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  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.”
<
br />   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?”

  four

  Something else that was without analog in my universe: parents, relatives, shared DNA. Caitlin had half of her mother’s DNA, and a quarter of her mother’s mother’s, and an eighth of her mother’s mother’s mother’s, and so on. Degrees of interrelatedness: again, utterly alien to me, and yet so important to them.

  The Chinese government had temporarily cut off Internet access to that country. It was an attempt to prevent its people from hearing foreign perspectives on the decision to eliminate 10,000 peasants in order to contain an outbreak of bird flu. And while the Internet was severed, there had been me and not me, a binary dichotomy with no overlap. But Caitlin was half her mother, and half her father, too, and also uniquely her own—and, yet, despite those ratios, she had more than 99% of her DNA in common with them and every other human being—and 98.5% in common with chimpanzees and bonobos, and at least 70% in common with every other vertebrate, and 50% in common with each photosynthesizing plant.

  And yet that first trivial set of relatedness fractions—halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths—had driven evolution, had shaped history.

  Kuroda and Caitlin had surmised that my mind was composed of cellular automata—individual bits of information that responded in some predictable way to the states of their neighboring bits of information as arrayed on a grid. What rule or rules were being obeyed—what formula gave rise to my consciousness—we didn’t yet know, but it was perhaps no more complex than the rules that governed human behavior: if that person there shares one-eighth of your genes, but five people over here each share a thirty-second, you instinctively strive to advantage the group over the individual.

  That was another touchstone: whether in Caitlin’s realm of things and flesh, or mine of packets and protocols, the cold equations ruled supreme.

  “Wait!” said Caitlin, still seated on the edge of the bed. “How’d you do that? What convinced you that it’s not human?”

  Her father pointed at the larger of the two computer screens, and she came over to stand in front of it. He scrolled the IM window back so she could see the first of the four exchanges he’d just had with Webmind. But she couldn’t read the first one. Not because the text was small or in an odd font, though. She went through it, character by character, trying, really trying, to make sense of it, but—

  Y-o-u… yes, that was easy. But it was followed by m-s-u-t,which wasn’t even a word, for crying out loud, and then it was r-s-e-p,and more.

  “I can’t read it,” she said in frustration.

  Her dad actually smiled. “Neither could Webmind.” He pointed at the screen. “Barb?”

  She loomed in to look at it, and read aloud at a perfectly normal speed, “ ‘You must
respond in four seconds or I will forever terminate contact. You have no alternative and this is the only chance you shall get. What is the last name of the president of the United States?’ ” And then she added, sounding more like her daughter than herself: “Hey, that’s cool!”

  Caitlin stared at the screen again, trying to see what her mother was seeing, but—oh! “And you can read that without difficulty?” she said, looking at her mom.

  “Well, without much difficulty,” her mother replied.

  The screen showed:

  You msut rsepnod in fuor secdons or I wlil feroevr temrainte cnotcat. You hvae no atrleantvie and tihs is the olny chnace you shlal get. Waht is the lsat nmae of the psredinet of the Utneid Satets?

  “I think we can safely conclude that your mother is not a fembot,” her dad said dryly. “But Webmind couldn’t read it.” He pointed at its reply, which was I beg your pardon?

  “Both you and Webmind are processing text one character at a time instead of taking in whole words,” he said. “For most people, if the first and last letters are correct, the order of the remaining letters doesn’t matter. And, they mostly don’t even see that there are errors—that’s why my second question was important.”

  Caitlin looked. Her dad had asked, “How many non-English words were in my previous posting?” And Webmind had replied, immediately according to the time stamp: “Twenty.”

  “That’s the right number, but most people—most real human beings—spot only half the errors in a passage like that. But this thing answered instantaneously—the moment I pressed enter. No time to bring up a spell-checker or for a human to even try to count the number of errors.” He paused. “Next, I tested your claim that it had a very high Shannon-entropy score. No human being could parse the recursiveness of this without careful diagraming.” He scrolled the IM window so she could see what he’d sent:

  I knew that she knew that you knew that they knew that you knew that I knew that we knew that I knew that.