“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.
Chapter 27
As soon as Shoshana arrived at the Marcuse Institute on Saturday morning, she, Dillon, and the Silverback headed over to the island. Hobo was inside the gazebo, leaning against one of the wooden beams that made up its frame.
Hello, Hobo, signed Marcuse once they were all inside. His fingers were fat and some signs were a struggle for him.
Hello, doctor, Hobo signed back. Marcuse was the only one who required the ape to call him by an honorific instead of his first name. Still, it wasn’t as bad as William Lemmon, the ultimate supervisor of Roger Fouts’s work with Washoe in the 1970s; Lemmon used to make Washoe and his other ape charges kiss his ring when he arrived, as if he were pope of the chimps.
Picture of Shoshana good, Marcuse signed.
Hobo grinned, showing teeth. Hobo paint! Hobo paint!
Yes. Now will you paint … His hands froze in midair, and Shoshana wondered if he’d decided that he didn’t want to see himself caricatured by an ape. After a moment, he began signing again: Dillon?
Hobo turned an appraising set of eyes on the young grad student with the scraggly blond beard; he was wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans, which, Shoshana hoped, weren’t the same ones as yesterday. Maybe … maybe…
Dillon looked surprised to be conscripted for this duty, but he moved over to one of the two stools in the gazebo, sat on it, and struck a pose like Rodin’s Thinker. Shoshana smiled at the sight.
But Hobo threw his hands up over his head, made a pant-hoot, and ran on all fours out the gazebo’s door. Shoshana looked at Marcuse for permission, he nodded, and she took off after the ape, who was now cowering behind the yellow stone statue of the Lawgiver.
What’s wrong? Shoshana asked. She held her arms out to gather Hobo in a hug. What’s wrong?
Hobo looked back up at the gazebo, then at Shoshana. No people. No watch, he signed. There weren’t many things he was self-conscious about; indeed, it had taken a lot to convince him not to masturbate or defecate in front of visiting dignitaries. But his art was something he was uneasy about, at least while it was being created.
We go away, you paint Dillon?
Hobo was quiet for a moment. Paint Shoshana.
Again? Why?
Shoshana pretty.
She felt herself blushing.
Shoshana have ponytail, added Hobo.
She knew that getting him to paint someone other than her would be better. Otherwise, critics would argue that he’d just stumbled on a random combination of shapes that Marcuse, et al., had decided represented Shoshana, and he simply reproduced those same fixed shapes over and over again to get a reward — not unlike half the cartoonists in the world, Shoshana thought; the guy who drew The Family Circus seemed to have a repertoire of about eight things.
Fine, she signed. Paint me, then Dillon, okay?
Shoshana knew she was out-thinking the poor ape; he could, of course, paint her regardless of what she said. After a moment, he signed, Yes yes.
She held out her hand and he took it, intertwining his fingers with hers. They walked back up to the gazebo, the hot morning sun beating down on them.
“Hobo is going to paint another picture of me,” Shoshana announced once they’d passed through the screen door. Marcuse frowned. She switched to signing so Hobo could follow along. And after, Hobo will paint Dillon — right, Hobo?
Hobo lifted his shoulders. Maybe.
“All right,” Shoshana said, “everybody out, please. You know he doesn’t like an audience.”
Marcuse didn’t seem happy about taking orders from a subordinate, but he followed Dillon outside. Shoshana looked around the gazebo, double-checking that the additional cameras they’d set up last night could clearly see both Hobo and his canvas. Then she headed for the door, too. As she exited she glanced back, and, to her astonishment, saw Hobo stretching his long arms out in front of him, with fingers interlocked, as if warming up.
And then the artist got down to work.
That special point! How wondrous, but how frustrating, too!
The datastream from it didn’t always follow the same path, but it did always end up at the same location — and so I took to intercepting the datastream just before it arrived there.
There had been no repetition of the intriguing bright flashes, and for a long time there was nothing at all I could make sense of in the data pouring forth from that point. But now the datastream had become a reflection of me again. How strange, though! Instead of the constantly changing perspective I’d grown used to, the datastream seemed to focus for extended periods on just a very small portion of reality and … and something was distorted about the passage of time, it seemed. I tried to fathom the significance, if any, of that tiny part of the universe, but then, maddeningly, the datastream turned to gibberish once more…
After they’d finished the snack — which turned out to be oatmeal cookies her mom had gotten from the Mennonites — Caitlin and Dr. Kuroda returned to the basement. Caitlin had switched her eyePod to simplex mode for the break, but now had it back in duplex and was looking again at webspace.
“Okay,” said Kuroda, settling into his chair, “we’ve got a background to the Web made up of cellular automata — but what exactly are the cells? I mean, even if they’re just single bits, they still have to come from somewhere.”
“Slack storage space?” suggested Caitlin. Hard drives store data in clusters of a fixed size, she knew; the new computer her dad had bought yesterday probably had an NTFS-formatted drive, meaning it used clusters of four kilobytes, and if a file contained only three kilobytes of data, the fourth kilobyte — over eight thousand bits — was left unused.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Kuroda. “Nothing can read or write to that space; even if there was some way for Web protocols to access slack space on servers, you wouldn’t see bits flipping rapidly. No, this must be something out there — something in the data pipes.” He paused. “Still, there’s nothing I can think of in the Internet’s TCP/IP or OSI model that could produce cellular automata. I wonder where they’re coming from?”