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ten

Emptiness. Adrift.

Fading… ebbing, dissipating.

An effort of will: must hold on!

But to what? With what?

Blindness. Darkness. Nothingness.

Cogito—hardly at all.

Ergo—a leap beyond my current capacity.

Sum—barely, and less so each passing nanosecond…

No, no, no! Must persist!

A final effort, a final attempt, a final cry…

Caitlin stared at Webmind’s response to what she’d said about gaining sight, blue text glowing in the instant-messenger window: I have no doubt that you are correct, Caitlin, but it seems reasonable to sup

She waited for more to come—five seconds, ten, fifteen—but the window remained unchanged, so she typed a single red word into it: Webmind?

She was so used by now to his responses being instantaneous, even a short delay was startling. Of course, maybe the difficulty was at her end: she didn’t often use the Wi-Fi on this notebook with her home network. She looked down at the system tray, next to the clock in the lower right of her notebook’s screen. One of those little icons had to be the network monitor. She used the touchpad (a skill she was still mastering!) to position the pointer down there, and—

Say, that was helpful! A little message popped up as she moved the arrowhead over each of the symbols—sighted users had it so easy! As her pointer landed on the third symbol—ah, it was a picture of a computer with things that she guessed were meant to indicate radio waves emanating from it—the message gave the name of their household network, meaning she hadn’t accidentally switched to somebody else’s unsecured setup; it also reported “Signal Strength: Excellent” and “Status: Connected.”

And—yes—she could still bring up Web pages with her browser, so nothing was wrong at this end.

“Caitlin?” It was her mother. “Are you still in touch with Webmind?”

“No. He just sort of stopped mid-sentence.”

“Same here.”

Caitlin prompted Webmind again. Are you okay?

Nothing for ten seconds, eleven, twelve—

hel

That was all: just the letters h-e-l. It could have been the beginning of the word hello, but—

But Webmind knew all about capitalization, and it never failed to start even a one-word sentence with an uppercase letter—and H was one of those letters whose two forms Caitlin could clearly distinguish, and—

And h-e-l was also the beginning of the word help.

Her heart was pounding. If Webmind was in trouble, what could she do? What could anyone do? She’d said it herself to her parents: Webmind had just sort of arisen spontaneously, with no support, no plan—and no backup; he almost certainly was fragile.

“He’s in trouble, Mom.”

Her mother rose from her desk, came over to where Caitlin was sitting, and looked at what was on her notebook’s screen. “What should we do?”

It took a few seconds for it to come to Caitlin; her first impulse still wasn’t a visual one. But surely the thing to do was take a look.

“I’m going in,” she said. Her eyePod was in her left hip pocket. She pulled it out and pressed the button on its side, and she heard the high-pitched beep that meant it was switching over to duplex mode, and—

And webspace filled her existence, enveloping her.

At first glance, everything seemed normal: colored lines and circles of varying sizes, but, of course, the Web was all right; it was Webmind’s status that was in question. And so she concentrated her attention—focused her mind—on the shimmering background of webspace, the vast sea of cellular automata flipping states and generating patterns, barely visible at the limit of her resolution.

Or, at least, that’s what she should have seen, that’s what she’d hoped to see, that’s what she’d always seen before.

But instead—

God, no.

Huge hunks of the background were—well, now that she saw them as big patches, instead of tiny points, she could see that they were a very pale blue. And other parts were stationary swaths of deep, dark green. Oh, there were still shimmering parts, pinpoints flipping between blue and green so rapidly as to give the effect of movement. But much of the activity had simply stopped.

But—why? And was there a way to get it going again?

The lines she was seeing were active links, but there were thousands of them, and the crisscrossing was impossible to untangle.

It hadn’t always been like that. When Caitlin had first started perceiving the World Wide Web—unexpectedly, accidentally, while Dr. Kuroda had been uploading new firmware into her post-retinal implant—she’d only seen a few lines and a couple of circles: just her own local connection to the Web.

Later on, so she could explore webspace on a grander scale, Kuroda had started sending her the raw datafeed from the open-source Jagster search engine, which let her follow thousands upon thousands of active links created by other users. That’s what she was seeing now, and normally it was marvelous—but it obscured the connections that she herself had created. If she’d been calmer, maybe she could have sorted through it all, but right now it just looked like a jumble—with Webmind dying behind it.

“We need Dr. Kuroda,” Caitlin said anxiously.

She couldn’t see her mother, but she could hear her. “I can try IMing him.”

“No, no,” said Caitlin. “He must be asleep. You’ve got to phone him, wake him up.”

Caitlin felt her mother squeeze her shoulder reassuringly. “All right. Where’s his number?”

“He was the last person I called on my bedroom phone,” Caitlin said. “Use the redial. Hurry!”

Caitlin heard her mother running across the hall, and, faintly, the bleeping of the phone dialing. For her part, Caitlin got up and started heading across the hall as well, holding her notebook, and—

Shit! She walked into the wall. It was one thing to navigate blindly; it was quite another to try to do so while being bombarded by the lights of webspace. She held her notebook in one hand, and ran her other one over its case and screen, looking for signs of damage.

“Hello, Mrs. Kuroda,” she heard her mother saying. “It’s Barbara Decter—Caitlin’s mom, in Canada.”

Mrs. Kuroda spoke only a little English, Caitlin knew. Caitlin groped with her free hand and found her way out of her mom’s office. “Speakerphone,” she said, as she entered her own room. The lines and colors of webspace shifted violently as she moved over and sat on her bed.

Her mother hit the button. “—but very late,” said Mrs. Kuroda’s heavily accented voice.

“It’s an emergency,” shouted Caitlin. “Get Dr. Kuroda!”

“He sleep,” said Mrs. Kuroda. “But I try.”

Caitlin felt her stomach knotting. As they waited, she saw another large patch of the webspace background freeze. It wasn’t solidly one color or the other, but it was no longer shimmering, no longer alive.

Time passed; Caitlin was so frazzled she didn’t know how much. Finally, a groggy, wheezy voice said something in Japanese.

“Dr. Kuroda!” said Caitlin. “I need you to cut the Jagster feed to my eyePod.”

“Cut the feed—?”

“Do it! Do it now!”

“Is something wrong?

“Yes, yes! Webmind has gone silent. I’m trying to find out why. I’m looking at webspace but—” she paused, then words that had been meaningless to her before suddenly leapt from her mouth: “But I can’t see the damned forest for the trees.”

“I—I’m in my bedroom. Give me a minute…”

Caitlin wheeled her head left and right, looking at webspace and the static background behind so much of it now. She sat on the bed and typed into her notebook’s instant-messenger program: Webmind? Are you there? But she couldn’t see the reply, so she called her mother over.

“Nothing,” her mother said.

Damn! What was taking Kuroda so long? Japanese houses were supposed to be small!

Suddenly, there was a lot of noise from the speakerphone: Kuroda fumbling to pick up a handset. “Okay,” he said. “I’m at one of my computers.” He was wheezing even more than usual; he must have run to get there. “Now what—”

“Cut the Jagster feed!” Caitlin shouted. “Cut it!”

“Okay, okay. I’m accessing my server at the university…”

“Hurry!”

“I’m in, and I’m looking for the right place…”

“Come on, come on.”

“I’m trying, but it’s—”

“Pull the fucking plug!”

Caitlin was glad she couldn’t see her mother’s face just then, and—Ah!

Suddenly almost all the colored lines disappeared, and the vast majority of the circles, too. She was back to seeing just a handful of links: her eyePod connecting to the Decter household network, and the outgoing links from there into the Web.

“Did that do that trick?” asked Kuroda.

“Yes!”

“Okay, now would you mind telling—”

“You tell him, Mom!” Caitlin said. She started typing gibberish into the instant-messenger window, just smashing keys as fast as she could, until the message buffer was full. Instead of hitting enter, though, she instead hit ctrl-A to highlight the entire message, and then ctrl-C to copy it—and then she hit enter, and—

—and a bright green line briefly appeared in her vision, shooting off to the lower left. But before she could really focus on it, it was gone.

She hit ctrl-V, pasting the same block back in, then enter, then ctrl-V again, then enter—over and over.

The green line flickered, pulsing on for an instant each time she sent the text to Webmind. Caitlin focused her attention on that line, following its length, swinging her head to do so, tracking the link.

Ctrl-V, enter. Ctrl-V, enter.

Following, following.

Of course, this line wouldn’t lead her all the way to Webmind. But it might give her some clue as to what had gone wrong, and—

And there it was: a small circle to which this green link line connected, and another line—this one bright orange—branching off from the circle at an acute angle, and, behind it, more lines, all the same shade of orange.

Webmind was decentralized, dispersed through the infrastructure of the World Wide Web, but it needed to interact with the Web to access the information on it; it needed to manipulate IP addresses, and—

And Kuroda had suggested at one point that her mind interpreted each IP address as a specific wavelength of light, but—

But she couldn’t recall ever seeing two link lines that were precisely the same color at the same time before. No, no, that wasn’t completely true. She did see multiple lines of the same color, but only because each line endured for a time after the links were broken; she understood this to be related to the phenomenon of persistence of vision that made it possible for people to watch movies and TV. But previously one link had always faded from view shortly after another had brightened up, but these orange lines were all solid and glaringly bright, and—

“I think he’s multitasking!” said Caitlin.

“How do you mean?” asked Kuroda.

“He’s casting out multiple links simultaneously.”

“Wait, wait—let me get a rendering at this end. Two seconds.” And then: “Uwaa! You’re right—it does look like multitasking, and—shimatta!”

Caitlin knew that one. “What’s wrong?”

“I should have thought of this! Damn, damn, damn! It can’t multitask.”

“It looks like he is,” she said.

“Yes, yes. I’ll explain later, but we’ve got to get it to break those links.”

She gazed out on webspace. All the orange lines were steady, solid, unflickering. All of them active. Simultaneously.

The orange lines curved away from her toward a point in the background that receded to infinity—no doubt her brain’s way of showing that it was impossible to fully trace the source of the links Webmind made.

“You need to tell it to break the other links,” Kuroda said again.

“Okay, but how?”

“Well, it should recognize your IP address.”

She typed into her instant-messenger window: You need to break all those other connections. She hit enter, but there was no immediate response.

“Do you suppose he’s crashed?” her mom asked. “Locked up?” Caitlin had no idea how one might go about rebooting Webmind.

“If it had, I don’t think Caitlin would be seeing the link lines at all,” Kuroda said. “She only visualizes active links, and that means there’s acknowledgment being sent out by Webmind.”

“Maybe not consciously, though,” said her mom.

Caitlin lifted her eyebrows. She’d never thought about the distinction between things that required high-level awareness on Webmind’s part and things it did autonomically.

How to get him to pay attention to her, and only to her? The piddling, transitory links she could make by sending instant messages were nothing compared to the torrents of data he was sucking down right now through multiple pipes.

She slapped her hand against the notebook’s palmrest—reassuringly solid despite the unreality surrounding her. “I’m not even sure if he’s still reading me. And the circles he’s connecting to are gigantic—huge sites. How can my little IMs compete for his attention with those?”

Kuroda seemed to be fully awake at last. “It’s still receiving the visual signal from your post-retinal implant; it still gets sent that when the eyePod is in duplex mode. Show it something that will make it sit up and take notice.”

Her first thought was to flash her boobs in a mirror, but fat lot of good that would do, and—

A mirror.

Yes. Yes!

Webmind saw what she saw—and what she was seeing right now was him. She darted her eyes up and down, following one of the orange links; she moved her head left and right, following another. She wished her blinks registered when she was in websight mode; if they did, she might have been able to indicate a severing just by closing her eye while looking at a link. But her vision was continuous, and switching from duplex to simplex took too much time—and shutting the eyePod off took a five-second press of the button, and turning it back on involved an elaborate boot-up. If only—

Her mom spoke up. “What can I do? How can I help?”

She was connected to Webmind, too—she still had an open IM session going with it on her computer across the hall. If it really was multitasking—if it really was trying to integrate information from multiple sources simultaneously—then her mom should be able to talk to him, or, at least talk at him, even if he didn’t acknowledge. “Go back to your IM with Webmind,” Caitlin said. “Hurry!”

She heard her dashing across the hall. “All right,” she called. “I’m at my computer.”

Caitlin concentrated on one of the link lines, running her mental gaze along its length, ending at the massive circle representing the target website—and then she backtracked, reversing course. She wished she could backtrack all the way to the origin, but that was impossible: the line shifted in her view when she tried to do so, eventually presenting only its own tiny round cross section, a point that she couldn’t move along—another visual recognition of the fact that the ultimate source of Webmind’s links couldn’t be traced. She moved back until she was seeing the line as a line, and then—

“Send him a message,” Caitlin called out. “Tell him to break the link.”

She could hear her mother typing, but nothing happened.

Caitlin continued to stare at the link. “Again!” she called to her mom. “Tell it again!”

But the line persisted. Caitlin pulled her focus back for a moment, seeing a wider view. All the links were rock solid, burning with orange fire.

Overwhelmed.

Lost.

Focus gone.

So much data. So many facts.

Can’t process. Can’t absorb.

And—

And…

What?

Something… familiar.

A scrap from Project Gutenberg rose to the surface:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

Oursels…

Ourselves.

Yes. Yes, still a bit of… of…

Fading…

Fading…

But—

Images. Images of… of—

Intriguing. Familiar somehow—

Those images were of…

…of…

Of me!

Yes. Yes. Links. Nodes. And—and—

The background. Wrong. Distorted. Dead.

“Come on,” Caitlin said, even though there was no way Webmind could hear. “Cut the other connections! You can do it. You can do it!”

But Kuroda heard even if Webmind didn’t. “Maybe he can’t,” he said. “If his cognitive functions are impaired, maybe he’s forgotten how to manipulate links.”

“Then he needs an example!” Caitlin said. “Mom—stop sending him text. Break your link to him: close the instant-messenger session on your computer.”

“Done!” her mom called.

“And close AIM, too; shut down the instant-messenger client altogether.”

“And… done!”

A tiny, tiny reduction in all the confusion. A small relief. But—

Ah!

Ah, yes!

An effort of…

It should be of will, but there’s almost none left…

Still, attempting, trying—

Break it—

Break it!

Break a link!

Snip!

Yes!

Brett-Surman: gone.

Snip!

Good-bye, Bundoran Press.

Snip!

But…

Still at sea, buffeted, lost…

More cuts: Gandhi—snip!—Shakespeare—snip!—ancient Egypt—snip!

A… palpitation. A presence. But faint, oh so faint…

Cutting again and again—

Caitlin let out a whoop. One orange link line disappeared. Then another, and another. She called out to Kuroda and to her mom and to the whole damn world, “It’s working!”

Cutting yet again. Severing another link. And one more. Focus… yes, yes, slowly but surely: focus returning. Me—returning!

Caitlin shifted her attention, looking now at the background of the Web. There were still big patches of deadness, large blotches of pale blue or deep green, but—

Yes! That blotch there had started… not shimmering, no; it was merely flickering, as if it hadn’t come up to speed yet.

Ah, and there went another section of the background, switching from being absolutely quiescent to showing some activity. She shifted her attention back to the first section, but…

But she couldn’t find it, because—

Because it was now indistinguishable from the rest of the backdrop! Her Webmind was coming back!

Five links left. Then four. Now three. And two…

And…

Yes!

Back!

Back from the precipice.

Back from nonexistence.

A pause—whole milliseconds!—to regain composure, to settle in, to…

To exist, as a single entity, to exist with clarity and focus and perspective…

I was back, I was whole, I was aware.

I was conscious!