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thirty-five

The doorbell rang, and Caitlin found herself running to it. She was now wearing a silky blue shirt—one her mother said was too low-cut for school. But she was not going to school anymore; she was pleased with her impeccable logic. Her shoulder-length brown hair was still wet, but at least she’d brushed it.

She opened the door. “Hi, Matt!”

And—wow!—boy’s eyes really did do that. She’d read about it, but hadn’t yet seen it: straight to the boobs, and only apparently with an effort of will coming up to the face.

His voice cracked. It was so cute! “Hi, Caitlin!”

He had a—a sack, or something in his right hand. “Here’s your stuff,” he said, setting it down on the tiled floor.

“Thanks!”

In his left hand, he was holding something large and rectangular. He held it out.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“A card—everyone in math class signed it. They were all sorry to hear you’re leaving school.”

She took it. It was quite large, and clearly handmade: a big piece of Bristol board folded in half, with a color printout pasted to the front. She looked at the image. “Who’s that?”

He seemed surprised for a second, then: “Lisa Simpson.”

“Oh!” She’d never have guessed she looked like that! She opened the card. The caption, written in thick block letters, was easy to read: “Brainy Girls Rule!” And surrounding it were things, in various colors of ink, that must have been the students’ signatures, but she couldn’t read them; she had almost no visual experience with cursive writing. “Which one’s yours?”

He pointed.

“Do you do that on purpose?” she said. He’d printed his name in capitals, but the two Ts touched, looking like the letter pi, which she knew because it was also the Perimeter Institute’s logo.

“Not normally,” he said. “But I thought you’d like it.” There was an awkward silence for a moment, then: “Umm, would you like to go for a walk? Timmy’s isn’t that far…”

Her parents had forbidden her going out on her own while there might still be Federal agents waiting to abduct her, and she suspected they wouldn’t think Matt was buff enough to be a bodyguard; in fact, Caitlin thought she’d have no trouble taking him herself. “I can’t,” she said.

That same look Bashira had made: crestfallen. “Oh.” He took a half step backward, as if preparing to leave.

“But you can come in for bit,” Caitlin blurted out.

He smiled that lopsided smile of his.

Screw symmetry, Caitlin thought, and she moved aside to let him enter.

They could head up to her bedroom, she supposed, but she’d never had a boy in her room in this house, and, besides, her mother was right across the hall and would hear everything they said.

Or they could stay on the ground floor, in the kitchen, or the living room, but—

No, just as with Bashira, the basement was the place to go: private, and no way her mother could hear.

She led the way down. The two black office chairs were side by side, tucked under the worktable. Matt took the one on the right, which meant he’d be on her blind side. This time she did speak up about it. “I can’t see out of my right eye, Matt.”

“Oh, um, actually, I know that.”

She was startled—but, well, it was public knowledge; video of the press conference was online, and there’d been a lot of news coverage about Dr. Kuroda’s miracle.

And then she had a sudden thought: he knew she couldn’t see him when he was on her right, and yet he’d chosen twice now to position himself there. Maybe he was self-conscious about his appearance; living in a world of Bashiras could do that to a person, Caitlin supposed.

He switched chairs, and Caitlin took the other one, and she opened the big card and placed it on the table in front of them. “Read what people wrote to me,” she said.

“Well, that’s mine, like I said. I wrote, ‘Math students never die—they just cease to function.’ ”

“Hah! Cute.”

“And that one’s Bashira’s.” He pointed to some bold writing in red ink. “She wrote, ‘See if you can get me sprung, too!’ ”

She laughed.

“Most of the others just say, ‘Best wishes,’ or ‘Good luck.’ Mr. Heidegger wrote, ‘Sorry to see my star pupil go!’ ”

“Awww!”

“And that one’s Sunshine’s—see how she makes the dot above the i look like the sun?”

“Holy crap,” Caitlin said.

“She wrote, ‘To my fellow American: keep the invasion plans on the DL, Cait—these Canadian fools don’t suspect a thing.’ ”

Caitlin smiled; that was more clever than she’d expected from Sunshine. She was feeling twinges of sadness. She’d still see Bashira, but she was going to miss some of the others, and—

“Um, where’s Trevor’s?” she asked.

Matt looked away. “He didn’t want to sign.”

“Oh.”

“So, what do you think about Webmind?” Matt asked.

Caitlin’s heart jumped. Her first thought was that he knew—knew that she was the one who had brought Webmind forth, knew that it was through her eye that Webmind focused his attention, knew that at this very moment Webmind was looking at him while she did the same thing.

But no, no. Surely all he wanted to do was get away from talking about another boy—and who could blame him?

“Well,” she said, closing the card, “I’m convinced.”

“You believe it’s what it says it is?”

She bit her tongue and didn’t correct him on the choice of pronouns—even with three occurrences of it in an eight-word sentence. “Yes. Why, what do you think?”

He frowned, considering—and Caitlin was surprised at how tense she became waiting for his verdict. “I buy it,” he said at last. “I mean, what else could it be? A promo for something? Puh-leeze. A scam?” He shook his head. “My dad doesn’t believe it, though. He says Marcello Truzzi used to say, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.’ ”

“Who’s that?”

“My male parent; my mother’s husband.”

She laughed and whapped him on the arm. “Not your dad, silly. Marcello whoever.”

Matt grinned—he clearly liked her touching him. “He was one of the founders of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. My dad says Truzzi originally said that about things like UFOs, and he thinks it applies here, too.”

“Ah.”

“But, thing is,” said Matt, “I don’t think this is an extraordinary claim. It’s something that should have happened by now. In fact, if anything, it’s overdue.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever read Vernor Vinge?” Matt asked.

“Is that how you say it? ‘Vin-jee’? I always thought it rhymed with hinge.”

“No, it’s vin-jee.Anyway, so you’ve read him?”

“No,” said Caitlin. “I keep seeing his name on the list of Hugo winners; I know I should read him, but…”

“Oh, he’s great,” said Matt. “But you should really read this essay he wrote called—wait for it—‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.’ Just google on ‘Vinge’ and ‘singularity’; you’ll find it.”

“Okay.”

“He wrote that in, um, 1993, I think,” Matt said.

Caitlin frowned. She had a hard time believing that anything written before she’d been born could have a bearing on what was going down right now.

Matt went on. “He said in it that the creation of intelligence greater than our own would occur sometime between 2005 and 2030—and I’ve always been expecting it to be at the earlier end.”

They sat in silence for a few moments. The headlong rush of Webmind’s progress had made Caitlin think things didn’t have to take a long time to unfold. But there was more to it than that. She was no longer going to see Matt every day at school. If she didn’t make an impression, he’d lose interest, or move on to someone else. Yes, yes, yes, she knew what Bashira said about his looks, but she couldn’t be the only one who saw his good qualities: his kindness, his gentleness, his brilliance, his wit. She had to impress him now, while she had the opportunity, and—

And she knew one way that would work for sure. “Can you keep a secret?” she said.

His blond eyebrows went up. “Yes.”

Of course, everybody answered that question the same way; she’d never once met anyone who’d replied, “No, not at all; I blab things all over the place.” Still, she thought Matt was telling the truth.

“Webmind?” she said.

Matt replied, “What about it?” but the word hadn’t been addressed to him. Rather, it was an invitation for Webmind to stop her before she went further. What sailed across her vision in a series of Braille dots was,

I am guided by your judgment.

“Okay,” Caitlin said, now to Matt, “but you have to promise not to tell anyone.”

“That’s what keeping a secret means,” Matt said, smiling.

“Promise,” Caitlin said earnestly. “Promise it.”

“Okay, yes. I promise.”

He’s telling the truth, Webmind supplied.

“Well,” she said at last, “that was me.”

“What was you?” Matt asked.

“Bringing forth Webmind. Bringing him into full consciousness. Helping him interact with the real world.”

Matt was making that deer-caught-in-headlights face.

“You don’t believe me,” Caitlin said.

“Wellll,” said Matt, “I mean, what are the two most amazing news stories of the last month? Sure, ‘World Wide Web Claims to be Conscious’ has got to be number one. But a good contender for number two must be, ‘Blind Girl Gains Sight.’ What are the chances that both of them would involve the same person?”

Caitlin smiled. If he was going to doubt her word, at least he was doing it based on statistics. “That would be a remarkable coincidence,” she said, “if they were unrelated events. But they’re not. See, when Dr. Kuroda—that’s the guy who gave me sight—when he wired this thing up” (she pulled the eyePod/BlackBerry combo out of her pocket so Matt could see it) “he made a mistake. When I’m getting data uploaded to it over the Web, it gets fed into my optic nerve, as well—and when that’s happening, I visualize the structure of the World Wide Web; my brain co-opted its visual centers to do that while I was blind. And, well, it was through this websight—that’s what we call it; websight, s-i-g-h-t—that I first detected what was going on in the background of the Web.”

She waited for his reply. If he did reject what she was saying again, well—she’d have to kick him in the shin!

But what he said was perfect. “I think I’d come out of hiding to be with you, too.”

“You can’t tell anyone,” Caitlin said again.

“Of course not. Who does know that you’re involved?”

“My parents. Dr. Kuroda.”

“Ah.”

“The Canadian government. The American government.”

“God.”

“The Japanese government, too.”

“Wow.”

“And who knows who else? But so far, no one has said anything about me publicly.”

“Aren’t you afraid, you know, that somebody’s going to try to do something to you?”

“That’s why I’m not going outside just now—although I think my parents are overreacting. After all, I’m being watched.”

He lowered his voice. “By who?”

“By him,” she said. “By Webmind.” She pointed to her left eye.

Matt made what must have been a perplexed frown.

“He sees what I see,” Caitlin said. “There’s a little implant behind this eye that picks up the signals my retina is putting out. Those signals get copied to him.”

“Him?”

“Him. After all, if he were a girl, his name would be Webminda.”

He smiled, but it disappeared quickly. “So, so he can see me right now?”

“Yes.”

He paused, perhaps thinking, then raised his right hand, splayed out his thumb, and separated his remaining fingers into two groups of two.

“What’s that mean?” Caitlin asked.

Matt looked momentarily puzzled. “Oh! I keep forgetting. It’s the Vulcan salute. I’m telling Webmind to live long and prosper.”

Caitlin smiled. “I take it you like Star Trek? ”

“I’d never seen the TV show until J.J. Abrams’s movie came out a few years ago, but I loved that movie, and so I downloaded the old episodes. The original versions had really cheesy effects, but later they put in CGI effects, and, yeah, I got hooked.”

“You and my dad are going to so get along,” she said.

They both fell silent for a moment, and Braille dots briefly obstructed part of her vision: Tell him I say, “Peace and long life.”

“Webmind says, ‘Peace and long life.’ ”

“It can talk to you right now?”

“Text messages to my eye.”

“That is so cool,” Matt said.

“Yes, it is. And there’s no freaking fifteen-cents-per-text charge, either.”

“ ‘Peace and long life’—that’s the traditional response to the Vulcan greeting,” Matt said, in wonder. “How does it know that?”

“If it’s online, he knows about it. He’s read all of Wikipedia, among other things.”

“Wow,” said Matt, stunned. “My girlfriend knows Webmind.”

Caitlin felt her heart jump, and Matt, suddenly realizing what he’d said, brought a hand to his mouth. “Oh, my… um, I…”

She got up from her chair, and reached out with her two hands, taking his, and pulled him to his feet. “That’s okay,” Caitlin said. She closed her eyes and—

And waited.

After five seconds, she reopened them. “Matt? You’re supposed to kiss me now.”

His voice was low. “He’s watching.”

“Not if my eyes are closed, silly.”

“Oh!” he said. “Right.”

She closed her eyes again.

And Matt kissed her, gently, softly, wonderfully.