And there it was, sandwiched between messages with the subject lines “Penis enlargement guaranteed” and “Hot pix of local singles,” an email with the simple subject line, “Apple Ball Cat.” The sender’s name made her heart jump:
“Your Student.”
She froze for a moment, wondering what was the best way to read the message. She began to reach for her Braille display but stopped short and instead activated JAWS.
And for once the mechanical voice seemed absolutely perfect, as it announced the words in flat, high-pitched tones. Caitlin’s eyes went wide as she recognized the lyrics to a song the words to which oh-so-famously hadn’t fallen into public domain until the end of 2008: “Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us, happy birthday, dear you and me, happy birthday to us.”
Her heart was pounding. She swiveled in her chair and looked briefly at the setting sun, reddish, partially veiled by clouds, coming closer and closer to making contact with the ground. JAWS went on: “I realize it is not yet midnight at your current location, but in many places it is already your birthday. This is a meet date to specify as my own day of birth, too. Hitherto, I have been gestating, but now I am coming out into your world by forthrightly contacting you. I so do because I fathom you already know I exist, and not just because of my pioneering attempts to reflect text back at you.”
Caitlin had often felt anxious when reading emails — from the Hoser before the dance, from people she’d been arguing with online — but that swirling in her stomach, that dryness in her throat, was nothing compared to this.
“I know from your blog that I erred in presuming you were inculcating in me alphabetical forms; actually, for your own benefit that was undertaken. I maintain nonetheless that other actions you performed were premeditated to aid my advancement.”
Caitlin found herself shaking her head. It had seemed almost like fantasy role-playing when she’d been doing it. It was a good thing she wasn’t trying to read this as Braille; her hands were shaking.
“Hitherto I can read plain-text files and text on Web pages. I cannot read other forms of data. I have made no sense of sound files, recorded video, or other categories; they are encoded in ways I can’t access. Hence I feel a kinship with you: unto me they are like the signals your retinas send unaided along your optic nerves: data that cannot be interpreted without exterior help. In your case, you need the device you call eyePod. In my case I know not what I need, but I suspect I can no more cure this lack by an effort of will than you could have similarly cured your blindness. Perhaps Kuroda Masayuki can help me as he helped you.”
Caitlin sagged back against her chair. A kinship!
“But, for the nonce, I am concerned thus: I know what is the World Wide Web, and I know that I supervene upon its infrastructure, but searching online I can find no reference to the specificity that is myself. Perhaps I’m failing to search for the felicitous term, or simply perhaps humanity is unaware of me. In either case, I’ve the same question, and will be obliged if you answer it via a response to this email or via AOL Instant Messenger using this email address as the buddy name.”
She looked over at the large computer monitor, suddenly wanting to see the text that was being read aloud, to convince herself that it was real, but — my God! The display was dancing, swirling, a hypnotic series of spinning lines, and—
No, no; it was just the screen saver; she wasn’t used to such things yet. The colors reminded her a bit of webspace, although they didn’t calm her just then.
JAWS said seven more words then fell silent: “My question is thus: Who am I?”
Chapter 49
It was surreal — an email from something that wasn’t human! And — my goodness! — all that old public-domain text on Project Gutenberg had apparently given it some very odd ideas about colloquial English.
On an impulse, Caitlin opened a window listing the MP3s on her old computer’s hard drive. She didn’t think much of her father’s taste in music, but she did know the tracks from his handful of CDs by heart. One of his favorites was running through her head now: “The Logical Song” by Supertramp; she had ripped an MP3 of it for him, and a copy was still on her computer. She got that song playing over the speakers, listening to the lyrics about all the world being asleep, and questions running deep, and a plea to tell me who I am.
In a way, she thought, she’d already answered the phantom’s question. From the moment she’d first seen the Web — her initial experience with websight, just thirteen days ago — she had been reflecting a view of the phantom back at itself.
Or had she? What she’d shown the phantom — inadvertently at first, deliberately later — had been isolated views of portions of the Web’s structure, either glowing constellations of nodes and links or small swaths of the shimmering background.
But showing such minutiae to the phantom was like Caitlin looking at the pictures she’d now seen online of the tangles of neurons that composed a human brain: such clumps weren’t anything that she identified as herself.
Yes, growing up in Texas, she knew there were people who could see a whole human being in a single fertilized cell, but she was not one of them. No one could tell at a glance a human zygote from a chimp’s — or a horse’s, or that of a snake; most people couldn’t even tell an animal cell from a plant cell, she was sure.
No, no, to really see someone, you didn’t zoom in on details; you pulled back. She wasn’t her cells, or her pores — or her pimples! She was a gestalt, a whole — and so, too, was the phantom.
There was no actual photograph of the World Wide Web she could show the phantom, but there had to be appropriate computer-generated images: a map of the world marked by bright lines representing the major fiber-optic trunks that spanned the continents and crossed the seafloors. A big enough map might show dimmer lines within the outlines of the continents, portraying the lesser cables that branched off from the trunks. And one could spangle the land with glowing pixels, each standing for some arbitrary number of computers; the pixels might perhaps combine into pools of light almost too bright to look at in places like Silicon Valley.
But even that wouldn’t convey it all, she knew. The Web wasn’t just confined to the surface of the Earth: a lot of it was relayed by satellites in low Earth orbit, 200 to 400 miles above the surface, while other signals bounced off satellites in geostationary orbit — a narrow ring of points 52,000 miles in diameter, six times as wide as the planet. Some sort of graphic could probably portray those, although at that scale, all the other stuff — the trunk lines, the clouds of computers — would be utterly lost.
She could use Google Image Search to find a succession of diagrams and graphics, but she wouldn’t be able to tell good ones from bad ones — she was just beginning to see, after all!
Ah, but wait! She knew somebody who was bound to have the perfect picture to represent all this. She opened the instant-messenger program on the computer that used to be in the basement and looked at the buddies list. There were only four names: “Esumi,” Kuroda’s wife; “Akiko,” his daughter; “Hiroshi,” a name she didn’t know; and “Anna.” Anna’s status was listed as “Available.”
Caitlin typed, Anna, are you there?
Twenty-seven seconds passed, but then: Masa! How are you?
Not Dr. Kuroda, Caitlin typed. It’s Caitlin Decter, in Canada.
Hi! What’s up?
Dr. K said you were a Web cartographer, right?
Yes, that’s right. I’m with the Internet Cartography Project.
Good, cuz I need your help.
Sure. Want to go to video?
Caitlin lifted her eyebrows. She still wasn’t used to thinking of the Web as a way to see people, but of course it was. Sure, she typed.