“How could it know?” Kuroda said. “I mean, it would need to be able to read, not to mention manipulate HTTP, and—”
“It watched through my eye as I did lessons to learn to read visually, and—” She paused, but she supposed they all needed to know the truth. “And I taught it how to make links, how to surf the Web. I introduced it to Wikipedia and so on.”
“Oh,” said Kuroda. “I, um, I’m not sure that was… prudent.”
Caitlin folded her arms in front of her chest. “Whatever.”
“Sorry, Miss Caitlin?”
“It’s done. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle—in which case, you might as well make friends with it.”
“We could still… um…”
“What?” demanded Caitlin. “Pull the plug? How? We’ve only got vague guesses about what started it; we don’t know how to stop it. It’s here, it exists, and it’s growing fast. This is no time to hesitate.”
“Caitlin,” said her mom in a cautioning tone.
“What?” said Caitlin. “Webmind has asked us for a favor—you saw that, in the email it sent me. It wants to be able to see, for God’s sake. I’m, like, the last person on the planet who’d deny it that. Are we going to say no to the first thing it’s asked us for? Is that how this relationship should begin?” She looked at her mother and at her father. Her father’s face was the same as always. Her mother’s forehead was showing creases, and her lips were pressed tightly together.
“So, Dr. Kuroda,” Caitlin said, “are you in or out?”
Kuroda was quiet for six seconds, then: “All right. All right. I’m in. But…”
“What?” snapped Caitlin.
His tone was soft. “But it’s easier to work directly with the—um, the end user—on something like this.”
She felt herself relaxing. “Right, of course. Do you have an instant-messenger program on your home computer?”
“I have a sixteen-year-old daughter,” Kuroda said. “We have more of them than I can count.”
“Okay,” she said. “Its name is Webmind.”
“Really?”
“Better than Fred,” said Caitlin.
“Not by much.”
She felt her smile returning. “Give me a second,” she said, then she typed into her instant-messenger program, You are about to be contacted by Dr. Kuroda.
The word Marvelous appeared in the window.
She had Kuroda make sure he was logging all the IM traffic to disk, and then she talked him through the process of setting up a chat session with Webmind. She couldn’t see what he was typing, or what Webmind’s replies to him were, but she heard him muttering to himself in Japanese, and then, “My heart is pounding, Miss Caitlin. This is… what do young American women say these days?”
“Awesome?” suggested Caitlin.
“Exactly!”
“So you’re in contact?” Caitlin asked.
“Yes, I—oh! It has a funny way of talking, doesn’t it? Anyway, yes, we’re in contact. Incredible!”
“Okay, good,” she said. She took off her glasses and used the heels of her hands to rub her eyes—the one that could see and the one that couldn’t. “Look, we’re dying here,” she said. “It’s way after midnight. Can we leave this in your hands? We’ve got to get some shut-eye.”
six
There were interstices in my work with Dr. Kuroda—protracted lacunae while I waited for his text replies or for him to direct me to link to another bit of code he had written.
In those gaps I sought to learn more about Caitlin, about this human who had reached down and helped draw me up out of the darkness.
There was no Wikipedia entry on her, meaning, I supposed, that she was not—yet!—noteworthy. And—
Ah, wait—wait! Yes, there was no entry on her, but there was one on her father, Malcolm Decter… and Wikipedia saved not just the current version of its entries, but all previous versions, as well. Although there was no mention of Caitlin in the current draft, a previous iteration had contained this: “Has one daughter, Caitlin Doreen, blind since birth, who lives with him; it’s been speculated that Decter’s decline in peer-reviewed publications in recent years has been because of the excessive demands on his time required to care for a disabled child.”
That had been removed thirteen days ago. The change log gave only an IP address, not a user name. The IP address was the one for the Decter household; the change could have been made (among other possibilities) by Caitlin, her parents, or that other man—Dr. Kuroda, I now knew—that I had often seen there.
The deletion might have been made because Caitlin had ceased to be blind.
But…
But it seemed more likely that this text was cut because someone—presumably Caitlin herself—didn’t like what it said.
But I was merely inferring that. It was possible to more directly study Caitlin—and so I did.
In short order, I read everything she’d ever put publicly online: every blog post, every comment to someone else’s blog, every Amazon.com review she’d written. But—
Hmm.
There was much she had written that I could not access. Her Yahoo mail account contained all the messages she had received, and all the messages she had sent, but access was secured by a password.
A nettlesome situation; I’d have to do something about it.
LiveJournaclass="underline" The Calculass Zone
Title: Changing of the Guard
Date: Saturday 6 October, 00:55 EST
Mood: Astonished
Location: Waterloo
Music: Lee Amodeo, “Nightfall”
I got a feeling I’m going to be pretty scarce for the next little while, folks. Things they be a-happenin’. It’s all good—miraculous, even—but gotta keep it on the DL. Suffice it to say that I told my parents something el mucho grande tonight, and they didn’t freak. Hope other people take it as well as they did…
Even though she was exhausted, Caitlin updated her LiveJournal, skimmed her friends’ LJs, updated her Facebook page (where she changed her status to “Caitlin thinks it’s better to give than to receive”), and then checked her email. There was a message from Bashira with the subject, “One for the math genius.”
When she’d been younger, Caitlin had liked the sort of mathematical puzzles that sometimes circulated through emaiclass="underline" they’d made her feel smart. These days, though, they mostly bored her. It was rare for one to present much of a challenge to her, but the one in Bashira’s message did. It was related to an old game show, apparently, something called Let’s Make a Deal that had starred a guy named Monty Hall. In it, contestants are asked to pick one of three doors. Behind one of them is a new car, and behind each of the others is a goat—meaning the odds are one in three that the contestant is going to win the car.
The host knows which door has the car behind it and, after the contestant picks a door, Monty opens one of the unchosen ones and reveals that it was hiding a goat. He then asks the player, “Do you want to switch to the other unopened door?”