“I thought Mrs. Zed made a good point,” Bashira continued, rotating her chair a little. “Everyone being watched all the time, everything being recorded and tracked. Webcams, security cameras, phone records, cell phones with GPSs, all of that.” She looked at Caitlin. “Did you know that Gmail retains your deleted email messages?”
Caitlin shook her head, but it didn’t surprise her. Storage was dirt cheap.
Bashira went on. “She might be right. The Web might be Big Brother incarnate.”
“Mrs. Zehetoffer is old,” Caitlin said.
Bashira nodded. “Yeah, she must be in her forties. But I still think she might be right. I don’t want everything I say and do to be tracked.”
“I don’t know,” said Caitlin. “When I was blind, it was comforting to know there were security cameras in public areas. I mean, they were like magic to me; I didn’t have any sense of what vision was, but knowing that I was being watched over was relaxing.”
“Yeah, but you are—you were—a special case. And Mrs. Zehetoffer thinks we’re very close to having Big Brother, if he isn’t here already.”
“So?” Caitlin said—and she surprised herself with how sarcastic she sounded.
“Hey, Cait… chill.”
“I’m just saying,” said Caitlin sharply.
“It’s just a book, babe.”
But it wasn’t, Caitlin realized. Nineteen Eighty-Four was not just a novel but rather what Richard Dawkins called a meme—or a series of memes: ideas that spread and survived like genes, through reproduction and natural selection. And Orwell’s meme that surveillance is evil, that it inevitably leads to totalitarianism, that it invades privacy, that it constrains normal behavior, and that it is fundamentally corrupt, had won out over every other possible take on those issues. It was impossible to discuss such matters without people almost immediately invoking Big Brother, confident that merely raising the specter of Orwell’s world would be enough to win any argument.
“Big Brother got a bum rap,” Caitlin said.
“What?”
“You know, I never had one—a big brother—but my friend Stacy does. And he always looks after her. There’s nothing inherently wrong with someone knowing everything, some caring person keeping tabs on you and making sure you’re safe.”
“But if he’s corrupt—”
“He doesn’t have to be corrupt,” Caitlin said.
Bashira looked at her. Caitlin supposed other people had always looked at her while thinking of what to say next, but it was disconcerting; she averted her eyes, understanding, for a moment, what her dad must feel all the time.
“ ‘Power corrupts,’ ” Bashira said gently. “ ‘And absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ ”
“It doesn’t have to turn out that way,” Caitlin said.
“Of course it does,” said Bashira. “Humans are imperfect and subject to corruption. The only thing that isn’t imperfect is the divine, and you said it yourself, my beloved infidel friend: you don’t believe in the divine.”
fifteen
“You can’t go back out there again,” Dr. Marcuse said to Dillon, as he and Shoshana entered the bungalow. “Hobo has voted you off the island.”
Dillon had taken off his soaking-wet shirt, shoes, and socks, but he was still wearing his black jeans. “But he’s my thesis subject!” he protested.
Dr. Marcuse had brought in the painting Hobo had made, and had set it on a worktable, leaning against the wall. “Look at it,” he said to Dillon.
“Yes?” Dillon replied, peering at the canvas.
“That’s you,” Marcuse said. “With your arms ripped off.”
“Oh,” said Dillon softly.
“You’re not to go out there. Of course, you can still watch him all you want on the closed-circuit cameras.”
“What the hell is wrong with him?” asked Dillon, looking first at Shoshana, and then at Dr. Marcuse.
“He’s reaching maturity,” Marcuse said.
“He’s too young for that,” said Shoshana.
“Is he?” said Marcuse, giving her a withering glance. “Who knows what’s normal for a chimp-bonobo hybrid? Regardless, he’s taking after his father: when male chimps reach maturity, they become hostile loners and are very hard to handle.”
Sho felt her heart sink. If Marcuse was right, then Hobo was going to be like this from now on.
“His reaction to you, Dillon, is symptomatic,” continued Marcuse. “You’re another male, and adult male chimps defend their territories against intruding males. When Werner comes in on Monday, I’ll tell him the same thing—Hobo is off-limits to him, too. Maria is at Yerkes for the next two weeks, but I’ll see if maybe she can cut her trip short and get back here.”
“What about you?” asked Dillon.
“Werner is five-four, and sixty-seven years old—and you, frankly, are a stick insect. But I can take care of myself. Hobo knows who the alpha is around here.”
Shoshana looked at him. Dr. Marcuse could be loud and overbearing, but he did truly adore apes and treated them well. Still, even at the best of times, he was pretty high-strung—and this was not the best of times. As soon as the world had learned that Hobo was making representational art—mostly in the form of paintings of Shoshana’s profile—the Georgia Zoo had served Dr. Marcuse with papers, demanding that Hobo be returned to them. They didn’t care about Hobo as a—yes, damn it all, thought Sho—as a person. No, all they were interested in was the money his paintings were now fetching on eBay and in art galleries. If they won their suit, they’d no doubt try to sell the one of Dillon with his arms ripped off for a particularly high price.
Marcuse moved over to the large chair and picked up the printout he’d been reading earlier. He held it up, inviting Shoshana to look at it.
Sho’s eyesight was good—well, at least when she had her contacts in—but the type was too small for her to make out while he was holding it. “What’s that?” she asked.
“News coverage from June of aught-eight,” he said. He was the only person Sho had ever met who referred to the initial decade of the twenty-first century as the aughts. “Spain’s parliament committed back then to the Declaration on Great Apes.”
Shoshana knew the declaration well. It had first been put forward in 1993, and held that great apes should be entitled to the right to life, the protection of their individual liberty, and freedom from torture. So far, Spain was the only country to have adopted its provisions. Sho was all in favor of it, and so, she knew, was Marcuse. If something is self-aware—if it can communicate, and if it passes the mirror test and all that—then it should be recognized as a person, and it should have rights.
“And you think that’s got a bearing on Hobo’s case?” she asked.
“Absolutely. The Declaration defines ‘the community of equals’ as ‘all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. ’ And Article Two of the Declaration says, ‘Members of the community of equals are not to be arbitrarily deprived of their liberty.’ ” He spread his arms as if his point were now self-evident. “Well, the Georgia Zoo wants to deprive Hobo of precisely that.”
Sho thought about the high chain-link fence that surrounded the Marcuse Institute, and the moat around the island on which Hobo spent most of his time. “This isn’t Spain,” she said gently.
He frowned. “I know that, but the point is still correct. And Hobo should have a say in the matter—and, unlike just about every other ape on the planet, he actually can speak up on his own behalf.”