WWW: Wake

Prolific science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer published the first book in his WWW Trilogy in 2009. Titled WWW: Wake, the speculative fiction novel follows several disparate storylines, all of which tackle themes of perception, learning, spectrums of ability, and inter-species conflict and coexistence. The main thread of the novel concerns a blind teenager whose new cybernetic eye implant eventually allows her to communicate with a digital consciousness that has arisen on the World Wide Web. Side plots track a devastating bird flu epidemic in China and a battle over the personhood of an unusually intelligent ape in a US zoo. Most of these stories are left unresolved at the end of this novel, which is followed by the sequels Watch and Wonder.

Although the novel often flips from one of its plots to the others, this summary will take each thread in turn.

The story opens in 2012. One plotline concerns the sudden outbreak of deadly bird flu in China. When the government realizes that the virus is 90 percent fatal, senior official Dr. Quan Li recommends killing 11,000 people in the affected province in order to stop the epidemic. As the plan is enacted, China cuts off all telephone, satellite, and wireless communication with the rest of the world, in an attempt to keep the Changcheng Strategy secret. However, the communication crackdown inspires activist and hacker Wong Wai-Jeng to rally allies to circumvent the ban. As soon as communication is restored weeks after thousands of people have been killed by airborne chemicals, Wong Wai-Jeng posts a blog under the pseudonym Sinanthropus, telling the world about what has happened. Quickly, the police capture him.



Another plotline follows a primate research lab, the Marcuse Institute, in San Diego. Dr. Shoshana Glick has been working with a chimpanzee-bonobo hybrid named Hobo. After Hobo is allowed to use a webcam to sign with an orangutan in the Miami Zoo, word of the first interspecies online communication leaks. Hobo’s birthplace, the Georgia Zoo, initiates a lawsuit to sterilize Hobo so that his hybrid genes don’t interfere with the pure chimpanzee and bonobo bloodlines. To complicate matters, Hobo stops painting abstract blobs, instead, painting a portrait of Dr. Glick. The Institute decides to go public with Hobo’s new skills, to rally the public to his side in this impending lawsuit.

The main plotline is about fifteen-year-old Caitlin Decter, who was born blind, and who has grown into a young, pretty, feisty, math genius. Many readers find her characterization in the novel severely lacking, arguing that she is both too perfect and also too complacent and docile to be a believable representation of a teenager. Caitlin’s blindness is caused by a rare disorder – her eyes work fine; it is the connection between them and her brain that is miscoded.

After the Decters move to Ontario from Texas, a cutting-edge researcher from Japan, Dr. Masayuki Kuroda, emails them to offer Caitlin a chance to gain the ability to see. Dr. Kuroda has developed an implantable signal processor, an “eyePod,” that could send correct data to her optic nerve. Without hesitation, Caitlin jumps at the opportunity to be able to see, which some readers point to as an offensive moment. In Tokyo, Dr. Kuroda implants the device and starts tinkering with its software.



Caitlin doesn’t see the outside world but does begin to “see” the World Wide Web. She switches the device from simplex mode, which sends one-way signals, to duplex mode, which allows two-way communication. She immediately notices that along with the links and networks, her “websight” allows her to see a chessboard-like structure in the background. After some research, the Decters, Dr. Kuroda, and Anna Bloom, a network cartographer, realizing that means the cellular automata contain intelligence content, worry that this content might be top secret NSA materials.

As Dr. Kuroda updates the eyePod’s software, Caitlin experiments with the simplex and duplex modes of her device. Suddenly, the duplex mode stops working – but the simplex mode now allows Caitlin to see the outlines of nearby objects. In the middle of a press conference, Dr. Kuroda calls to announce the success of his invention; Caitlin’s eyePod electrically shocks her and crashes. When she reboots it in duplex mode, she sees an image of her own face in her websight, and all the pieces of what has been happening with the background cellular automata fall into place.

The World Wide Web has spontaneously generated an intelligence, which seeing Caitlin’s eyePod, assumes that this device is attempting to communicate with it. Sending a picture of Caitlin in response is the intelligence’s way of trying to communicate back. Slowly realizing what she is interacting with, Caitlin begins to simultaneously teach herself to read and to teach the intelligence. With her efforts, and eventually through the intelligence’s own study of websites, the complexity of the cellular automata reaches a level that exceeds that of humans.



The novel ends on Caitlin’s sixteenth birthday. The intelligence emails her congratulations, and thanks her for helping it to learn and grow. When Caitlin asks what she should call this new being, it responds, “Webmind.”