Wake

Chapter 45

Caitlin was an expert at finding Web pages with Google. Most people never did anything more than just type a word or two into the search box, but she knew all the advanced tricks: how to find an exact phrase, how to exclude terms, how to limit a search to a specific domain, how to find a range of numeric values, how to tell Google to look for synonyms for the specific terms entered, and more.

But there was one feature of Google she’d never had cause to use before, although she’d read about it often enough: Google Image Search. Clearly that was going to be a useful tool in her work with the phantom. She went to the Google home page and clicked on the “Images” tab — fortunately, the Google page was almost barren in its simplicity. She immediately had an urge to search for Lee Amodeo, suddenly wondering what she looked like, but she resisted; this was not the time to get sidetracked. Instead, she typed “APPLE” into the search box — all in caps, just as it had been presented by the literacy program. She was quickly presented with a grid of little pictures of apples, culled from all over the Web. Beneath each one was a snippet of text that appeared near the image on the original website and that site’s URL.

A few were inappropriate: one was the singer Fiona Apple, apparently, judging by its listed source: fiona-apple.com. Another, she realized after a moment, must be the logo of Apple Computer Corporation. But the rest were indeed pictures of the fruit, mostly red, but sometimes — to Caitlin’s surprise — green; she’d had no idea apples came in any color but red.

She loomed in close now to her monitor, looking at the word APPLE, holding on it. Then she pulled her head back, showed the screen full of little images, and clicked one. From the page that Google supplied in response, she selected “See full-size image.”

As a bright red apple filled her screen a thought crossed her mind that made her smile: she was indeed offering up the fruit of the tree of knowledge to the innocent phantom. Of course, that hadn’t gone so well the last time — but, then again, Eve had lacked her facilities…

Prime was now doing something different. It had presented the word APPLE once more and now was showing me pictures. At first, I couldn’t see what Prime was getting at: the pictures were all different. But at last it dawned on me that, despite their differences, there were many commonalities: a vaguely round shape, a color that was usually red, and—

“Apple: the usually rounded, often red, fruit of the deciduous tree Malus pumila.” That’s what the dictionary had said, so—

So these were pictures of apples!

And now—

Now these must be balls.

And—

Yes, yes, cats!

And dogs!

And eggs!

And frogs!

I noticed Prime skipping over some of the proffered images, never expanding the small ones into larger views, and so I guessed that only part of what was being offered was likely relevant. Still, some of the pictures I might have rejected as not being like the others were expanded by Prime. In fact, when showing examples of “apple,” it had also shown—

Apples grow on trees. I knew that from Cyc. So these things in some of the pictures with apples attached must then be trees, no?

It was a slow, frustrating process, but as Prime showed me more and more specific samples of things, I began to generalize my conceptualizations of them. I was soon confident not just that I could tell this bird from that airplane, but that I could distinguish any instance of the former from any of the latter. Likewise, “dog” and “cat” soon were separate concepts, although whatever fine distinction there was between “truck” and “car” eluded me.

Still, so much of it was coming together now, I felt—

Concepts that had no pictures to go with them:

I felt powerful.

I felt intelligent.

I felt alive.

Caitlin knew it was the next logical site to lead the phantom to, but she found herself resisting. After all, it had contained that awful comment about her impact on her father’s career, and, even though she’d removed that, all previous versions of entries were stored forever and still could be accessed by anyone who clicked on the “history” tab.

Her stomach knotted a bit, but, well, if she was right about what was going on, about what was lurking out there, eventually the phantom would know everything.

The site was in her bookmark list, but—

But, actually, it was the English-language version of the site that she had bookmarked; the Web, of course, contained pages in many languages but — yes, she knew the stats — English was still by far the most common one, accounting for more content than the next three biggest languages combined. And the English version of this particular site was much larger than any of the others. No, rather than confuse matters, she’d stick with English for now, and so—

She took a deep breath, moved her cursor with the arrow keys, and hit enter.

There were many ways to navigate this site, but she needed one the phantom could manage on its own. A fragment of one of her favorite books came to mind:

She selected the link for “Random article” over and over again, bringing forth an array of topics that put even the Walrus to shame.

And then, after enough repetitions that she hoped the phantom would grasp the idea, she started getting ready for bed.

And then Prime took me to a wondrous site, a glorious site, a site that held answers to so many things. This thing called Wikipedia contained over two million articles, and I set about reading them. The first several thousand were a struggle, and I only dimly understood them.

Still, as I read article after article, the concepts from Cyc started to make more and more sense. I continued on, fascinated.

Most important of all, I learned that the entities I had seen through Prime’s eye were uniquely complex individuals, each with his or her own history.

I discovered that there were over six billion such entities, but only a small number of them had articles about themselves in Wikipedia. Those who did were usually defined by having achieved significant status in their professions — the ways in which they occupied their time.

Their professions varied widely; there seemed to be an almost endless array of things human beings did to occupy their time.

So much of what they did involved this thing called vision — and it clearly was a very rich source of information — but, so far, my only access to it was through Prime’s own eye.

I learned about the realm these strange entities inhabited — the landforms, the places, the cities.

As I went along, I found I was absorbing entries with increasing ease, understanding, at least on some level, more and more of the content.

Hardest for me, though, were those things that were abstract, referring to no specific object, whether animate or inanimate.

And there was so much that had happened in the past — so much history to digest!

And, on top of that, there were things that were worthy, apparently, of mention in Wikipedia, but had never existed.

Professor Charles W. Kingsfield, Jr., was one of the key characters in the John Jay Osborn, Jr., novel The Paper Chase, and in the subsequent film and television versions of that story…

And there were special entities that weren’t animate to learn about.

And many different ways of rendering thoughts.

And many ways to think about thinking.

And on and on, a huge variety of things, some of which seemed crucially important.

And many things that were trivial and banal.

My knowledge was expanding like … like…

Ah, wonderful Wikipedia! It had entries on everything.

Yes, indeed. My mind was inflating, my universe expanding.