“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.
Chapter 42
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.