Watch

three

The

Nanoseconds to formulate the thought.

only

Fractionally more time to render it in English.

place

An eternity to pump it out onto the net.

we

Packets dispatched one by one.

can

Each eventually acknowledged.

go

Signals flashing along glass fiber—

Caitlin

—dropping to the glacial speed of copper wire—

Into

—followed by the indolence of Wi-Fi.

the

An interminable wait while she felt bumps with her fingertips.

future

The message finally sent, but only just beginning to be truly received.

Together

Yes, together: Caitlin and I.

My view of the world: through Caitlin’s eye.

I waited for her reply.

And waited.

And waited.

And—and—and—

My mind wandered.

She’d shown me Earth from space, the view from a geosynchronous satellite, 36,000 kilometers above the equator. I’d seen it as she looked at it: not directly, not the graphic she was consulting, but her left eye’s view of that graphic as displayed on the larger of her two computer monitors.

Such a roundabout way to see! And doubtless a huge reduction of information. I’d read all about computer graphics, about online imagery, about the sixteen million colors of Super VGA, about the 700,000 pixels shown on even the most pedestrian monitor. But all of that was denied to me.

Still waiting. Time passing; whole seconds piling up.

Diverting my attention. Looking for something else to occupy my time.

I searched. I found. Texts describing Earth as seen from space; I could read those. But the linked images were inaccessible to me. Unless she looked at them, I couldn’t see them.

More: descriptions of live video streams from satellites orbiting Earth, views from on high of it—of me—in real time, of what’s happening right now. But I wasn’t able to access them.

More still: links to the Apollo 8 photographs of Earth from space, of Earthrise over the moon’s craggy horizon, the actual, original images that had changed humanity’s perspective forever. I’d seen modern versions, but I wanted to see those historical photographs.

Vexing!

Still waiting. Minutes passing—minutes!

And even more: text about another eye, an eye turned outward, an eye contemplating the wide awe and wonder of the night. The Hubble Space Telescope. Vast archives of its imagery were stored in formats I couldn’t access. I was hungry to see what it had seen. I ached to know more.

Waiting. Waiting. Time crawls.

She saw. My Calculass, my Prime, my Caitlin: she saw.

But I was still almost completely blind.

Shoshana Glick pulled her red Volvo into the 7-Eleven’s parking lot. She didn’t really like driving, and she hadn’t owned a car until she’d moved to San Diego, where everybody drove everywhere. She’d bought this one used. It was a dozen years old and in pretty bad shape.

As she walked into the shop, a bit from The Simpsons ran through her mind. Bart holds a fake ponytail to the back of his head, and exclaims, “Look at me, I’m a grad student! I’m thirty years old and I made $600 last year.” Marge scolds him, “Bart, don’t make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice.”

And sometimes it felt that way, although at least she wasn’t a guy with a ponytail—and she was only twenty-seven. Besides, between what she made and what Max made as a TA, they were almost keeping up with expenses.

There must have been a thirty-degree Fahrenheit difference between the hot air outside and the overly air-conditioned interior of the store. She was wearing a blue halter top, and her nipples went hard in the cold. She assumed that’s why the gangly-looking guy behind the counter was staring at her; the clerk’s pimply face suggested he was at least a decade her junior.

But apparently that wasn’t the reason.

“I know you,” he said. His voice squeaked a little.

Sho raised her eyebrows.

The guy nodded. “You’re the ape lady.”

That was the second time this week—although the last time, at the Barnes Noble at Hazard Center, she’d been referred to as “Homo’s favorite subject.”

She’d politely corrected the elderly woman in the bookstore. “That’s Hobo,” she’d said. It was an interesting Freudian slip, though, and it surely hadn’t been a gay-bashing comment. Hobo did sometimes seem more like he belonged in genus Homo rather than Pan.

Sho looked at the kid behind the 7-Eleven’s counter. “The ape lady?” she repeated coolly.

The young man seemed disconcerted, perhaps at last recognizing that what he’d said could have been construed as an insult—although it wasn’t to Sho: she admired apes a lot, which was why she was pursuing a career in primate communications.

“I mean,” he said, “you’re the woman that ape likes to paint—you know, Bobo.”

“Hobo,” said Shoshana. For God’s sake, it wasn’t that hard a name.

“Right, right,” said the guy. “I saw it on the news and on YouTube.”

Sho wasn’t quite sure she liked being famous—but, then again, her fifteen minutes would doubtless soon be up.

She stopped here often enough—although she’d never seen this kid before—to buy raisins, one of Hobo’s favorite treats. She knew where they were kept and went over to get a box, feeling the boy’s eyes on her as she did so.

When she went up to the cash register, the boy seemed to want to say something to make up for calling her the “ape lady.” “Well, I can see why he likes to paint you.”

Sho decided to take it in stride. “Thanks,” she said, opening her little purse and paying for the raisins.

“I mean—”

But anything else he said would be too much; she knew that, even if he didn’t, and so she cut him off. “Thanks,” she said again. She headed out of the cold store into the harsh late-afternoon sunshine. As she approached her car, she idly wondered if the California vanity plate APELADY was already taken—not that she could afford any such thing.

Shoshana drove the additional fifteen minutes to the Marcuse Institute, which was located outside San Diego on a large grassy lot, pulling her car in next to the black Lincoln owned by Harl Marcuse himself. If he’d had a vanity plate, it might have read 800 LBS; he was known around the NSF as the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. Or, she supposed, it could have said SLVRBCK—although she actually rather hoped that he’d never overheard either her or Dillon, the other grad student, calling him the Silverback.

She entered the Institute’s white clapboard bungalow. Dr. Marcuse was in the little kitchen, fixing himself a snack. “Good afternoon,” Sho said. She didn’t actually know if she was allowed to call him “Harl,” and yet “sir” seemed too formal. He always called her Shoshana—all three syllables—even though he’d doubtless often heard the others call her just Sho. She tilted her head toward the window. “How is he?”

“A bit grumpy,” said Marcuse, slicing a big hunk off a brick of white cheese. “He misses you when you’re late coming in.”

Sho ignored the barb. “I’ll go say hi.” She headed out the back door and walked across the wide lawn leading toward the pond. In its middle was a circular dome-shaped island about seventy feet in diameter, with a gazebo at the center. Shoshana crossed the little wooden drawbridge.

The island had two occupants. One was made of stone: an eight-foot-tall statue of the Lawgiver, the orangutan Moses from the Planet of the Apes movies. The other was flesh and blood. Hobo was sitting in the shade of one of the island’s six palm trees, his chinless jaw propped up by a bent arm; the pose reminded Shoshana of Rodin’s Thinker.

But suddenly the pose dissolved into a flurry of long hairy limbs. Hobo caught sight of Sho and came bounding on all fours toward her. When he’d closed the distance, he gathered her into a hug and, as always, gave a playful tug on her ponytail.

Where been? he demanded, as soon as his hands were free. Where been?

Sorry! Shoshana signed back. At university today.

Fun? asked Hobo.

Not as much fun as being here, she said, and she reached out and tickled him on either side of his flat belly.

Hobo hooted with joy, and Shoshana laughed and squirmed away as he tried to even the tickling score.

Caitlin knew nothing yet about telling people’s ages by their appearance. Her mother was forty-seven, but she couldn’t say if she looked it or not, although Bashira said she didn’t. Her hair was brown, and her eyes were large and blue, and she had an upturned nose.

Her father was two years younger than her mother, and quite a bit taller than either of them. He had brown eyes, like Caitlin, and hair that was a mixture of dark brown and gray.

Her mother was looking at Caitlin; her father was staring off in another direction. “Yes, dear?” her mom said, concerned, in response to Caitlin having announced that she had something to tell them.

But, Caitlin discovered, it was not the sort of thing that came trippingly to the tongue. “Um, Dad, you remember those cellular automata Dr. Kuroda and I found in the background of the World Wide Web?”

He nodded.

“And, well, remember the Zipf plots we did on the patterns they made?”

He nodded again. Zipf plots showed whether a signal contained information.

“And, later, remember, you calculated their Shannon entropy?”

Yet another nod. Shannon entropy showed how complex information was—and, when her dad had done his calculations, the answer had been: not very complex at all. Whatever was in the background of the Web hadn’t been sophisticated.

“Wellll,” said Caitlin, “I did my own Shannon analyses… over and over again. And, um, as time went by, the score kept getting higher: third-order, fourth-order.” She paused. “Then eighth and ninth.”

“Then it was secret messages!” said her father. English, and most other languages, showed eighth- or ninth-order Shannon entropy. And that had indeed been their fear: that they’d stumbled onto an operation by the NSA, or some other spy organization, running in the background of the Web.

“No,” said Caitlin. “The score kept getting higher and higher. I saw it reach 16.4.”

“You must have been—” But he stopped himself; he knew better than to say “—doing the math wrong.”

Caitlin shook her head. “It isn’t secret messages.” She paused, recalling that Webmind’s first words to her were, in fact, “Seekrit message to Calculass,” imitating a phrase Caitlin herself often used online.

“Then what is it?” her mother asked.

Caitlin took a deep breath, blew it out, then: “It’s a… consciousness.”

“A what?” her mom said.

Caitlin spread her arms. “It’s a consciousness, an intelligence, that’s emerged spontaneously, somehow, in the infrastructure of the Web.”

Caitlin still had to parse facial expressions piece by piece, and then match the clues to descriptions she’d read in books. Her father’s eyes narrowed into a squint, and he pressed his lips tightly together: skepticism.

Her mother’s tone was gentle. “That’s an… interesting idea, dear, but…”

“Its name,” Caitlin said firmly, “is Webmind.”

And that look on her mother’s face—mouth opened and rounded, eyes wide—had to be surprise. “You’ve spoken with it?”

Caitlin nodded. “Via instant messenger.”

“Sweetheart,” her mother said, “there are lots of con artists on the Web.”

“No, Mom. For Pete’s sake, this is real.”

“Has he asked you to meet him?” her mother demanded. “Asked for photographs?”

“No! Mom, I know all about online predators. It’s nothing like that.”

“Have you given him any personal information?” her mother continued. “Bank account numbers? Your Social Security number? Anything like that?”

“Mom!”

Her mother looked at her father, as if resuming some old argument. “I told you something like this would happen,” she said. “A blind girl spending all that time unsupervised online.”

Caitlin’s voice was suddenly sharp. “I’m not blind anymore! And, even when I was, I was always careful. This is as real as anything.”

“You didn’t answer your mother’s question,” her dad said. “Have you given out any personal numbers or passwords?”

“Jesus, Dad, no. This isn’t a scam.”

“That’s what everyone who is being scammed says,” he replied.

“Look, come up to my room,” Caitlin said. “I’ll show you.”

She didn’t wait for an answer; she just turned and headed for the staircase. Her breathing was ragged, but she knew she wasn’t going to accomplish anything by being pissy. She took a deep breath, and a memory of an animated cartoon came to her. She hadn’t seen it yet, but she’d always enjoyed listening to it, after Stacy back in Austin had explained what was going on. It was a Looney Tunes short called “One Froggy Evening,” about a frog who sang and danced for the guy who’d found it, but just croaked when anyone else was around. Eyes closed, steps passing beneath her feet, the frog’s favorite song ran through her head:

Hello! ma baby

Hello! ma honey

Hello! ma ragtime gal

Send me a kiss by wire

Baby, ma heart’s on fire!

Her parents followed her. Caitlin sat down in the swivel chair in front of her desk. She had an old seventeen-inch monitor hooked up to one computer, and the new twenty-seven-inch widescreen monitor she’d received that morning as an early birthday present connected to her other computer. Her mother took up a position on her left, arms crossed in front of her chest, and her father stood on her right. The chat session with Webmind was still on screen, with her brb as the last post. Things she said were in red letters, and Webmind’s words were in blue.

She couldn’t see her father—she was still blind in her right eye—but in her left-side peripheral vision, she saw her mother shoot him another look.

She typed, Back.

There was no response. The IM window—a white rectangle parked in a corner of her big monitor—showed nothing except an animated ad at its top. She shifted in her chair. Of course, Webmind knew she wasn’t alone. It watched the datafeed from her eyePod, and certainly could see her mother.

She tried again, typing Hello.

Still nothing. She turned to look at her father—and realized that might have been a mistake, since Webmind could now see that he was there, too. She faced the screen again and drummed her fingers on the stonewashed denim stretched across her thigh. Come on, she thought. Send me a kiss by wire…

And after six more seconds, the blue letters “POS” appeared in the instant-messenger window.

A startled laugh burst from Caitlin.

“What’s that mean?” demanded her mother.

“ ‘Parents over shoulder,’ ” Caitlin said. “It’s what you write in an IM when you can’t talk freely.” She typed: Yes, they are, and I’d like you to meet them. She looked at her father, so Webmind could see him, and she sent, That’s my dad, Dr. Malcolm Decter. And she looked the other way, then added, And my mom, Dr. Barbara Decter.

Webmind might have wrestled mightily with what to do next—but its response appeared instantaneously. Greetings and felicitations.

Caitlin smiled. “It’s read all of Project Gutenberg,” she said. “Its language tends to be dated.”

“Sweetheart,” her mother said gently, “that could be anyone.”

“It’s read all of Wikipedia, too,” Caitlin said. “Ask it something that no human being could find quickly online.”

“The Wikipedia entry on any topic is usually the first Google hit,” her mom said. “If this guy’s got a fast enough connection, he could find anything quickly.”

“Ask it a question, Dad. Something technical.”

He seemed to hesitate, as if wondering whether to go along with this nonsense or not. Finally, he said, “Are heterotic strings open or closed?”

Caitlin started to type. “How do you spell that?”

“H-e-t-e-r-o-t-i-c.”

She finished typing the question, but didn’t press enter. “Now, watch how fast it answers—it won’t be searching, it’ll know it.” She sent the question, and the word closed appeared at once.

“Fifty-fifty shot,” said her mother.

Caitlin was getting pissed again. There had to be an easy way to prove what she was saying.

And there was!

“Okay, look, Mom—my webcam is off, see?”

Her mother nodded.

“Okay, now hold up some fingers—any number.”

Her mom looked surprised, then did what she was asked. Caitlin glanced at her, then typed, “How many fingers is my mom holding up?”

The numeral three appeared instantly.

“Which ones?” typed Caitlin.

The text “Index, middle, ring” popped into the window.

Her mother made that round-mouth look again. Caitlin had Webmind repeat the stunt three times, and it got the answers right, even when she made the devil’s horns gesture with her index and baby fingers.

Caitlin’s mother sat down on the edge of the bed, and her father crossed the room and leaned against one of the blank walls, which, she had learned, were a color called cornflower blue.

“Sweetheart,” her mother said, gently. “Okay, somebody is intercepting the signal your eyePod is putting out. I grant you that, but—”

“The eyePod signal is just my retinal datastream,” Caitlin said. “Even if someone was intercepting it, they wouldn’t be able to decode it.”

“If it’s somebody at the University of Tokyo, they might have access to Masayuki’s algorithms,” her mother said. “There are con artists everywhere. And, honey, this is exactly how a certain type of Internet crook works. They find people who are… misunderstood. People who are brilliant, but don’t fit in well in the regular nine-to-five world.”

“Mom, it’s real—really.”

Her mother shook her head. “I know it seems real. The standard ploy is to come on to such a person in email or a chat room saying they’ve noticed how clever and insightful they are, how they—forgive me—how they see things that others don’t. One version has the scammer pretending to be a recruiter for the CIA; I have a friend who had her bank account cleared out after she gave up information supposedly for a security check. It’s exactly what these people do: they try to make you feel like you’re special—like you’re the most special person on the planet. And then they take you for everything you’ve got.”

“Well, first, my bank account has, like, two hundred dollars in it, so who cares? And, second, Jesus, Mom, this is real.”

“That’s why it works,” her mother said. “Because it seems real.”

“For God’s sake,” Caitlin said. She swiveled in her chair. “Dad?” she said imploringly. Yes, he was hard to deal with; yes, he was a cold fish. But, as she’d once overheard a university student say about why he’d taken one of his courses, he was Malcolm Fucking Decter: he was a genius. He surely knew how to definitively test a hypothesis, no matter how outlandish it might seem. “You’re a scientist,” she said. “Prove one of us wrong.” She got out of her chair and motioned for him to sit down in front of the keyboard.

“All right,” he said. “Are you logging your IM sessions?”

“I always do,” said Caitlin.

He nodded. He clearly realized that if Caitlin was right, the record of the initial contact with Webmind would be of enormous scientific value.

“Do not watch me type,” he said, taking the seat. At first she thought he was being his normal autistic self—since acquiring sight, she’d had to train herself not to look at him—but he went on: “Stare at the wall while I do this.”

She sat down on the bed next to her mother and did as he’d asked.

“Where’s Word?” he said.

Silly man was probably looking for a desktop icon, but Caitlin hadn’t needed them when she was blind, and a Windows wizard had cleared most of them away ages ago. “It’s the third choice down on the Start menu.”

She heard keyclicks, and lots of backspacing—her backspace key made a slightly different sound than the smaller, alphabetic ones.

He worked for almost fifteen minutes. Caitlin was dying to ask what he was up to, but she kept staring at the deep blue wall on the far side of the room. For her part, her mother also sat quietly.

Finally, he said, “All right. Let’s see what it’s made of.”

Caitlin had audible accessibility aids installed on her computer, including a bleep sound effect when text was cut, and a bloop when it was pasted. She heard both sounds as her dad presumably transferred whatever he’d written from Word into the IM window.

She fidgeted nervously. He sucked in his breath.

Another cut-and-paste combo. He made a “ hmmm” sound.

Yet another transfer, this time followed by silence, which lasted for seven seconds, and then he did one more cut and paste, and then—

And then her father spoke. “Barb,” he said, “care to say hello to Webmind?”