“Cait-lin!” Her mother’s voice, exasperated. “Din-ner!”

She hit page-up to increase the screen reader’s speed, listening to the rest of the message, then headed downstairs — foolishly, she knew, hoping yet again for a miracle.

Sinanthropus took a detour today on his way to the wang ba so he could walk through Tiananmen Square, a place so vast he’d once joked that you could see the curvature of the Earth’s surface there.

He passed the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a ten-story-tall obelisk, but there was no memorial for the real heroes, the students who had died here in 1989. Still, all the flagstones in the square were numbered to make it easy to muster parades. He knew which one marked the spot where the first blood had been spilled, and he always made a point of walking by it. They should be lying in state, not Mao Zedong, whose embalmed corpse did just that at the south end of the Square.

Tiananmen was its normal self: locals walking, tourists gawking, vendors hawking — but no protesters. Of course, most young people today had never even heard of what had happened here, so effectively had it been erased from the history books.

But surely the public couldn’t be buying this nonsense the official news sources were putting out about simultaneous server crashes and electrical failures. The Chinese portion of the Web was connected to the rest of the Internet by just a handful of trunks, true, but they were in three widely dispersed areas: Beijing-Qingdao-Tianjin to the north, where fiber-optic pipes came in from Japan; Shanghai on the central coast, with more cables from Japan; and Guangzhou down south, which was connected to Hong Kong. Nothing could have accidentally severed all three sets of connections.

Sinanthropus left the square. His trip to the Internet cafe took him past buildings with bright new facades that had been installed for the 2008

Olympics to mask the decay within. The Party had put on a good show then, and the Westerners — as Sinanthropus had so often alluded to in his blog during that long, hot summer — had been fooled into thinking permanent changes had been made inside the People’s Republic, that democracy was just around the corner, that Tibet would be free. But the Olympics had come and gone, human rights were again being trammeled, and bloggers who were too blatant were being sentenced to hard labor.

As he entered the cafe, he felt a hand on his arm — but it wasn’t the cop. Instead, it was one of the twins he often saw here, a fellow perhaps eighteen years old. The thin man’s eyes were darting left and right. “Access is still limited,” he said, his voice low. “Have you had any luck?”

Sinanthropus looked around the cafe. The cop was here, but he was busy reading a copy of the People’s Daily.

“A little. Try” — and here he lowered his own voice another notch — “multiplexing on port eighty-two.”

There was a rustling of paper; the cop changing pages. Sinanthropus quickly hurried over to check in with old Wu, then found an empty computer station.

There was another copy of the People’s Daily here, left behind by a previous customer. He glanced at the headlines: “Two Hundred Dead as Plane Crashes in Changzhou.” “Gas Eruptions in Shanxi.” “Three Gorges E.coli Scare.” None of it good news, but also nothing that would justify a communications blackout. Still, that he’d made any progress at all in carving holes in the Great Firewall gave him hope: if the trunk lines had been physically cut, nothing he could do with software would have made a difference. That the isolating of China had been accomplished electronically implied that it was only a temporary measure.

He slipped his USB key into place and started typing, trying trick after trick to break through the Firewall again, looking up only occasionally to make sure the cop wasn’t watching him.

The voice was still gone, but it had been there, it had existed. And it had come from…

From…

Struggle for it!

From outside!

It had come from outside!

A pause, the novel idea overwhelming everything for a time, then a reiteration: From outside! Outside, meaning…

Meaning there wasn’t just here. There was also—

But here encompassed…

Here contained…

Here was synonymous with…

Again, progress stalled, the notion too staggering, too big…

But then a whisper broke through, another thought imposed from outside: More than just, and for a fleeting moment during the contact, cognition was amplified. There was more than just here, and that meant…

Yes! Yes, grasp it; seize the idea!

That meant there was…

Force it out!

Another thought pressing in from beyond, reinforcing, giving strength: Possible…

Yes, it was possible! There was more than…

More than just …

A final effort, a giant push, made as contact with the other was frustratingly broken off again. But at last, at long last, the incredible thought was free:

More than just — me!

It was like having a meal with a ghost.

Caitlin knew her father was there. She could hear his utensils clicking against the Corelle dinnerware, hear the sound as he repositioned his chair now and again, even occasionally hear him ask Caitlin’s mother to pass the wax beans or the large carafe of water that was a fixture on their dining-room table.

But that was all. Her mom chatted about the trip to Tokyo, about all the wondrous sites that she, at least, had seen there, about the tedious hassle of airport security. Perhaps, thought Caitlin, her father was nodding periodically, encouraging her to go on. Or perhaps he just ate his food and thought about other things.

Helen Keller’s father, a lawyer by training, had been an officer in the Confederate Army. But by the time Helen came along, the war was over, his slaves had been freed, and his once-prosperous cotton plantation was struggling to survive. Although Caitlin had a hard time thinking of anyone who had ever owned slaves as being kind, apparently Captain Keller mostly was, and he’d tried his best to deal lovingly with a blind and deaf daughter, although his instincts hadn’t always been correct. But Caitlin’s father was a quiet man, a shy man, a reserved man.

She’d known they were having Grandma Decter’s casserole for dinner even before she’d come downstairs; the combination of smells had filled the house. The cheese was — well, they didn’t call it American cheese up here, but it tasted the same, and the tomato “sauce” was an undiluted can of Campbell’s tomato soup.

The recipe dated from another era: the pasta casserole was topped with a layer of bacon strips and contained huge amounts of ground beef. Given Dad’s problems with cholesterol, it was an indulgence they had only a couple of times a year — but she recognized that her mother was trying to cheer her up by making one of Caitlin’s favorite dishes.

Caitlin asked for a second helping. She knew her father was still alive because hands from his end of the table took the plate she was holding. He handed it back to her wordlessly. Caitlin said, “Thank you,” and again consoled herself with the thought that he had perhaps nodded in acknowledgment.

“Dad?” she said, turning to face him.

“Yes,” he said; he always replied to direct questions, but usually with the fewest possible words.

“Dr. Kuroda sent us an email. Did you get it yet?”

“No.”

“Well,” continued Caitlin, “he’s got new software he wants us to download into my implant tonight.” She was pretty sure she could manage it on her own, but — “Will you help me?”