Authors: Robert J Sawyer
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.
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.”
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.