Robert Sawyer - Wake

“Who? Anna?”

“Exactly: Anna Bloom, the network cartographer. I’ll IM her to see if she’s online. Does this new computer have a webcam?”

“I suspect my dad didn’t think I’d have much use for one,” she said gently.

“Well, he — ah! He’s more of an optimist than you think, Miss Caitlin. There’s one right here, sitting on top of the tower.” He used the keyboard for a few moments, then: “Yup, she’s at home and online. Let me get a webcam call going…”

“Konnichi wa, Masayuki-san!” said the same voice Caitlin had heard on the speakerphone the night she’d seen the Web for the first time. But the woman immediately switched to English, presumably when she saw that he was with a Westerner. “Hey, who’s the sweet young thing?”

Dr. Kuroda sounded slightly embarrassed. “This is Miss Caitlin.” Of course, Anna hadn’t seen her when they’d spoken before.

Anna sounded surprised. “Where are you?”

“Canada.”

“Oooh! Is it snowing?”

“Not yet,” said Kuroda. “It’s still September, after all.”

“Hi, Caitlin,” Anna said.

“Hello, Professor Bloom.”

“You can call me Anna. So, what can I do for you?”

Kuroda recounted what they’d dreamed up so far: legions of ghost packets floating in the background of the Web, somehow self-organizing into cellular automata. Then: “So, what do you think?”

“It’s a novel idea,” Anna said slowly.

“Could it work?” asked Caitlin.

“I … suppose. It’s a classic Darwinian scenario, isn’t it? Mutant packets that are better able to survive bouncing around endlessly. But the Web is expanding fast, with new servers added each day, so a slowly growing population of these ghost packets might never overwhelm its capacity — or, at least, it clearly hasn’t yet.”

“And the Web has no white blood cells tracking down useless stuff,” said Caitlin. “Right? They would just persist, bouncing around.”

“I guess,” said Anna. “And — just blue-skying here — but the checksum on the packet could determine if you’re seeing it as black or white; even-number checksums could be black and odd-number ones white, or whatever. If the hop counter changes with each hop, but never goes to zero, the checksum would change, too, and so you’d get a flipping effect.”

“I thought of something similar,” Kuroda said, “although the checksum didn’t occur to me.”

“And,” Caitlin said to Dr. Kuroda, “you said cellular automata rules can arise naturally, right? Like with that snail that uses them to paint its shell? So maybe all of this just spontaneously emerged.”

“Maybe indeed,” said Kuroda, sounding intrigued.

“I think I smell a paper,” said Anna.

“You want to be a mathematician when you grow up, right, Miss Caitlin?” asked Kuroda.

I am a mathematician, she thought. But what she said was, “Yes.”

“How’d you like to get the jump on the competition and coauthor your first paper with Professor Bloom and me? ‘Spontaneous Generation of Cellular Automata in the Infrastructure of the World Wide Web.’”

Caitlin was grinning from ear to ear. “Sweet!”

“Well, there’s no doubt now, is there?” said Shoshana, shifting her gaze from the painting to Dr. Marcuse and then back again. “That’s me again, all right.”

They were in the main room of the bungalow, watching the live video feed as Hobo painted away in the gazebo. Four LCD monitors were lined up on a workbench, one for each of the cameras; it reminded Shoshana of the security guard’s station in her apartment building’s lobby.

Marcuse nodded his great lump of a head. “Now, if he’d just paint something other than you.” A pause. “Note that he’s doing your same profile again: you looking off to the right. If he’d done it the other way, that might have torpedoed my thought about it reflecting brain lateralization.”

“Well,” said Shoshana, “it is my good side.”

He actually smiled, then: “Okay. Let’s put your video-editing skills to work.”

Shoshana had a not-so-secret hobby: vidding. She took clips of TV shows she’d snagged from BitTorrent sites and cut them to fit popular songs, making humorous or poignant little music videos that she shared with like-minded vidders on the Web. Her fandoms included the TV medical drama House, which had a lot of slashy subtext that was great for mixing to love songs, and the latest incarnation of Doctor Who. Marcuse had caught her working on these once or twice over lunch, using the fancy Mac the Institute had had donated to it.

“When Hobo’s done,” continued Marcuse, “take the footage from all four cameras and splice together a version that shows the whole thing as it happened. Real Hollywood-style, okay? Shot of Hobo, shot of canvas over Hobo’s shoulder, close-up on canvas, back to Hobo, like that. I’ll write up a voice-over commentary to go with it.”

“Sure,” Shoshana said, looking forward to the assignment. Timbaland has nothing on me.

“Good, good.” Marcuse rubbed his big hands together. “After this hits YouTube, the only cutting room our Hobo is going to be involved with is your edit suite.”

“What we really could use,” Kuroda said, down in the basement, “is an expert on self-organizing systems.”

“And there’s never one around when you need one!” Caitlin declared in mock seriousness. “But my dad’s a physicist. He must know something about them.” In fact, he knew something about just about everything, in her experience — at least in theoretical areas. “I’ll go get him.”

Caitlin headed upstairs. She took a detour, going all the way up to her bedroom first. It really was chilly in the basement, so she grabbed her PI sweatshirt, which her mom had thoughtfully run through the dryer after last night’s storm.

She found her dad in his den, which was a little room near the back of the house. It was easy enough tracking him down: he had a three-disc CD player in there, which seemed perpetually loaded with the same discs: Supertramp, Queen, and The Eagles. “Hotel California” was playing as she stepped through the open doorway. He was typing on his keyboard; he had an ancient, heavy IBM one that clicked loudly. She rapped her knuckles gently on the door jamb, in case he was too absorbed in his work to notice her arrival, and said, “Can you help Dr. Kuroda and me?”

She heard his chair pushing back against the carpet, which she took as a “yes.”

Once they got downstairs, Caitlin let her dad have the chair she’d been sitting in, and she leaned against the worktable; through the small window, she could hear a few of the neighborhood kids playing street hockey. Anna Bloom was still hooked up via webcam from the Technion in Israel.

“Even if there are lost packets persisting on the infrastructure of the Web,” her dad said, after Kuroda had briefed him, “why would Caitlin see them? Why would they be represented at all in the feed she’s getting from Jagster?”

Kuroda shifted noisily in his chair. “That’s a good question. I hadn’t—”

“It’s because of the special method Jagster uses to get its data,” Anna said.

“Sorry?” said Kuroda, and “What?” said Caitlin.

Anna’s voice sounded tinny over the computer’s speakers. “Well, remember, Jagster was created as an alternative to the Google approach. PageRank, the standard Google method, looks for how many other pages link to a page, right?

But that isn’t necessarily the best measure of how frequently a page is accessed. If you’re looking for info on a hot rock star, like, say, Lee Amodeo…”

“She’s awesome!” said Caitlin.