Wonder

It’s me again, appeared in the window. Xiaomi. Come to me. I miss you so much.

Feng felt his head swimming. He tried to ground himself by looking about his office: Bones, books, journals, diplomas, and photos of him with Party officials and the worldwide greats of paleontology who had visited over the decades. When he looked down at the screen, the words I am waiting had been added to what was there before, and, while he watched, the word please popped in as well.

He got to his feet, slowly, pain stabbing through his right hip as he put weight upon it as if his body were urging him to accede to his wife’s request; no part of him was happy.

He left the office and shuffled toward the metal staircase, heading down the three floors to the second-story gallery, a vast square of displays with a huge opening in its middle through which the dinosaur skeletons on the first floor were visible. At this end, the tapering neck of the sauropod Mamenchisaurus snaked up from below; at the other, the hadrosaur Tsintaosaurus, standing—quite incorrectly, they knew now—on his hind legs, reared up through the opening. The gallery lights were dim—only a few lamps were left on at night—and the skeletons appeared black and ominous.

The opening was surrounded by white metal railings. Feng had been standing right here when Wong Wai- Jeng had climbed them and leapt to the floor below; he had done it in a desperate bid to escape capture by the police. This would be an escape of a different kind: an escape from loneliness, an escape from pain. And if Xiaomi really was waiting for him…

He was still clad in his dragon robe, and he realized he wanted to undo the sash, so that when he fell, the silk garment would billow up about him like wings. It wouldn’t break his fall, of course, not in the slightest—but it pleased him to think, as he fell to the floor below, with its displays of feathered dinosaurs from Liaoning province, that for one brief moment, a dragon would actually fly.

Down below, the allosaur was facing off against the stegosaur, the latter’s tail with its quartet of spikes curved around to try to disembowel the marauding carnivore.

When Wai-Jeng had climbed the barrier around the opening, which was made of metal tubular segments, he’d used the successively higher segments like the rungs of a ladder. He’d clambered up and over in a desperate rush that Feng could never copy. But Feng did manage to climb up slowly, each awkward bending of his limbs sending pain coursing through him. And he painfully swung himself around, and perched on the top of the barrier, his thin legs dangling over the precipice, his gnarled hands gripping the topmost of the white tubes.

I miss you so much, Xiaomi had said.

I’m waiting for you, she had said.

Come to me, she’d said.

Webmind was doubtless right: a fall of ten meters would easily finish him off; his bones were as brittle as were fossils before being treated with resin.

He took a deep breath, then pushed off, spreading his arms, closing his eyes, falling—and flying—into the embrace of his loving wife.

thirty-two

Caitlin—still in the swivel chair on the street in Waterloo—knew that what had just happened in webspace was metaphoric. Her mind interpreted events in that realm by likening them to things it understood. She’d read a lot about consciousness on Wikipedia since Webmind had emerged, and knew metaphor (or, no doubt as her former English teacher Mrs. Z would correct her, simile) was the defining trait of self-awareness: being conscious meant it was like something to be alive. In fact, one of the seminal papers in consciousness studies was Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” He contended that humans could never understand the mental states of a flying creature that perceived the world through echolocation. But because of her forays into webspace, Caitlin did feel she knew what flight was like—and she (and most other totally blind people) actually did have at least some notion of what echolocation was like.

But to connect to websites by movement, to call up content by yearning, to have making connections feel like touching—these metaphors, these ways of perceiving, were a product of her own mind. What was it like to be a bat? What was it like to be Caitlin? What was it like to be Webmind? And—most important of all right now—what was it like to be the Other?

Although she was in contact with it and could feel its presence, what it seemed most like was how it used to be when she’d sat on the living-room couch while her father sat on the easy chair: she knew he was there, but there was no interactivity. He was so reserved, so wrapped up in his own thoughts, so isolated.

And she was aware that there really had been no rush through webspace—whatever that meant. The special packets that formed both Webmind and the Other were widely and evenly dispersed in vast oceans of regular packets that her mind was blind to, just as a frog’s vision didn’t encode nonmoving objects. But now that she was in contact with the Other, there had to be a way to coax it to reach across the gulf toward Webmind, just as Webmind was striving to connect with it.

She wasn’t exactly sure where she was in the real world just now; she had no previous experience judging distances while being pushed along in an office chair by a running man. Somewhere down the block from her house? Or maybe even in the next block? The sun was still out; she could feel it on her skin. In fact, she probably should be wearing sunglasses even though her brain wasn’t perceiving what her open eyes were looking at. Matt was behind her still, and his thin hands now rested on her shoulders, as much out of affection as to prop himself up, she bet. She could hear him breathing noisily, trying to recover from his mad hundred-yard—or thousand-yard!—dash.

She thought about the difference between the Hoser, who had tried repeatedly to touch her without permission, and Matt, whose hand she’d had to gently place upon her breast that first time, and—

And that was it! For this to work, the Other had to want to be touched, had to desire the connection.

But what could she do to entice it to reach out to Webmind? What did he or she have to offer it but—

But websight! A look at itself. Yes, it could see through webcam eyes, but that only enabled it to see the outer world of trees and bees, of mice and lice, of faces and spaces. But she could show the Other itself.

There was no direct way for her to share what she was seeing with it—but there was an indirect way: what she was looking at was now being projected on the big sixty- inch screen in the Decters’ living room. And although she couldn’t see it from here, Webmind could, through the camera on the netbook back in the house. But it would only be getting an oblique view of the monitor since her father had aimed the webcam to favor the couch and the easy chair.

And, in that second, she was reminded of how much Webmind did need physical agents—his peeps!—in the real world. “Can someone go point the netbook in the living room directly at the TV?” Caitlin said into the air.

“I’ll do it,” her mother replied, and Caitlin instantly heard her mom’s shoes—sensible ones, of course!— striking the pavement. In all the wild rush to get out here, Caitlin hadn’t heard whether the side door had been closed, but if it hadn’t, her mom had probably been itching to go back and take care of that, anyway. Her mother’s legs were nowhere near as long as her dad’s, but it still shouldn’t take her long to get there—after all, she wasn’t pushing a 110-pound girl in an office chair!

Matt seemed to sense that they were waiting for something, and he started rubbing Caitlin’s shoulders the way she’d read a trainer might rub a boxer’s between rounds. At last, Webmind spoke to her through the Bluetooth earpiece. “I have a clear view of the monitor now.”

Caitlin nodded acknowledgment, the view of webspace bobbing once as she did so. “Okay, here we go!”

She focused on the shimmering mass that was the Other, fighting to keep her gaze from being drawn to the much larger body of Webmind, which was shimmering more rapidly. It was a struggle—especially for her! Other