“No,” she said, perhaps too quickly. “Weird, isn’t it?”
Kuroda’s features rearranged themselves in a way Caitlin had never seen before, but she guessed it meant he was perplexed. “It certainly is,” he said.
“You’re using an online literacy site, right?”
“Yes.”
“It must communicate in HTML, or at least with HTTP standards,” he said. “I mean, I’ll check it out, but if the feed from it was just somehow echoing back at you, there should be more than just the ASCII characters.”
“Doesn’t most of the Web use Unicode instead of ASCII these days?” Caitlin asked.
“Oh, lots of it is still pure ASCII, but for basic Western letters, Unicode and ASCII are the same, anyway; Unicode just adds a second byte to each character that’s nothing but eight zero bits.”
“Ah, okay. But where’s this coming from?”
He took a deep breath, let it out, and lifted his chubby hands a bit. “I’m sorry, Miss Caitlin. I have no idea.”
Back in her room, Caitlin did two hours of online literacy lessons, but found her mind wandering back to the question of why she’d gotten a different Shannon-entropy score than her father had. She decided to try to replicate his results again, going through the process of gathering more data from the cellular automata and feeding it into the Shannon-entropy calculator, and—
Shit.
This time it came up as fourth-order entropy.
It could be another sampling error, but the sequence of second, third, fourth seemed more like a progression…
Could it be?
Could the information being conveyed by the cellular automata be growing more complex over time?
Did that make any sense at all?
No, no. Surely it was just that she wasn’t properly clearing out the data she’d previously fed into Mathematica. Yes, that had to be it: first, her dad had fed it a single set of data, and it had shown up as second-order entropy; next, she’d accidentally added another set on top of the first one, and it yielded third-order entropy. And now, she’d dumped yet another set of data on top of the previous two, and the program was reporting a result of fourth-order entropy. There must be a data cache somewhere in the program; all she needed to do was find it and flush it.
She went to the help function and searched for “cache.” Nothing. She tried “buffer” and “memory,” and a bunch of other things … but none of the answers given seemed appropriate. No, unless she had specifically merged in previous data sets, they simply shouldn’t be included in the calculations she was doing now.
Which meant…
No, Caitlin thought. That’s ridiculous.
But—
But.
Oh, come on! she thought. She knew better than to try to extrapolate a trend from only three data points.
But…
But it was as though there was something emerging on the Web, and it was growing smarter hour by hour.
No.
No, it was crazy. She was tired; that’s all. Tired, and making mistakes.
She needed to clear her head, and so she went downstairs to get something to drink. She had to pass through the living room and the dining room to get to the kitchen. Her father was in the living room, sitting in his favorite chair, reading a magazine. After Caitlin got some water from the dispenser on the front of the fridge, she sat in the dining room — not in her usual seat, but the one opposite, so that she could look out at her father, hopefully without him being aware of it.
He was a good man, she knew that. He worked hard, and he was brilliant. And although she’d thanked her mother for all the sacrifices she’d made for her, Caitlin had never thanked him. She sat, thinking for a time, trying to decide what to say, and, at last, she got to her feet and crossed through the opening that separated the two rooms.
“Dad?”
He shifted his gaze — not to look at her, but at least he was no longer looking at the magazine. “Yes?”
He said it mechanically, coldly — as he said everything. Why couldn’t he be warmer? Why did he have to be so flat?
It just popped out, unbidden, and she regretted it as soon as she said it:
“You never say you love me.”
“Yes I do,” he said, again without looking at her. “I said it after you appeared in your school play as a koala bear.”
That had been when she was seven. And, she guessed, since he’d made the point then, and nothing had changed since, there was no need to belabor the issue.
“Dad…” she said again, softly, plaintively.
And he tried … he really tried. He shifted his gaze from the empty space he’d been looking at and, for just a moment, he looked at her. But then his eyes snapped away. Caitlin wanted to reach out to him, to touch his arm, to connect with him. But that would just make things worse, she knew. She looked at him a moment longer, then withdrew, heading up to her room while he returned to his magazine.
Once upstairs, she lay back on her bed, and, with an effort of will, she managed to stop thinking about her father, and instead focused on the anomalous Shannon-entropy results. She could hear her mother puttering around in the master bedroom, but she shut that out — she shut everything out — and tried to think rationally.
Something out there, something in webspace, had reflected her own face back at her. And that something had now also reflected back text strings at her. And, damn it all, she was a fine mathematician. She did not make mistakes, and it probably wasn’t a sampling error. No, there really was something out there, in the background of the Web, and it was getting smarter; the Shannon-entropy scores showed that.
She closed her eyes, but she could still see a pinkish haze: the overhead lights coming through her eyelids. She had an urge, all of a sudden, to … go home, to go back to where she’d come from, to experience blindness once more, just for a moment; after all, if you couldn’t see, it didn’t matter that other people couldn’t look at you.
She reached into her pocket, found the switch on the eyePod, and held it down until the unit shut off altogether. The vague notion of sight she had when her eyes were closed ceased. Yes, her mind was supplying the same gray haze as before, but that just made the experience of blindness she was having more like Helen Keller’s, and—
And it hit her then. It hit her like—
Not like a lightbulb going on; she knew that was the common metaphor, and now had even seen it happen.
And not like a lightning bolt — another metaphor she knew that applied to being struck by something unexpected.
No, it hit her like … like—
Like water! Like cold, clean water running out of a pump onto her hand…
She knew what she had to do. She knew why she’d been given this strange, strange gift of websight.
Poor Helen had been blind and deaf from the age of nineteen months. When she’d lost her vision and hearing, she had descended into animal-like behavior, undisciplined and unthinking; there was no external reason to believe that any rational being was left inside her. But when Annie Sullivan was hired to be Helen’s teacher and governess, she took it as an article of faith that somewhere, down deep in the silence and darkness, adrift in a void, was a mind. And she committed herself to reaching down to it, whatever it took, and pulling that mind up, literally and figuratively bringing it into the light of day.
Helen’s parents thought Annie was deluded — and, as they were quick to point out, they knew their wild child better than Annie did. But Miss Sullivan didn’t waver. She knew she was right and they were wrong, in part because of her personal experience of having been nearly blind in her own youth. Even cut off from much of the outside world, even isolated and alone, she knew a mind could exist, could grow.