WWW: Wake (34 page)

She then brought up Microsoft Word, and used the same technique to resize its window into a narrow strip just a couple of inches high. Then she used the move command on the control menu to place that strip at the bottom of the screen.

Next, she fumbled around trying to figure out how to make the text big in Word. She’d used the program for years, but had rarely had cause to worry about font choices or type sizes. But she found the drop-down size menu, and she selected the largest choice on the list, which was seventy-two points.

And—oh, that pesky mouse pointer! It was so hard to see. Ah, but she knew from her old school that there was a way to make a bigger, bolder mouse pointer, and ... found it!

“All right,” she said softly, “let’s see what kind of teacher I am...”

She knew the phantom could see what her left eye saw; it had reflected that eye’s view of herself in a mirror back at her, after all. And so she looked at the monitor for ten seconds, holding her gaze as steady as she could, establishing an overall view, letting the phantom absorb what it was being shown: a large picture with a long, narrow text box beneath. The picture must have been oddly recursive for the phantom, and Caitlin wanted to give it time to understand that what she was sending had switched from being her actual, real-time view of webspace to a still image of webspace.

And then she slowly, deliberately, moved the mouse, bringing the pointer over to one of the bright circles that represented a website. She moved the pointer around it repeatedly, hoping the phantom would notice the action.

Caitlin had once read a science-fiction book in which someone who had never seen a computer screen mistook the arrowhead pointer for a little pine tree. She realized that the idea of a pointer was freighted with assumptions, including a familiarity with archery, that the phantom couldn’t possibly possess. Still, she hoped the combination of movements she was making would draw its attention. But, just to be on the safe side, she slowly reached her own hand into her field of view, and tapped the point on the screen with her index finger. If the phantom had been watching the output of her eyePod, it had to have seen her indicate things that way before, and she hoped that it would get that she was now referring to a specific part of the screen.

And then she switched to the squashed Word window below the picture, and typed

“WEBSITE,” which appeared in inch-high letters. She repeated the process: pointing at a website in the picture, and then typing the word again (after first highlighting it, so her new typing replaced the original version).

She repeated it with another circle, and identified it as a WEBSITE, too. And yet another circle, and again the word WEBSITE.

And then she found the selection tool for the graphics program that was displaying the picture of webspace, and she used it to draw a box around three large circles that weren’t linked to each other. She typed WEBSITES—wondering briefly if introducing plurals so early was a mistake. And then she isolated just one particularly large circle with the selection box and she typed AMAZON—knowing that it was highly unlikely that she’d actually guessed correctly which website that circle represented. Still, she pressed on, identifying a second website as GOOGLE and a third as CNN. All points are websites, she hoped to convey, and each has its own particular name.

And then, mathematician that she was, she pointed to a single website and typed “1,” and then, highlighting the numeral, she typed not the number again but rather its name: “ONE.”

She then used the selection tool to put a box around two points that weren’t otherwise connected to each other. And she typed “2,” then “TWO.” She continued for three, four, and five points. And then, wanting to help the phantom make a jump that had taken human thinkers thousands of years, she selected a spot that had no points in it at all, and typed the numeral zero and its name.

She then used the mouse to indicate a link line, and also traced its length on the screen with her fingertip. And she typed “LINK.”

Establishing nouns for the handful of things she could point to in webspace was easy enough. But even when they’d thought the information in the background of the Web was just dumb spies talking, she’d automatically given the spies verbs: drop bomb; kill bad guy. But how to illustrate verbs in webspace? Indeed, what verbs were appropriate? What happened in webspace?

Well, files were transferred, and—

And this phantom had apparently learned how to make links and send existing content; it had to have those skills to have echoed her face and the ASCII text strings back at her. But it likely didn’t know anything about file formats: it was probably ignorant of how information was stored and arranged in a Word .doc or .docx file, an Acrobat .pdf file, an Excel .xls file, an .mp3 sound file, or the .jpg graphic she was displaying on her monitor. The phantom was surrounded by the largest library ever created—millions upon millions of written documents and pictures and videos and audio recordings—and yet almost certainly had no idea how to open the individual volumes, or how to read their contents. The Web’s basic structure had protocols for moving a file from point A to point B, but the actual use of the files was something normally done by application programs running on the user’s own computer, and so was likely outside the phantom’s current scope. There was so much to teach it!

But all that was for later. For now, she wanted to focus on the basics. And the basic verb—the basic action—of the Web was right there in the names of its various protocols: HTTP, the hypertext transfer protocol; FTP, the file transfer protocol; SMTP, the simple mail transfer protocol. Surely the verb to transfer could be demonstrated!

She used the mouse pointer to indicate a site, but then was stymied. She wanted to show material flowing from one site to another in a single direction. But there was no way to turn off the mouse pointer; it was always there. Oh, she could move the mouse—or her finger—from a point on the left to a point on the right, but to repeat the gesture she’d have to bring the pointer or finger back to where it had started, and that would look like she was indicating movement in both directions—either that, or maybe it would look like she was highlighting the link line as an object, but not pointing out what that line was doing.

But, yes, there was a way! All she had to do was close her eyes for a second!

And she did just that, moving the pointer back to the origin while her eyes were closed, and then, with her eyes open, she moved the pointer from the origin to the destination again. Then she typed the word “TRANSFER” into her Word window.

She repeated this demonstration, showing the pointer moving from left to right along the length of the link line, over and over again, suggesting movement in a single direction, something going from the source to the destination, being transferred and—

“Cait-lin! Din-ner!”

Ah, well. It was probably wise to take a break, anyway, and let all this sink in. After her meal, though, like any good teacher, she’d assess how her pupil was doing: she’d give the phantom a test.

Dr. Kuroda dropped a bomb between the salad and the main course. “I’ve got to go back to Tokyo,” he said. “Now that word’s out about us having cured Miss Caitlin’s blindness there really is a lot of commercial interest in the eyePod technology, and the team at my university that tries to find industry partnerships wants me there for meetings.”

Caitlin suddenly felt sad and frightened. Kuroda had been her mentor through so much of late and, well, she’d just sort of assumed he was going to be around forever, but—

“It’s time, anyway,” he said. “Miss Caitlin can see, so my work here is done.”

She might not yet be perfect at decoding facial expressions, but she was better than most people at reading inflection. He was putting up false bravado; he was sad to be going. “But the bright side is, booking a flight at the last minute meant that there was only Executive Class left, and so the university has sprung for that.”

“When ... when do you go?” asked Caitlin.

“Early tomorrow afternoon, I’m afraid. And, of course, it’s an hour or more to Pearson, and I should be there two hours in advance for an international flight, so...”

So he was only going to be here, and awake for, maybe another half-dozen hours.

“My birthday is in two days,” Caitlin said—and she felt foolish as soon as she’d said it. Dr. Kuroda was a busy man, and he’d already done so much for her. Expecting him to stay away from his family and work obligations just to attend her birthday dinner was unfair, she knew.

“Your Sweet Sixteen,” said Kuroda, smiling. “How wonderful. I’m afraid I won’t have time to get you a present before I leave.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” her mom said, looking at Caitlin. “Dr. Kuroda’s already given you just about the best present possible, isn’t that right, dear?”

Caitlin looked at him. “Will you come back?”

“I honestly don’t know. I’d like to, of course. You—and, you, too, Barbara and Malcolm—have been wonderful. But we’ll be in touch: email, instant messenger.”

He smiled. “You’ll hardly know I’m gone. Oh, and I guess we can stop recording the datastream from your eyePod. I mean, I’ve got plenty of old data to study, and everything does seem to be working fine now. I know you were concerned about privacy, Miss Caitlin, so after dinner I’ll detach the Wi-Fi module from the eyePod, and—”

“No!”

Even her father looked briefly at her.

“I mean, um, won’t that cut me off from seeing webspace if I want to?”

“Well, yes. But I suppose I could modify things so that you could still accept a data-stream from Jagster without transmitting back what your eye is seeing.”

Caitlin’s heart was racing. That would still mean she would no longer be able to send what her eye was seeing to the phantom.

“No, no, please. You know what they say: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

“Oh, this won’t—”

“Please. Just leave everything exactly the way it is.”

“I’m sure Dr. Kuroda knows what he’s talking about, dear,” her mother said.

“And besides,” Kuroda added, “you’ve been getting some interference of late over the Wi-Fi connection—those text strings bouncing back, remember? We wouldn’t want that to start spilling over into your...” He paused, then smiled kindly at Caitlin’s coinage: “...worldview. Better to just unplug all that now while I’m here to do it, rather than have it become a problem later.”

“No,” Caitlin said. “Please.”

“It’ll be fine,” Kuroda said. “Don’t worry, Miss Caitlin.”

“No, no, you can’t.”

“Caitlin,” her mother said in an admonishing tone.

“Just leave it alone!” Caitlin said. She got to her feet. “Leave me and my eyePod alone!”

And she ran from the room.

* * * *

Caitlin threw herself down on her bed, feet kicking up in the air. All of this—websight, the phantom—was hers! They couldn’t take it away from her now!

She had found something no one else even knew was there, and she was trying to help it, and they were going to cut her off!

She took a deep breath, hoping to calm down. Maybe she should just tell them, but—

But Kuroda would try to patent it, or control it, or make a buck off of it. And he, or her father, or her mother, would start talking about stupid sci-fi movies in which computers took over the world. But to keep her phantom in the dark would be like Annie Sullivan saying it was better to leave Helen the way she was, in case she grew up to be Adolf Hitler or ... or whoever the heck had been a monster in Annie’s own time.

No, if Caitlin was going to be like Annie Sullivan, she was going to do it right. Annie had had another duty besides just teaching Helen. After the breakthrough, she had looked after Helen, had done her best to make sure she wasn’t exploited or mistreated or taken advantage of.

Of course, Caitlin knew that if what she suspected was true, eventually this phantom would realize that there was a huge world out here, and at that point she might no longer be special to it. But for now the phantom was hers and hers alone, and she was going to not just teach it but also protect it.

Still, she wasn’t sure if she was making progress at all, if the phantom had understood anything she’d tried to teach it before dinner. For all she knew, she’d accomplished nothing.

And so she set out to administer the test. She once again switched to websight, buffered some of the Jagster raw feed, focused in on the cellular automata, and ran the Shannon-entropy plot again.

And—

And, yes, yes, yes! A score of 4.5! The information content was richer, more complex, more sophisticated. Her lesson about website and link and to transfer had had an impact ... or, at least she hoped it had; the score had been trending upward on its own previously, of course. But no, no: it had to be responding to what she was doing, just as the earlier increases must have happened accidentally in response to the phantom having observed her doing literacy lessons.

She leaned back in her chair, thinking. A car honked its horn outside, and she heard someone running water in the bathroom. This—this ... whatever it was—was indeed learning.

She looked at the window, a dark rectangle. It was such a small portal, and, as the theme song to one of her mother’s favorite movies said, there was such a lot of world to see...

More sounds from outside: another car, a man talking to someone as he walked along, a dog yapping.

She looked back at her computer monitor, a window of another sort. Its bezel was black, with silver letters on the bottom forming the word DELL, the E

canted at an odd angle.

Yes, Waterloo was full of high-tech industry, but so was Austin, where she used to live. It was where Dell had its headquarters, and AMD had a major facility there, too, and—

Yes, yes, of course!

Austin was also home to Cycorp, a company that had been periodically making the news, at least back in Texas, her whole life.

An old one-liner bubbled up in her mind: You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.

Or maybe you can—and who you callin’ a ho, anyway?