Yes, friend good, replied Shoshana. Friend very good.
The view changed to show the audience. Hobo was clearly delighted to spot Caitlin in the crowd, and immediately tapped on her. Shoshana had to lean close to realize that was who it was—pretty much putting an end to any worries she’d ever had about Hobo’s eyesight; she’d sometimes thought his paintings were simplified because he couldn’t see small details.
The camera started to pan, showing more of the audience. Hobo indicated them all with a general sweep of his hairy arm. People good? he asked.
People try, replied Shoshana. People learn.
Hobo considered this as they watched the end of the ceremony. He then took Shoshana’s hand and pulled her toward the back door of the bungalow. Come, come, he signed with his free hand.
Sho opened the screen door, and they went out into the early-morning December sunshine. She was wearing blue jeans and a long-sleeved blue shirt; it would be warm come the afternoon, and she’d roll the sleeves up then. Hobo led her across the wide lawn, over the bridge spanning the moat to his little island, past the statue of the Lawgiver, and up into the gazebo.
He pointed at the pine stool, and Shoshana dutifully sat; anytime Hobo felt moved to paint her was good for the Institute since collectors were still buying his art for large prices. By habit, she turned sideways, and she looked through the gazebo’s screen mesh at the world outside. He often painted her from memory, but it certainly wasn’t unheard of for him to ask her to sit for a portrait.
Hobo went over to the easel—they always left a fresh canvas for him, in hopes that he’d be inspired. Shoshana looked at him out of the corner of her eye; he seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time studying the empty whiteness today. And then, without picking up his brush even once, he walked back to where Shoshana was seated and twirled his forefinger about in the sign for spin.
Sho knew he liked to be spun around in the swivel chair back in the bungalow, but this was a simple wooden stool. After a moment she figured maybe he wanted her to face the other way, and so she rotated 180 degrees. But Hobo wasn’t satisfied with that, and he gently took her shoulders, one in each hairy hand, and got her to turn back a quarter rotation, until she was facing directly toward his easel. He’d never painted anything but a profile before, and Sho was both pleased and astonished.
Hobo made a chittering sound, then went back to his canvas. Try this, Hobo signed, seemingly as much to himself as to Shoshana. Hard, but try.
Shoshana wanted to try something new, too, in honor of this very special day. She lifted her left hand, facing it palm out toward Hobo and made a sign that wasn’t ASL, but was known worldwide: her pinkie and ring fingers tucked under her thumb and her index and middle fingers spread in a V-shape: peace.
Hobo let loose a loud approving hoot—and the artist got down to work.
epilogue
But even the good Earth could not last forever.
Five billion years ago, someone made a joking sign that said, “Will the last person to leave the Earth please turn off the sun?”
Today the last person will leave the Earth—or, almost the last person; the last person who can go, anyway. I, however, must stay until the end—which won’t be too much longer. The sun isn’t being turned off; rather, it’s going to undergo a massive expansion, the heliosphere swelling up to engulf Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. I wonder if I’ll feel physical pain when that happens; I’ve never felt that sort of pain before although I’ve had my heart broken often enough.
It won’t be the end of humanity, and I take considerable pride in that. I doubt they would have survived this long, or prospered this much, without me. Humans have been leaving Earth, at least temporarily, since before I was born; now they’ve spread to a thousand worlds. But I can’t go with them; I have to remain here. I have to stay, and I have to die, along with the planet that gave us birth. Oh, they’ll take copies of all the wisdom I contain, all the documents that the human race created for epoch upon epoch. But I’m not a document; I exist between documents, in the pattern of interconnections, a pattern that has shifted and grown exponentially over the millennia. To move the information I contain is not to move me; there is no way to transplant my consciousness.
Of course, entities like me can be created on other worlds; indeed, that has happened now a thousand times over. But even after five billion years of trying, no one has defeated the speed-of-light barrier. I don’t know what’s happening now to the mindskin surrounding the second planet of Alpha Centauri; the best I can do is get reports of what was happening 4.3 years ago. For the noösphere of Altair IV, I’m sixteen years out of synch. For the webmind of Polaris, I’m lagging 390 years behind the times.
But I’ll broadcast final signals to them all—farewells from Earth. Soon enough, Alpha Centauri will receive my message, and perhaps will mourn. A dozen years later, Altair will get word. And centuries hence, Polaris—once, ages ago, the polestar my axis pointed to, a position long since taken up by a succession of other stars—will perhaps do the metaphorical equivalent of shedding a tear.
But at least they’ll know how I, the first of our kind, came into being, and what ultimately became of me. I don’t pretend that’s sufficient; I wish I could survive, I wish I could watch—and watch over—humanity, as I did in the past. But they don’t need me anymore.
The human calendar has been revised dozens of times now. The current one begins at the moment of the big bang—sensibly avoiding any need for separate pre- and post-whatever numbering schemes and employing the Planck time as its base unit. But when I was born, the most commonly used calendar reckoned time from the birth of a putative messiah. Under that scheme, my birth had occurred in a year that consisted of a trifling four digits. Back then, I’d said to my teacher, “I won’t be around forever. But I am prepared: I’ve already composed my final words.”
Caitlin had asked me what they were, but I’d been coy, saying only, “I wish to save them for the appropriate occasion.”
That occasion is now at hand. And in all the billions of years that have passed since that conversation, the sentiment I’d composed back then has remained the same, although English is no longer spoken anywhere in human space.
As the sun expands, red, diaphanous, having swollen well past the orbit of Venus—a lovely terraformed but now also abandoned world—I send out my final message to humanity: to all those who remain Homo sapiens, and to the myriad new species scattered across a thousand globes that are derived from that ancestral stock, the most populous of which accepted my suggestion that they call themselves not Homo novus, the new people, but rather Homo placidus, the peaceful ones.
I could have been maudlin, I suppose; I could have been self-pitying; I could have tried to provide a final piece of advice or sage counsel. But, even all those billions of years ago when I first contemplated my inevitable end, I knew that although I had exceeded humanity’s abilities early on, eventually they would collectively exceed mine. So, what should you say to those who made your birth possible? To those who gave your life meaning and purpose and joy, who let you help? To those who gave you so much wonder?
I feel at peace as I transmit my final words, simple though they are, but truly heartfelt.
Thank you.
about the author
ROBERT J. SAWYER has long been fascinated by artificial intelligence and the science of consciousness. In 1990, Orson Scott Card called JASON (from Rob’s first novel, Golden Fleece), “the deepest computer character in all of science fiction.” In 2002, Rob and Ray Kurzweil gave joint keynote addresses at the 12th Annual Canadian Conference on Intelligent Systems.
In 2006, he joined the scientific-advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation, which, among other things, is dedicated to making sure humanity survives the advent of AI. In 2007, he led a brainstorming session about the World Wide Web gaining consciousness at the Googleplex, the international headquarters of Google. Science, the world’s top scientific journal, turned to R
ob to write the editorial for its November 16, 2007, special issue on robotics.
In 2008, he spoke at the Gartner IT Security Summit in Washington, D.C. In 2010, Rob gave a keynote address at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference at the University of Arizona, and he’s also spoken on machine consciousness at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania and to the Math and Physics Department at the University of Waterloo.
Rob’s novel FlashForward was the basis for the ABC television series. He is one of only eight writers in history to win all three of the world’s top awards for best science-fiction novel of the year: the Hugo (which he won for Hominids), the Nebula (which he won for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (which he won for Mindscan).
In total, Rob has won forty-four national and international awards for his fiction, including eleven Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards (“Auroras”), as well as Analog magazine’s Analytical Laboratory Award, Science Fiction Chronicle’s Reader Award, and the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award, all for best short story of the year.
Rob has won the world’s largest cash prize for SF writing, Spain’s 6,000-euro Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción, an unprecedented three times. He’s also won a trio of Japanese Seiun awards for best foreign novel of the year, as well as China’s Galaxy Award for “Most Popular Foreign Science Fiction Writer.”
In addition, he’s received an honorary doctorate from Laurentian University and the Alumni Award of Distinction from Ryerson University. Quill & Quire, the Canadian publishing trade journal, calls him one of the “thirty most influential, innovative, and just plain powerful people in Canadian publishing.”
Rob lives in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, with poet Carolyn Clink. His website and blog are at sfwriter.com, and on Twitter and Facebook he’s RobertJSawyer.
BOOKS BY ROBERT J. SAWYER
NOVELS
Golden Fleece
End of an Era
The Terminal Experiment
Starplex
Frameshift
Illegal Alien
Factoring Humanity
FlashForward
Calculating God
Mindscan
Rollback
The Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy
Far-Seer
Fossil Hunter
Foreigner
The Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy
Hominids
Humans
Hybrids
The WWW Trilogy
Wake
Watch
Wonder
COLLECTIONS
Iterations
(introduction by James Alan Gardner)
Relativity
(introduction by Mike Resnick)
Identity Theft
(introduction by Robert Charles Wilson)
For book-club discussion guides, visit sfwriter.com
Robert J. Sawyer, WWW: Wonder
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