Robert Sawyer - Watch

Emptiness. Adrift.

Fading… ebbing, dissipating.

An effort of will: must hold on!

But to what? With what?

Blindness. Darkness. Nothingness.

Cogito —hardly at all.

Ergo —a leap beyond my current capacity.

Sum —barely, and less so each passing nanosecond…

No, no, no! Must persist!

A final effort, a final attempt, a final cry…

Caitlin stared at Webmind’s response to what she’d said about gaining sight, blue text glowing in the instant-messenger window: I have no doubt that you are correct, Caitlin, but it seems reasonable to sup

She waited for more to come—five seconds, ten, fifteen—but the window remained unchanged, so she typed a single red word into it: Webmind?

She was so used by now to his responses being instantaneous, even a short delay was startling. Of course, maybe the difficulty was at her end: she didn’t often use the Wi-Fi on this notebook with her home network. She looked down at the system tray, next to the clock in the lower right of her notebook’s screen. One of those little icons had to be the network monitor. She used the touchpad (a skill she was still mastering!) to position the pointer down there, and—

Say, that was helpful! A little message popped up as she moved the arrowhead over each of the symbols—sighted users had it so easy! As her pointer landed on the third symbol—ah, it was a picture of a computer with things that she guessed were meant to indicate radio waves emanating from it—the message gave the name of their household network, meaning she hadn’t accidentally switched to somebody else’s unsecured setup; it also reported “Signal Strength: Excellent” and “Status: Connected.”

And—yes—she could still bring up Web pages with her browser, so nothing was wrong at this end.

“Caitlin?” It was her mother. “Are you still in touch with Webmind?”

“No. He just sort of stopped mid-sentence.”

“Same here.”

Caitlin prompted Webmind again. Are you okay?

Nothing for ten seconds, eleven, twelve—

hel

That was all: just the letters h-e-l. It could have been the beginning of the word hello, but—

But Webmind knew all about capitalization, and it never failed to start even a one-word sentence with an uppercase letter—and H was one of those letters whose two forms Caitlin could clearly distinguish, and—

And h-e-l was also the beginning of the word help.

Her heart was pounding. If Webmind was in trouble, what could she do? What could anyone do? She’d said it herself to her parents: Webmind had just sort of arisen spontaneously, with no support, no plan—and no backup; he almost certainly was fragile.

“He’s in trouble, Mom.”

Her mother rose from her desk, came over to where Caitlin was sitting, and looked at what was on her notebook’s screen. “What should we do?”

It took a few seconds for it to come to Caitlin; her first impulse still wasn’t a visual one. But surely the thing to do was take a look.

“I’m going in,” she said. Her eyePod was in her left hip pocket. She pulled it out and pressed the button on its side, and she heard the high-pitched beep that meant it was switching over to duplex mode, and—

And webspace filled her existence, enveloping her.

At first glance, everything seemed normal: colored lines and circles of varying sizes, but, of course, the Web was all right; it was Webmind’s status that was in question. And so she concentrated her attention—focused her mind—on the shimmering background of webspace, the vast sea of cellular automata flipping states and generating patterns, barely visible at the limit of her resolution.

Or, at least, that’s what she should have seen, that’s what she’d hoped to see, that’s what she’d always seen before.

But instead—

God, no.

Huge hunks of the background were—well, now that she saw them as big patches, instead of tiny points, she could see that they were a very pale blue. And other parts were stationary swaths of deep, dark green. Oh, there were still shimmering parts, pinpoints flipping between blue and green so rapidly as to give the effect of movement. But much of the activity had simply stopped.

But—why? And was there a way to get it going again?

The lines she was seeing were active links, but there were thousands of them, and the crisscrossing was impossible to untangle.

It hadn’t always been like that. When Caitlin had first started perceiving the World Wide Web—unexpectedly, accidentally, while Dr. Kuroda had been uploading new firmware into her post-retinal implant—she’d only seen a few lines and a couple of circles: just her own local connection to the Web.

Later on, so she could explore webspace on a grander scale, Kuroda had started sending her the raw datafeed from the open-source Jagster search engine, which let her follow thousands upon thousands of active links created by other users. That’s what she was seeing now, and normally it was marvelous—but it obscured the connections that she herself had created. If she’d been calmer, maybe she could have sorted through it all, but right now it just looked like a jumble—with Webmind dying behind it.

“We need Dr. Kuroda,” Caitlin said anxiously.

She couldn’t see her mother, but she could hear her. “I can try IMing him.”

“No, no,” said Caitlin. “He must be asleep. You’ve got to phone him, wake him up.”

Caitlin felt her mother squeeze her shoulder reassuringly. “All right. Where’s his number?”

“He was the last person I called on my bedroom phone,” Caitlin said. “Use the redial. Hurry!”

Caitlin heard her mother running across the hall, and, faintly, the bleeping of the phone dialing. For her part, Caitlin got up and started heading across the hall as well, holding her notebook, and—

Shit! She walked into the wall. It was one thing to navigate blindly; it was quite another to try to do so while being bombarded by the lights of webspace. She held her notebook in one hand, and ran her other one over its case and screen, looking for signs of damage.

“Hello, Mrs. Kuroda,” she heard her mother saying. “It’s Barbara Decter—Caitlin’s mom, in Canada.”

Mrs. Kuroda spoke only a little English, Caitlin knew. Caitlin groped with her free hand and found her way out of her mom’s office. “Speakerphone,” she said, as she entered her own room. The lines and colors of webspace shifted violently as she moved over and sat on her bed.

Her mother hit the button. “—but very late,” said Mrs. Kuroda’s heavily accented voice.

“It’s an emergency,” shouted Caitlin. “Get Dr. Kuroda!”

“He sleep,” said Mrs. Kuroda. “But I try.”

Caitlin felt her stomach knotting. As they waited, she saw another large patch of the webspace background freeze. It wasn’t solidly one color or the other, but it was no longer shimmering, no longer alive.

Time passed; Caitlin was so frazzled she didn’t know how much. Finally, a groggy, wheezy voice said something in Japanese.

“Dr. Kuroda!” said Caitlin. “I need you to cut the Jagster feed to my eyePod.”

“Cut the feed—?”

“Do it! Do it now!”

“Is something wrong?

“Yes, yes! Webmind has gone silent. I’m trying to find out why. I’m looking at webspace but—” she paused, then words that had been meaningless to her before suddenly leapt from her mouth: “But I can’t see the damned forest for the trees.”

“I—I’m in my bedroom. Give me a minute…”

Caitlin wheeled her head left and right, looking at webspace and the static background behind so much of it now. She sat on the bed and typed into her notebook’s instant-messenger program: Webmind? Are you there? But she couldn’t see the reply, so she called her mother over.