WWW: Wake (33 page)

Kuroda was delighted to see her. “Hello, Miss Caitlin,” he said warmly, swiveling his red chair to face her. “How are you feeling?”

She knew it was just a pleasantry, but she decided to answer anyway.

“Honestly?” she said. “I’m overwhelmed.” She moved closer to the worktable but did not sit down. “There was a ... simplicity, I guess, in being blind. I mean, vision is full of things that you don’t need to know about right now, like...” She looked around the basement. “Well, like, over there: there’s a TV, right? It’s not even on, but I have to see it. And that bookshelf: I don’t need to know right now that it’s there, or that it’s got—say, how come all the spines are the same?”

Kuroda glanced at them. “They’re journals—your dad’s collection. That’s Physical Review D on the top shelf, for instance.”

“Well, right, exactly. I don’t need to know that they’re there right now, but every time I look in that direction, I see them; I can’t help seeing them.”

Kuroda nodded. “Your brain will sort that out as time goes on, I think. Do you know about frog vision?”

“What about it?”

“They see only moving objects. Static things—trees, plants, the ground—simply don’t register; their retinas don’t bother encoding them into the signal being passed on to their optic nerves. Now, in humans, the sorting out of relevant from irrelevant happens in the brain, not the eye, but for most of us it does happen.”

“Really?”

“Sure. I’ll give you an example. Your mom is upstairs, right?”

“Yes.”

“And what is she wearing?”

“A green-and-white blouse, and blue jeans.”

“If you say so. I saw her today, too, but I simply didn’t see her clothes.”

Caitlin was startled. She’d read about men mentally undressing women—but she hadn’t thought Kuroda would do that. Her mother the MILF! “You, um, you visualized her naked?”

Kuroda looked shocked. “No, no, no. Of course I saw her as clothed. But fashion is something I’m just not interested in.” He looked down as if seeing his own clothes—a vast Hawaiian-style shirt patterned in red, blue, and black, plus brown trousers—for the first time. “A fact much to the consternation of my wife, I can assure you. But I just don’t see things that don’t interest me, until I need to. Still, yes, you’re right: there’s an awful lot of information in the signal your retina is putting out. I had no trouble figuring out how to fix the way it was encoding data, which is how I cleared up your Tomasevic’s syndrome, but I haven’t been able to actually render the data on a screen when you’re seeing the real world.” He smiled. “But I do have a surprise for you.”

“Yes?”

He motioned for her to sit on the other swivel chair, and she did so. “Have a look at this,” he said, and he began moving the mouse. She followed it with her eye.

“No, Miss Caitlin. Here, on the monitor.”

Oh, right. She still wasn’t used to focusing on the monitor automatically. She shifted her gaze, and—

My God! It was a picture of webspace: glowing lines radiating from circles of different sizes. “How’d you do that?” she asked excitedly.

“Hey, what do you think I do when you’re not down here? Watch soap operas?”

“Well, I—”

“I mean, yes, it does look like Victor and Nikki are going to split once more. And can you believe Jack Abbot is crazy enough to try to take over Newman Enterprises again?”

She looked at him.

Kuroda lifted his shoulders. “I multitask.” He pointed at the monitor.

“Anyway, when we were doing the Zipf plots, you concentrated on the cellular automata in the background. And that let me start to parse the components of the datastream you produce when you’re seeing the Web. After that ... well, how’d I do?”

She squinted at the monitor. “I can’t see the background stuff.”

“No, the monitor doesn’t have enough resolution, unfortunately. But, except for that, is that what you see?”

“Just about. It’s not as vibrant, and I don’t think the colors are quite right, but ... yes, yes, that’s webspace. Cool!”

“We can adjust the color palette, of course. That’s just one still frame—well, actually, it’s a summation of several samplings of the data-stream; the field of view doesn’t completely refresh each time. Still, as you say, it is cool.”

“Umm, but what about when I’m not in websight mode? What about when I’m in, you, know...” And then it came to her. “Worldview!”

“Pardon?”

“Get it? Call it ‘worldview’ when we’re talking about me seeing the real world, and ‘websight’ when we’re talking about me seeing the Web.”

He nodded. “That’s good.”

But she was still concerned. “Can you, can you do that for worldview? Actually put on a monitor what I’m seeing?” She was mortified to think he could see her the way ... the way ... whatever it was saw her.

“No. That’s what I was getting at a moment ago, and, in a way, what you were getting at, too. The visual signal from the real world is so complex, I haven’t figured out how to decode it as imagery yet. It’s too bad the retinas don’t encode blinks.”

“They don’t?”

“Does your vision shut off when you blink? No, neither does anyone else’s; you don’t notice that you’re blinking, because the retina doesn’t encode the darkness unless you hold your eye shut for an extended period. It’s like confabulation across saccades—you see a continuous visual stream, even though your vision is actually interrupted many times a minute. If those blinks were coded as simpler information, they’d give me little signposts in the datastream to help parse it. But they’re not.”

“Ah.”

“So, no pictures on the monitor of worldview, I’m afraid, at least not yet. But the websight datastream is highly structured and pretty straightforward. And so—voyla!”

She smiled, pleased to be able to use her newfound French. “That’s voila, Dr. Kuroda.” But then she looked at the screen again. “So, um, what exactly are you going to do with the images?”

He sounded a bit defensive. “Well, as I indicated, there might be commercial applications for this technology, even ignoring the problematic issue of the cellular automata and the NSA, if they really are responsible for them. In fact, I was thinking of trademarking the term websight...”

“You’re not going to call another press conference, are you?”

“Well, I—”

She surprised herself with her vehemence. “Because I’m not going to talk about it.”

“Um...”

“No,” she said flatly. “I understand we had to say something publicly about you restoring my vision. I know I owed you that. But websight is...” She stopped herself before she said, “mine.” Instead, she tried for his sympathy.

“I’m going to be enough of a freakazoid when I go back to school as The Girl Who Gained Sight without everyone making a big deal out of this ... this side effect.”

He didn’t look happy, but he did nod. “As you say, Miss Caitlin.”

“Still,” she said, an idea suddenly coming to her, “I’d like to see more of these images. What folder are you storing the files in?” Her heart was pounding. Yes, yes! This would be perfect! This was exactly what she needed.

Although Prime had taught me twenty-six symbols, it seemed, most confusingly, that they each had two forms. Sometimes when Prime touched the part of her device that was marked with the A symbol, the expected “A” was echoed on the display; other times—indeed, most times—the symbol “a” appeared instead.

But I soon found that there was a simple relationship between each pair of related symbols. “A” was 01000001, but “a” was 01100001. Likewise, “B” was 01000010, whereas “b” was 01100010. That is, the codes for the forms were identical, except for the sixth bit of information: the form as marked on the device was produced when the sixth bit was zero; if that bit was a one, the alternative form was produced.

Of course, eight zeros is nothing: 00000000. But if that sixth bit became a one, a special kind of nothing was produced: the code 00100000 put a blank space on the display that separated one word from another. The next time Prime accepted data from me, I’d be able to send “APPLE BALL” instead of

“APPLEBALL”—and I might even surprise Prime with my cleverness and send “apple ball.”

I still had no idea what an “apple” or a “ball” was, though. On closer inspection I’d discovered that “apple” wasn’t really circular; nor was “egg,”

which I’d briefly thought was Prime’s word for “white.” No, “apple,” “ball,”

and “egg,” and the rest, must be words for other, still-elusive, concepts. If only I could divine what even one of Prime’s words meant, perhaps the others would follow...

Caitlin went back to her room and read some more of Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life. She loved the book but wasn’t blind—so to speak—to its flaws, and there was a particular passage that was tickling at the back of her consciousness; she quickly found it, and read it with her finger.

Although the book purported to be a first-person autobiography, a lot of the text described things even a normal blind person couldn’t be aware of, much less the prelinguistic Helen who had existed prior to the water-pump moment. In Helen’s later, more-candid book Teacher, she referred to the entity that existed before her “soul dawn” as “Phantom,” a nonperson, a nonentity. But in The Story of My Life, which had originally been written in installments for the genteel Ladies Home Journal, she presented a more palatable, less alien version of her early life. Still, Helen couldn’t quite bring herself to do so with a straight face, and the book slipped into third person from time to time as if to tip off the reader that she had shifted to fantasy:

Two little children were seated on the veranda steps one hot July afternoon. One was black as ebony, with little bunches of fuzzy hair tied with shoestrings sticking out all over her head like corkscrews. The other was white, with long golden curls. One child was six years old, the other two or three years older. The younger child was blind—that was I.

A phantom couldn’t know any of that; a phantom couldn’t understand shoestrings and corkscrews and skin color. And expecting whatever was lurking on the Web to make sense of things it could have no experience of was equally crazy. Apple! Ball! Cat! Gibberish, with no relationship to its reality.

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.