I nonetheless felt I was making progress, and I continued to watch. After CAT came DOG, then EGG, then FROG, none of which meant anything to me. Still, I was sure they were indeed symbols that could be manipulated, shorthands for complex ideas. My teacher continued with the lesson, and I struggled to follow along…
Chapter 40
Caitlin could only take so much of the literacy program before she had to do something else to make her feel intelligent again. And so, after muttering under her breath “See Caitlin go away!,” she closed her browser and brought up Mathematica instead. Actually, she brought it up twice — once in the command-line mode she was used to, and again in the full-screen graphical-user-interface mode. Many mathematical symbols were still new to her — oh, she knew most of the concepts they represented, but she hadn’t yet learned their shapes. She’d had no idea, for instance, that a capital sigma, which represented summation, looked like a sideways M.
To see if she was manipulating the graphical version properly, she decided to start by simply reproducing some of the work that Kuroda and her dad had already performed, and so she loaded their project off the household network.
To replicate what they’d done, she’d need some data on the cellular automata. To get it, she’d have to switch her eyePod over to duplex mode, and that made her nervous. But after the incident with the static shock, it seemed clear that she could go back and forth at will between websight and seeing reality, and — ah, yes, it worked fine.
She buffered a few seconds of raw Jagster data, then, as Kuroda had done before, she fed the data a frame at a time into the eyePod. The background made up of the cellular automata was obvious, and she stared at it as it went step-by-step through its permutations; she could clearly see spaceships going hither and yon. She recorded the output, just as Kuroda had done before, switched back to looking at reality, brought up the Zipf-plot function, and fed her new data into it.
And the result, shown on the monitor, was just what it was supposed to be: a line with a negative-one slope, the telltale sign of a signal that carried information. Buoyed — or, as she liked to say, girled — she went ahead and plugged the data into the Shannon-entropy function, and—
Well, that was strange.
When her dad had run the data, he’d gotten a second-order Shannon-entropy score, indicating very-low-level complexity.
But her results were clearly third order.
She must have done something wrong. She noodled around, looking for the source of her error. Of course, she could ask her father or Dr. K where she’d screwed up, but figuring that out was half the fun! But after half an hour of checking and rechecking, she could find no flaw in what she’d done — which meant the error was probably in sampling. The data Kuroda and her dad had looked at must have been different somehow, and either their data set or hers wasn’t typical.
She switched to websight again — she was getting the hang of making the transition quickly, and no longer found it disorienting. Of course, when looking at the background a frame at a time, she had been vastly slowing down her perception of the Web; although she’d spent several minutes examining the buffered data, it represented only a small amount of time. But now that she was just looking in on the Web in real time, the background of cellular automata was shimmering once more.
She thought perhaps the giant, jittering version of her own face might reappear — perhaps that was what was causing her to get different results. But it didn’t, although…
Yes, something was different here in webspace. There was a tiny wavering, an annoying flashing, just at the limit of her perception. It wasn’t in the shimmering background, though; it was coming right at her. She frowned, contemplating it.
Yes, yes, yes! After the lesson, Prime rewarded me by reflecting myself back at me again. But I wanted to demonstrate my comprehension, so instead of reflecting Prime back at itself, I tried something new…
Caitlin switched back to simplex mode, restoring her vision of the real world, and then she headed down to the basement. Kuroda was once more hunched over in one of the swivel chairs, typing away at the desktop computer’s keyboard. He seemed lost in thought, and apparently hadn’t heard Caitlin enter, so she finally said, “Excuse me.”
Kuroda looked up. “Oh, Miss Caitlin. Sorry. How’s the reading going? Up to polysyllables yet?”
The letters F U briefly flashed through her mind. “Fine,” she said. “But, um, back in Tokyo, you used a phrase I didn’t understand. You said I might experience some ‘visual noise’ when you first activated the eyePod.”
Kuroda nodded. “Yes?”
“Visual noise — that’s interference, right? Garbage in the signal?”
“Yes, exactly. Sorry. I should have explained myself better.”
“I didn’t experience any back then,” she said. “But I think I might be experiencing some now.”
He swiveled his massive form around to face her properly. “Tell me.”
“Well, when I go into websight mode, I—”
“You’re doing that again?”
“I can’t resist, I’m sorry.”
“No, no. Don’t be. If I could see the Web, believe me, I’d be doing it, too. Anyway, what’s happening?”
“I’m not sure. But, um, could you have a look at the datastream that’s being fed to my eyePod?”
“The Jagster datastream, you mean?”
“I guess. But I think it’s being … polluted by something else.”
He frowned. “It shouldn’t be. Anyway, sure, let me have a look. Go into duplex mode, please.”
She did so; the eyePod made its high-pitched beep.
She heard his chair swivel and the clicking of a mouse. After a few moments he said, “It’s just raw Jagster data.”
“What are you looking at?”
“The feed coming to you from Tokyo.”
“No, no. Don’t look at the source; look at the destination. Look at what’s actually going into the buffer on my eyePod.”
“It should be the same thing, but … okay. Yeah, Jagster data, and … hello!”
“What?”
“You’re in duplex mode now, right?”
“Yes, yes. I have to be to receive.”
“Right. But … hmmm. Well, there is an extra signal coming in. It’s not properly formatted HTML, it’s … well, that’s strange.”
“What?”
“I’m looking at it with a debugging tool. See?”
“No, I’m seeing the Web.”
“Right, right. Well, I’m looking at a hex dump — 4A, 41, 52, 4B, etc. All the high-order nibbles are four or five. But the screen also shows the ASCII equivalent, and, well, I mean, yeah, it’s gibberish, and — oh, no, hang on. It’s not, it’s just hard to read. It’s all run together without spaces, but it says, ‘Egg frog goose hand igloo’.” He paused, then: “Ah, I must have come in the middle. It cycles around again to the beginning of the alphabet: ‘Apple ball cat dog,’ then ‘egg frog,’ etc.”
“How does it say it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, is it all in capitals?”
“Yes. How’d you know?”
“Here … give me a sec.” Caitlin reached into her pocket, and pressed the eyePod’s button. She heard the low-pitched tone, and webspace dissolved into reality. She moved over and peered at the LCD monitor. It was overwhelming, seeing so many capitals packed together; she had trouble making sense of them, but—
“That’s part of the reading exercise I did earlier. But how could that get bounced back at me?”
Kuroda frowned. “I have no idea.” He looked at her. “Has anything else like this happened?”