Robert Sawyer - Watch

“Nothing,” her mother said.

Damn! What was taking Kuroda so long? Japanese houses were supposed to be small!

Suddenly, there was a lot of noise from the speakerphone: Kuroda fumbling to pick up a handset. “Okay,” he said. “I’m at one of my computers.” He was wheezing even more than usual; he must have run to get there. “Now what—”

“Cut the Jagster feed!” Caitlin shouted. “Cut it!”

“Okay, okay. I’m accessing my server at the university…”

“Hurry!”

“I’m in, and I’m looking for the right place…”

“Come on, come on.”

“I’m trying, but it’s—”

“Pull the fucking plug!”

Caitlin was glad she couldn’t see her mother’s face just then, and— Ah!

Suddenly almost all the colored lines disappeared, and the vast majority of the circles, too. She was back to seeing just a handful of links: her eyePod connecting to the Decter household network, and the outgoing links from there into the Web.

“Did that do that trick?” asked Kuroda.

“Yes!”

“Okay, now would you mind telling—”

“You tell him, Mom!” Caitlin said. She started typing gibberish into the instant-messenger window, just smashing keys as fast as she could, until the message buffer was full. Instead of hitting enter, though, she instead hit ctrl-A to highlight the entire message, and then ctrl-C to copy it—and then she hit enter, and—

—and a bright green line briefly appeared in her vision, shooting off to the lower left. But before she could really focus on it, it was gone.

She hit ctrl-V, pasting the same block back in, then enter, then ctrl-V again, then enter—over and over.

The green line flickered, pulsing on for an instant each time she sent the text to Webmind. Caitlin focused her attention on that line, following its length, swinging her head to do so, tracking the link.

Ctrl-V, enter. Ctrl-V, enter.

Following, following.

Of course, this line wouldn’t lead her all the way to Webmind. But it might give her some clue as to what had gone wrong, and—

And there it was: a small circle to which this green link line connected, and another line—this one bright orange—branching off from the circle at an acute angle, and, behind it, more lines, all the same shade of orange.

Webmind was decentralized, dispersed through the infrastructure of the World Wide Web, but it needed to interact with the Web to access the information on it; it needed to manipulate IP addresses, and—

And Kuroda had suggested at one point that her mind interpreted each IP address as a specific wavelength of light, but—

But she couldn’t recall ever seeing two link lines that were precisely the same color at the same time before. No, no, that wasn’t completely true. She did see multiple lines of the same color, but only because each line endured for a time after the links were broken; she understood this to be related to the phenomenon of persistence of vision that made it possible for people to watch movies and TV. But previously one link had always faded from view shortly after another had brightened up, but these orange lines were all solid and glaringly bright, and—

“I think he’s multitasking!” said Caitlin.

“How do you mean?” asked Kuroda.

“He’s casting out multiple links simultaneously.”

“Wait, wait—let me get a rendering at this end. Two seconds.” And then: “Uwaa! You’re right—it does look like multitasking, and— shimatta!”

Caitlin knew that one. “What’s wrong?”

“I should have thought of this! Damn, damn, damn! It can’t multitask.”

“It looks like he is,” she said.

“Yes, yes. I’ll explain later, but we’ve got to get it to break those links.”

She gazed out on webspace. All the orange lines were steady, solid, unflickering. All of them active. Simultaneously.

The orange lines curved away from her toward a point in the background that receded to infinity—no doubt her brain’s way of showing that it was impossible to fully trace the source of the links Webmind made.

“You need to tell it to break the other links,” Kuroda said again.

“Okay, but how?”

“Well, it should recognize your IP address.”

She typed into her instant-messenger window: You need to break all those other connections. She hit enter, but there was no immediate response.

“Do you suppose he’s crashed?” her mom asked. “Locked up?” Caitlin had no idea how one might go about rebooting Webmind.

“If it had, I don’t think Caitlin would be seeing the link lines at all,” Kuroda said. “She only visualizes active links, and that means there’s acknowledgment being sent out by Webmind.”

“Maybe not consciously, though,” said her mom.

Caitlin lifted her eyebrows. She’d never thought about the distinction between things that required high-level awareness on Webmind’s part and things it did autonomically.

How to get him to pay attention to her, and only to her? The piddling, transitory links she could make by sending instant messages were nothing compared to the torrents of data he was sucking down right now through multiple pipes.

She slapped her hand against the notebook’s palmrest—reassuringly solid despite the unreality surrounding her. “I’m not even sure if he’s still reading me. And the circles he’s connecting to are gigantic—huge sites. How can my little IMs compete for his attention with those?”

Kuroda seemed to be fully awake at last. “It’s still receiving the visual signal from your post-retinal implant; it still gets sent that when the eyePod is in duplex mode. Show it something that will make it sit up and take notice.”

Her first thought was to flash her boobs in a mirror, but fat lot of good that would do, and—

A mirror.

Yes. Yes!

Webmind saw what she saw—and what she was seeing right now was him. She darted her eyes up and down, following one of the orange links; she moved her head left and right, following another. She wished her blinks registered when she was in websight mode; if they did, she might have been able to indicate a severing just by closing her eye while looking at a link. But her vision was continuous, and switching from duplex to simplex took too much time—and shutting the eyePod off took a five-second press of the button, and turning it back on involved an elaborate boot-up. If only—

Her mom spoke up. “What can I do? How can I help?”

She was connected to Webmind, too—she still had an open IM session going with it on her computer across the hall. If it really was multitasking—if it really was trying to integrate information from multiple sources simultaneously—then her mom should be able to talk to him, or, at least talk at him, even if he didn’t acknowledge. “Go back to your IM with Webmind,” Caitlin said. “Hurry!”

She heard her dashing across the hall. “All right,” she called. “I’m at my computer.”

Caitlin concentrated on one of the link lines, running her mental gaze along its length, ending at the massive circle representing the target website—and then she backtracked, reversing course. She wished she could backtrack all the way to the origin, but that was impossible: the line shifted in her view when she tried to do so, eventually presenting only its own tiny round cross section, a point that she couldn’t move along—another visual recognition of the fact that the ultimate source of Webmind’s links couldn’t be traced. She moved back until she was seeing the line as a line, and then—

“Send him a message,” Caitlin called out. “Tell him to break the link.”