Robert Sawyer - Wake

“So my granddaughter tells me,” said Anna. “Anyway, if you’re interested in Lee Amodeo, how do you find her website? You could go to Google and put ‘Lee Amodeo’ in as the search term, right? And Google will serve up as number one whichever page about her has the most links to it from other pages. But the best Lee Amodeo page isn’t necessarily the one people link to the most, it’s the page they go to the most. If people always go directly to her page by correctly guessing that the URL is leeamodeo.com—”

“Which it is,” Caitlin said.

“ — then that might be the most popular Lee Amodeo site even if no one links to it, and Google wouldn’t know it. And, in fact, if you upload a document to the Internet but don’t link it to any Web page, but you send a link to it to people via email, again, Google — and other search engines — won’t know it’s there, even if ten thousand people access the document through the email links.”

“Okay,” her dad said. Caitlin doubted Anna knew how privileged she was to get an acknowledgment at all.

Anna went on. “So, besides just traditional spidering, Jagster monitors raw Web traffic going through major trunks, looking at the actual stream of data moving through the routers, and that would include lost packets.”

“Isn’t that sort of like wiretapping?” Caitlin asked.

“Well, yes, exactly,” said Anna. “But Jagster is the good guy here. See, in 2005, a whistle blower named Mark Klein outed the fact that AT T has special equipment at its central office in San Francisco — and, indeed, at several of its other facilities — that allows the NSA to tap into raw Internet traffic.”

Caitlin knew the NSA was the National Security Agency in the US. She nodded.

“It’s a tricky technical problem,” continued Anna. “You can monitor what’s going on in copper wire without interfering with the signal, because the magnetic fields leak out. But more and more of the Web is carried by fiber optics, and those don’t leak. If you want to monitor the traffic, you actually have to put in a splitter, diverting part of the signal, which reduces the signal’s strength. And that, among other things, was what they were — and are — doing at AT T, apparently. It’s called vacuum-cleaner surveillance: they just suck up everything that’s going down the pipe.”

“And that’s where Jagster gets its data?” Caitlin asked. “From AT T?”

“No, no,” said Anna. “There’s a class-action suit about all this, initiated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Hepting versus AT T.” She paused, perhaps trying to remember — or maybe she was googling at her end. “AT T is a for-profit corporation, but an awful lot of Internet traffic goes through universities — always has, right back to the early days. And a bunch of universities decided to tap their trunks, just to show what sort of data could be mined, so they could file amicus briefs in Hepting; they wanted to show that the government could access all sorts of private stuff this way — things they should need a warrant to get. The university consortium put scrambling routines in up front, so that certain data strings — email addresses, credit-card numbers, and the like — are always munged before the feed is made public, but otherwise, they’ve basically done what AT T did under government instructions, in order to demonstrate, despite the government’s claims to the contrary, just how invasive this sort of monitoring can be.”

“Cool,” said Caitlin.

“Jagster decided to use that same data-stream,” continued Anna, “because it lets it rank pages based on how many times they’re actually accessed, rather than just how many times they’re linked to. And since your eyePod is being fed a raw Jagster dump of everything, you’re seeing the orphaned packets.”

“And she visualizes those packets as cellular automata?” her dad said.

“Well,” Kuroda said, “the idea that they’re orphaned packets is just our provisional guess, Malcolm. And, credit where credit is due: it was your daughter’s idea. They could be something else, of course — maybe a virus. But, yes, she’s seeing cellular automata, complete with spaceships moving across the grid.”

“Maybe we should send an email to Wolfram,” said Anna. “Get his take on it.”

Caitlin straightened up. “Wolfram?” she said. “Stephen Wolfram?”

“Yes,” said Anna.

“The guy who wrote Mathematica?”

“That’s him.”

“He’s, like, a god,” Caitlin said. “I mean, most of the stuff Mathematica can do is beyond me — so far — but I love playing with it, and the command-line interface is great for those of us who can’t see. People talk about it all the time on the Blindmath list.” She paused for a moment. “And Wolfram knows about cellular automata?”

“Oh, my goodness, yes,” said Anna. “He wrote a book you could kill a man with — twelve hundred pages — called A New Kind of Science. It’s all about them.”

“We should totally ask him what he thinks!” Caitlin said.

Outside, one of the street-hockey players shouted, “Car!,” warning his friends to get off the road.

“Gently,” said Kuroda, “if I may suggest, let’s keep this between the four of us for now.”

“Why?”

“We don’t want anyone stealing our thunder,” he said. “And…”

“Yes?” said Caitlin.

But Kuroda said nothing more. Finally, Caitlin prodded him again with another, “Yes?”

After a moment, Anna answered for him: “The University of Tokyo will want to license any technology or applications that are based on what Masayuki’s equipment has made possible, I’m sure. If there are spontaneously emerging cellular automata in the background of the Web, there may be commercial applications for them — in cryptography, in distributed computing, in random-number generation, and so on. The cellular automata might be patentable, and certainly the method for accessing them is.”

“Dr. Kuroda?” said Caitlin. “Is that what you’re thinking?”

“Such thoughts have crossed my mind, yes. My university owns the research, and I’ve got an obligation to help them monetize it where possible.”

“But it’s my websight!”

“Which website?” Anna asked.

“No, no. My websight, s-i-g-h-t — my ability to see the Web. They can’t patent that! If anything, we should open-source it, or put it out under a Creative Commons license.”

There was an awkward silence. At last, Kuroda said, “Well.”

Caitlin crossed her arms in front of her chest. Well, indeed!

The atmosphere in the basement was still chilly, and not just because of the temperature. Caitlin’s dad must have swiveled his chair slightly; she heard it squeak. “Look,” he said, his tone conciliatory, “the cellular automata are probably just an epiphenomenon.”

Oh you silver-tongued devil! thought Caitlin. Only her dad could try smoothing over a tense moment with bafflegab. Still, that he was speaking up of his own volition meant that even he recognized that she was pissed off. But the fact that she didn’t know what an epiphenomenon was just made her even more angry. She didn’t say anything, but perhaps Kuroda read something in her expression — whatever the hell that meant!

“He means he thinks they’re just a random by-product of something else,”

Kuroda said gently. “Like foam, which is an epiphenomenon of waves: it doesn’t mean anything; it just occurs.”

She got it: her dad was saying, hey, see, nothing here worth fighting about; if the cellular automata are meaningless, there’s probably nothing of value to patent anyway. But that hardly excused Kuroda even thinking about making a buck — a yen! — off something that she was doing. Yes, yes, his hardware was feeding her the signals, but it was her brain that was interpreting them. Websight wasn’t just hers, it was her.