“I’m going in,” she said. Her eyePod was in her left hip pocket. She pulled it out and pressed the button on its side, and she heard the high-pitched beep that meant it was switching over to duplex mode, and—
And webspace filled her existence, enveloping her.
At first glance, everything seemed normaclass="underline" colored lines and circles of varying sizes, but, of course, the Web was all right; it was Webmind’s status that was in question. And so she concentrated her attention—focused her mind—on the shimmering background of webspace, the vast sea of cellular automata flipping states and generating patterns, barely visible at the limit of her resolution.
Or, at least, that’s what she should have seen, that’s what she’d hoped to see, that’s what she’d always seen before.
But instead—
God, no.
Huge hunks of the background were—well, now that she saw them as big patches, instead of tiny points, she could see that they were a very pale blue. And other parts were stationary swaths of deep, dark green. Oh, there were still shimmering parts, pinpoints flipping between blue and green so rapidly as to give the effect of movement. But much of the activity had simply stopped.
But—why? And was there a way to get it going again?
The lines she was seeing were active links, but there were thousands of them, and the crisscrossing was impossible to untangle.
It hadn’t always been like that. When Caitlin had first started perceiving the World Wide Web—unexpectedly, accidentally, while Dr. Kuroda had been uploading new firmware into her post-retinal implant—she’d only seen a few lines and a couple of circles: just her own local connection to the Web.
Later on, so she could explore webspace on a grander scale, Kuroda had started sending her the raw datafeed from the open-source Jagster search engine, which let her follow thousands upon thousands of active links created by other users. That’s what she was seeing now, and normally it was marvelous—but it obscured the connections that she herself had created. If she’d been calmer, maybe she could have sorted through it all, but right now it just looked like a jumble—with Webmind dying behind it.
“We need Dr. Kuroda,” Caitlin said anxiously.
She couldn’t see her mother, but she could hear her. “I can try IMing him.”
“No, no,” said Caitlin. “He must be asleep. You’ve got to phone him, wake him up.”
Caitlin felt her mother squeeze her shoulder reassuringly. “All right. Where’s his number?”
“He was the last person I called on my bedroom phone,” Caitlin said. “Use the redial. Hurry!”
Caitlin heard her mother running across the hall, and, faintly, the bleeping of the phone dialing. For her part, Caitlin got up and started heading across the hall as well, holding her notebook, and—
Shit! She walked into the wall. It was one thing to navigate blindly; it was quite another to try to do so while being bombarded by the lights of webspace. She held her notebook in one hand, and ran her other one over its case and screen, looking for signs of damage.
“Hello, Mrs. Kuroda,” she heard her mother saying. “It’s Barbara Decter—Caitlin’s mom, in Canada.”
Mrs. Kuroda spoke only a little English, Caitlin knew. Caitlin groped with her free hand and found her way out of her mom’s office. “Speakerphone,” she said, as she entered her own room. The lines and colors of webspace shifted violently as she moved over and sat on her bed.
Her mother hit the button. “—but very late,” said Mrs. Kuroda’s heavily accented voice.
“It’s an emergency,” shouted Caitlin. “Get Dr. Kuroda!”
“He sleep,” said Mrs. Kuroda. “But I try.”
Caitlin felt her stomach knotting. As they waited, she saw another large patch of the webspace background freeze. It wasn’t solidly one color or the other, but it was no longer shimmering, no longer alive.
Time passed; Caitlin was so frazzled she didn’t know how much. Finally, a groggy, wheezy voice said something in Japanese.
“Dr. Kuroda!” said Caitlin. “I need you to cut the Jagster feed to my eyePod.”
“Cut the feed—?”
“Do it! Do it now!”
“Is something wrong?
“Yes, yes! Webmind has gone silent. I’m trying to find out why. I’m looking at webspace but—” she paused, then words that had been meaningless to her before suddenly leapt from her mouth: “But I can’t see the damned forest for the trees.”
“I—I’m in my bedroom. Give me a minute…”
Caitlin wheeled her head left and right, looking at webspace and the static background behind so much of it now. She sat on the bed and typed into her notebook’s instant-messenger program: Webmind? Are you there? But she couldn’t see the reply, so she called her mother over.
“Nothing,” her mother said.
Damn! What was taking Kuroda so long? Japanese houses were supposed to be small!
Suddenly, there was a lot of noise from the speakerphone: Kuroda fumbling to pick up a handset. “Okay,” he said. “I’m at one of my computers.” He was wheezing even more than usual; he must have run to get there. “Now what—”
“Cut the Jagster feed!” Caitlin shouted. “Cut it!”
“Okay, okay. I’m accessing my server at the university…”
“Hurry!”
“I’m in, and I’m looking for the right place…”
“Come on, come on.”
“I’m trying, but it’s—”
“Pull the fucking plug!”
Caitlin was glad she couldn’t see her mother’s face just then, and—Ah!
Suddenly almost all the colored lines disappeared, and the vast majority of the circles, too. She was back to seeing just a handful of links: her eyePod connecting to the Decter household network, and the outgoing links from there into the Web.
“Did that do that trick?” asked Kuroda.
“Yes!”
“Okay, now would you mind telling—”
“You tell him, Mom!” Caitlin said. She started typing gibberish into the instant-messenger window, just smashing keys as fast as she could, until the message buffer was full. Instead of hitting enter, though, she instead hit ctrl-A to highlight the entire message, and then ctrl-C to copy it—and then she hit enter, and—
—and a bright green line briefly appeared in her vision, shooting off to the lower left. But before she could really focus on it, it was gone.
She hit ctrl-V, pasting the same block back in, then enter, then ctrl-V again, then enter—over and over.
The green line flickered, pulsing on for an instant each time she sent the text to Webmind. Caitlin focused her attention on that line, following its length, swinging her head to do so, tracking the link.
Ctrl-V, enter. Ctrl-V, enter.
Following, following.
Of course, this line wouldn’t lead her all the way to Webmind. But it might give her some clue as to what had gone wrong, and—
And there it was: a small circle to which this green link line connected, and another line—this one bright orange—branching off from the circle at an acute angle, and, behind it, more lines, all the same shade of orange.
Webmind was decentralized, dispersed through the infrastructure of the World Wide Web, but it needed to interact with the Web to access the information on it; it needed to manipulate IP addresses, and—
And Kuroda had suggested at one point that her mind interpreted each IP address as a specific wavelength of light, but—
But she couldn’t recall ever seeing two link lines that were precisely the same color at the same time before. No, no, that wasn’t completely true. She did see multiple lines of the same color, but only because each line endured for a time after the links were broken; she understood this to be related to the phenomenon of persistence of vision that made it possible for people to watch movies and TV. But previously one link had always faded from view shortly after another had brightened up, but these orange lines were all solid and glaringly bright, and—