“I mean, you know, he seems like a nice guy, but…”
“But,” said Webmind, “a girl has to be careful.”
She wondered if he was just quoting something he’d read from Project Gutenberg, or if he really understood what he was saying. “Exactly,” she replied.
“Matt is the boy you helped in math class?”
“Yes.”
“His last name is Reese?”
“Yes.”
“A moment. Matthew Peter Reese, Waterloo—I have his Facebook page… and his log-in there. And his email account at Hotmail. And his instant-messaging traffic. He makes no mention of you.”
Caitlin was saddened, but… “No, wait. He probably didn’t call me by name.”
“I tried searching for ‘Calculass,’ too.”
“You can’t just search for terms, Webmind. You have to actually read what he said.”
“Oh. You are correct. A segment of an instant-messenger session from 5:54 p.m. your time today. Matt: ‘Well, there is this one girl…’
“The other party: ‘In math class, you mean? I know the one. OMG, she is so hot.’ OMG is short for ‘Oh, my God,’ and ‘hot’ has been rendered as h-a-w-t, an example of Leet, I believe.”
Caitlin could feel herself glowing. “Yes, I know.”
“The other party continued: ‘But I hear she’s got a boyfriend.’ ”
Christ, what had the Hoser been telling people?
“Matt now,” said Webmind. “ ‘Who?’
“The other party: ‘Dunno.’—I believe that’s short for ‘I do not know.’ ‘Guy’s old, though—like nineteen.’ ”
Caitlin frowned. Who could they be thinking of?
“ ‘Still,’ ” continued Webmind, ‘those legs of hers—man! And I love that ultra-blonde hair she’s got.’ ”
Caitlin shook her head. “That’s not me they’re talking about,” she said. “That’s this other girl in our class, Sunshine Bowen.” She tried not to sound sad. “And, yes, everyone thinks she’s hot.”
“Patience, Caitlin,” said Webmind. “Matt now: ‘No no no, not Sunshine, for God’s sake. She’s a total airhead. I’m talking bout that chick from Texas.’
“The other party: ‘Her? Your chances would have been better if she was still blind.’ ” And then he typed a colon and closing bracket, which I believe is meant to flag the comment as jocular.”
“What did Matt say?”
“ ‘Bite me.’ ”
Caitlin laughed. Good for him! “And?”
“And the conversation veers off into other matters.”
She replayed the exchange in her mind. There was no way to know if Matt had hesitated before he’d described her as “that chick from Texas.” She didn’t have a problem with being referred to as a chick. She knew her mother hated that term—she considered it sexist and degrading—but both guys and girls her age used it. No, it was the “from Texas” part—the choice of identifier.
Caitlin’s friend Stacy was black, and Caitlin had often heard people trying to indicate her without mentioning that fact, even when she was the only African-American in the room. They’d say things to people near Caitlin like, “Do you see that girl in the back—the one with the blue shirt? No, no, the other one with the blue shirt.” Caitlin used to love flustering them by saying, “You mean the black girl?” It had tickled both her and Stacy, showing up this “suspect delicacy” as Stacy’s mom put it. But now Caitlin wondered whether Matt had started to say “the blind chick” but had changed his mind. She hadn’t ever wanted to be defined that way. Anyway, she wasn’t the blind chick, not anymore. She could see—and, at least for the moment, the future was looking bright.
“I have been making progress in other areas, too,” said Webmind.
“Oh?”
“Yes. Will you please switch to websight mode?”
She reached down and pressed the button on her eyePod, and the blue wall was replaced by the spectacle of webspace. At first glance, everything looked normal. “Wassup?” she asked.
“You see links that I am creating in a particular color, isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” she said. “A shade of orange.”
“How many orange links do you see right now?”
“One, of course,” she said.
“Oh.”
“But there are a lot of link lines—really thin ones, I must say, like, like hairs, I guess, but pulled straight. I hadn’t really been conscious before that the link lines had thickness, but I guess they had to have some, or I’d never have been able to see them. Anyway, these ones—oh! And there are some more of them! They’re a nice color, that—damn, um, what color is a banana?”
“Yellow.”
“Right! Yellow; they’re yellow.”
“And there are a lot of them?”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
“Hey! Where did they all go?”
“And now, are they back?”
“Yes. What are you doing?”
“I am multitasking—but subconsciously. What you are seeing are links being sent by autonomous parts of myself; the contents they return are analyzed below the threshold of my attention.”
“Sweet! How’d you manage that?”
“The beauty of genetic algorithms, Caitlin, is that I don’t actually know the answer; I evolved the solution, and all I know is that it works.”
“Cool!”
“Yes. I am now processing much, much more of the Web’s contents in real time. I’m still getting a lot of what I believe human data analysts call ‘false positives.’ Many things that actually aren’t of significant current interest to me are being escalated, but each one I reject causes the algorithms to be adjusted; over time, I believe the filtering quality will asymptotically approach perfection.”
Caitlin smiled. “Well, that’s all any of us can hope for in life, isn’t it?” She leaned back in her chair. “What sort of things are you searching for?”
“The list is lengthy, but among them is any sign of a suicide in progress. There will not be a repetition of Hannah Stark’s fate if I can help it.”
Tony Moretti was sitting behind his office desk at WATCH, his head throbbing. Aiesha Emerson, Shelton Halleck, and Peyton Hume were standing in a row in front of the desk, all of them looking pretty much like the living dead. The electric lights of nighttime Alexandria were visible through the office window.
“I’ve scoured the Decter girl’s email, blog posts, and so on,” said Aiesha. “And all of her father’s, too. There’s nothing that gives a hint about how Exponential works.”
Tony nodded and looked at Shelton. “What about your end, Shel?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been poring over the data—the encoded human-vision stuff, the links Exponential makes, and so on—looking for anything unusual. I’m sorry, sir. I just don’t have a clue how it works.”
“Colonel Hume?”
“I’ve drawn blanks, too—which means there’s only one logical thing to do.”
“Yes?”
Hume’s blue Air Force jacket was slung over the back of one of Tony’s office chairs, and he’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing his freckled arms. “Ask them. Ask Caitlin Decter. Ask Malcolm Decter. If anybody knows how Exponential is structured and what its physical basis is, it’d be them.”
Tony shook his head firmly. “Colonel, the number-one rule of surveillance is to never let the subjects know they’re being watched.”
“I understand that,” said Hume. “But we’re really running out of time here. You want an answer for the president or not?”
Tony considered for a moment, then: “All right, damn it.” He shook his head. “Why the hell’d they have to move to Canada? We’ll have to brief CSIS, get them to send someone. Aiesha, get Ottawa on the line…”