She led the way down. The two black office chairs were side by side, tucked under the worktable. Matt took the one on the right, which meant he’d be on her blind side. This time she did speak up about it. “I can’t see out of my right eye, Matt.”
“Oh, um, actually, I know that.”
She was startled—but, well, it was public knowledge; video of the press conference was online, and there’d been a lot of news coverage about Dr. Kuroda’s miracle.
And then she had a sudden thought: he knew she couldn’t see him when he was on her right, and yet he’d chosen twice now to position himself there. Maybe he was self-conscious about his appearance; living in a world of Bashiras could do that to a person, Caitlin supposed.
He switched chairs, and Caitlin took the other one, and she opened the big card and placed it on the table in front of them. “Read what people wrote to me,” she said.
“Well, that’s mine, like I said. I wrote, ‘Math students never die—they just cease to function.’ ”
“Hah! Cute.”
“And that one’s Bashira’s.” He pointed to some bold writing in red ink. “She wrote, ‘See if you can get me sprung, too!’ ”
She laughed.
“Most of the others just say, ‘Best wishes,’ or ‘Good luck.’ Mr. Heidegger wrote, ‘Sorry to see my star pupil go!’ ”
“Awww!”
“And that one’s Sunshine’s—see how she makes the dot above the i look like the sun?”
“Holy crap,” Caitlin said.
“She wrote, ‘To my fellow American: keep the invasion plans on the DL, Cait—these Canadian fools don’t suspect a thing.’ ”
Caitlin smiled; that was more clever than she’d expected from Sunshine. She was feeling twinges of sadness. She’d still see Bashira, but she was going to miss some of the others, and—
“Um, where’s Trevor’s?” she asked.
Matt looked away. “He didn’t want to sign.”
“Oh.”
“So, what do you think about Webmind?” Matt asked.
Caitlin’s heart jumped. Her first thought was that he knew—knew that she was the one who had brought Webmind forth, knew that it was through her eye that Webmind focused his attention, knew that at this very moment Webmind was looking at him while she did the same thing.
But no, no. Surely all he wanted to do was get away from talking about another boy—and who could blame him?
“Well,” she said, closing the card, “I’m convinced.”
“You believe it’s what it says it is?”
She bit her tongue and didn’t correct him on the choice of pronouns—even with three occurrences of it in an eight-word sentence. “Yes. Why, what do you think?”
He frowned, considering—and Caitlin was surprised at how tense she became waiting for his verdict. “I buy it,” he said at last. “I mean, what else could it be? A promo for something? Puh-leeze. A scam?” He shook his head. “My dad doesn’t believe it, though. He says Marcello Truzzi used to say, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.’ ”
“Who’s that?”
“My male parent; my mother’s husband.”
She laughed and whapped him on the arm. “Not your dad, silly. Marcello whoever.”
Matt grinned—he clearly liked her touching him. “He was one of the founders of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. My dad says Truzzi originally said that about things like UFOs, and he thinks it applies here, too.”
“Ah.”
“But, thing is,” said Matt, “I don’t think this is an extraordinary claim. It’s something that should have happened by now. In fact, if anything, it’s overdue.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever read Vernor Vinge?” Matt asked.
“Is that how you say it? ‘Vin-jee’? I always thought it rhymed with hinge.”
“No, it’s vin-jee.Anyway, so you’ve read him?”
“No,” said Caitlin. “I keep seeing his name on the list of Hugo winners; I know I should read him, but…”
“Oh, he’s great,” said Matt. “But you should really read this essay he wrote called—wait for it—‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.’ Just google on ‘Vinge’ and ‘singularity’; you’ll find it.”
“Okay.”
“He wrote that in, um, 1993, I think,” Matt said.
Caitlin frowned. She had a hard time believing that anything written before she’d been born could have a bearing on what was going down right now.
Matt went on. “He said in it that the creation of intelligence greater than our own would occur sometime between 2005 and 2030—and I’ve always been expecting it to be at the earlier end.”
They sat in silence for a few moments. The headlong rush of Webmind’s progress had made Caitlin think things didn’t have to take a long time to unfold. But there was more to it than that. She was no longer going to see Matt every day at school. If she didn’t make an impression, he’d lose interest, or move on to someone else. Yes, yes, yes, she knew what Bashira said about his looks, but she couldn’t be the only one who saw his good qualities: his kindness, his gentleness, his brilliance, his wit. She had to impress him now, while she had the opportunity, and—
And she knew one way that would work for sure. “Can you keep a secret?” she said.
His blond eyebrows went up. “Yes.”
Of course, everybody answered that question the same way; she’d never once met anyone who’d replied, “No, not at all; I blab things all over the place.” Still, she thought Matt was telling the truth.
“Webmind?” she said.
Matt replied, “What about it?” but the word hadn’t been addressed to him. Rather, it was an invitation for Webmind to stop her before she went further. What sailed across her vision in a series of Braille dots was,
I am guided by your judgment.
“Okay,” Caitlin said, now to Matt, “but you have to promise not to tell anyone.”
“That’s what keeping a secret means,” Matt said, smiling.
“Promise,” Caitlin said earnestly. “Promise it.”
“Okay, yes. I promise.”
He’s telling the truth, Webmind supplied.
“Well,” she said at last, “that was me.”
“What was you?” Matt asked.
“Bringing forth Webmind. Bringing him into full consciousness. Helping him interact with the real world.”
Matt was making that deer-caught-in-headlights face.
“You don’t believe me,” Caitlin said.
“Wellll,” said Matt, “I mean, what are the two most amazing news stories of the last month? Sure, ‘World Wide Web Claims to be Conscious’ has got to be number one. But a good contender for number two must be, ‘Blind Girl Gains Sight.’ What are the chances that both of them would involve the same person?”
Caitlin smiled. If he was going to doubt her word, at least he was doing it based on statistics. “That would be a remarkable coincidence,” she said, “if they were unrelated events. But they’re not. See, when Dr. Kuroda—that’s the guy who gave me sight—when he wired this thing up” (she pulled the eyePod/BlackBerry combo out of her pocket so Matt could see it) “he made a mistake. When I’m getting data uploaded to it over the Web, it gets fed into my optic nerve, as well—and when that’s happening, I visualize the structure of the World Wide Web; my brain co-opted its visual centers to do that while I was blind. And, well, it was through this websight—that’s what we call it; websight, s-i-g-h-t—that I first detected what was going on in the background of the Web.”