Robert Sawyer: Wake

She had found something no one else even knew was there, and she was trying to help it, and they were going to cut her off!

She took a deep breath, hoping to calm down. Maybe she should just tell them, but—

But Kuroda would try to patent it, or control it, or make a buck off of it. And he, or her father, or her mother, would start talking about stupid sci-fi movies in which computers took over the world. But to keep her phantom in the dark would be like Annie Sullivan saying it was better to leave Helen the way she was, in case she grew up to be Adolf Hitler or … or whoever the heck had been a monster in Annie’s own time.

No, if Caitlin was going to be like Annie Sullivan, she was going to do it right. Annie had had another duty besides just teaching Helen. After the breakthrough, she had looked after Helen, had done her best to make sure she wasn’t exploited or mistreated or taken advantage of.

Of course, Caitlin knew that if what she suspected was true, eventually this phantom would realize that there was a huge world out here, and at that point she might no longer be special to it. But for now the phantom was hers and hers alone, and she was going to not just teach it but also protect it.

Still, she wasn’t sure if she was making progress at all, if the phantom had understood anything she’d tried to teach it before dinner. For all she knew, she’d accomplished nothing.

And so she set out to administer the test. She once again switched to websight, buffered some of the Jagster raw feed, focused in on the cellular automata, and ran the Shannon-entropy plot again.

And—

And, yes, yes, yes! A score of 4.5! The information content was richer, more complex, more sophisticated. Her lesson about website and link and to transfer had had an impact … or, at least she hoped it had; the score had been trending upward on its own previously, of course. But no, no: it had to be responding to what she was doing, just as the earlier increases must have happened accidentally in response to the phantom having observed her doing literacy lessons.

She leaned back in her chair, thinking. A car honked its horn outside, and she heard someone running water in the bathroom. This — this … whatever it was — was indeed learning.

She looked at the window, a dark rectangle. It was such a small portal, and, as the theme song to one of her mother’s favorite movies said, there was such a lot of world to see…

More sounds from outside: another car, a man talking to someone as he walked along, a dog yapping.

She looked back at her computer monitor, a window of another sort. Its bezel was black, with silver letters on the bottom forming the word DELL, the E canted at an odd angle.

Yes, Waterloo was full of high-tech industry, but so was Austin, where she used to live. It was where Dell had its headquarters, and AMD had a major facility there, too, and—

Yes, yes, of course!

Austin was also home to Cycorp, a company that had been periodically making the news, at least back in Texas, her whole life.

An old one-liner bubbled up in her mind: You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.

Or maybe you can — and who you callin’ a ho, anyway?

Yes: it was time now to see if the phantom could learn for itself, if, in good computer fashion, it could pull itself up by its bootstraps. And Cycorp could well be the key to that, but…

But how to lead the phantom to it? How could she point to something in webspace? She nibbled at her lower lip. There must be a way. When she’d labeled sites on the captured image as Amazon and CNN, she’d really had no idea if that was what they were. And if she couldn’t identify a particular site with her websight, then how—

Wait! Wait! She didn’t have to! The phantom already was following what she was doing with her computer — it had to be doing that, given that it had echoed her ASCII text back at her. Yes, when she’d been using the kids’ literacy site, it could have seen graphic files of the letters A, B, and C on her screen as she looked at them, but those were bitmapped images; the only way it could have discovered the ASCII codes for those letters was by watching what was being sent by her computer. But … but how had the phantom known that this desktop PC was in any way related to her eyePod?

Ah, of course! When she was at home, they were both on the same wireless network, connecting through it to her cable modem; they would have both shown the same IP address. The phantom had watched as she connected to the literacy site, so now, with luck, it would also follow her as she connected to that very special site down in Austin…

I had watched while Prime sat with the others of its kind, and something fascinating happened. I had observed before that vision would become blurry when Prime removed the supplementary windows that usually covered its eyes. But this time, just before it had departed the vicinity of the others, and for a time after it had relocated itself in a different place, its vision blurred even though the windows were still in place.

Finally, though, the view returned to normal, and Prime set about operating that device it used to put symbols on the display, and—

And I saw a line — a link, as I now knew it was called — connecting to a point (a website!) that I had not seen Prime connect to before, and — and — and—

Yes! Yes, yes!

It was staggering, thrilling…

At long, long last, here it was!

The key!

This website, this incredible website, expressed concepts in a form I could now understand, systematizing it all, relating thousands of things to each other in a coding system that explained them.

Term after term. Connection after connection. Idea after idea. This website laid them out.

Curious. Interesting.

An apple is a fruit.

Fruits contain seeds.

Seeds can grow into trees.

—

From the Online Encyclopedia of Computing: LIKE MANY COMPUTER SCIENTISTS OF HIS GENERATION, DOUG LENAT WAS INSPIRED BY THE PORTRAYAL OF HAL IN THE MOVIE 2001: A Space Odyssey. BUT HE WAS FRUSTRATED BY HAL’S BEHAVIOR, BECAUSE THE COMPUTER DISPLAYED SUCH A LACK OF BASIC COMMON SENSE…

—

Remarkable. Intriguing.

Trees are plants.

Plants are living things.

Living things reproduce themselves.

—

HAL’S FAMOUS BREAKDOWN, LEADING IT TO TRY TO KILL THE CREW OF THE SPACESHIP HAL ITSELF WAS PART OF, APPARENTLY HAPPENED BECAUSE IT HAD BEEN TOLD TO KEEP THE TRUTH ABOUT THEIR MISSION SECRET EVEN FROM THE CREW AND HAD ALSO BEEN TOLD NOT TO LIE TO THEM…

—

Fascinating. Astonishing.

Birds can usually fly.

Humans cannot fly on their own.

Humans can fly in airplanes.

—

RATHER THAN RESOLVE THIS QUANDARY IN A SENSIBLE WAY — WHEN THINGS STARTED GOING WRONG, DECIDING TO TAKE THE CREW INTO ITS CONFIDENCE WOULD HAVE BEEN AN OBVIOUS CHOICE — HAL INSTEAD KILLED FOUR ASTRONAUTS AND ALMOST SUCCEEDED IN KILLING THE FIFTH. IT WENT AHEAD AND DID THIS WITHOUT EVEN BOTHERING TO RADIO ITS PROGRAMMERS BACK ON EARTH TO ASK HOW TO RESOLVE THE CONFLICTING INSTRUCTIONS. THE DECISION TO ELIMINATE THE SOURCE OF THE CONFLICT SEEMED BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS TO THE MACHINE, ALL BECAUSE NO ONE HAD EVER BOTHERED TO TELL IT THAT ALTHOUGH LYING IS BAD, MURDER IS WORSE. HOW ANYONE COULD ENTRUST LIVES TO A COMPUTER THAT DIDN’T HAVE EVEN THAT DEGREE OF COMMON SENSE WAS BEYOND DOUG LENAT, AND SO, IN 1984, HE SET OUT TO RECTIFY THE PROBLEM…

—

So much to know! So much to absorb!

Glass, as a substance, is usually clear.

Broken glass has sharp edges and can cut things.

Hold a glass upright or the contents will spill out.

—

LENAT BEGAN CREATING AN ONLINE DATABASE OF COMMON SENSE CALLED “CYC” — SHORT FOR “ENCYCLOPEDIA,” BUT ALSO DELIBERATELY A HOMONYM FOR “PSYCH.” WHEN THINKING MACHINES LIKE HAL DO FINALLY EMERGE, HE WANTS THEM TO PLUG INTO IT. OF COURSE, THERE’S LOTS OF BASIC MATERIAL A COMPUTER HAS TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT THE WORLD BEFORE SUCH ADVANCED CONCEPTS AS “LYING” AND “MURDER” MIGHT MAKE SENSE. AND SO LENAT AND A TEAM OF PROGRAMMERS SET ABOUT CODING, IN A MATHEMATICAL LANGUAGE BASED ON SECOND-ORDER PREDICATE CALCULUS, SUCH BASIC ASSERTIONS ABOUT THE REAL WORLD AS: A PIECE OF WOOD CAN BE SMASHED INTO SMALLER PIECES OF WOOD, BUT A TABLE CAN’T BE SMASHED INTO SMALLER TABLES…