Wake

Chapter 16

It was now way past Caitlin’s bedtime, but — hot damn! — she was seeing the Web!

Her mother and father stayed with her, and she kept downloading the new software over and over again into her implant in order to keep the Web connection open. Her father was (so her mom had told her) a good artist, and Caitlin was describing what she saw for him so he could draw it. Of course, she couldn’t see the drawings, so none of them knew if he was getting it right but, still, it was important to have some sort of record, and—

The phone rang. Caitlin had the caller ID hooked up through her computer, and it announced, “Long Distance, Unknown Caller.”

She hit the speakerphone button and said, “Hello.”

“Miss Caitlin,” wheezed the familiar voice.

“Dr. Kuroda, hi!”

“I have an idea,” he said. “Do you know about Jagster?”

“Sure,” said Caitlin.

“What’s that?” asked her mom.

“It’s an open-source search-engine — a competitor for Google,” said Kuroda. “And I think it may be of use to us.”

Caitlin swiveled in her chair to face her computer and typed “jagster” into Google; not surprisingly, the first hit wasn’t Jagster itself — no need for Coke to redirect customers to Pepsi! — but rather an encyclopedia entry about it. She brought the article up on screen so her mother could read it.

Caitlin and her parents were still on the phone with Dr. Kuroda in Tokyo.

“I’ve got a conference call going here,” Kuroda said. “Also on the line is a friend of mine at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. She’s part of the Internet Cartography Project. They use data from Jagster to keep track moment by moment of the topology of the Web — its constantly changing shape and construction. Dr. Decter, Mrs. Decter, and Miss Caitlin, please say hello to Professor Anna Bloom.”

Caitlin felt a bit miffed on behalf of her mom — she was Dr. Decter, too, after all, even if she hadn’t had a university appointment since Bill Clinton was president. But there was nothing in her mother’s voice to indicate she felt slighted. “Hello, Anna.”

Caitlin said, “Hello,” too; her father said nothing.

“Hello, everyone,” Anna said. “Caitlin, what we want to do is keep the link between your post-retinal implant and the Web open, but instead of just going back and forth downloading and redownloading the same piece of software from Masayuki’s site, we want to plug you directly into the datastream from Jagster.”

“What if it overloads her brain?” said Caitlin’s mom, her tone conveying that she couldn’t believe she was uttering such a sentence.

“I rather doubt that’s possible from what I’ve heard about Caitlin’s brain,”

Anna said warmly. “But, still, you should have your cursor on the ‘abort’ button. If you don’t like what’s happening, you can cut the connection.”

“We shouldn’t be messing around like this,” her mom said.

“Barbara, I do need to try things if I’m going to help Miss Caitlin see the real world,” Kuroda said. “I need to see how she reacts to different sorts of input.”

Her mother exhaled noisily, but didn’t say anything else.

“Are you ready, Miss Caitlin?”

“Um — you mean right now?”

“Sure, why not?” said Kuroda.

“Okay,” Caitlin said nervously.

“Good,” said Anna. “Now, Masayuki is going to terminate the software download, so I guess your vision will shut off for a moment.”

Caitlin’s heart fluttered. “Yes. Yes, it’s gone.”

“All right,” said Kuroda. “And now I’m switching in the Jagster datastream. Now, Miss Caitlin, you may—”

He perhaps said more, but Caitlin lost track of whatever it was because—

— because suddenly there was a silent explosion of light: dozens, hundreds, thousands of crisscrossing glowing lines. She found herself jumping to her feet.

“Sweetheart!” her mom exclaimed. “Are you okay?” Caitlin felt her mother’s hand on her arm, as if trying to keep her from flying up through the roof.

“Miss Caitlin?” Kuroda’s voice. “What’s happening?”

“Wow,” she said, and then “wow” and “wow” again. “It’s … incredible. There’s so much light, so much color. Lines are flickering in and out of existence everywhere, leading to … well, to what must be nodes, right? Websites? The lines are perfectly straight, but they’re at all angles, and some…”

“Yes?” said Kuroda. “Yes?”

“I — it’s…” She balled her fist. “Damn it!” She normally didn’t swear in front of her parents, but it was so frustrating! She was way better than most people at geometry. She should be able to make sense of the lines and shapes she was seeing. There had to be a … a correspondence between them and things she’d felt, and—

“They’re like a bicycle wheel,” she said suddenly, getting it. “The lines are radiating in all directions, like spokes. And the lines have thickness, like — I don’t know, like pencils, I guess. But they seem to … to…”

“Taper?” offered Anna.

“Yes, exactly! They taper away as if I’m seeing them at an angle. At any moment, some have only one or two lines connecting them; others have so many I can’t begin to count them.”

She paused, the enormity of it all sinking in at last. “I’m seeing the World Wide Web! I’m seeing the whole thing.” She shook her head in wonder. “Sweet!”

Kuroda’s voice: “Amazing. Amazing.”

“It is amazing,” Caitlin continued, and she could feel her cheeks starting to hurt from smiling so much, “and … and … my God, it’s…” She paused, for it was the first time she’d ever thought this about anything, but it was, it so totally was: “It’s beautiful!”