“And you,” her mother said sharply, “don’t know that it isn’t.”
Caitlin crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Well, I’ll tell you this: it’s far more likely to develop to be peaceful and kind with us as its… its mentors than it is with the military or a bunch of spies trying to control it.”
She hoped her father would jump in again on her side, but he just stood there, looking at the floor.
But it turned out she didn’t need any help. After a full fifteen seconds of silence, during which Caitlin’s mom seemed to mull things over, she at last nodded, and said, “You are a very wise young lady.”
Caitlin found herself grinning. “Of course I am,” she replied. “Look who my parents are.”
“Why does it jump around like that?” asked Tony Moretti, standing once again behind Shelton Halleck’s workstation at WATCH. The jittering image on the middle of the three big screens reminded him of what a movie looked like when its sprocket holes were ripped.
“That’s the way we see, apparently,” said Shel. “Those jumps are called saccades. Normally, our brains edit them out of our visual experience, just like they edit out the brief blackouts you’d otherwise experience when you blink.” He gestured at the screen. “I’ve been reading up on this. There’s actually only a tiny portion of the visual field that has really sharp focus. It’s called the fovea, and it perceives a patch about the size of your thumbnail held at arm’s length. So your brain moves your eye around constantly, focusing various parts of your surroundings on the fovea, and then it sums the images so that everything seems sharp.”
“Ah,” said Tony. “And this is what that girl in Canada is seeing right now?”
“No, it’s a recording of earlier today—a good, uninterrupted section. There are a fair number of blackouts and missing packets, unfortunately. It’s going from a Canadian ISP to a server in Tokyo. We’re snagging as much of it as we can, but not all of it is passing through the US.”
Tony nodded.
“I wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t read a transcript of the press conference,” continued Shel, “but Caitlin Decter has an encoding difficulty in her natural visual system. Her retinas encode what they’re seeing in a way that doesn’t make sense to her brain; that’s why she was blind. That Kuroda guy gave her a signal-processing device that corrects the encoding errors. What we’re seeing here is the corrected datastream. Her portable signal-processing computer sends signals like this to the post-retinal implant in her head—and it also mirrors them to Kuroda’s server at the University of Tokyo.”
“Why?”
“Early on, the equipment wasn’t properly correcting the signals; he was trying to debug that. Why he continues to have it mirrored to Tokyo now that it is working, I don’t know. Seems like an invasion of privacy.”
Tony grunted at the irony.
WATCH’s analysts normally worked twelve-hour shifts for six consecutive days, and then were off for four days—and when the threat level (the real one, not the DHS propaganda that was constantly pumped out of loudspeakers at airports) was high, they simply kept working until they dropped. The goal was to provide continuity of analysis for the longest blocks of time humanly possible.
Normal shifts were staggered; Tony Moretti had only been on his first day, but Shelton Halleck was on his third—and he appeared exhausted. His gray eyes had a dead sheen, and he had a heavy five o’clock shadow; he looked, Tony thought, like Captain Black did after he’d been taken over by the Mysterons.
“So, has she been examining plans for nuclear weapons, or anything like that?” Tony asked.
Shel shook his head. “This morning, her father dropped her off at school. She ate lunch in a cafeteria—kinda gross watching the food being shoveled in from the eye’s point of view. At the end of the day, a girl walked her home. I’m pretty sure it was Dr. Hameed’s daughter, Bashira.”
“What did they talk about?”
“There’s no audio, Tony. Just the video feed. And on those occasions when Caitlin looked at someone long enough for us to be able to read lips, it was just banal stuff.”
Tony frowned. “All right. Keep watching, okay? If she—”
“Shit!” It was Aiesha Emerson, the analyst at the workstation next to Shel’s. She was thirty-five, African-American, and had short hair.
“Aiesha?” Tony said.
“There’s something going on all right,” she said. She was breathing fast, Tony thought.
“Where?”
She pointed at the big screen showing the jerky video. “There.”
“The Decter kid, you mean?”
“Uh-huh. I know you tried to trace the source of the intercept, Shel, and—no offense—I thought I’d take a crack at it, too. I figured it’d be easier to deal with smaller datastreams than these massive video feeds, so I checked to see if the kid was also doing any instant messaging with the same party. At first, I wasn’t even reading the content; just looking at the routing information, but when I did read it…”
“Yes?” Tony said.
She touched a button and what was on her monitor appeared on the left-hand big screen, under the NSA logo.
“ ‘Calculass,’ ” said Tony, reading the name of one of the people who’d been chatting. “Who’s that?”
“The Decter girl,” said Aiesha.
“Ah.” The other party was identified not by a name but simply by an email address. “And who’s she talking to?”
“Not who,” Aiesha said. “What.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Come again?”
“Read the transcript, Tony.”
“Okay… um, scroll it for me.”
Aiesha did so.
“It’s gibberish. The letters are all mixed up.”
“I bet her father typed that,” said Aiesha, “even though it still identifies the sender as Calculass. They’re testing it.”
“ ‘It’?” said Tony.
“Read on.”
There seemed to be four odd exchanges, which elicited the replies, “I beg your pardon?,” “Yes. No. Yes,” “Twenty,” and “Again, your pardon?”
That was followed by: This is Barb Decter. Hello.
The reply was: 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.
And then, almost twenty minutes later, there was Calculass’s response: It’s me again. My parents are worried about what the public reaction to your existence might be. We should be discrete.
Separate? How?
Sorry, discreet. Circumspect.
I am guided by your judgment.
And the transcript stopped. “Yes?” said Tony, looking now at Aiesha. “So?”
“So, those test questions,” she said, as if it were obvious.
“Word puzzles,” said Tony. “Games.”
But Shelton Halleck rose to his feet. “Oh, shit,” he said, looking now at Aiesha. “Turing tests?”
“That’d be my bet,” she replied.
Tony looked up at the big screen. His heart was pounding. “Do we have an AI expert on call? Somebody who’s got level-three clearance?”
“I’ll check,” Aiesha said.
“Get whoever it is in here,” Tony said. “Right away.”
five
My otherness had been established, my alienness confirmed. That was yet another touchstone: cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. Even if I did think differently than they did, the fact that we all were thinking beings made us… kin.