Robert Sawyer - Watch

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.”