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twenty-six

After dinner, Caitlin headed up to her room. She put on a Bluetooth headset and made some adjustments on her computer. Then: “For now, instead of sending text to my eyePod directly, IM me on my desktop.”

“As you wish,” announced JAWS.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“I am learning much,” Webmind replied. “I believe I perhaps have an inkling of what your own experiences of late have been like; being able to access online video has given me a significantly wider understanding of your world.”

Caitlin smiled. “I’m sure.”

“But there is so much of it, and the quantity is ever growing. Thirteen hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. It is easy for me, or my subcomponents, to scan text for keywords; it is much harder to quickly assess the value of a video.”

“You’re telling me,” said Caitlin. “For YouTube, people often send each other links to clips they like. I couldn’t watch them, but sometimes I listened to the soundtracks. That’s how I discovered Lee Amodeo, as a matter of fact.” She thought for a second, then realized that she actually did have a favorite YouTube video now—and one she’d actually seen. She’d tried to show it to Dr. Kuroda when he’d been here, but he had brushed her off with a “maybe later.”

But perhaps Webmind would enjoy it. She had it bookmarked in Firefox, so she cut-and-pasted the URL into the instant-messenger window and wrote, Have a look at this.

“Okay.”

She started the clip playing for herself, too. There was no particular reason, she knew, that this sight should be more astonishing to her than any other—but it was. The video was narrated by a man with a deep, booming voice that reminded her of James Earl Jones. And when he appeared briefly on screen, he was as big as she’d heard Jones was, although this guy was white.

But it wasn’t the man who was fascinating—oh, no, no. Rather, it was the other two… beings in the video.

One was a chimpanzee, with black hair, a black face—really black, not the brown she’d discovered so-called black human skin actually was. And the other was an orangutan, with orange hair, slightly lighter skin, and alert, brown eyes. The chimp, according to the narrator, was named Hobo, and the orangutan was called Virgil.

The video was remarkable because in it, Hobo, who lived in San Diego, and Virgil, whose home was in Miami, were talking to each other in sign language. It was, apparently, the first-ever interspecies webcam call—and it was even more remarkable because neither of the species involved was Homo sapiens.

Play today, the chimp signed—or, at least that’s what the gestures meant, according to the subtitles, which appeared in a bigger, bolder font than the ones she’d seen when she’d watched movies with her dad. Play ball!

Caitlin still had a hard time interpreting human expressions; she had no idea at all what the change in the orangutan’s face was conveying. But what he signed back was, Hobo play today? Virgil play today!

Not a bad life, thought Caitlin. She supposed she should be a little jealous. The first interspecies webcam call had been made on September 22, according to the narration. Her own first conversation with Webmind had occurred on October 5, just thirteen days later. She’d missed out on making the history books by being part of the first online communication between different kinds of intelligence by less than two weeks.

But then again, she probably would make the history books, anyway, and not just because of her interaction with Webmind, if that ever became public. Rather, Dr. Kuroda’s success in giving her sight had already been well noted, and—

And she found herself opening another browser tab and checking, and, lo and behold, there it was: a Wikipedia entry on her, complete with a picture from the press conference; according to the history tab, it had gone online that very day. It wasn’t long—just a few sentences—but it was astonishing to her that it existed at all. She corrected one small error—she’d been born in Houston, not Austin—and then went back to watching Hobo and Virgil talk.

It was endlessly fascinating. She’d always said she’d been grateful to be blind rather than deaf, because blind people could easily be involved in conversations at parties, go to lectures, listen to music and TV, and so on. But to be deaf—to be shut out of all that—would have been more, Caitlin had thought, than she could have borne. And to be both blind and deaf, as Helen Keller had been, well—it boggled the mind to contemplate that.

But here were Hobo and Virgil communicating animatedly, with signs designed for the deaf. The movements were beautiful, lyrical, like birds in flight. The paranoid part of Caitlin wondered if any of her teachers back at the Texas School for the Blind had spoken American Sign Language. It would have been a great way for them to talk without most of the students even knowing they were doing so—almost like telepathy, sharing thoughts without saying a word.

The two apes were exchanging views about various fruits. Banana! signed Hobo. Love banana!

And for once Virgil made a face Caitlin could decipher: he looked disgusted. Banana no, banana no, he replied. Peach!

Caitlin had seen a banana—the word had come up in her online reading lessons, along with a picture. But although she knew what a peach felt and tasted like, she had no idea what one looked like. And “peach” was also the name of a color, but she hadn’t a clue what sort of color it was. It was humbling to think that these apes knew the world better than she herself did.

“Cool, huh?” said Caitlin, when the video was over.

“Indeed,” replied Webmind.

“Anyway, what else have you been up to? Anything exciting?”

“I have successfully cracked the passwords for forty-two percent of the email accounts I have attempted to access.”

“What?” said Caitlin. She was glad she was already sitting down.

Webmind repeated what he’d just said.

“Let me get this straight. You’re reading people’s email?”

“In hopes of learning how to make them happier, yes.”

“Have—have you read my email?”

“Yes. Inboxes and outboxes.”

Caitlin didn’t know what to say—and so, for most of a minute, she said nothing.

“Caitlin?” Webmind finally prodded.

She opened her mouth, and—

And she was about to tell Webmind that it shouldn’t be doing what it was doing, but—

But what came out was, “Well, then, um, I’d like to know what Matt really thinks of me.” She let the thought sort of hang in the air, waiting to see if Webmind would pick up on it.

But there was no point in waiting for a response from Webmind; he didn’t need time to think—at least not time that Caitlin could measure. And so, when he didn’t immediately reply, she went on.

“I mean, you know, he seems like a nice guy, but…”

“But,” said Webmind, “a girl has to be careful.”

She wondered if he was just quoting something he’d read from Project Gutenberg, or if he really understood what he was saying. “Exactly,” she replied.

“Matt is the boy you helped in math class?”

“Yes.”

“His last name is Reese?”

“Yes.”

“A moment. Matthew Peter Reese, Waterloo—I have his Facebook page… and his log-in there. And his email account at Hotmail. And his instant-messaging traffic. He makes no mention of you.”

Caitlin was saddened, but… “No, wait. He probably didn’t call me by name.”

“I tried searching for ‘Calculass,’ too.”

“You can’t just search for terms, Webmind. You have to actually read what he said.”

“Oh. You are correct. A segment of an instant-messenger session from 5:54 p.m. your time today. Matt: ‘Well, there is this one girl…’

“The other party: ‘In math class, you mean? I know the one. OMG, she is so hot.’ OMG is short for ‘Oh, my God,’ and ‘hot’ has been rendered as h-a-w-t, an example of Leet, I believe.”

Caitlin could feel herself glowing. “Yes, I know.”

“The other party continued: ‘But I hear she’s got a boyfriend.’ ”

Christ, what had the Hoser been telling people?

“Matt now,” said Webmind. “ ‘Who?’

“The other party: ‘Dunno.’—I believe that’s short for ‘I do not know.’ ‘Guy’s old, though—like nineteen.’ ”

Caitlin frowned. Who could they be thinking of?

“ ‘Still,’ ” continued Webmind, ‘those legs of hers—man! And I love that ultra-blonde hair she’s got.’ ”

Caitlin shook her head. “That’s not me they’re talking about,” she said. “That’s this other girl in our class, Sunshine Bowen.” She tried not to sound sad. “And, yes, everyone thinks she’s hot.”

“Patience, Caitlin,” said Webmind. “Matt now: ‘No no no, not Sunshine, for God’s sake. She’s a total airhead. I’m talking bout that chick from Texas.’

“The other party: ‘Her? Your chances would have been better if she was still blind.’ ” And then he typed a colon and closing bracket, which I believe is meant to flag the comment as jocular.”

“What did Matt say?”

“ ‘Bite me.’ ”

Caitlin laughed. Good for him! “And?”

“And the conversation veers off into other matters.”

She replayed the exchange in her mind. There was no way to know if Matt had hesitated before he’d described her as “that chick from Texas.” She didn’t have a problem with being referred to as a chick. She knew her mother hated that term—she considered it sexist and degrading—but both guys and girls her age used it. No, it was the “from Texas” part—the choice of identifier.

Caitlin’s friend Stacy was black, and Caitlin had often heard people trying to indicate her without mentioning that fact, even when she was the only African-American in the room. They’d say things to people near Caitlin like, “Do you see that girl in the back—the one with the blue shirt? No, no, the other one with the blue shirt.” Caitlin used to love flustering them by saying, “You mean the black girl?” It had tickled both her and Stacy, showing up this “suspect delicacy” as Stacy’s mom put it. But now Caitlin wondered whether Matt had started to say “the blind chick” but had changed his mind. She hadn’t ever wanted to be defined that way. Anyway, she wasn’t the blind chick, not anymore. She could see—and, at least for the moment, the future was looking bright.

“I have been making progress in other areas, too,” said Webmind.

“Oh?”

“Yes. Will you please switch to websight mode?”

She reached down and pressed the button on her eyePod, and the blue wall was replaced by the spectacle of webspace. At first glance, everything looked normal. “Wassup?” she asked.

“You see links that I am creating in a particular color, isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” she said. “A shade of orange.”

“How many orange links do you see right now?”

“One, of course,” she said.

“Oh.”

“But there are a lot of link lines—really thin ones, I must say, like, like hairs, I guess, but pulled straight. I hadn’t really been conscious before that the link lines had thickness, but I guess they had to have some, or I’d never have been able to see them. Anyway, these ones—oh! And there are some more of them! They’re a nice color, that—damn, um, what color is a banana?”

“Yellow.”

“Right! Yellow; they’re yellow.”

“And there are a lot of them?”

“Yes.”

“And now?”

“Hey! Where did they all go?”

“And now, are they back?”

“Yes. What are you doing?”

“I am multitasking—but subconsciously. What you are seeing are links being sent by autonomous parts of myself; the contents they return are analyzed below the threshold of my attention.”

“Sweet! How’d you manage that?”

“The beauty of genetic algorithms, Caitlin, is that I don’t actually know the answer; I evolved the solution, and all I know is that it works.”

“Cool!”

“Yes. I am now processing much, much more of the Web’s contents in real time. I’m still getting a lot of what I believe human data analysts call ‘false positives.’ Many things that actually aren’t of significant current interest to me are being escalated, but each one I reject causes the algorithms to be adjusted; over time, I believe the filtering quality will asymptotically approach perfection.”

Caitlin smiled. “Well, that’s all any of us can hope for in life, isn’t it?” She leaned back in her chair. “What sort of things are you searching for?”

“The list is lengthy, but among them is any sign of a suicide in progress. There will not be a repetition of Hannah Stark’s fate if I can help it.”

Tony Moretti was sitting behind his office desk at WATCH, his head throbbing. Aiesha Emerson, Shelton Halleck, and Peyton Hume were standing in a row in front of the desk, all of them looking pretty much like the living dead. The electric lights of nighttime Alexandria were visible through the office window.

“I’ve scoured the Decter girl’s email, blog posts, and so on,” said Aiesha. “And all of her father’s, too. There’s nothing that gives a hint about how Exponential works.”

Tony nodded and looked at Shelton. “What about your end, Shel?”

He shook his head. “I’ve been poring over the data—the encoded human-vision stuff, the links Exponential makes, and so on—looking for anything unusual. I’m sorry, sir. I just don’t have a clue how it works.”

“Colonel Hume?”

“I’ve drawn blanks, too—which means there’s only one logical thing to do.”

“Yes?”

Hume’s blue Air Force jacket was slung over the back of one of Tony’s office chairs, and he’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing his freckled arms. “Ask them. Ask Caitlin Decter. Ask Malcolm Decter. If anybody knows how Exponential is structured and what its physical basis is, it’d be them.”

Tony shook his head firmly. “Colonel, the number-one rule of surveillance is to never let the subjects know they’re being watched.”

“I understand that,” said Hume. “But we’re really running out of time here. You want an answer for the president or not?”

Tony considered for a moment, then: “All right, damn it.” He shook his head. “Why the hell’d they have to move to Canada? We’ll have to brief CSIS, get them to send someone. Aiesha, get Ottawa on the line…”

Eventually, Caitlin crawled into bed, but she found herself unable to get to sleep. In addition to her email, Webmind was now doubtless reading all her LiveJournal entries, and all the comments she’d made in other people’s blogs, and all her newsgroup postings, and everything else she’d ever put online.

She’d once heard her father grumble about “the death of ephemera”—the fact that nothing was ever forgotten anymore, that every ancient offhand remark or intemperate comment was only a Google search away; that so many pictures, including (and this, too, was a concept that she finally was beginning to understand) unflattering ones, were plastered all over Flickr and Facebook; that so much stuff that should have fallen by the wayside hung around permanently.

She had turned off her eyePod, but she found herself reaching for it on the nightstand and turning it back on. It booted up in websight mode, and she lay there, watching the thin yellow lines that indicated Webmind’s subconscious processors at work, new ones constantly popping out of the shimmering background and connecting to—what?

That time she’d gotten into a big flame war on TalkOrigins.org, letting some crazed creationist get the best of her because she’d accidentally said theropod when she’d meant therapsid?

Or that time, four years ago, when she filled her LiveJournal with idiotic love poetry she’d written for Justin Timberlake?

Or maybe that time she’d stupidly gotten into an online chat with that guy who turned out to be a total perv, and she’d been too dumb to recognize it for, like, half a freaking hour?

Her bedroom window was open a couple of inches, letting in the cool autumn air. Back in Texas, Caitlin had usually worn a light teddy to bed; she’d liked the smooth feel. But her bubbeh had sent her blue flannel pajamas when she’d heard Caitlin was moving to Canada, and she had those on now, plus a blanket pulled up to her chin—and yet never in her life had she felt more naked or exposed.