“Oh, he borrowed them from work. Speaking of which, let’s get to it.”
Kuroda helped guide her to one of the chairs, and he settled into the other; she could hear it squeaking a bit. “Let me log onto my servers in Tokyo,” he said. “I want to examine the datastream you sent them during the lightning storm — see if we can isolate what it was that caused your primary visual cortex to respond.”
She could hear him typing away and, as he did, she realized she’d forgotten to mention something over breakfast. “After the lightning flashes,” she said, “webspace looked different.”
“Different how?”
“Well, I could still see the structure of the Web clearly, like before, but the … the background, I guess, was different.”
He stopped typing. “What do you mean?”
“It used to be dark. Black, I guess.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s, um, lighter? I could see details in it.”
“Details?”
“Yeah. Like — like…” She struggled to make the connection; the pattern did remind her of something she was familiar with, but — got it! “Like a chessboard.” She had a blind person’s chessboard, with squares that were alternately raised and lowered, and Braille initials on the top of each piece; she sometimes played her dad. “But, um, not quite. I mean, it was made of lighter and darker squares, but they’re not in the same pattern as a chessboard, and they go on, like, forever.”
“How big are they?”
“Tiny. If they were any tinier, I don’t think I could see them. In fact, I can’t swear that they were squares, but they were packed tightly together and made rows and columns.”
“And there were thousands of them?”
“Millions. Maybe billions. They’re everywhere.”
Kuroda sat as quietly as was possible for him, then: “You know, human vision is made of pixels, just like a computerized image. Each axon in the optic nerve provides one picture element. Now, most people aren’t conscious of them, but if you have decent focus, and you look at a blank wall, some people can see them. Your brain is processing Web information as if it were coming from your eye; it may be hardwired to see it all as a mesh of pixels at the limits of resolution, but…”
He trailed off. After ten seconds she prodded him.
“But?”
“Well, I’m just thinking. You’ve described seeing circles, which we’ve taken to be websites, and lines connecting them, which we’ve assumed represent hyperlinks. And that’s it — that’s the World Wide Web, right? That’s all of it. So, what could make up the background to the Web? I mean, in human vision, the—”
“Don’t say that.”
“Pardon?”
“‘Human vision.’ Don’t say that. I’m human.”
A sharp intake of breath. “I’m so sorry, Miss Caitlin. May I say ‘normal’ vision?”
“Yes.”
“All right. In normal vision, the background is — well, it’s the distant reaches of the universe if you’re looking up at the night sky. But what would be the background for the Web?”
“Background radiation?” she suggested. “Like the cosmic microwave background?”
Kuroda was quiet for a moment. “How old are you again?”
“Hey,” she said, “my father is a physicist, you know.”
“Well, the cosmic microwave background is uniform to a fraction of a degree in all directions. But what you’re seeing is mottled in black and white, you say?”
“Yeah. And it keeps shifting.”
“Pardon?”
“Shifting. Changing. Didn’t I mention that?”
“No. What do you mean precisely?”
Something brushed against her legs — ah, Schrodinger! Caitlin scooped him up into her lap. “The dark squares switch to light, and the light ones to dark,” she said.
“How rapidly?”
“Oh, really fast. Makes the whole thing shimmer.”
The springs on Kuroda’s chair squeaked as he stood up. She heard him walking across the room and then walking back toward her, then repeating the process: pacing. “It can’t be…” he said at last.
“What?”
He ignored her question. “How clearly could you see the individual cells?”
She scratched Schrodinger behind the ears. “Cells?”
“Pixels. I mean pixels. How clearly could you see them?”
“It was really hard.”
“Can you try again? Can you put the eyePod in duplex mode now?”
She fumbled to get the device out of her pocket without sending Schrodinger to the floor. Once it was free, she pressed the switch; the eyePod made its usual high-pitched beep, which Schrodinger answered with a surprised meow, and—
And there it was, spreading out before her: the World Wide Web.
“Can you see the background now?” Kuroda asked.
“Yes, if I concentrate…”
He sounded surprised. “You’re squinting.”
She shrugged. “It helps. But, yeah, if I really try, I can focus on a small group — a few hundred squares on a side.”
“Okay. Do you have a Go board?”
“What?”
“Um, okay — do you have any money?”
She narrowed her eyes again, but this time in suspicion. “Fifty bucks, maybe, but…”
“No, no. Coins! Do you have coins?”
“In a jar on my dresser.” She was saving to go see Lee Amodeo with Bashira when she came to Centre in the Square.
“Great, great. Do you mind if I go get it?”
“I can do it. It’s my house.”
“No, you take the time to look at the Web, see if you can make out any more detail in the background. I’ll be right back.”
Kuroda could never sneak up on anyone. She heard the sounds of his return long before he actually arrived. She then heard a great jangling as he dumped the coins on their worktable, and more noise as he shuffled them around — perhaps sorting them. “All right. Here’s a bunch of coins. Can you arrange them in the pattern you’re seeing? Put one down for each light spot, and leave a coin-sized space for each dark spot.”
Caitlin shooed Schrodinger out of her lap, and swung her chair to face the table. “I told you. They keep changing.”
“Yes, yes, but…” He made a noisy sigh. “I wish there were some way to photograph it, or at least to slow down your perception, and—” His voice brightened. “And there is! Of course there is!”
She heard him moving about, then soft key clicks. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m halting your reception of the datastream from Jagster, and just passing on the last iteration of it over and over again, so it’ll keep coming down the pike without changing, sort of like—”
“A freeze-frame!” she said as the image ceased to move. She was delighted to be able to apply another concept she’d only ever read about before.
“Exactly. Now, can you make a pattern with the coins that matches what you’re seeing in a portion of the background?”
“A very small portion,” she said. And she started moving the coins around; he’d given her a bunch of dimes. After a moment, she pushed one off to a corner of the desk. “American,” she said; all those years of reading Braille made it easy to tell Queen Elizabeth from FDR.
She built up a grid of dimes and dime-sized empty spaces, counting the coins automatically as she deployed them. “Done,” she announced. “Eight dollars and ninety cents.”
“Completely random,” Kuroda said, sounding disappointed.
“No, it’s not. Not quite. See this group of five dimes here?” She had no trouble keeping track of the pattern she’d made, and touched the appropriate coins. “It’s the same as this group here, except turned ninety degrees to the right.”
“So it is,” he said, excitedly. “It looks like the letter L.”
“And this one’s the same, too,” she said, “turned upside down.”