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And, again, that comes from you having a single point of view.”

“How so?” asked Caitlin’s mom.

“It’s only because you have a limited perspective that you understand that the person facing you must be seeing something completely different from what you’re seeing as you face him. Are you in Miss Caitlin’s room now?”

“Yes,” said her mom.

“Well, if we were facing each other there, you might be seeing the window and the outside world, and I might be seeing the door and the hallway beyond—not only are we seeing completely different things, but you understand that we are. Your limited perspective lets you know that my point of view is different. And there are those terms again: ‘perspective, ’ ‘point of view’! Thought and vision are inexorably connected in our brains.”

“But what about blind people?” asked Caitlin, taking another break from typing.

“Again, you don’t actually need the vision, just the neural infrastructure geared for a single point of view.” He paused. “Look, if having eyes in the back of our heads really was an improvement, we’d have them. Mutants with extra eyes are born periodically today, and probably have been throughout vertebrate history—and if that had conferred a survival advantage, the mutation would have spread. But it didn’t. Having one point of view—having consciousness and being able to understand that what the predator sees is different from what you see—trumps even being able to see things approaching you from behind.”

Caitlin was wrestling with the implications of this, but it was her mother who got it first. “And Webmind sees through Caitlin’s eye, right? Caitlin is his window on our world.”

Caitlin found herself looking down, pleased but a tad embarrassed that the conversation had suddenly come around to her, and—

And she saw what Webmind had written at the end of her transcript of Kuroda’s comments, glowing blue: You really did uplift me. You gave me the perspective and point of view and focus I needed to become truly conscious. Without you, I wouldn’t exist.

Caitlin looked up and allowed herself a warm, satisfied smile. “Go me!” she said.

thirteen

“What the hell happened?” demanded Tony Moretti. He was standing at the side of the WATCH mission- control room again. Peyton Hume was next to him, somewhat higher up on the sloping floor; although he was shorter than Tony, they were now seeing eye to eye.

Shel Halleck was back at his workstation in the third row. “I’m not sure,” he called out. “There was a sudden surge in traffic associated with the AI, and then it just froze. And Caitlin Decter—or someone in her house—kept sending it IMs saying it should ‘break the links.’ ”

“Why?” asked Tony.

“I’m not sure,” Shel said again.

“I’m getting tired of hearing that,” Tony snapped. In fact, he was getting tired, period.

“There seem to be limits to its processing capacity,” Peyton Hume offered. “That suggests at least some models of how it might be composed—and eliminates some other ones. In fact…”

“Yes?” said Tony.

“Well,” the colonel said, “remember what the Chinese did last month? I don’t mean the slaughter; I mean how they tried to keep word about it from getting out. They cut off almost all communication with the outside world for several days, including the Internet. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the cleaving then reunification of so large a part of the Internet preceded the emergence of this entity. That suggests there’s a critical threshold of components required to keep it going—and that at least some of them are in China.”

“All right,” said Tony. “It’s a lead, anyway. Shel, Aiesha, let’s find out precisely where the damned thing resides. If the president does give the kill order, I want us to be ready to implement it at once.”

Shoshana stared in astonishment across the little dome-shaped island until Hobo had disappeared from view.

The back of her head still hurt. She patted it again to see if the bleeding had stopped; it hadn’t. Hobo was much stronger than she, and an angry ape was not to be taken lightly. But she loved him and cared about him and was worried about him, and he’d never hurt her—or anyone—before.

She had her cell phone with her, and could call Dr. Marcuse if need be. And if Hobo did come chasing after her, all she had to do was dive into the circular moat around the island; Hobo couldn’t swim.

She started walking, but rather than crossing the island, as Hobo had done, she strode along its perimeter, keeping close to the water in case she needed to escape. He’d gone right past the gazebo at the top of the island mound—she’d seen that much. He could be on the ground, or he could have shinnied up one of the palm trees; he didn’t do that often, though.

She continued on for another dozen paces—and there he was, sitting on his scrawny rump, leaning his back against the trio of rolled-up stone scrolls at the base of the Lawgiver statue.

Hobo, she signed. He looked at her, said nothing, then looked away.

Which meant she couldn’t talk to him. She clapped her hands together—he wasn’t deaf, after all, even if he used a language devised for those who were. He turned his head to look at the source of the sound.

Hobo, she signed again. Are you okay? Can I help?

He made no reply.

She stepped closer. Please, Hobo. Worried about you.

Suddenly he sat up straight, and Sho, startled by the movement, felt her own back tense. And then, all at once, he was in motion, a blur of black fur. She pulled back a half pace, but Hobo was not going out but up, clambering up the eight-foot-tall statue of the Lawgiver, until he was high on the faux orangutan’s shoulders, hooting and panting at the sun.

Sign language was a funny thing. When Shoshana signed with Dr. Marcuse, she mentally heard the words in his normal deep speaking voice. Hobo had no normal speaking voice. That was another bogus thing about the Planet of the Apes films—the notion that it was merely a lack of intelligence, rather than a structural deficiency in the larynx, that prevented apes from articulating. And the wild shaking of his fist at the sky he was doing right now wasn’t really a sign. But, still, somehow, Shoshana thought she heard the voice of Roddy McDowall, the actor who had played Caesar in last night’s film, furiously shouting, “And that day is upon you NOW!”

She clapped her hands again, but he refused to look down, refused to listen. She tried for a full minute, then headed back to the drawbridge, hoisting it once she had crossed. She then returned to the white bungalow.

In the interim, Dr. Marcuse had been joined by Dillon Fontana, who was doing his Ph.D. thesis on ape hybridization. Dillon was thin, had blond hair and a wispy beard, and, as always, was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt.

“Hobo just yanked my ponytail,” Shoshana announced.

Marcuse was seated in the one comfortable chair in the room, reading a printout. He lowered it, and said, “He always does that.”

“No,” said Shoshana. “He gently tugs it. But this time he pulled hard.”

“Well,” said Marcuse, “it can’t have been that hard—not by his standards. If he’d wanted to, he could have torn it right out of your head.”

“He came damn near,” she said, and she turned around, inviting them to look.

Dr. Marcuse didn’t bother to get his bulk out of the overstuffed chair, but Dillon—who, she knew, would take any excuse to get close to her—came over and peered at her scalp. “Ouch!” he said.

“Exactly!”

“Did you tell him he was misbehaving?” Marcuse asked. “You know you have to discipline him immediately, or he won’t connect the punishment with what he’s done that was wrong.”

“He wouldn’t even talk to me,” Shoshana said.