And so she held out a hand—although she couldn’t see it. “Matt?”
His hand took hers, and from the sound of his voice he had crouched beside her. “I’m here, Caitlin.”
“I need your help…”
thirty-one
Wai-Jeng’s hands danced over the keyboard with an ease they hadn’t felt for weeks. He was proficient at Perl—the duct tape of the Web—and had a thousand tricks at his command. Here, in the room devoted to plugging holes, he had access to port-sniffers, Wireshark, Traceback, and all the other tools of the hacker’s trade—electronic awls to pierce with, software pliers to bend with, subroutine wrenches to twist with.
This iteration of the Great Firewall was stronger than the last, and presumably he alone here in the Blue Room was working to slash it open; all the others were attempting to shore it up. But Wai-Jeng had an additional resource now, something he hadn’t possessed when he’d managed to break through the earlier, less sophisticated barrier: he had Webmind himself for his beta tester. Linus’s law said that with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow—and Webmind had more eyes than even the Communist Party.
Sinanthropus’s hands flew across the keyboard, the keyclicks an anthem of freedom.
Caitlin felt herself rushing through webspace, felt herself streaking toward the shimmering backdrop that represented the Chinese Webmind, felt herself racing along, felt the incredible rush of speed, felt the giddy exhilaration of being a projectile, a rocket, felt—yes, indeed!—her hair whipping in the breeze!
Bashira’s voice from the outside world, from far away, from way behind her: “Faster! Faster!”
The reckless surge continued, and—yes, yes, yes!—the background pixels were growing, were taking on distinctive shapes. She was getting closer!
Sounds like thunder behind her—beside her—in front of her, and her mother’s voice: “Go, Matt, go!”
And now Matt’s voice, a mixture of huffing and cracking: “Are… you… there… yet?”
The pixels growing larger still, so big that she could easily see individual ones flipping from green to blue and back again, their arrangements forming geometric patterns.
“No!” Caitlin shouted. “It’s still a long way off.”
Thunder now echoing from the rear and Bashira’s voice over top of it: “Faster, Matt!”
The background moving into the foreground, the cellular automata resolving themselves into animated, living things—
Her mom: “I’ve got the door!”
Banging, clanging, wood against wood, suddenly all echoes stopping, and—yes!—birdcalls! Cool air on her face, and—
Oh, my God!
Matt, voice cracking: “Hang on!”
Bump bump bump bump bump!
Getting there, getting there, and—a sharp left turn? What—no! Damn! “No, no, no!” Caitlin yelled. “I have to go that way!” She pointed to her right with a hand she couldn’t see.
“Working on it!” Matt said, his voice straining with exertion.
The cellular automata were sliding by now as if she were skimming above them, a meteor glancing off the atmosphere—but the field of pixels was coming to an end; she was reaching its edge.
“Turn!” Caitlin said. “Turn now!”
“Almost… to… the… street!” Matt called.
Sliding by, sliding by…
“And—now!” exclaimed Matt.
More bumps, then careening, almost tipping over, her heart jumping as she thought she’d be thrown from the chair—
Suddenly, a smoother ride, with Matt pushing her as hard and as fast as he could, his running shoes slapping against asphalt now.
She was going in the right direction again, surging forward, falling downward, flying upward—the sensation kept shifting, but regardless of which she felt, the wall of cellular automata was again growing closer.
Her mom’s voice, breathy, ragged: “I can… take over…”
Matt, firmly. “No! I’ve got her!”
A headlong rush, her hair flying behind her.
Two quick toots of a car horn—a driver remarking on the spectacle of Matt furiously pushing her down the street in an office chair.
“Almost there!” Caitlin said, and—
Bam! She shook violently and thought again that she was going to be thrown from the chair.
“Sorry!” Matt huffed. “Pothole!”
The ride steadied, and they zoomed farther along, and the cellular automata grew ever larger, more distinct, more alive. She could almost touch the flickering wall of them, almost reach the Other, almost… almost… almost…
Woot!
Woohoo!
Contact!
Since his wife had died earlier this year, Dr. Feng often slept on the small couch in his office at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. It was against the rules, of course, but as everyone who lived in the People’s Republic knew, there were rules and there were rules. The security guards and cleaning staff knew what he was doing; indeed, they sometimes turned off his office light and gently closed the door for him when he fell asleep without doing those things himself.
The wooden cases here were filled with fossil bones—Mesozoic material on this floor; Cenozoic above; Paleozoic below, in good stratigraphic sequence. The long dead he had no trouble with; it was the recently departed that tore at his heart, and to go home to his little empty house, the fruit of five decades of service to the Party, was often too much for him to bear. Everything there reminded him of her: the carefully framed pressed flowers in the main room, her collection of poetry books in the bedroom, even the bamboo furniture, every piece of which she had picked out.
Besides, after decades of fieldwork in the Gobi Desert, this musty office was a veritable Hilton compared to where he’d spent many a night.
Dr. Feng woke, as he often did, in the predawn darkness, staring up at the winking red eye of the smoke detector affixed to the office roof. He sat up slowly, stiffly, then turned on the lamp on a nearby bookcase. He was wearing his underwear and undershirt, and he shuffled across to the red silk robe that hung from the hook on the back of his office door and slipped it on. The robe was bright red and had a golden dragon on its front. Of course, as a paleontologist, he favored the notion that his country’s myths about fire-breathing reptiles had sprung from the discovery of dinosaur bones. Tyrannosaurs really had once roamed this land, tearing hundred-kilo chunks of flesh from the hides of terrorized prey, but beasts like the one now spread across his chest had never existed; imaginary things could do no harm.
He plodded over to his desk, cursing his old bones as he did so, then was briefly amused that he’d thought of them as such; the Yangchuanosaurus tibia on the bookshelf was two million times older than his own arthritic shinbone.
Feng shook his mouse, and his desktop computer came to life; his wallpaper was a photo of the waterfall at Diaoshuilou, where Xiaomi and he had spent their honeymoon sixty years ago. His monitor had recently been replaced with a wider one, and the image was stretched horizontally, distorting it. Feng wished young Wong Wai-Jeng were still on staff here; he’d been so good about looking after every little computer problem. The new fellow, a taciturn Zhuang, seemed to feel any request was an imposition.