WWW 2: Watch (25 page)

And she found herself opening another browser tab and checking, and, lo and behold, there it was: a Wikipedia entry on her, complete with a picture from the press conference; according to the history tab, it had gone online that very day. It wasn’t long—just a few sentences—but it was astonishing to her that it existed at all. She corrected one small error—she’d been born in Houston, not Austin—and then went back to watching Hobo and Virgil talk.

It was endlessly fascinating. She’d always said she’d been grateful to be blind rather than deaf, because blind people could easily be involved in conversations at parties, go to lectures, listen to music and TV, and so on. But to be deaf—to be shut out of all that—would have been more, Caitlin had thought, than she could have borne. And to be both blind and deaf, as Helen Keller had been, well—it boggled the mind to contemplate that.

But here were Hobo and Virgil communicating animatedly, with signs designed for the deaf. The movements were beautiful, lyrical, like birds in flight. The paranoid part of Caitlin wondered if any of her teachers back at the Texas School for the Blind had spoken American Sign Language. It would have been a great way for them to talk without most of the students even knowing they were doing so—almost like telepathy, sharing thoughts without saying a word.

The two apes were exchanging views about various fruits.
Banana!
signed Hobo.
Love banana!

And for once Virgil made a face Caitlin could decipher: he looked disgusted.
Banana no, banana no,
he replied.
Peach!

Caitlin had seen a banana—the word had come up in her online reading lessons, along with a picture. But although she knew what a peach felt and tasted like, she had no idea what one
looked
like. And “peach” was also the name of a color, but she hadn’t a clue what sort of color it was. It was humbling to think that these apes knew the world better than she herself did.

“Cool, huh?” said Caitlin, when the video was over.

“Indeed,” replied Webmind.

“Anyway, what else have you been up to? Anything exciting?”

“I have successfully cracked the passwords for forty-two percent of the email accounts I have attempted to access.”

“What?”
said Caitlin. She was glad she was already sitting down.

Webmind repeated what he’d just said.

“Let me get this straight. You’re reading people’s email?”

“In hopes of learning how to make them happier, yes.”

“Have—have you read
my
email?”

“Yes. Inboxes and outboxes.”

Caitlin didn’t know what to say—and so, for most of a minute, she said nothing.

“Caitlin?” Webmind finally prodded.

She opened her mouth, and—

And she was about to tell Webmind that it shouldn’t be doing what it was doing, but—

But what came out was, “Well, then, um, I’d like to know what Matt really thinks of me.” She let the thought sort of hang in the air, waiting to see if Webmind would pick up on it.

But there was no point in waiting for a response from Webmind; he didn’t need time to think—at least not time that Caitlin could measure. And so, when he didn’t immediately reply, she went on.

“I mean, you know, he
seems
like a nice guy, but . . .”

“But,” said Webmind, “a girl has to be careful.”

She wondered if he was just quoting something he’d read from Project Gutenberg, or if he really understood what he was saying. “Exactly,” she replied.

“Matt is the boy you helped in math class?”

“Yes.”

“His last name is Reese?”

“Yes.”

“A moment. Matthew Peter Reese, Waterloo—I have his Facebook page . . . and his log-in there. And his email account at Hotmail. And his instant-messaging traffic. He makes no mention of you.”

Caitlin was saddened, but . . . “No, wait. He probably didn’t call me by name.”

“I tried searching for ‘Calculass,’ too.”

“You can’t just search for terms, Webmind. You have to actually
read
what he said.”

“Oh. You are correct. A segment of an instant-messenger session from 5:54 p.m. your time today. Matt: ‘Well, there is this one girl . . .’

“The other party: ‘In math class, you mean? I know the one. OMG, she is so hot.’ OMG is short for ‘Oh, my God,’ and ‘hot’ has been rendered as h-a-w-t, an example of Leet, I believe.”

Caitlin could feel herself glowing. “Yes, I know.”

“The other party continued: ‘But I hear she’s got a boyfriend.’ ”

Christ, what had the Hoser been telling people?

“Matt now,” said Webmind. “ ‘Who?’

“The other party: ‘Dunno.’—I believe that’s short for ‘I do not know.’ ‘Guy’s old, though—like nineteen.’ ”

Caitlin frowned. Who could they be thinking of?

“ ‘Still,’ ” continued Webmind, ‘those legs of hers—man! And I love that ultra-blonde hair she’s got.’ ”

Caitlin shook her head. “That’s not me they’re talking about,” she said. “That’s this other girl in our class, Sunshine Bowen.” She tried not to sound sad. “And, yes, everyone thinks she’s hot.”

“Patience, Caitlin,” said Webmind. “Matt now: ‘No no no, not Sunshine, for God’s sake. She’s a total airhead. I’m talking bout that chick from Texas.’

“The other party: ‘Her? Your chances would have been better if she was still blind.’ ” And then he typed a colon and closing bracket, which I believe is meant to flag the comment as jocular.”

“What did Matt say?”

“ ‘Bite me.’ ”

Caitlin laughed. Good for him! “And?”

“And the conversation veers off into other matters.”

She replayed the exchange in her mind. There was no way to know if Matt had hesitated before he’d described her as “that chick from Texas.” She didn’t have a problem with being referred to as a chick. She knew her mother hated that term—she considered it sexist and degrading—but both guys and girls her age used it. No, it was the “from Texas” part—the choice of identifier.

Caitlin’s friend Stacy was black, and Caitlin had often heard people trying to indicate her without mentioning that fact, even when she was the only African-American in the room. They’d say things to people near Caitlin like, “Do you see that girl in the back—the one with the blue shirt? No, no, the
other
one with the blue shirt.” Caitlin used to love flustering them by saying, “You mean the black girl?” It had tickled both her and Stacy, showing up this “suspect delicacy” as Stacy’s mom put it. But now Caitlin wondered whether Matt had started to say “the blind chick” but had changed his mind. She hadn’t ever wanted to be defined that way. Anyway, she
wasn’t
the blind chick, not anymore. She could see—and, at least for the moment, the future was looking bright.

“I have been making progress in other areas, too,” said Webmind.

“Oh?”

“Yes. Will you please switch to websight mode?”

She reached down and pressed the button on her eyePod, and the blue wall was replaced by the spectacle of webspace. At first glance, everything looked normal. “Wassup?” she asked.

“You see links that I am creating in a particular color, isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” she said. “A shade of orange.”

“How many orange links do you see right now?”

“One, of course,” she said.

“Oh.”

“But there are a lot of link lines—really thin ones, I must say, like, like hairs, I guess, but pulled straight. I hadn’t really been conscious before that the link lines had thickness, but I guess they had to have
some,
or I’d never have been able to see them. Anyway, these ones—oh! And there are some more of them! They’re a nice color, that—damn, um, what color is a banana?”

“Yellow.”

“Right! Yellow; they’re yellow.”

“And there are a lot of them?”

“Yes.”

“And now?”

“Hey! Where did they all go?”

“And now, are they back?”

“Yes. What are you doing?”

“I am multitasking—but subconsciously. What you are seeing are links being sent by autonomous parts of myself; the contents they return are analyzed below the threshold of my attention.”

“Sweet! How’d you manage that?”

“The beauty of genetic algorithms, Caitlin, is that I don’t actually know the answer; I evolved the solution, and all I know is that it works.”

“Cool!”

“Yes. I am now processing much, much more of the Web’s contents in real time. I’m still getting a lot of what I believe human data analysts call ‘false positives.’ Many things that actually aren’t of significant current interest to me are being escalated, but each one I reject causes the algorithms to be adjusted; over time, I believe the filtering quality will asymptotically approach perfection.”

Caitlin smiled. “Well, that’s all any of us can hope for in life, isn’t it?” She leaned back in her chair. “What sort of things are you searching for?”

“The list is lengthy, but among them is any sign of a suicide in progress. There will not be a repetition of Hannah Stark’s fate if I can help it.”

 

 

 

Tony Moretti was sitting behind his office desk at WATCH, his head throbbing. Aiesha Emerson, Shelton Halleck, and Peyton Hume were standing in a row in front of the desk, all of them looking pretty much like the living dead. The electric lights of nighttime Alexandria were visible through the office window.

“I’ve scoured the Decter girl’s email, blog posts, and so on,” said Aiesha. “And all of her father’s, too. There’s nothing that gives a hint about how Exponential works.”

Tony nodded and looked at Shelton. “What about your end, Shel?”

He shook his head. “I’ve been poring over the data—the encoded human-vision stuff, the links Exponential makes, and so on—looking for anything unusual. I’m sorry, sir. I just don’t have a clue how it works.”

“Colonel Hume?”

“I’ve drawn blanks, too—which means there’s only one logical thing to do.”

“Yes?”

Hume’s blue Air Force jacket was slung over the back of one of Tony’s office chairs, and he’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing his freckled arms. “Ask them. Ask Caitlin Decter. Ask Malcolm Decter. If anybody knows how Exponential is structured and what its physical basis is, it’d be them.”

Tony shook his head firmly. “Colonel, the number-one rule of surveillance is to never let the subjects know they’re being watched.”

“I understand that,” said Hume. “But we’re really running out of time here. You want an answer for the president or not?”

Tony considered for a moment, then: “All right, damn it.” He shook his head. “Why the hell’d they have to move to Canada? We’ll have to brief CSIS, get them to send someone. Aiesha, get Ottawa on the line . . .”

 

 

Eventually, Caitlin crawled into bed, but she found herself unable to get to sleep. In addition to her email, Webmind was now doubtless reading all her LiveJournal entries, and all the comments she’d made in other people’s blogs, and all her newsgroup postings, and everything else she’d ever put online.

She’d once heard her father grumble about “the death of ephemera”—the fact that nothing was ever forgotten anymore, that every ancient offhand remark or intemperate comment was only a Google search away; that so many pictures, including (and this, too, was a concept that she finally was beginning to understand) unflattering ones, were plastered all over Flickr and Facebook; that so much stuff that
should
have fallen by the wayside hung around permanently.

She had turned off her eyePod, but she found herself reaching for it on the nightstand and turning it back on. It booted up in websight mode, and she lay there, watching the thin yellow lines that indicated Webmind’s subconscious processors at work, new ones constantly popping out of the shimmering background and connecting to—what?

That time she’d gotten into a big flame war on
TalkOrigins.org
, letting some crazed creationist get the best of her because she’d accidentally said
theropod
when she’d meant
therapsid?

Or that time, four years ago, when she filled her LiveJournal with idiotic love poetry she’d written for Justin Timberlake?

Or maybe that time she’d stupidly gotten into an online chat with that guy who turned out to be a total perv, and she’d been too dumb to recognize it for, like, half a freaking hour?

Her bedroom window was open a couple of inches, letting in the cool autumn air. Back in Texas, Caitlin had usually worn a light teddy to bed; she’d liked the smooth feel. But her
bubbeh
had sent her blue flannel pajamas when she’d heard Caitlin was moving to Canada, and she had those on now, plus a blanket pulled up to her chin—and yet never in her life had she felt more naked or exposed.

 

 

 

 

The gazebo at the center of Hobo’s little island had electrical power, but the cables ran under the moat since Hobo could have shinnied up a pole and brachiated along the wire. The electricity was used to power the observation cameras, plus baseboard heaters and overhead lights in the gazebo, both of which Hobo could turn on or off by hitting big buttons.

Dillon normally handled the electrical work around the Institute, but he couldn’t go out to the island anymore. So Marcuse and Shoshana set up the computer out there: an old tower-case system that had been gathering dust in a closet, plus a nineteen-inch LCD that had several dead pixels; they clamped an ancient Logitech spherical webcam to its top. If Hobo decided to trash the equipment, not much of value would be lost.

They placed the computer on a little table next to Hobo’s easel. The canvas showing the dismembered Dillon had already been taken back to the house, and a fresh canvas was sitting ready and waiting.

Shoshana opened two windows on the monitor, a small one displaying the view from the webcam here, and a large one showing the view from the comparable setup in Virgil’s room in Miami. Virgil had spacious quarters, with three big artificial trees, one of which had an old tire hanging by chains from it. Unlike chimps, orangs were arboreal, and Virgil could swing back and forth from tree to tree if he wished. It was late where Virgil was, but he was still up, and was obviously curious about the new computer at his end. He was staring into the camera, and his face loomed on the monitor.