Caitlin stared at the screen again, trying to see what her mother was seeing, but—oh! “And you can read that without difficulty?” she said, looking at her mom.
“Well, without much difficulty,” her mother replied.
The screen showed:
You msut rsepnod in fuor secdons or I wlil feroevr temrainte cnotcat. You hvae no atrleantvie and tihs is the olny chnace you shlal get. Waht is the lsat nmae of the psredinet of the Utneid Satets?
“I think we can safely conclude that your mother is not a fembot,” her dad said dryly. “But Webmind couldn’t read it.” He pointed at its reply, which was I beg your pardon?
“Both you and Webmind are processing text one character at a time instead of taking in whole words,” he said. “For most people, if the first and last letters are correct, the order of the remaining letters doesn’t matter. And, they mostly don’t even see that there are errors—that’s why my second question was important.”
Caitlin looked. Her dad had asked, “How many non-English words were in my previous posting?” And Webmind had replied, immediately according to the time stamp: “Twenty.”
“That’s the right number, but most people—most real human beings—spot only half the errors in a passage like that. But this thing answered instantaneously—the moment I pressed enter. No time to bring up a spell-checker or for a human to even try to count the number of errors.” He paused. “Next, I tested your claim that it had a very high Shannon-entropy score. No human being could parse the recursiveness of this without careful diagraming.” He scrolled the IM window so she could see what he’d sent:
I knew that she knew that you knew that they knew that you knew that I knew that we knew that I knew that.
Did she know that you knew that I knew that you knew that I knew that you knew that?
Did you know that I knew that they knew that she knew?
Did I know that she knew that you knew that we knew that you knew?
To which Webmind had instantly replied: Yes. No. Yes.
“And those are the right answers?” Caitlin’s mom asked.
“Yes,” said her father. “At least, I think so. I was mostly convinced by this point, but I tried one more to be sure.” He scrolled the screen again, revealing his fourth and final test:
Wit you’re aide Wii knead to put the breaks awn the cereal Keller their B4 this decayed is dun, weather ore knot we aught too. Who nose if wee will secede. Dew ewe?
To which poor Webmind had replied, Again, your pardon?
“A piece of cake for one of us,” said her dad, “even if piece is spelled p-e-a-c-e.”
Caitlin clapped her hands together. “Go, Daddy! Okay, Mom—your turn. Say hi to Webmind.”
He got up, and Caitlin’s mom sat in the swivel chair. The last words Webmind had typed were still glowing blue in the IM window. She considered for a moment, then sent, “This is Barb Decter. Hello.” Caitlin was surprised to see that her mother couldn’t touch-type.
Webmind replied instantly: “A pleasure to meet you. Hitherto, I already knew of your husband from his Wikipedia entry, but I do not know much about you. I welcome learning more.”
Down in the kitchen, the timer went off. Caitlin’s mother frowned at this reminder of the forgotten dinner. She said, “Excuse me” and hurried downstairs, perhaps as much to buy herself some time to think as to avoid a culinary crisis.
And, in that moment, Caitlin understood. Of course her mother didn’t touch-type. Back when she’d been in school, the typing classes—yes, not keyboarding but old-fashioned typing—had doubtless been filled with girls who were destined for secretarial jobs, and the young, feisty, brilliant Barbara Geiger had had much higher ambitions. She would have gone out of her way not to cultivate what were, back then, traditionally female skills.
Caitlin’s mother had a Ph.D. in economics; her specialty was game theory. She had been an associate professor at the University of Houston until Caitlin was born. She’d spent the next six years looking after her daughter at home, and then nine more volunteering at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, where Caitlin had been enrolled until this past June.
Her mother knew a lot about math and computers. In fact, Caitlin had once heard her quip that the difference between her and her husband was that while the math he did as a theoretical physicist described things that might not even exist, the math economists did described things that people wished didn’t exist: inflation, deficits, taxes, and so on.
Now that Caitlin was in a regular school, she knew her mother hoped to get a job at one of Waterloo’s universities. But her Canadian work permit hadn’t come through yet, and so—
And so she was cooking, and cleaning, and doing all the other crap she’d never in her life wanted to do. Caitlin’s heart went out to her.
She looked at her father, hoping he would say something—anything—while they waited for her mom to return. But he was his usual silent self.
Her mother came back less than a minute later. “I think the lasagna can wait,” she said. “Now, where were we?”
“It wants to know you better,” Caitlin’s dad said.
She made no move, Caitlin noted, to return to the swivel chair in front of the computer screens. “So, what do we do now?” she said. “Do we have another press conference?”
There’d been a press conference two days ago, held at the Mike Lazaridis Theatre of Ideas at the Perimeter Institute, at which Dr. Kuroda had announced his success in giving Caitlin vision—although no mention had been made of her ability to see the structure of the Web.
“No!” said Caitlin. “No, we can’t tell anyone—not yet.”
“Why not?” asked her mother.
“Because it’s not safe.”
“Oh, I don’t think anything bad will happen to us,” her mom said.
“No, no. It’s not safe—it, Webmind.” She looked at her father, who was staring at the floor, and then back at her mother. “As soon as word gets out, people will try to find exploits—vulnerabilities, holes, whatever. They’ll try to bring it down, to hack it. That’s what people like that do, for the challenge, for the street cred, for the glory. And it probably has no defenses or security. We don’t know how it came into being, but I bet it’s fragile.”
“All right,” said her mother. “But we should inform the authorities.”
To Caitlin’s surprise, her father lifted his head and spoke up. “Which authorities? Do you trust the CIA, the NSA, or goddamned Homeland Security? Or the Canadian authorities—some Mountie with a Commodore 64?” He shook his head. “Nobody has authority over this.”
“But what if it’s dangerous?” her mom replied.
“It’s not dangerous,” Caitlin said firmly.
“You don’t actually know that,” her mother said. “And, even if it’s not dangerous right now, it might become so.”
“Why?” said Caitlin in as defiant a tone as she could muster.
Her mother looked at her father, then back at Caitlin. “Terminator. The Matrix. And so on.”
“Those are just movies,” Caitlin said, exasperated. “You don’t know that it’s going to turn out like that.”