She then brought up Microsoft Word, and used the same technique to resize its window into a narrow strip just a couple of inches high. Then she used the move command on the control menu to place that strip at the bottom of the screen.
Next, she fumbled around trying to figure out how to make the text big in Word. She’d used the program for years, but had rarely had cause to worry about font choices or type sizes. But she found the drop-down size menu, and she selected the largest choice on the list, which was seventy-two points.
And — oh, that pesky mouse pointer! It was so hard to see. Ah, but she knew from her old school that there was a way to make a bigger, bolder mouse pointer, and … found it!
“All right,” she said softly, “let’s see what kind of teacher I am…”
She knew the phantom could see what her left eye saw; it had reflected that eye’s view of herself in a mirror back at her, after all. And so she looked at the monitor for ten seconds, holding her gaze as steady as she could, establishing an overall view, letting the phantom absorb what it was being shown: a large picture with a long, narrow text box beneath. The picture must have been oddly recursive for the phantom, and Caitlin wanted to give it time to understand that what she was sending had switched from being her actual, real-time view of webspace to a still image of webspace.
And then she slowly, deliberately, moved the mouse, bringing the pointer over to one of the bright circles that represented a website. She moved the pointer around it repeatedly, hoping the phantom would notice the action.
Caitlin had once read a science-fiction book in which someone who had never seen a computer screen mistook the arrowhead pointer for a little pine tree. She realized that the idea of a pointer was freighted with assumptions, including a familiarity with archery, that the phantom couldn’t possibly possess. Still, she hoped the combination of movements she was making would draw its attention. But, just to be on the safe side, she slowly reached her own hand into her field of view, and tapped the point on the screen with her index finger. If the phantom had been watching the output of her eyePod, it had to have seen her indicate things that way before, and she hoped that it would get that she was now referring to a specific part of the screen.
And then she switched to the squashed Word window below the picture, and typed “WEBSITE,” which appeared in inch-high letters. She repeated the process: pointing at a website in the picture, and then typing the word again (after first highlighting it, so her new typing replaced the original version).
She repeated it with another circle, and identified it as a WEBSITE, too. And yet another circle, and again the word WEBSITE.
And then she found the selection tool for the graphics program that was displaying the picture of webspace, and she used it to draw a box around three large circles that weren’t linked to each other. She typed WEBSITES — wondering briefly if introducing plurals so early was a mistake. And then she isolated just one particularly large circle with the selection box and she typed AMAZON — knowing that it was highly unlikely that she’d actually guessed correctly which website that circle represented. Still, she pressed on, identifying a second website as GOOGLE and a third as CNN. All points are websites, she hoped to convey, and each has its own particular name.
And then, mathematician that she was, she pointed to a single website and typed “1,” and then, highlighting the numeral, she typed not the number again but rather its name: “ONE.”
She then used the selection tool to put a box around two points that weren’t otherwise connected to each other. And she typed “2,” then “TWO.” She continued for three, four, and five points. And then, wanting to help the phantom make a jump that had taken human thinkers thousands of years, she selected a spot that had no points in it at all, and typed the numeral zero and its name.
She then used the mouse to indicate a link line, and also traced its length on the screen with her fingertip. And she typed “LINK.”
Establishing nouns for the handful of things she could point to in webspace was easy enough. But even when they’d thought the information in the background of the Web was just dumb spies talking, she’d automatically given the spies verbs: drop bomb; kill bad guy. But how to illustrate verbs in webspace? Indeed, what verbs were appropriate? What happened in webspace?
Well, files were transferred, and—
And this phantom had apparently learned how to make links and send existing content; it had to have those skills to have echoed her face and the ASCII text strings back at her. But it likely didn’t know anything about file formats: it was probably ignorant of how information was stored and arranged in a Word .doc or .docx file, an Acrobat .pdf file, an Excel .xls file, an .mp3 sound file, or the .jpg graphic she was displaying on her monitor. The phantom was surrounded by the largest library ever created — millions upon millions of written documents and pictures and videos and audio recordings — and yet almost certainly had no idea how to open the individual volumes, or how to read their contents. The Web’s basic structure had protocols for moving a file from point A to point B, but the actual use of the files was something normally done by application programs running on the user’s own computer, and so was likely outside the phantom’s current scope. There was so much to teach it!
But all that was for later. For now, she wanted to focus on the basics. And the basic verb — the basic action — of the Web was right there in the names of its various protocols: HTTP, the hypertext transfer protocol; FTP, the file transfer protocol; SMTP, the simple mail transfer protocol. Surely the verb to transfer could be demonstrated!
She used the mouse pointer to indicate a site, but then was stymied. She wanted to show material flowing from one site to another in a single direction. But there was no way to turn off the mouse pointer; it was always there. Oh, she could move the mouse — or her finger — from a point on the left to a point on the right, but to repeat the gesture she’d have to bring the pointer or finger back to where it had started, and that would look like she was indicating movement in both directions — either that, or maybe it would look like she was highlighting the link line as an object, but not pointing out what that line was doing.
But, yes, there was a way! All she had to do was close her eyes for a second!
And she did just that, moving the pointer back to the origin while her eyes were closed, and then, with her eyes open, she moved the pointer from the origin to the destination again. Then she typed the word “TRANSFER” into her Word window.
She repeated this demonstration, showing the pointer moving from left to right along the length of the link line, over and over again, suggesting movement in a single direction, something going from the source to the destination, being transferred and—
“Cait-lin! Din-ner!”
Ah, well. It was probably wise to take a break, anyway, and let all this sink in. After her meal, though, like any good teacher, she’d assess how her pupil was doing: she’d give the phantom a test.
Chapter 43