscript and marking it for correction, but somehow it eluded our clutches all the way to the finish line.

* * * *

Dear Dr. Schmidt,

The Fourth of July fireworks just came to a glorious conclusion, here in Columbus, Ohio.

I decided to follow that with the conclusion of Kukulkan by Sarah K. Castle (May 2008).

I was well rewarded for saving this story.

I then visited www.analogsf.com, hoping to find that with the advance of the Internet Age, and Web 2.0, and the contributions of the younger people you are bringing along with such success, there might be an advance in the quill pen technology of rating stories.

Alas, as one of your long-in-the-tooth readers, I confess I was unable to find what I was looking for.

I came to www.analogsf.com, hoping to find a quick and simple way to express my appreciation for Ms. Castle’s remarkable story.

If there is a way to contribute to the positive feedback for Ms. Castle’s work, I did not find it.

You chided me once before for my inability to abide by the antiquated feedback system you’ve had in place for more than the thirty years I’ve been reading Analog. You even went so far as to inform me that Mrs. Schmidt had found a way to deal with the ancient methodology you have in place.

I have great admiration for Mrs. Schmidt.

I have equal admiration for you.

I do not admire the quill pen methodology you inherited from Ben Bova, and from John Campbell before him.

Please enlist one or two of your bright young people to set up a simple database for subscribers who are so inclined to record their impressions of a particular story by a particular author within minutes of the peak moment when the story or article has come to its inevitable end.

With sincere appreciation for decades of inspiring stories and articles,

Thomas A Hanson

Columbus, Ohio

* * * *

As you’ve just demonstrated, there already is a quick, simple way to express your immediate appreciation for a story: e-mail.

There is also a quick, simple way on our website to record your comparative impressions for the year, called online voting—which leaves me puzzled as to why you claim we’re still using “quill pen technology.”

Although, now that you mention it, keeping a page of paper where you jot down your immediate impressions so you can compare them at the end of the year isn’t such a bad idea. If you shudder at the thought of pen or paper, you could just as easily do the same in any of the many readily available word processors, spreadsheets, or database programs. If what you’re suggesting is that we should supply you with a readymade electronic form for doing that, we can look into the possibilities—although, our readers being who they are, I suspect each of you would prefer a different way of doing it. So I put it to you directly: What would you like to see us do to make it easier for you to keep track of your ratings of stories and convey them to us in a meaningful and mutually useful way?

Before you write, let me emphasize one thing. Much as you might be bubbling with enthusiasm over a story you’ve just read, what we’re most interested in is which ones made you bubble the most, and still left you feeling that way some time later. Which is why, much as we like getting letters enthusing about a story you’ve just read, we still want to know which ones stand out in your mind when you’ve read the whole year.

* * * *

Dear Dr. Schmidt,

I am prompted to write to you by Angie Boyter’s letter in your June 2008 edition. Praising your editorials, she says, “I often want to pull them out to send to my local elected officials.” Well, I am an elected official of a locality, and I want to praise Angie for her thinking.

I have been a reader of Analog for over thirty years. Science fiction and fact have helped define the person I am. Stories that answer questions starting with the words, “What if?” have been, and still are, my favorite reference texts. Through SF, I’ve met the most thoughtful, educated, and caring people I know. Yet many of us just assume that we are outside the mainstream, sidelined from the political forces that shape much of our world.

You have written on the topic of climate change, which I regard as humanity’s greatest and most urgent challenge. SF readers are skilled and experienced at seeing the various futures that answer the questions of “What if?” There has never been a more pressing need for that ability in the offices of local government than is now created by the dangers of our damaged ecology.

Your readers should know that they are not precluded from being leaders in the mainstream, nor from solving the problems they are uniquely equipped to foresee. I ask them to do as Angie suggests, and send your essays to their elected officials. Or, do as I have done, and join those officials themselves. I assure you, and them, that if I can do it, they can too.

Please forgive the honorific in my signature line. I very rarely use it, but perhaps it will draw an extra eye or two to this note, which I hope will suggest a possibility to a future local leader.

Hon. Stevens R. Miller

Dulles District Supervisor

Loudoun County, VA

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Dear Dr Schmidt:

As always, when the current issue of Analog arrives, I turn first to the editorial. No exception this month [July/August, 2008].

May I express a note of serious disagreement with your idea that Scottish Gaelic has as bad a pronunciation-to-spelling “fit” as English? I’m a native English speaker, but a Gaelic learner—and for my sins, the chairman of the Gaelic Education Committee of a regional Gaelic culture/language organization. I’ve had a lot of exposure to Scottish Gaelic in written, spoken, & sung forms over the last ten years, and I’m firmly convinced that spelling in Scottish Gaelic is far more logical and consistent than spelling in English.

Once one gets past the (mistaken) notion that Latin letters have intrinsic sound meanings, the spelling rules for Gaelic are simple & very consistent. None of this stuff of, say, “ough” having four or five different sounds. There are rules for assigning pronunciation to letters & letter combinations. The latter are a bit more complex, but they are consistent.

I’d say that the consistency exceeds French.

Chas. H.W. Talbot

Gaelic Education Committee

Seattle, Washington

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I’ll take your word for it; I haven’t attempted an exact numerical analysis, and I haven’t studied Gaelic in as much depth as I gather you have. However, I did get through most of an introductory course, and while it’s true that the rules are good for identifying broad and slender consonants, no rules that I encountered made it easy to tell which vowels were pronounced as vowels. If there are such rules, I’d be interested in hearing about them—but if they’re as complicated as I suspect they are, I’d still have to say the system is at best cumbersome.

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Dr. Schmidt:

France imposed a roman alphabet on Vietnam that uses a great many diacritics to correlate spellings and pronunciation, which the socialist republic of Vietnam still uses. But you cannot look at a word and tell how to pronounce it without learning the rules, which, as you pointed out with regard to French, are hardly simple. Colonial schools did not teach the old Vietnamese script, an extensively modified form of Chinese ideographs, cutting modern Vietnamese off from over a thousand years of their literature. It is being reconstructed now, but it is as difficult as you can imagine. But don’t imagine that a phonetic alphabet will transparently preserve literature of the past, because it won’t. English spelling was phonetic which first devised, and if you knew the spelling rules, you’d know it is ridiculous to aver “fish” may be spelled “ghoti.”

Lee in Siam

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The observation about “ghoti,” which I believe is due originally to George Bernard Shaw, is based on today’s English usage, for which “rules” is too strong a word: “gh” as in “laugh,” “o” as in “women,” and “ti” as in “nation.”

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Dr. Schmidt,

It is very difficult for me to read this story (“Tracking” by David Palmer in the July/August 2008 issue). I don’t know what to call the type of writing, skipping all those words, but it is very distracting for me. I read a couple pages, then skipped forward to see if it continued throughout. I will not read the other installments if they are written this way. Hopefully this is not a “trend.” I have been subscribing for too long to give up now.

Jay Berlo

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I’m sorry you found the language in TRACKING off-putting, but I very much hope you’ll give it another chance. At least read as far as the “Interlude” beginning at the end of p. 18, which explains why Candy writes the way she does—and it certainly has nothing to do with illiteracy. Yes, it does take a little getting used to, but nowhere near as much as learning a new language. In our experience, most people find it feels a little strange for a very small number of pages, but then they get caught up in it and find it not only easy going but irresistible. EMERGENCE, the first story in this series, was written in exactly the same style, and the AnLab scores said it was, at least for many years, the most popular story we ever published.

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Dr. Schmidt,

I recently submitted a manuscript for consideration by your publication. It was rejected which I certainly accept, however I think you could provide the submitting writers with more information than you do.

With the reasonable assumption that you are reading the manuscript to assess its suitability for publication, you have some criterion in mind as a basis for rejection of the submission (when you reject it). It would seem to me that a checklist with at least the main reasons for rejection wouldn’t take much time to complete.

It is frustrating to invest the time and money in a submission and then not really learn anything from the submission. I wouldn’t consider a format using a checklist with few checked off boxes giving more specific reasons for rejection as burdensome because I would assume you are making those decisions as you read anyway. It would also be useful to know if you read the entire manuscript.

You have a good thing going. A little bit of help to the writers will do nothing but improve the quality of the submissions and your final product.

Arthur Pluim

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Actually, the checklist you suggest would be far more burdensome and less informative than you realize. It would be at best oversimplified and therefore misleading, and deciding where to put the check marks would take more extra time than you think, with 500 or so manuscripts a month—and would produce little or no benefit for the magazine. We have a very small staff and our job is not to provide free writing instructions to everybody who wants it, but to fill the magazine with stories readers will want to buy. This means 98-99% of stories must be rejected, and it’s simply not because of any thing conspicuously wrong with them, but simply because they don’t stand out as sufficiently special from 98% of the competition. There are other places to get help with writing; I’ll give it when a writer is getting close to what we need, but I have to resist the temptation to try to do more than that. Giving a meaningful critique of a story that’s almost there can be so time-consuming that the first question I must answer about every manuscript—as quickly as possible—is whether it warrants spending company time on a detailed critique. (For more, please see my March 2007 editorial, “New Writers.”)

[Back to Table of Contents]

Reader’s Department: IN TIMES TO COME

We start 2009 with the first “double” issue in our new format, with a strikingly dramatic cover by John Allemand for Rajnar Vajra’s novella “Doctor Alien,” which gives new meaning to the archaic term “alienist.” It’s hard enough for psychiatrists to help patients of their own species, for whom they have a pretty good idea of what is “normal.” But what is one to do when thrust into the life-or-death position of having to treat a motley collection of extraterrestrials, whose standards of normality are all over the map—and all quite unknown? The possibilities are, so to speak, mind-boggling….

As usual, we take advantage of the extra space in a double issue to feature items that wouldn’t fit in a regular issue. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s January/February offering in this category is “The Recovery Man’s Bargain,” an offshoot of the “Retrieval Artist” series she started here some while back, but with a different kind of specialist—who has a lot to learn, not all of it comfortable.

Kevin Walsh returns with another of his fact articles exploring our rapidly expanding knowledge of what sorts of extrasolar planets are really out there. This one he calls “Neptune, Neptune, and Neptune … But Not Neptune,” examining a trio of discoveries which all have some similarity to one of “our guys”—but also plenty of differences from it, and from each other.

Rounding out the issue will be a mixed bag of intriguing stories by Dave Creek, Edward M. Lerner, Richard Foss, Richard A. Lovett, and John G. Hemry—and, last but by no means least, Part 3 of Robert J. Sawyer’s Wake.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Reader’s Department: UPCOMING EVENTS

by Anthony Lewis

16-19 January 2009

ARISIA 2009 (New England regional SF & fantasy conference) at Hyatt Regency, Cambridge, MA. Guest of Honor: Walter L. Hunt; Artist Guest of Honor: Dave Seeley; Fan Guests of Honor: Ricky and Karen Dick. Membership: $50 until 31 December 2008, $60 thereafter and at the door (if not sold out). Info: www.arisia.org; info@arisia.org; Arisia, Building 600, PMB 322, 1 Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA 02139.

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23-25 January 2009

VERICON IX (Harvard SF, fantasy, gaming, anime conference) at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Guest of Honor: Kim Stanley Robinson. Membership: $15/$25 (student/ non-student) online until 10 December 2008, $20/$25 online until 14 January 2009, $25/$35 at the door. Info: www.vericon.org; Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, Student Organizations Center, 59 Shepard St., Box 93, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138

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13-15 February 2009

BOSKONE 46 (New England regional SF & fantasy conference) at Westin Waterfront, Boston, MA. Guest of Honor: Jo Walton; Official Artist: Stephan Martiniere; Special Guest: Irene Gallo; Featured Filker: Dr. Seti; NESFA Press Guests: Greg & Astrid Bear. Art show, dealer’s room, gaming, talks, panels, music, whimsy. Membership: $46 in advance, more at the door. Info: www.boskone.org; info-b46@boskone.org; (617) 776-3243 (fax); Boskone 46, PO Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701.

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27 February-1 March 2009

SheVaCon 17 (SF conference) at Roanoke Virginia. Writer Guest of Honor: Larry Niven; Art Guest of Honor: Ernie Chan; Fan Guest of Honor: Carla Brindle. Multi-genre con: art room, dealer’s room, gaming, anime room, video room, computer room, masquerade/ cosplay, workshops and panels. Membership: $35 until 31 December 2008, $40 thereafter and at the door. Info: www.shevacon.org; PO Box 7622, Roanoke, VA 24019-0622.

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13-15 March 2009

MADICON 18 (Virginia area SF conference) at James Madison University Festival Center, Harrisonburg, VA. Guest of Honor: L.E. Modesitt, Jr. Info: www.madicon.org.

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6-10 August 2009

ANTICIPATIONSF (67th World Science Fiction Convention) at Palais des congres de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Guests of Honor: Neil Gaiman, Elisabeth Vonarburg; Fan Guest of Honor: Taral Wayne; Editor Guest of Honor: David G. Hartwell; Publisher Guest of Honor: Tom Doherty; MC: Julie Czerneda. Membership: until 31 December 2008 (see website for latest details): USD/CAD 215, GBP 95; EUR 130; JPY 20000; supporting membership USD/CAD 55; GBP 30; EUR 35; JPY 6000. This is the SF universe’s annual get-together. Professionals and readers from all over the world will be in attendance. Talks, panels, films, fancy dress competition—the works. Nominate and vote for the Hugos. Info: www.anticipationsf.ca/English/Home. C.P. 105, Succursale NDG, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H4A 3P4

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