Robert Sawyer - Wake

No, no, if this phantom was ever going to do more than just echo words, mindlessly parroting them back, it needed to learn terms for things in its realm, things with which it had experience — things in webspace!

The computer in the basement was on the household network. Up in her bedroom, using her own computer, Caitlin navigated to the basement system’s hard drive, found the folder that contained the JPEG still-image files Kuroda had produced from her eyePod’s datastream, and brought one up on her bedroom monitor. She looked at it, decided she didn’t like the perspective, and opened another one. Better.

But how to make sure it was watching? Well, when it had wanted to catch her attention, it had reflected her own face back at her. And maybe, just maybe, it had landed on the idea of doing that by seeing her reflect its realm back at it.

She pushed the button on her eyePod, switching to websight mode, and—

Are you there, Phantom? It’s me, Caitlin.

— and she looked around, wondering where it was, this thing that was trying to communicate with her. It seemed reasonable to suppose the phantom entity had something to do with the cellular automata, but they were everywhere, in every part of this realm. She wished there was some special spot to focus on, some particular site or nexus. It had seen her face; the phantom would be so much easier to relate to if it had a face of its own.

But no, that was the whole problem. It was different from everything in her world. And, if she was to reach out to it, she had to bridge that gap.

Caitlin was fascinated by names that seemed apt or ironic. Helen Keller had been friends with Alexander Graham Bell, who had invented the phone (in Canada, as she’d now been told over and over again since coming here). Had the idea that phones would ring somehow been influenced by his last name?

And, as Anna Bloom had said, there was Google’s Larry Page, who had devoted his life to indexing Web pages.

And, of course, there was a certain wistfulness in Helen Keller having been named for the most beautiful woman in Greek mythology, but never being able to see herself. And her last name — a near-homonym for “color,” something foreign to her experience — was also poignant.

But the name that came to Caitlin’s mind just then was that of Helen’s predecessor, Laura Bridgman. Fifty years before Helen, Laura, who had also been deaf and blind since infancy, had learned to communicate; indeed, it was reading Charles Dickens’s account of her story that had inspired Helen’s mother to seek a teacher for her own child. Laura Bridgman had managed to bridge two worlds, just as Helen eventually did. And Caitlin was now going to try to build a bridge of her own.

As she looked out onto the vastness of webspace, with its razor-sharp lines and vibrant colors, a wavering began, the same flashing she’d experienced before.

Yes! The phantom was signaling her again, presumably sending her more ASCII text. Kuroda had now shown her how to look at the data with a debugger on her own, but it probably didn’t matter what strings it was sending her way. She was confident they were meaningless to it; it was just echoing them back at her simply as a way of conveying that it was paying attention to what she was doing — which was exactly what she wanted. She switched out of websight mode and back to worldview, and got down to work.

Caitlin had only a seventeen-inch monitor; after all, who’d known she’d ever make any use of it? It had been put there solely so she could occasionally show things to her parents, and it had seemed pointless to take up desk space with a bigger unit. Now, though, she wished it was much larger. She fumbled with the mouse — she still wasn’t very proficient with it — and tried to resize the window showing the still image Kuroda had made of webspace. But grabbing the correct portion of the window’s frame was too hard for her, and she finally broke down and used the size option on the control menu — something most sighted users didn’t even know was there — and shrunk it using the arrow keys on her keyboard. She’d learned about sizing windows at her old school, where many of the students had some vision; the school’s full name was the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

She then brought up Microsoft Word, and used the same technique to resize its window into a narrow strip just a couple of inches high. Then she used the move command on the control menu to place that strip at the bottom of the screen.

Next, she fumbled around trying to figure out how to make the text big in Word. She’d used the program for years, but had rarely had cause to worry about font choices or type sizes. But she found the drop-down size menu, and she selected the largest choice on the list, which was seventy-two points.

And — oh, that pesky mouse pointer! It was so hard to see. Ah, but she knew from her old school that there was a way to make a bigger, bolder mouse pointer, and … found it!

“All right,” she said softly, “let’s see what kind of teacher I am…”

She knew the phantom could see what her left eye saw; it had reflected that eye’s view of herself in a mirror back at her, after all. And so she looked at the monitor for ten seconds, holding her gaze as steady as she could, establishing an overall view, letting the phantom absorb what it was being shown: a large picture with a long, narrow text box beneath. The picture must have been oddly recursive for the phantom, and Caitlin wanted to give it time to understand that what she was sending had switched from being her actual, real-time view of webspace to a still image of webspace.

And then she slowly, deliberately, moved the mouse, bringing the pointer over to one of the bright circles that represented a website. She moved the pointer around it repeatedly, hoping the phantom would notice the action.

Caitlin had once read a science-fiction book in which someone who had never seen a computer screen mistook the arrowhead pointer for a little pine tree. She realized that the idea of a pointer was freighted with assumptions, including a familiarity with archery, that the phantom couldn’t possibly possess. Still, she hoped the combination of movements she was making would draw its attention. But, just to be on the safe side, she slowly reached her own hand into her field of view, and tapped the point on the screen with her index finger. If the phantom had been watching the output of her eyePod, it had to have seen her indicate things that way before, and she hoped that it would get that she was now referring to a specific part of the screen.

And then she switched to the squashed Word window below the picture, and typed “WEBSITE,” which appeared in inch-high letters. She repeated the process: pointing at a website in the picture, and then typing the word again (after first highlighting it, so her new typing replaced the original version).

She repeated it with another circle, and identified it as a WEBSITE, too. And yet another circle, and again the word WEBSITE.

And then she found the selection tool for the graphics program that was displaying the picture of webspace, and she used it to draw a box around three large circles that weren’t linked to each other. She typed WEBSITES — wondering briefly if introducing plurals so early was a mistake. And then she isolated just one particularly large circle with the selection box and she typed AMAZON — knowing that it was highly unlikely that she’d actually guessed correctly which website that circle represented. Still, she pressed on, identifying a second website as GOOGLE and a third as CNN. All points are websites, she hoped to convey, and each has its own particular name.

And then, mathematician that she was, she pointed to a single website and typed “1,” and then, highlighting the numeral, she typed not the number again but rather its name: “ONE.”