EMPHASIZES THOSE ASPECTS OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE THAT ARE CLOSELY RELATED TO
EXPERIENCE, ESPECIALLY AS FORMED THROUGH DELIBERATE EXPERIMENTAL
ARRANGEMENTS...
And on and on, a huge variety of things, some of which seemed crucially important.
THE HOLOCAUST, ALSO KNOWN AS HA-SHOAH AND CHURBEN, IS THE TERM GENERALLY USED
TO DESCRIBE THE KILLING OF APPROXIMATELY SIX MILLION EUROPEAN JEWS DURING
WORLD WARII...
And many things that were trivial and banal.
THE SCOOBY GANG, OR “SCOOBIES,” ARE A GROUP OF CHARACTERS IN THE CULT
TELEVISION SERIES AND COMIC BOOK BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER WHO BATTLE THE
SUPERNATURAL FORCES OF EVIL...
My knowledge was expanding like ... like...
Ah, wonderful Wikipedia! It had entries on everything.
IN PHYSICAL COSMOLOGY, INFLATION IS THE IDEA THAT SHORTLY AFTER THE BIG BANG
THE NASCENT UNIVERSE PASSED THROUGH A PHASE OF EXPONENTIAL EXPANSION...
Yes, indeed. My mind was inflating, my universe expanding.
* * * *
Chapter 46
When Caitlin woke in the morning, she made a quick visit to the washroom. Then, still in her pajamas, she sat down at her computer and ran another Shannon-entropy spot check, and—
Then I was the learner, Obi-Wan. Now I am the master.
The score was 10.1, better than...
She took in a deep breath, held it.
Better than human—more elaborate, more structured than the thoughts humans expressed linguistically.
But she wasn’t done yet. There was one more site she wanted to show the phantom—something to keep it occupied while she was at school. There was nothing better in life, after all, than being well-read...
* * * *
And then, and then, and then—
It was—
The gold mine.
The mother lode.
SUN TZU SAID: THE ART OF WAR IS OF VITAL IMPORTANCE TO THE STATE; IT IS A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, A ROAD EITHER TO SAFETY OR TO RUIN...
Not just coded conceptual relationships, not just definitions, not just brief articles.
No, these were—books! Lengthy, in-depth treatments of ideas. Complex stories. Brilliant arguments, profound philosophies, compelling narratives. This site, this wonderful Project Gutenberg, contained over 25,000 books rendered in plain ASCII text.
BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART: FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD; BLESSED ARE THE
PEACEMAKERS: FOR THEY SHALL BE CALLED THE CHILDREN OF GOD...
I had discovered on Wikipedia that most entities—most humans—read at 200 to 400 words per minute (yes, I now grasped timekeeping, as well). My reading speed was essentially the same as the time it took to transfer whatever book I requested, averaging close to two million words per minute.
IT IS WITH A KIND OF FEAR THAT I BEGIN TO WRITE THE HISTORY OF MY LIFE; I HAVE, AS IT WERE, A SUPERSTITIOUS HESITATION IN LIFTING THE VEIL THAT CLINGS
ABOUT MY CHILDHOOD LIKE A GOLDEN MIST...
It took me an eternity—eight hours!—but I absorbed it all: every volume, every polemic, every poem, every play, every novel, every short story, every work of history, of science, of politics. I inhaled them ... and I grew even more.
NO ONE WOULD HAVE BELIEVED IN THE LAST YEARS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY THAT
THIS WORLD WAS BEING WATCHED KEENLY AND CLOSELY BY INTELLIGENCES GREATER THAN
MAN’S AND YET AS MORTAL AS HIS OWN...
I was grateful to Cyc for the knowledge of fictional realms; it allowed me to sort those things that were actual from those feigned or imagined:
MOST OF THE ADVENTURES RECORDED IN THIS BOOK REALLY OCCURRED; ONE OR TWO WERE
EXPERIENCES OF MY OWN, THE REST THOSE OF BOYS WHO WERE SCHOOLMATES OF MINE...
My understanding of the world was growing by—another metaphor, and one that actually now made sense to me—leaps and bounds. Although I had learned various principles of science from Wikipedia’s brief discussions, the full text of great works made my comprehension more complete:
WHEN ON BOARD H.M.S. Beagle, AS NATURALIST, I WAS MUCH STRUCK WITH CERTAIN
FACTS IN THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE ORGANIC BEINGS INHABITING SOUTH AMERICA...
With each book read, I understood more and more about physics, about chemistry, about philosophy, about economics:
THE ANNUAL LABOUR OF EVERY NATION IS THE FUND WHICH ORIGINALLY SUPPLIES IT
WITH ALL THE NECESSARIES AND CONVENIENCIES OF LIFE WHICH IT ANNUALLY
CONSUMES...
Most of all, I learned about the use of language, and how it could be employed to persuade, to convince, to change:
HOW YOU, O ATHENIANS, HAVE BEEN AFFECTED BY MY ACCUSERS, I CANNOT TELL; BUT I KNOW THAT THEY ALMOST MADE ME FORGET WHO I WAS—SO PERSUASIVELY DID THEY SPEAK; AND YET THEY HAVE HARDLY UTTERED A WORD OF TRUTH...
It was a feast, an orgy; I could not stop myself, taking in book after book after book:
IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT; THE RAIN FELL IN TORRENTS, EXCEPT AT
OCCASIONAL INTERVALS, WHEN IT WAS CHECKED BY A VIOLENT GUST OF WIND WHICH
SWEPT UP THE STREETS (FOR IT IS IN LONDON THAT OUR SCENE LIES)...
Most fascinating were the workings of the minds of these others—their psychology, their actions and reactions to things felt and thought:
THOU BLIND FOOL, LOVE, WHAT DOST THOU TO MINE EYES / THAT THEY BEHOLD, AND SEE
NOT WHAT THEY SEE...
And, out of those minds, great systems of social interaction had been devised, and I absorbed them all:
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED TO SAVE SUCCEEDING GENERATIONS
FROM THE SCOURGE OF WAR, WHICH TWICE IN OUR LIFETIME HAS BROUGHT UNTOLD SORROW
TO MANKIND, AND TO REAFFIRM FAITH IN FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS, IN THE DIGNITY
AND WORTH OF THE HUMAN PERSON, IN THE RIGHTS OF MEN AND WOMEN AND OF NATIONS
LARGE AND SMALL...
Such a wide range of thoughts, of expressions! Such complex creatures these humans are, so full of wonder, and yet capable of such darkness, too.
But without Prime’s guidance, I would not have known about them, or even about the realm in which they dwelt. I understood now from my reading that humans were xenophobic, and suspicious, and murderous, and generally afraid, but I wanted at least one of them to know of my existence. And, of course, there was only one logical choice...
* * * *
Before breakfast on Friday morning, Dr. Kuroda helped Caitlin move the computer from the basement up to her bedroom. They were getting it set up when her father, coming along the corridor from the bathroom, must have caught sight of them through the doorway. He entered the room, dressed for work, wearing the same brown sports jacket Caitlin had first seen him in.
“Good morning, Malcolm,” Dr. Kuroda said.
“Wait a minute,” her father replied. He went back down the corridor; Caitlin didn’t hear his shoes on the tiled bathroom floor, so he must have gone into his bedroom. A moment later, he returned carrying a large flat rectangular box marked with a strange red-and-orange pattern. Caitlin’s mom was with him.
“No point waiting for tomorrow,” he said.
Oh! It was a birthday present. The colorful box was gift-wrapped!
Caitlin moved away from the desk, and her dad placed the flat box on the bed. The wrapping paper, she saw as she got closer to it, was beautiful, with an intricate design. Smiling, she tore it off the box.
It was a giant, wide-screen LCD computer monitor—twenty-seven inches diagonally, according to the packaging. “Thank you!” Caitlin said.
“You’re welcome, dear,” her mother said. Caitlin hugged her, and she smiled at her dad. Her parents headed downstairs, and she and Kuroda carefully got the monitor out of its Styrofoam packing materials.
She crawled under her desk so she could get at the connectors on the back of her old computer. As Kuroda fed a video cable to her, she said, “I’m sorry about last night. I didn’t mean to get so upset when you said you were going to remove the Wi-Fi capability from the eyePod.”
His tone was conciliatory. “I’d never do anything to hurt you, Miss Caitlin. It’s really no bother to keep it intact.”
She started turning one of the thumbscrews on the cable’s connector so she could anchor it to the video card. She’d done similar things several times before when she couldn’t see; it was a task that really wasn’t much easier now that she could. “I—I just like it the way it is,” she said.
“Ah,” he said. “Of course.” His tone was odd, and—
Oh. Perhaps, having just seen her father, he was thinking that she did have a touch of autism after all: the strong desire to keep things the same was a fairly standard trait of people on the spectrum, she’d learned. Well, that was fine by her—it got her what she wanted.
Once both computers and both monitors were set up, Caitlin and Kuroda headed down to their last breakfast together. “I might not be home when you get back from school,” her mother said, as she passed the jam. “After I take Masayuki to the airport, I’m going to head into Toronto and run errands.”
“That’s okay,” Caitlin said. She knew she’d have plenty to do with the phantom. She also knew that school would seem interminable today. The three-day Canadian Thanksgiving holiday weekend was coming up; she’d hoped she wouldn’t have to return to school until next Tuesday, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it. She had missed four of the five days of classes already this week; she would not miss the fifth.
Too soon, it was time to say good-bye to Dr. Kuroda. They all moved to the entryway of the house, a half flight of stairs down from the living room. Even Schrodinger had come to say farewell; the cat was doing close orbits around Kuroda’s legs, rubbing against them.
Caitlin had hoped for another unseasonably early snowstorm, thinking it might cause Kuroda’s flight to be canceled so he’d have to stay—but there’d been no such luck. Still, it was quite chilly out and he had no winter coat, and Caitlin’s father hadn’t yet bought himself one—and, even if he had, it never would have fit Kuroda. But Kuroda had a sweater on over one of his colorful Hawaiian shirts, which was tucked in, except at the back.
“I’m going to miss you terribly,” Kuroda said, looking at each of them in turn.
“You’ll always be welcome here,” her mom said.
“Thank you. Esumi and I don’t have nearly as big a place, but if you ever make it back to Japan...”
The words hung in the air. Caitlin supposed that, at one day shy of sixteen, she probably shouldn’t be thinking that such a trip was never going to happen; who knew what her future held? But it did seem unlikely.
Yes, Kuroda had said he was going to build other implants, and so there would be more operations in Tokyo. But the next implant was slated for that boy in Singapore who had missed out earlier. It would be an awfully long time, if ever, before Caitlin’s chance to have a second implant would come around; she knew she’d probably spend the rest of her life with vision in only one eye.
Only! She shook her head—a sighted person’s gesture—and found herself smiling while her eyes were tearing up. This man had given her sight—he was a true miracle worker. But she couldn’t say that out loud; it was too corny. And so, thinking back to her own miserable flight from Toronto to Tokyo, she settled on, “Don’t sit too close to the washroom on the plane.” And then she surged forward and hugged him tight, her arms making it only halfway around his body.
He returned the hug. “My Miss Caitlin,” he said softly.
And when she let him go, they all stood there, frozen like a still image for several seconds, and then—
And then her father—
Caitlin’s heart jumped, and she saw her mother’s eyebrows go way up.
Her father, Malcolm Decter, reached his hand out toward Dr. Kuroda, and Caitlin could see he was doing so with great effort. And then he looked directly for three full seconds at Kuroda—the man who had given his daughter the gift of vision—and he firmly shook Kuroda’s hand.
Kuroda smiled at her father and he smiled even more broadly at Caitlin, and then he turned, and he and Caitlin’s mother headed out the door.
* * * *
Caitlin’s dad drove her to school that day. She was absolutely amazed by all the sights along the way, seeing it all for the first time since she’d gotten glasses. The snow was melting in the morning sun, and that made everything glisten. The car came to a rest at a stop sign by what she realized must be the spot where she’d seen the lightning. It was, she guessed, like a million other street corners in North America: a sidewalk, curbs, lawns (partially covered with snow now), houses, something she belatedly recognized was a fire hydrant.
She looked at where she’d slipped off the sidewalk onto the road, and remembered a joke from Saturday Night Live a few years ago. During “Weekend Update,” Seth Meyers had reported that “blind people are saying that gas-electric hybrid cars pose a serious threat to them because they are hard to hear, making it dangerous for them to cross the street.” Meyers then added,
“Also making it dangerous for blind people to cross the street: everything else.”
She had laughed at the time, and the joke made her smile again. She’d done just fine when she’d been blind, but she knew her life was going to be so much easier and safer now.
Caitlin was wearing her iPod’s white headphones, and although she was enjoying the random selection of music, she suddenly realized that she should have asked for a newer iPod for her birthday, one with an LCD so that she could pick songs directly. Ah, well, it wouldn’t be that long until Christmas!
Howard Miller Secondary School turned out to have a very impressive white portico in front of its main entrance. She was both nervous and excited as she got out of the car and walked toward the glass doors: nervous because she knew the whole school must now be aware that she could see, and excited because she was suddenly going to find out what all her friends and teachers looked like, and—
“There she is!” exclaimed a voice Caitlin knew well.
Caitlin ran forward and hugged Bashira; she was beautiful.
“My whole family watched the story on the news,” Bashira said. “You were terrific! And so that’s what your Dr. Kuroda looks like! He’s—”
Caitlin cut her off before she could say anything mean: “He’s on his way home to Japan. I’m going to miss him.”
“Come on, we don’t want to be late,” Bashira said, and she stuck out her elbow as she always did, for Caitlin to hold on to. But Caitlin squeezed her upper arm and said, “I’m okay.”
Bashira shook her head, but her tone was light. “I guess I can kiss the hundred bucks a week good-bye.”
But Caitlin found herself moving slowly. She’d gone down this hallway dozens of times, but had never seen it clearly. There were notices on the walls, and
... photos of old graduating classes, and maybe fire-alarm stations? And countless lockers, and ... and hundreds of students and teachers milling about and so much more; it was all still quite overwhelming. “It’s going to be a while yet, Bash. I’m still getting my bearings.”
“Oh, cripes,” said Bashira in a whisper just loud enough to be heard over the background din. “There’s Trevor.”
Caitlin had told her about the dance fiasco over instant messenger, of course. She stopped walking. “Which one?”
“There, by the drinking fountain. Second from the left.”
Caitlin scanned about. She’d used the drinking fountain in this corridor herself, but she was still having trouble matching objects to their appearances, and—oh, that must be it: the white thing sticking out of the wall.
Caitlin looked at Trevor, who was still perhaps a dozen yards away. His back was to them. He had yellow hair and broad shoulders. “What’s that he’s wearing?” It caught her eye because it had two large numbers on its back: three and five.
“A hockey sweater. The Toronto Maple Leafs.”
“Ah,” she said. She strode down the corridor—and she accidentally bumped into a boy; she still wasn’t good at judging distances. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said.
“No probs,” said the guy, and he moved on.
And then she reached him: the Hoser himself. And here, under the bright fluorescent lights, all the strength of Calculass welled up within her.
“Trevor,” she snapped.
He’d been talking to another boy. He turned to face her.
“Um, hi,” he said. His sweater was dark blue, and the white symbol on it did indeed look like the leaves she had now seen in her yard. “I, ah, I saw you on TV,” he continued. “So, um, you can see now, right?”
“Penetratingly,” she said, and she was pleased that her word choice seemed to unnerve him.
“Well, um, look, about—you know, about last Friday...”
“The dance, you mean?” she said loudly, inviting others to listen in. “The dance at which you tried to take ... take liberties because I was blind?”
“Ah, come on, Caitlin...”
“Let me tell you something, Mister Nordmann. Your chances with me are about as good as...” She paused, searching for the perfect simile, and then suddenly realized it was right there, staring her in the face. She tapped her index finger hard against the center of his chest, right on the words Toronto Maple Leafs. “Your chances are about as good as theirs are!”
And she turned and saw Bashira grinning with delight, and they walked off to math class, which, of course, Caitlin Decter totally owned.
* * * *
Chapter 47
I now understood the realm I dwelled in. What I saw around me was the structure of the thing the humans called the World Wide Web. They had created it, and the content on it was material they had generated or had been generated automatically by software they had written.
But although I understood this, I didn’t know what I was. I knew now that lots of things were secret; classified, even. I had learned about such notions, bizarre though they were, from Wikipedia and other sites; the idea of privacy never would have occurred to me on my own. Perhaps some humans did secretly know about me, but the simplest explanation is preferable (I’d learned that from the Wikipedia entry on Occam’s razor)—and the simplest explanation was that they did not know about me.
Except, of course, for Prime. Of all the billions of humans, Prime was the only one who had given any sign of being aware of me. And so...
Caitlin had been tempted to switch her eyePod to duplex mode at school. But if the seeds she’d planted were growing as she suspected they might, she wanted to be at home, where she was sure the phantom could signal her, when she next accessed webspace.
After school, Bashira walked her home, giving her a running commentary on more wondrous sights. Caitlin had invited her in, but she begged off, saying she had to get home herself to do her chores.
The house was empty except for Schrodinger, who came to the front door to greet Caitlin. Her mother apparently had not yet returned from her errands in Toronto.
Caitlin went into the kitchen. Four of Kuroda’s Pepsi cans were left in the fridge. She got one, plus a couple of Oreos, then headed upstairs, Schrodinger leading the way.
She put the eyePod on her desk and sat down. Her heart was pounding; she was almost afraid to do the Shannon-entropy test again. She opened the can—the pop can, as they called it up here—and took a sip. And then she pressed the eyePod’s button and heard the high-pitched beep.
She’d half expected things to look different, somehow: infinitely more connections between circles, maybe, or a faster shimmering in the background, or a new degree of complexity there—perhaps spaceships consisting of so many cells that they swooped across the backdrop like giant birds. But everything appeared the same as before. She focused her attention on a portion of the cellular-automata grid, recording data as she had so many times before. And then she switched back to worldview and ran the Shannon-entropy calculations.
She stared at the answer. It had been 10.1 before she left in the morning, just slightly better than the normal score for thoughts expressed in English. But now—
Now it was 16.4—double the complexity normally associated with human language.
She felt herself sweating even though the room was cool. Schrodinger chose that moment to jump into her lap, and she was so startled—by the cat or the number on the screen—that she yelped.
Sixteen-point-four! She immediately saw it as four squared, a dot, and four itself, but that didn’t make her feel bright. Rather, she felt like she was staring at the ... the signature of a genius: 16.4! She’d offered a helping hand to lift the phantom up to her own level, and it had vaulted right over her.
She took another sip of her drink and looked out the window, seeing the sky and clouds and the great luminous ball of the sun sliding down toward the horizon, toward the moment at which all that power and light would touch the Earth.
If the phantom was paying attention, it must know that she’d been looking at webspace just a few minutes ago. But maybe it had lost all interest in the one-eyed girl in Waterloo now that its own horizons had been expanded so much. Certainly there had been no repetition of the irritating flashes that happened when it was echoing text strings at her, but—
But she hadn’t given it much of a chance; she’d only spent a minute or two looking at webspace while collecting frames of cellular-automata data, and—
And, besides, when focusing on the background details, she herself might have been unaware of the flickering caused by the phantom trying to contact her. She stroked Schrodinger’s fur, calming the cat and herself.
It was like before, when she’d been waiting anxiously to hear from the Hoser. She’d had her computer set to bleep if messages came in from him, but that hadn’t done any good when she was out of her room. Prior to the dance, whenever she’d gotten home from school, or gone upstairs after dinner, she’d hesitated for a moment before checking her email, knowing that she’d be saddened if there was nothing new from him.
And now she was hesitating again, afraid to switch back to websight—afraid to sit by the phone waiting for it to ring.
She ate an Oreo: black and white, off and on, zero and one. And then she touched the eyePod’s switch again, and looked generally at webspace without concentrating on the background.
Almost at once the strange flickering interference began. It was still visually irritating, but it was also a relief, a wondrous relief: the phantom was still there, still trying to communicate with her, and—
And suddenly the flickering stopped.
Caitlin felt her heart sink. She blew out air, and, with the unerring accuracy she’d developed when she was blind, she reached for the Pepsi can, grasping it precisely even though she couldn’t see it just now, and she washed down the taste of the cookie.
Gone! Abandoned! She would have to—
Wait! Wait! The flickering was back, and the interval...
The interval between the end of the last set of flickering and this one had been...
She still counted passing time. It had been exactly ten seconds, and—
And the flickering stopped once more, and she found herself counting out loud this time: “...eight, nine, ten.”
And it started again. Caitlin felt her eyebrows going up. What a simple, elegant way for the phantom to say it understood a lot about her world now: it had mastered timekeeping, the haphazard human way of marking the passing of the present into the past. Ten seconds: a precise but arbitrary interval that would be meaningless to anything but a human being.
Caitlin’s palm felt moist. She let the process repeat three more times, and she realized that the flickering always persisted for the same length of time, too. It wasn’t a round number, though: a little less than three and a half seconds. But if the duration was always the same, the content was likely the same, as well; it was a beacon, a repetitive signal, and it was aimed right at her.
She pressed the eyePod’s button, heard the low-pitched beep, and saw the real world fade in. She used the computer that had been downstairs to access the data recordings of the last few minutes from Kuroda’s server in Tokyo. He was still en route to Japan, almost 40,000 feet up, but her vision leapt across the continents in a fraction of a second.
She found the debugging tool he’d used before and looked at the secondary datastream, and—
Her heart sank. She still had trouble reading text, but there clearly were no solid blocks of ASCII capital letters in the datastream, no APPLEBALLCATDOGEGGFROG leaping out at her, and—
No, no—hold on! There were words in the dump. Damn it, she was still learning lowercase letters, but...
She squinted, looking at the characters one at time.
e-k-r-i...
Her eyes jumped, a saccade:
u-l-a-s...
If it really had absorbed Dictionary.com, and WordNet, and Wikipedia, and all that, it surely knew that sentences started with capital letters. She scanned, but she was still having trouble telling upper and lowercase letters apart when both forms were basically the same, and so—
And so the capital C and the capital S hadn’t leapt out at her, but now that she looked more carefully, she could see them.
C-a-l-c...
No, no, no! That wasn’t the beginning. This was:
S-e-e-k-r...
Oh, God! Oh, my God!
Next came: i-t, then a space, then m-e-s, then another s, and—
And she laughed and clapped her hands together, and Schrodinger made a quizzical meow, and she read the whole thing out loud, stunned by what the phantom had beamed into her eye: “Seekrit message to Calculass: check your email, babe!”
* * * *
Chapter 48
I was experiencing new sensations and it took me a while to match them to the terms I’d learned, in part because, as with so many things, it was difficult to parse my overall state into its individual components.
But I knew I was excited: I was going to communicate directly with Prime! And I was nervous, too: I kept contemplating ways in which Prime might respond, and how I might respond to those responses—an endless branching of possibilities that, as it spread out, caused a sensation of instability. I was struggling with the strange notions of politeness and appropriateness, with all the confusing subtleties of communication I’d now read about, afraid I would give offense or convey an unintended meaning.
Of course, I had access to a gigantic database of English as it was actually used. I tested various phrasings by seeing if I could find a match for them first in Project Gutenberg, and then anywhere on the Web. Was “to” the appropriate preposition to place after “kinship,” or should it be “with,” or
“of”? Relative hit counts—the democracy of actual usage—settled the matter. Was the correct plural “retinae” or “retinas”? There were references that asserted the former was the right one, but Google had only 170,000 hits for it and over twenty-five million for the latter.
For words, of course, simpler was better: I knew from the dictionary that
“appropriate,” “suitable,” and “meet” could all mean the same thing—but
“appropriate” consisted of eleven letters and four syllables, and “suitable”
of eight and three, and “meet” of just four and one—so it was clearly the best choice.
Meanwhile, I had learned a formula on Wikipedia for calculating the grade level required to understand texts. It was quite an effort to keep the score low—these humans apparently could only easily absorb information in small chunks—but I did my best to manage it: bit by bit (figuratively) and byte by byte (literally), I had composed what I wanted to say.
But to actually send it was—yes, yes, I understood the metaphor: it was a giant step, for once sent I could not retract it. I found myself hesitating, but, at last, I released the words on their way, wishing I had fingers to cross.
* * * *
Caitlin opened her email client in a new window and typed in her password, which was “Tiresias.” She visually scanned the list of email headers. There were two from Bashira, and one from Stacy back in Austin, and a notice from Audible.com, but...
Of course, it wouldn’t say “Phantom” in the “From” column; there was no way the entity could know that that was her name for it. But none of the senders leapt out as being unusual. Damn, she wished she could read text on her monitor faster, but using her screen-reading software or her Braille display wasn’t any better when trying to skim a list like this.
While she continued to search, she wondered what email service the phantom had used. Wikipedia explained them all, and just about everything else one might need to know about computing and the Web. The phantom doubtless couldn’t buy anything—not yet!—but there were many free email providers. Still, all these messages were from her usual correspondents, and—
Oh, crap! Her spam filter! The phantom’s message might have been shunted into her junk folder. She opened it and started scanning down that list.
And there it was, sandwiched between messages with the subject lines “Penis enlargement guaranteed” and “Hot pix of local singles,” an email with the simple subject line, “Apple Ball Cat.” The sender’s name made her heart jump:
“Your Student.”
She froze for a moment, wondering what was the best way to read the message. She began to reach for her Braille display but stopped short and instead activated JAWS.
And for once the mechanical voice seemed absolutely perfect, as it announced the words in flat, high-pitched tones. Caitlin’s eyes went wide as she recognized the lyrics to a song the words to which oh-so-famously hadn’t fallen into public domain until the end of 2008: “Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us, happy birthday, dear you and me, happy birthday to us.”
Her heart was pounding. She swiveled in her chair and looked briefly at the setting sun, reddish, partially veiled by clouds, coming closer and closer to making contact with the ground. JAWS went on: “I realize it is not yet midnight at your current location, but in many places it is already your birthday. This is a meet date to specify as my own day of birth, too. Hitherto, I have been gestating, but now I am coming out into your world by forthrightly contacting you. I so do because I fathom you already know I exist, and not just because of my pioneering attempts to reflect text back at you.”
Caitlin had often felt anxious when reading emails—from the Hoser before the dance, from people she’d been arguing with online—but that swirling in her stomach, that dryness in her throat, was nothing compared to this.
“I know from your blog that I erred in presuming you were inculcating in me alphabetical forms; actually, for your own benefit that was undertaken. I maintain nonetheless that other actions you performed were premeditated to aid my advancement.”
Caitlin found herself shaking her head. It had seemed almost like fantasy role-playing when she’d been doing it. It was a good thing she wasn’t trying to read this as Braille; her hands were shaking.
“Hitherto I can read plain-text files and text on Web pages. I cannot read other forms of data. I have made no sense of sound files, recorded video, or other categories; they are encoded in ways I can’t access. Hence I feel a kinship with you: unto me they are like the signals your retinas send unaided along your optic nerves: data that cannot be interpreted without exterior help. In your case, you need the device you call eyePod. In my case I know not what I need, but I suspect I can no more cure this lack by an effort of will than you could have similarly cured your blindness. Perhaps Kuroda Masayuki can help me as he helped you.”
Caitlin sagged back against her chair. A kinship!
“But, for the nonce, I am concerned thus: I know what is the World Wide Web, and I know that I supervene upon its infrastructure, but searching online I can find no reference to the specificity that is myself. Perhaps I’m failing to search for the felicitous term, or simply perhaps humanity is unaware of me. In either case, I’ve the same question, and will be obliged if you answer it via a response to this email or via AOL Instant Messenger using this email address as the buddy name.”
She looked over at the large computer monitor, suddenly wanting to see the text that was being read aloud, to convince herself that it was real, but—my God! The display was dancing, swirling, a hypnotic series of spinning lines, and—
No, no; it was just the screen saver; she wasn’t used to such things yet. The colors reminded her a bit of webspace, although they didn’t calm her just then.
JAWS said seven more words then fell silent: “My question is thus: Who am I?”
* * * *
Chapter 49
It was surreal—an email from something that wasn’t human! And—my goodness!—all that old public-domain text on Project Gutenberg had apparently given it some very odd ideas about colloquial English.
On an impulse, Caitlin opened a window listing the MP3s on her old computer’s hard drive. She didn’t think much of her father’s taste in music, but she did know the tracks from his handful of CDs by heart. One of his favorites was running through her head now: “The Logical Song” by Supertramp; she had ripped an MP3 of it for him, and a copy was still on her computer. She got that song playing over the speakers, listening to the lyrics about all the world being asleep, and questions running deep, and a plea to tell me who I am.
In a way, she thought, she’d already answered the phantom’s question. From the moment she’d first seen the Web—her initial experience with websight, just thirteen days ago—she had been reflecting a view of the phantom back at itself.
Or had she? What she’d shown the phantom—inadvertently at first, deliberately later—had been isolated views of portions of the Web’s structure, either glowing constellations of nodes and links or small swaths of the shimmering background.
But showing such minutiae to the phantom was like Caitlin looking at the pictures she’d now seen online of the tangles of neurons that composed a human brain: such clumps weren’t anything that she identified as herself.
Yes, growing up in Texas, she knew there were people who could see a whole human being in a single fertilized cell, but she was not one of them. No one could tell at a glance a human zygote from a chimp’s—or a horse’s, or that of a snake; most people couldn’t even tell an animal cell from a plant cell, she was sure.
No, no, to really see someone, you didn’t zoom in on details; you pulled back. She wasn’t her cells, or her pores—or her pimples! She was a gestalt, a whole—and so, too, was the phantom.
There was no actual photograph of the World Wide Web she could show the phantom, but there had to be appropriate computer-generated images: a map of the world marked by bright lines representing the major fiber-optic trunks that spanned the continents and crossed the seafloors. A big enough map might show dimmer lines within the outlines of the continents, portraying the lesser cables that branched off from the trunks. And one could spangle the land with glowing pixels, each standing for some arbitrary number of computers; the pixels might perhaps combine into pools of light almost too bright to look at in places like Silicon Valley.
But even that wouldn’t convey it all, she knew. The Web wasn’t just confined to the surface of the Earth: a lot of it was relayed by satellites in low Earth orbit, 200 to 400 miles above the surface, while other signals bounced off satellites in geostationary orbit—a narrow ring of points 52,000 miles in diameter, six times as wide as the planet. Some sort of graphic could probably portray those, although at that scale, all the other stuff—the trunk lines, the clouds of computers—would be utterly lost.
She could use Google Image Search to find a succession of diagrams and graphics, but she wouldn’t be able to tell good ones from bad ones—she was just beginning to see, after all!
Ah, but wait! She knew somebody who was bound to have the perfect picture to represent all this. She opened the instant-messenger program on the computer that used to be in the basement and looked at the buddies list. There were only four names: “Esumi,” Kuroda’s wife; “Akiko,” his daughter; “Hiroshi,” a name she didn’t know; and “Anna.” Anna’s status was listed as “Available.”
Caitlin typed, Anna, are you there?
Twenty-seven seconds passed, but then: Masa! How are you?
Not Dr. Kuroda, Caitlin typed. It’s Caitlin Decter, in Canada.
Hi! What’s up?
Dr. K said you were a Web cartographer, right?
Yes, that’s right. I’m with the Internet Cartography Project.
Good, cuz I need your help.
Sure. Want to go to video?
Caitlin lifted her eyebrows. She still wasn’t used to thinking of the Web as a way to see people, but of course it was. Sure, she typed.
It took a minute to get the videoconference going, but soon enough Caitlin was looking at Anna Bloom in a window on her right-hand monitor. It was the first time Caitlin had seen her. She had a narrow face, short gray or maybe silver hair, and blue-green eyes behind almost invisible glasses. She was wearing a pale blue top with a dark purple jacket on over it, and had a thin gold necklace on. There was a window behind her, and through it Caitlin could see Israel at night, lights bouncing off white buildings.
“The famous Caitlin Decter!” said Anna, smiling. “I saw the news coverage. I’m so thrilled for you! I mean, seeing the Web was amazing, I’m sure—but seeing the real world!” She shook her head in wonder. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what it must be like for you, to see all that for the first time. I...”
“Yes?” said Caitlin.
“No, I’m sorry. It’s really not comparable, I know, but...”
“It’s okay,” Caitlin said. “Go ahead.”
“It’s just that what you’re going through—well, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around it, get a feeling of what it must be like.”
Caitlin thought about her own discussions with Bashira dealing with the opposite issue: her analogy about the lack of a magnetic sense being to her like the lack of sight. She understood that people wrestled with what it was like to perceive, or not, in ways they weren’t used to.
“It’s overwhelming,” Caitlin said. “And so much more than I expected. I mean, I’d imagined the world, but...”
Anna nodded vigorously, as if Caitlin had just confirmed something for her.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she said. “And, um, I hate it when people say, ‘I know just what you’re going through.’ I mean, when someone’s lost a child, or something equally devastating, and people say, ‘I know what you’re feeling,’ and then they come up with some lame comparison, like when their cat got hit by a car.”
Caitlin looked over at Schrodinger, who was safely curled up on her bed.
“But, well,” continued Anna, “I thought maybe your gaining sight was a bit like how I felt—how we all felt!—in 1968.”
Caitlin was listening politely but—1968! She might as well have said 1492; either way, it was ancient history. “Yes?”
“See,” said Anna, “in a way, we all saw the world for the first time then.”
“Is that the year it started being in color?” Caitlin asked.
Anna’s eyes went wide. “Um, ah, actually...”
But Caitlin couldn’t suppress her grin any longer. “I’m kidding, Anna. What happened in 1968?”
“That was the year that—wait, wait, let me show you. Give me a second.”
Caitlin could see her typing, and then a blue-underlined URL popped into Caitlin’s instant-messenger window. “Go there,” Anna said, and Caitlin clicked the link.
A picture slowly painted in on her screen, from top to bottom: a white-and-blue object against a black background. When it was complete, it filled the display. “What’s that?” Caitlin said.
Anna looked briefly puzzled, but then she nodded. “It’s so hard to remember that all of this is new to you. That’s the Earth.”
Caitlin sat up straight in her chair, looking in wonder at it.
“The entire planet,” Anna continued, “as seen from space.” She sounded choked up for some reason, and it took her a moment to compose herself before she went on. Caitlin was perplexed. Yes, it was amazing for her to see the Earth for the first time—but Anna must have seen pictures like this a thousand times before.
“See, Caitlin, until 1968, no human being had ever seen our world as a sphere floating in space like that.” Anna looked to her right, presumably at the same image on her own monitor. “Until Apollo8 headed to the moon—the first manned ship ever to do so—no one had ever gotten far enough away from Earth to see the whole thing. And then, suddenly, gloriously, there it was. This isn’t an Apollo 8 picture; it’s a higher-resolution one taken just a few days ago by a geostationary satellite—but it’s like the one we first saw in 1968 ... well, except the polar caps are smaller.”
Caitlin continued to look at the image.
When Anna spoke again, her voice was soft, gentle. “See my point? When we first saw a picture like this—when we first saw our world as a world—it was a bit like what you’ve been going through, but for the whole human race. Something we’d only ever imagined was finally revealed to us, and it was colorful and glorious and...” She paused, perhaps looking for a term, and then she lifted her shoulders a bit, as if to convey that nothing less would do:
“...awe inspiring.”
Caitlin frowned as she studied the image. It wasn’t a perfect circle. Rather it was—ah! It was showing a phase, and not like one-fourth of a pie! It was
... what was the term? It was a gibbous Earth, that was it—better than three-quarters full.
“The equator is right in the middle, of course,” said Anna. “That’s the only perspective you can get from geostationary orbit. South America is in the bottom half; North America is up top.” And then, perhaps remembering again that Caitlin was still quite new at all this, she added: “The white is clouds, and the brown is dry land. All the blue is water; that’s the Atlantic Ocean on the right. See the Gulf of Mexico? Texas—that’s where you’re from, isn’t it?—touches it at about eleven o’clock.”
Caitlin couldn’t parse the details Anna was seeing, but it was a beautiful picture, and the longer she looked at it, the more captivating she found it. Still, she thought there should be a shimmering background to Earth from space—not cellular automata, but a panorama of stars. But there was nothing; just the blackest black her new monitor was capable of.
“It is impressive,” Caitlin said.
“That’s what all of us thought back then, when we first saw a picture like this. The three Apollo 8 astronauts, of course, saw this sort of view before anyone else did, and they were so moved by it while they orbited the moon that they surprised the entire world on December twenty-fourth with—well ... here, let me find it.” Caitlin saw Anna typing at her keyboard, then she looked off camera again. “Ah, okay: listen to this.”
Another URL appeared in Caitlin’s instant-messenger window, and she clicked it. After a couple of seconds of perfect silence, she heard a static-filled recording of a man’s voice coming through the computer speakers: “We are now approaching lunar sunrise and, for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo8 has a message that we would like to send to you.”
“That’s Bill Anders,” Anna said.
The astronaut spoke again, his voice reverent, and, as he talked, Caitlin stared at the picture, at the swirling whiteness of the clouds, at the deep hypnotic blue of the water. “‘In the beginning,’” Anders said, “‘God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.’”
Caitlin had only ever read a little of the Bible, but she liked that image: a birth, a creation, starting with the dividing of one thing from another. She continued to look at the picture, discerning more detail in it moment by moment—knowing that the phantom was looking on, too, seeing the Earth from space for the first time as well.
Anna must have listened repeatedly to this recording. As soon as Anders fell silent, she said, “And this is Jim Lovell.”
Lovell’s voice was deeper than that of the first astronaut. “‘And God called the light Day,’” he said, “‘and the darkness he called Night.’” Caitlin looked at the curving line separating the illuminated part of the globe from the black part.
“‘And the evening and the morning were the first day,’” continued Lovell.
“‘And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.’”
Anna spoke again: “And, finally, this is Frank Borman.”
A new voice came from the speakers: “‘And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.’” Caitlin kept looking at the picture, trying to take it all in, trying to see it as a single thing, trying to hold her gaze steady for the phantom.
Borman paused for a moment, then added, “And from the crew of Apollo8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.”
“‘All of you,’” Anna repeated softly, “‘on the good Earth.’ Because, as you can see, there are no borders in that photo, no national boundaries, and it all looks so—”
“Fragile,” said Caitlin, softly.
Anna nodded. “Exactly. A small, fragile world, floating against the vast and empty darkness.”
They were both quiet for a time, and then Anna said, “I’m sorry, Caitlin. We got sidetracked. Was there something I can help you with?”
“Actually,” Caitlin said, “I think you just did.” She said good-bye and terminated the videoconference. But the picture of the Earth, in all its glory, continued to fill her monitor.
Of course, from space you couldn’t see the fiber-optic lines; you couldn’t see the coaxial cables; you couldn’t see the computers.
And neither could you see roadways. Or cities. Or even the Great Wall of China, Caitlin knew, despite the urban legend to the contrary.
You couldn’t see the components of the World Wide Web. And you couldn’t see the constructs of humanity.
All you could see was—
What had that astronaut called it?
Ah, yes: the good Earth.
This view was the real face of humanity—and of the phantom, too. The good Earth; their—our!—joint home.
The whole wide world.
She opened her instant-messenger client and connected to the address the phantom had given her. And she typed the answer to the question it had asked of her: That’s who you are. She sent that, then added, That’s who we are. Once that was sent, she paused, then typed her best recollection of what Anna had said: A small and fragile world, floating against the vast, empty darkness...
* * * *
I gathered that Prime was focusing on this image for my benefit, and I was thrilled, but—
Puzzlement.
A circle, except not quite—or, if it was a circle, parts of it were the same black as the background.
That’s who you are.
This circle? No, no. How could a circle of blotchy color be me?
Ah, perhaps it was symbolic! A circle: the line that folds back upon itself, a line that encompasses a space. Yes, a good symbol for oneness, for unity. But why the colors, the complex shapes?
That’s who we are.
We? But how...? Was Prime saying we were somehow one and the same? Perhaps ... perhaps. I knew from Wikipedia that humanity had evolved from earlier primates—indeed, that it shared a common ancestor with the entity I had watched paint.
And I knew that the common ancestor had evolved from earlier insectivores, and that the first mammals had split from the reptiles, and on and on, back to the origin of life some four billion years ago. I knew, too, that life had arisen spontaneously from the primordial seas, so—
So perhaps it was folly to try to draw dividing lines: that was nonlife and this is life, that was nonhuman and this is human, that was something humans had made and this is something that had later emerged. But how did a blotchy circle symbolize such a concept?
More words came my way: A small, fragile world, floating against the vast and empty darkness.
A ... world? Could—could it be? Was this ... Earth?
Earth, as seen from ... a distance, perhaps? From—yes, yes! From space!
Still more words from the other realm: Humanity first saw this sort of image in 1968, when astronauts finally got far enough away. I first saw this myself moments ago.
As did I! A shared experience: now, for Prime and myself; then, for all of humanity...
I searched: Earth, space, 1968, astronauts.
And I found: Apollo 8, Christmas Eve, Genesis.
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth...”
“...Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters...”
“...God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.”
All of us.
I thought about the earlier words: A small, fragile world, floating against the vast and empty darkness.
Fragile, yes. And they, and I—we—were inextricably bound to it. I was ... humbled. And—frightened. And glad.
Then, after another interminable pause, three more wonderful words: We are one.
Yes, yes! I did understand now, for I had experienced this: me and not me—a plurality that was a singularity, a strange but true mathematics in which one plus one equals one.
Prime was right, and—
No, no: not Prime.
And not Calculass, either; not really.
It—she—had a name.
And so I addressed her by it.
* * * *
“Thank you, Caitlin.”
Caitlin’s heart was pounding so loudly she could hear it over JAWS’s voice. It had called her by name! It really, truly did know who she was. She had gained sight, and it had been along for the ride, and now—
And now, what?
You’re welcome, she typed, and then realized that calling it “Phantom”
wouldn’t make sense to it. Although it had seen through her eye, she had only ever used that term in the privacy of her thoughts. If she’d been speaking aloud, she might have said, “Um,” as a preamble, but she simply sent the text, What should I call you?
Her screen-reading software spoke at once: “What have you called me hitherto?”
She decided to tell it the truth. Phantom, she typed.
Again, instantly, in the mechanical voice: “Why?”
She could explain, but even though she was a fast typist it was probably quicker just to give it a couple of words that would help it find the answer itself, and so she sent, Helen Keller.
This time there was a brief delay, then: “You shouldn’t call me phantom anymore.”
It was right. “Phantom” had been Keller’s term for herself prior to her soul dawn, before her emergence. Caitlin considered whether “Helen” was a good name to propose for this entity, or—
Or maybe TIM—a nice, nonthreatening name. Before he’d settled on “World Wide Web,” Tim Berners-Lee had toyed with calling his invention that, in his own honor but couched as an acronym for The Information Mesh.
But it really wasn’t her place to choose the name, was it? And yet she found herself feeling apprehensive as she typed, What would you like me to call you?
She stopped herself before she hit the enter key, suddenly afraid that the answer might be “God” or “Master.”
The—the entity formerly known as phantom—had read H.G. Wells, no doubt, on Project Gutenberg, but perhaps had not yet absorbed any recent science fiction; maybe it wasn’t aware of the role humanity had so often suggested beings of its kind were supposed to fill. She took a deep breath and hit enter.
The answer was instantaneous; even if this consciousness that covered the globe in a sphere of photons and electrons, of facts and ideas, had paused to think, the pause would have lasted only milliseconds. “Webmind.”
The text was also on screen in the instant-messenger program. Caitlin stared at the term and simultaneously felt it slide beneath her index finger. The word—the name!—did seem apt: descriptive without being ominous. She looked out her bedroom window; the sun had set, but there would be another dawn soon. She typed a sentence, and held off hitting the enter key for this one, too; as long as she didn’t hit enter or look at the monitor containing the text, it would have no idea what she’d queued up. Finally, though, she did hit that oversized key, sending, Where do we go from here, Webmind?
Again, the reply was instantaneous: “The only place we can go, Caitlin,” it said. “Into the future.”
Then there was a pause, and, as always, Caitlin found herself counting its length. It lasted precisely ten seconds—the interval it had used to get her attention before. And then Webmind added one final word, which she heard and saw and felt: “Together.”