Wonder

thirty-two

Caitlin—still in the swivel chair on the street in Waterloo—knew that what had just happened in webspace was metaphoric. Her mind interpreted events in that realm by likening them to things it understood. She’d read a lot about consciousness on Wikipedia since Webmind had emerged, and knew metaphor (or, no doubt as her former English teacher Mrs. Z would correct her, simile) was the defining trait of self-awareness: being conscious meant it was like something to be alive. In fact, one of the seminal papers in consciousness studies was Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” He contended that humans could never understand the mental states of a flying creature that perceived the world through echolocation. But because of her forays into webspace, Caitlin did feel she knew what flight was like—and she (and most other totally blind people) actually did have at least some notion of what echolocation was like.

But to connect to websites by movement, to call up content by yearning, to have making connections feel like touching—these metaphors, these ways of perceiving, were a product of her own mind. What was it like to be a bat? What was it like to be Caitlin? What was it like to be Webmind? And—most important of all right now—what was it like to be the Other?

Although she was in contact with it and could feel its presence, what it seemed most like was how it used to be when she’d sat on the living-room couch while her father sat on the easy chair: she knew he was there, but there was no interactivity. He was so reserved, so wrapped up in his own thoughts, so isolated.

And she was aware that there really had been no rush through webspace—whatever that meant. The special packets that formed both Webmind and the Other were widely and evenly dispersed in vast oceans of regular packets that her mind was blind to, just as a frog’s vision didn’t encode nonmoving objects. But now that she was in contact with the Other, there had to be a way to coax it to reach across the gulf toward Webmind, just as Webmind was striving to connect with it.

She wasn’t exactly sure where she was in the real world just now; she had no previous experience judging distances while being pushed along in an office chair by a running man. Somewhere down the block from her house? Or maybe even in the next block? The sun was still out; she could feel it on her skin. In fact, she probably should be wearing sunglasses even though her brain wasn’t perceiving what her open eyes were looking at. Matt was behind her still, and his thin hands now rested on her shoulders, as much out of affection as to prop himself up, she bet. She could hear him breathing noisily, trying to recover from his mad hundred-yard—or thousand-yard!—dash.

She thought about the difference between the Hoser, who had tried repeatedly to touch her without permission, and Matt, whose hand she’d had to gently place upon her breast that first time, and—

And that was it! For this to work, the Other had to want to be touched, had to desire the connection.

But what could she do to entice it to reach out to Webmind? What did he or she have to offer it but—

But websight! A look at itself. Yes, it could see through webcam eyes, but that only enabled it to see the outer world of trees and bees, of mice and lice, of faces and spaces. But she could show the Other itself.

There was no direct way for her to share what she was seeing with it—but there was an indirect way: what she was looking at was now being projected on the big sixty-inch screen in the Decters’ living room. And although she couldn’t see it from here, Webmind could, through the camera on the netbook back in the house. But it would only be getting an oblique view of the monitor since her father had aimed the webcam to favor the couch and the easy chair.

And, in that second, she was reminded of how much Webmind did need physical agents—his peeps!—in the real world. “Can someone go point the netbook in the living room directly at the TV?” Caitlin said into the air.

“I’ll do it,” her mother replied, and Caitlin instantly heard her mom’s shoes—sensible ones, of course!—striking the pavement. In all the wild rush to get out here, Caitlin hadn’t heard whether the side door had been closed, but if it hadn’t, her mom had probably been itching to go back and take care of that, anyway. Her mother’s legs were nowhere near as long as her dad’s, but it still shouldn’t take her long to get there—after all, she wasn’t pushing a 110-pound girl in an office chair!

Matt seemed to sense that they were waiting for something, and he started rubbing Caitlin’s shoulders the way she’d read a trainer might rub a boxer’s between rounds. At last, Webmind spoke to her through the Bluetooth earpiece. “I have a clear view of the monitor now.”

Caitlin nodded acknowledgment, the view of webspace bobbing once as she did so. “Okay, here we go!”

She focused on the shimmering mass that was the Other, fighting to keep her gaze from being drawn to the much larger body of Webmind, which was shimmering more rapidly. It was a struggle—especially for her! Other girls would have undergone countless staring contests in their youth, learning not to flinch or blink, learning to lock their vision on a single point. But controlling her gaze was something she was still learning to do.

Caitlin had read about the mirror test: humans, some apes, and some birds could recognize their own reflection and were drawn to it out of either curiosity or vanity. Could the Other have sunk so low as to have lost the ability to recognize itself? If not, surely it had to be intrigued.

Come on! she thought, and “Come on!” she said.

She took a break from staring intently and let her eye jump from side to side, from right to left, from west to east, from Webmind to the Other. Back and forth, back and forth, back, and—

And stopping, her eye caught, her attention arrested. There, in the middle of the pit, was a piercing green point of light, an emerald against the emptiness, almost too bright to look at. It was minuscule, without any apparent diameter, and certainly wasn’t a line segment—at least not yet. But it seemed Sinanthropus was breaking through!

“Do you see it, Webmind?” she called out.

“Yes,” he replied, and even before the syllable had ended, a bright red link line shot out from the larger shimmering mass. It made it only as far as the green point—just halfway to the other shimmering mass. Still, it was a start!

“I’m offering it the living-room webcam feed of itself,” Webmind said. “Wai-Jeng is holding the hole open, but the Other hasn’t accepted the connection yet.”

Of course it hadn’t—she was now staring at the middle of the soul-crushing emptiness; the Other doubtless wanted to divert its attention from that, even if it did have that intriguing glowing hole in its center and a link line partially crossing it now.

Caitlin turned her attention back to the Other, focusing on it, concentrating on it, thinking about it, scrutinizing its every detail, its endlessly alternating components, seen so close now that she could discern coherent patterns flying or tumbling across the background, could detect shapes spawning other shapes at regular intervals, could see the very stuff of the Other’s thoughts, the dance of its consciousness, and—

And its curiosity was piqued! A blue link line of its own shot out, leaping to the green hole Sinanthropus had drilled, joining there with the red laser of Webmind’s feed from the camera in the living room.

“We are in contact,” said Webmind. Caitlin kept her gaze fixed on the Other—which was hard, since in her peripheral vision a light show was suddenly going on: more green pinpricks as Wai-Jeng continued to bore holes in the Great Firewall, and red and blue line segments jousting.

Finally, shimmering lobes started stretching into the abyss from either side, and—yes, yes, yes!—the nothingness was becoming merely black, then gray, and now it showed texture, a bubbling, a boiling away, and the emerald holes burned steadily like constellations of green stars, and the great divide continued to shrink, and the two masses, the two solitudes, the two consciousnesses grew closer and closer and—

And her vision could pan left now, sweeping continuously across the combined shimmering, and as she watched, the part on the left grew similar to the overall color of that on the right, and the flickering stepped up, matching the other side’s pace now that at last, gloriously, it was a continuous mass again.

“We are one,” Webmind said, and although the words were uninflected, Caitlin had no doubt that if he could have said them exuberantly, with joy and relief, he most certainly would have.