WWW: Watch Read online

  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.

  Did she know that you knew that I knew that you knew that I knew that you knew that?

  Did you know that I knew that they knew that she knew?

  Did I know that she knew that you knew that we knew that you knew?

  To which Webmind had instantly replied: Yes. No. Yes.

  “And those are the right answers?” Caitlin’s mom asked.

  “Yes,” said her father. “At least, I think so. I was mostly convinced by this point, but I tried one more to be sure.” He scrolled the screen again, revealing his fourth and final test:

  Wit you’re aide Wii knead to put the breaks awn the cereal Keller their B4 this decayed is dun, weather ore knot we aught too. Who nose if wee will secede. Dew ewe?

  To which poor Webmind had replied, Again, your pardon?

  “A piece of cake for one of us,” said her dad, “even if piece is spelled p-e-a-c-e.”

  Caitlin clapped her hands together. “Go, Daddy! Okay, Mom—your turn. Say hi to Webmind.”

  He got up, and Caitlin’s mom sat in the swivel chair. The last words Webmind had typed were still glowing blue in the IM window. She considered for a moment, then sent, “This is Barb Decter. Hello.” Caitlin was surprised to see that her mother couldn’t touch-type.

  Webmind replied instantly: “A pleasure to meet you. Hitherto, I already knew of your husband from his Wikipedia entry, but I do not know much about you. I welcome learning more.”

  Down in the kitchen, the timer went off. Caitlin’s mother frowned at this reminder of the forgotten dinner. She said, “Excuse me” and hurried downstairs, perhaps as much to buy herself some time to think as to avoid a culinary crisis.

  And, in that moment, Caitlin understood. Of course her mother didn’t touch-type. Back when she’d been in school, the typing classes—yes, not keyboarding but old-fashioned typing—had doubtless been filled with girls who were destined for secretarial jobs, and the young, feisty, brilliant Barbara Geiger had
had much higher ambitions. She would have gone out of her way not to cultivate what were, back then, traditionally female skills.

  Caitlin’s mother had a Ph.D. in economics; her specialty was game theory. She had been an associate professor at the University of Houston until Caitlin was born. She’d spent the next six years looking after her daughter at home, and then nine more volunteering at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, where Caitlin had been enrolled until this past June.

  Her mother knew a lot about math and computers. In fact, Caitlin had once heard her quip that the difference between her and her husband was that while the math he did as a theoretical physicist described things that might not even exist, the math economists did described things that people wished didn’t exist: inflation, deficits, taxes, and so on.

  Now that Caitlin was in a regular school, she knew her mother hoped to get a job at one of Waterloo’s universities. But her Canadian work permit hadn’t come through yet, and so—

  And so she was cooking, and cleaning, and doing all the other crap she’d never in her life wanted to do. Caitlin’s heart went out to her.

  She looked at her father, hoping he would say something—anything—while they waited for her mom to return. But he was his usual silent self.

  Her mother came back less than a minute later. “I think the lasagna can wait,” she said. “Now, where were we?”

  “It wants to know you better,” Caitlin’s dad said.

  She made no move, Caitlin noted, to return to the swivel chair in front of the computer screens. “So, what do we do now?” she said. “Do we have another press conference?”

  There’d been a press conference two days ago, held at the Mike Lazaridis Theatre of Ideas at the Perimeter Institute, at which Dr. Kuroda had announced his success in giving Caitlin vision—although no mention had been made of her ability to see the structure of the Web.

  “No!” said Caitlin. “No, we can’t tell anyone—not yet.”

  “Why not?” asked her mother.

  “Because it’s not safe.”

  “Oh, I don’t think anything bad will happen to us,” her mom said.

  “No, no. It’s not safe—it, Webmind.” She looked at her father, who was staring at the floor, and then back at her mother. “As soon as word gets out, people will try to find exploits—vulnerabilities, holes, whatever. They’ll try to bring it down, to hack it. That’s what people like that do, for the challenge, for the street cred, for the glory. And it probably has no defenses or security. We don’t know how it came into being, but I bet it’s fragile.”

  “All right,” said her mother. “But we should inform the authorities.”

  To Caitlin’s surprise, her father lifted his head and spoke up. “Which authorities? Do you trust the CIA, the NSA, or goddamned Homeland Security? Or the Canadian authorities—some Mountie with a Commodore 64?” He shook his head. “Nobody has authority over this.”

  “But what if it’s dangerous?” her mom replied.

  “It’s not dangerous,” Caitlin said firmly.

  “You don’t actually know that,” her mother said. “And, even if it’s not dangerous right now, it might become so.”

  “Why?” said Caitlin in as defiant a tone as she could muster.

  Her mother looked at her father, then back at Caitlin. “Terminator. The Matrix. And so on.”

  “Those are just movies,” Caitlin said, exasperated. “You don’t know that it’s going to turn out like that.”

  “And you,” her mother said sharply, “don’t know that it isn’t.”

  Caitlin crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Well, I’ll tell you this: it’s far more likely to develop to be peaceful and kind with us as its . . . its mentors than it is with the military or a bunch of spies trying to control it.”

  She hoped her father would jump in again on her side, but he just stood there, looking at the floor.

  But it turned out she didn’t need any help. After a full fifteen seconds of silence, during which Caitlin’s mom seemed to mull things over, she at last nodded, and said, “You are a very wise young lady.”

  Caitlin found herself grinning. “Of course I am,” she replied. “Look who my parents are.”

  “Why does it jump around like that?” asked Tony Moretti, standing once again behind Shelton Halleck’s workstation at WATCH. The jittering image on the middle of the three big screens reminded him of what a movie looked like when its sprocket holes were ripped.

  “That’s the way we see, apparently,” said Shel. “Those jumps are called saccades. Normally, our brains edit them out of our visual experience, just like they edit out the brief blackouts you’d otherwise experience when you blink.” He gestured at the screen. “I’ve been reading up on this. There’s actually only a tiny portion of the visual field that has really sharp focus. It’s called the fovea, and it perceives a patch about the size of your thumbnail held at arm’s length. So your brain moves your eye around constantly, focusing various parts of your surroundings on the fovea, and then it sums the images so that everything seems sharp.”

  “Ah,” said Tony. “And this is what that girl in Canada is seeing right now?”

  “No, it’s a recording of earlier today—a good, uninterrupted section. There are a fair number of blackouts and missing packets, unfortunately. It’s going from a Canadian ISP to a server in Tokyo. We’re snagging as much of it as we can, but not all of it is passing through the US.”

  Tony nodded.

  “I wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t read a transcript of the press conference,” continued Shel, “but Caitlin Decter has an encoding difficulty in her natural visual system. Her retinas encode what they’re seeing in a way that doesn’t make sense to her brain; that’s why she was blind. That Kuroda guy gave her a signal-processing device that corrects the encoding errors. What we’re seeing here is the corrected datastream. Her portable signal-processing computer sends signals like this to the post-retinal implant in her head—and it also mirrors them to Kuroda’s server at the University of Tokyo.”

  “Why?”

  “Early on, the equipment wasn’t properly correcting the signals; he was trying to debug that. Why he continues to have it mirrored to Tokyo now that it is working, I don’t know. Seems like an invasion of privacy.”

  Tony grunted at the irony.

  WATCH’s analysts normally worked twelve-hour shifts for six consecutive days, and then were off for four days—and when the threat level (the real one, not the DHS propaganda that was constantly pumped out of loudspeakers at airports) was high, they simply kept working until they dropped. The goal was to provide continuity of analysis for the longest blocks of time humanly possible.

  Normal shifts were staggered; Tony Moretti had only been on his first day, but Shelton Halleck was on his third—and he appeared exhausted. His gray eyes had a dead sheen, and he had a heavy five o’clock shadow; he looked, Tony thought, like Captain Black did after he’d been taken over by the Mysterons.

  “So, has she been examining plans for nuclear weapons, or anything like that?” Tony asked.

  Shel shook his head. “This morning, her father dropped her off at school. She ate lunch in a cafeteria—kinda gross watching the food being shoveled in from the eye’s point of view. At the end of the day, a girl walked her home. I’m pretty sure it was Dr. Hameed’s daughter, Bashira.”

  “What did they talk about?”

  “There’s no audio, Tony. Just the video feed. And on those occasions when Caitlin looked at someone long enough for us to be able to read lips, it was just banal stuff.”

  Tony frowned. “All right. Keep watching, okay? If she—”

  “Shit!” It was Aiesha Emerson, the analyst at the workstation next to Shel’s. She was thirty-five, African-American, and had short hair.

  “Aiesha?” Tony said.

  “There’s something going on all right,” she said. She was breathing fast, Tony thought.

  “Where?”

  She po
inted at the big screen showing the jerky video. “There.”

  “The Decter kid, you mean?”

  “Uh-huh. I know you tried to trace the source of the intercept, Shel, and—no offense—I thought I’d take a crack at it, too. I figured it’d be easier to deal with smaller datastreams than these massive video feeds, so I checked to see if the kid was also doing any instant messaging with the same party. At first, I wasn’t even reading the content; just looking at the routing information, but when I did read it . . .”

  “Yes?” Tony said.

  She touched a button and what was on her monitor appeared on the left-hand big screen, under the NSA logo.

  “ ‘Calculass,’ ” said Tony, reading the name of one of the people who’d been chatting. “Who’s that?”

  “The Decter girl,” said Aiesha.

  “Ah.” The other party was identified not by a name but simply by an email address. “And who’s she talking to?”

  “Not who,” Aiesha said. “What.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Come again?”

  “Read the transcript, Tony.”

  “Okay . . . um, scroll it for me.”

  Aiesha did so.

  “It’s gibberish. The letters are all mixed up.”

  “I bet her father typed that,” said Aiesha, “even though it still identifies the sender as Calculass. They’re testing it.”

  “ ‘It’?” said Tony.

  “Read on.”

  There seemed to be four odd exchanges, which elicited the replies, “I beg your pardon?,” “Yes. No. Yes,” “Twenty,” and “Again, your pardon?”

  That was followed by: This is Barb Decter. Hello.

  The reply was: A pleasure to meet you. Hitherto, I already knew of your husband from his Wikipedia entry, but I do not know much about you. I welcome learning more.