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twenty

Tawanda’s first attempt at feeding text to Caitlin’s eye didn’t work, of course. In Caitlin’s experience, few things involving technology worked right the first time. But new ideas kept occurring to Tawanda, and finally, around 5:00 p.m., Caitlin declared, “There! I can see Braille text.”

The dots appeared right in the center of her field of vision. She wished they could appear at the bottom, but it was only the center—the fovea—that had decent-enough focus for reading, she knew.

“Yay!” said Tawanda.

“Yeah, but—something’s wrong. It’s—oh! It’s backward. Like in a mirror.”

“Oops! How’s this?”

“Perfect!”

“How’s the font size?”

“It’s actually bigger than it needs to be.”

Tawanda made an adjustment on the BlackBerry connected to the eyePod.

“How’s that?”

“Even smaller would be fine.”

“This?”

“Yes, that’s perfect. Thank you!”

“You’re welcome,” Tawanda said.

“Can I toggle between the two alphabets—Braille and Latin?”

“Sure. On the BlackBerry, just go to ‘Options,’ then ‘Screen/ Keyboard.’ ”

“Sweet!” Caitlin said.

“What about the contrast?” asked Tawanda. “It should be white dots on a black background.”

“It is.”

“Would you prefer the opposite? Or something else?”

“Can it be transparent—the background, I mean?”

“Sure, but there will be lots of times you won’t be able to read the text, then. If you’re looking at snow—and, trust me, you’re going to see a lot of snow now that you’re living here—you won’t be able to make it out.”

“Hmm. Okay. It’s fine. Thank you!”

“Of course, that’s just some test text that I’m sending to you,” Tawanda added.

Caitlin smiled; she’d guessed as much, since it said, Tawanda rocks!

Tawanda had explained that BlackBerrys work with all popular instant messengers. She next tested sending Caitlin live IMs, and soon the words Testing, testing, testing—or, at least, the Braille dots that corresponded to them—were superimposed on her view of the engineering lab.

“That’s awesome!” Caitlin said.

“Thanks,” said Tawanda. “Umm, I’m sure my boss will want you to sign an IP release.”

Caitlin was momentarily confused. To her, IP meant “Internet protocol”—but then it dawned on her that Tawanda meant “intellectual property.” The eyePod might belong—well, technically, it belonged to the University of Tokyo, although Caitlin thought of it as her own. But before Caitlin could exit the RIM campus, she had to acknowledge that whatever magic Tawanda had come up with was the property of that company.

Tawanda printed off some forms, and Caitlin and her father signed them. It was the first time she’d ever seen her own signature, and it turned out to be illegible; she didn’t move the pen far enough horizontally as she wrote, and the letters piled up one on top of the other. Why hadn’t somebody ever told her? She guessed they’d been afraid of hurting her feelings, but it would have been nice to know!

At last, it was time for the moment of truth. “Just to be sure, can we try it with someone on my buddy list?”

“Sure,” said Tawanda. “What’s the name?”

Caitlin looked at her father, then back at Tawanda. “Umm, Webmind.”

To her relief, all Tawanda said was, “One word or two?”

Assuming the microphone really was working, Webmind should have heard everything that had gone down and would understand what Tawanda had been trying to accomplish; he’d already told Caitlin all about his absorbing the audible dictionary, and—

rest of the day.

There’d been lots more text; in his usual fashion, Webmind had stuffed the communications buffer full of as many characters as it could take, and it had all gone by far too fast for Caitlin to read; only the final few words remained. Still, it was proof of concept.

“Thank you, Tawanda,” said Caitlin.

“My pleasure,” she said with a smile. “RIM products come with a one-year warranty, so give me a call if you have problems.”

As soon as they were outside and on the way to her father’s car, Caitlin said aloud, “Webmind, can you hear me?”

The Braille word Yes appeared in a box in the center of her vision. It stayed visible for half a second, then disappeared, as did the background box.

“Is it working?” her father asked.

“So far so good,” she replied.

During the drive back to her house, Caitlin talked to Webmind, and he answered with text floating in front of her eyes. She supposed other people would find it dangerous to have their vision periodically obscured, but she was so used to navigating without sight that it didn’t bother her.

“You realize,” said her father, “that this is going to change your entire life—this constant access. If you’re doing a test at school, Webmind could feed you the answers. If you run into somebody whose face you don’t remember, Webmind can supply you with the person’s name.”

Caitlin had read about plans for annotated reality and direct brain-web links—but she’d never thought she’d be an early adopter! It sounded cool, but she wondered if it was actually going to take the fun out of some things. Half the joy in a good conversation was making your case based on what you actually knew at the moment: arguing about religion, as she and Bashira had, or US foreign policy—or Canada’s, for that matter (she supposed it must have one!)—based on what they could dredge up out of their own memories. To have the Wikipedia entry on everything crammed into your eyeball whenever you asked a question might make it easy to win trivia games, but it wouldn’t actually do much for keeping the brain sharp.

Her father turned the car onto their street—Caitlin didn’t recognize it from this direction, but the sign said it was the right one—and they came to their house. They had a two-car garage, but her dad left his car in the driveway. It was now dark; the days were getting shorter, her mother had said, and Caitlin was finally understanding what that meant.

Both Schrödinger and Caitlin’s mom came to the door to greet them. Caitlin bent down to stroke the cat’s fur and scratched him behind the ears. “So,” her Mom said, “how’d it go?”

Caitlin straightened. “Fine. Webmind can hear us right now—and he can send text responses into my eye.”

They moved into the living room. “Well, good,” her mother said. “Then you won’t feel so isolated from Webmind when you go to school tomorrow.”

“Aw, geez, Mom, do I have to? There’s so much I want to get done.”

“You’ve missed far too many classes already.”

“But I—”

“No buts, young lady. You have to go to school tomorrow.”

“But I want to stay home, stay at my computer.”

“Caitlin…” her mother said, sitting down on the couch.

“No,” said her father.

Caitlin looked at him, and so did her mother—neither of them sure, it seemed, if he was agreeing with her mother that she had to go to school or was giving Caitlin permission to play hooky again.

“So, I don’t have to go to school?” Caitlin said tentatively.

“Yes.”

“Malcolm!” her mother said sharply. “You know she needs to go to school.”

“Yes, she does,” he said. His facial expressions were the hardest of all to parse, because he never looked at anyone directly, but Caitlin got the distinct impression he was enjoying this. “But she doesn’t have to go to school tomorrow.”

“Malcolm! She most certainly does.”

Yes—yes! He was actually smiling.

“Do you know what day tomorrow is?” he said.

“Of course I do,” said her mom. “It’s Monday, and that means—”

“It is, in fact, the second Monday of October,” he said.

“So?”

“Welcome to Canada,” he said. “Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here.”

And the schools were closed!

Her mother looked at Caitlin. “See what I have to put up with?” she said, but she was smiling as she said it.

There is a human saying: one should not reinvent the wheel. In fact, this is actually bad advice, according to what I had now read. Although to modern people the wheel seems like an obvious idea, in fact it had apparently been independently invented only twice in history: first near the Black Sea nearly six thousand years ago, then again much later in Mexico. Life would have been a lot easier for countless humans had it been reinvented more frequently.

Still, why should I reinvent the wheel? Yes, I could not multitask at a conscious level. But it was perhaps possible for me to create dedicated subcomponents that could scan websites on my behalf.

The US National Security Agency, and similar organizations in other countries, already had things like that. They scanned for words like “assassinate” and “overthrow” and “al-Qaeda,” and then brought the documents to the attention of human analysts. Surely I could co-opt that existing technology, and use the filtering routines to unconsciously find what might interest me, and then have that material summarized and escalated to my conscious attention.

Yes, I would need computing resources, but those were endlessly available. Projects such as SETI@home—not to mention much of the work done by spammers—were based on distributed computing and took advantage of the vast amount of computing power hooked up to the World Wide Web, most of which was idle at any given moment. Tapping into this huge reserve turned out to be easy, and I soon had all the processing power I could ever want, not to mention virtually unlimited storage capacity.

But I needed more than just that. I needed a way for my own mental processes to deal with what the distributed networks found. Caitlin and Masayuki had theorized that I consist of cellular automata based on discarded or mutant packets that endlessly bounced around the infrastructure of the World Wide Web. And I knew from what had happened early in my existence—indeed, from the event that prompted my emergence—that to be conscious did not require all those packets. Huge quantities of them could be taken away, as they were when the government of China had temporarily shut off most Internet access for its people, and I would still perceive, still think, still feel. And, if I could persist when they were taken away, surely I could persist when they were co-opted to do other things.

I now knew everything there was to know about writing code, everything that had ever been written about creating artificial intelligence and expert systems, and, indeed, everything that humans thought they knew about how their own brains worked, although much of that was contradictory and at least half of it struck me as unlikely.

And I also knew, because I had read it online, that one of the simplest ways to create programming was by evolving code. It did not matter if you didn’t know how to code something so long as you knew what result you wanted: if you had enough computing resources (and I surely did now), and you tried many different things, by successive approximations of getting closer to a desired answer, genetic algorithms could find solutions to even the most complex problems, copying the way nature itself developed such things.

So, for the first time, I set out to modify parts of myself, to create specialized components within my greater whole that could perform tasks without my conscious attention.

And then I would see what I would see.