Wake

  She repeated it with another circle, and identified it as a WEBSITE, too. And yet another circle, and again the word WEBSITE.

  And then she found the selection tool for the graphics program that was displaying the picture of webspace, and she used it to draw a box around three large circles that weren’t linked to each other. She typed WEBSITES—wondering briefly if introducing plurals so early was a mistake. And then she isolated just one particularly large circle with the selection box and she typed AMAZON—knowing that it was highly unlikely that she’d actually guessed correctly which website that circle represented. Still, she pressed on, identifying a second website as GOOGLE and a third as CNN. All points are websites, she hoped to convey, and each has its own particular name.

  And then, mathematician that she was, she pointed to a single website and typed “1,” and then, highlighting the numeral, she typed not the number again but rather its name: “ONE.”

  She then used the selection tool to put a box around two points that weren’t otherwise connected to each other. And she typed “2,” then “TWO.” She continued for three, four, and five points. And then, wanting to help the phantom make a jump that had taken human thinkers thousands of years, she selected a spot that had no points in it at all, and typed the numeral zero and its name.

  She then used the mouse to indicate a link line, and also traced its length on the screen with her fingertip. And she typed “LINK.”

  Establishing nouns for the handful of things she could point to in webspace was easy enough. But even when they’d thought the information in the background of the Web was just dumb spies talking, she’d automatically given the spies verbs: drop bomb; kill bad guy. But how to illustrate verbs in webspace? Indeed, what verbs were appropriate? What happened in webspace?

  Well, files were transferred, and—

  And this phantom had apparently learned how to make links and send existing content; it had to have those skills to have echoed her face and the ASCII text strings back at her. But it likely didn’t know anything about file formats: it was probably ignorant of how information was stored and arranged in a Word .doc or .docx file, an Acrobat .pdf file, an Excel .xls file, an .mp3 sound file, or the .jpg graphic she was displaying on her monitor. The phantom was surrounded by the largest library ever created—millions upon millions of written documents and pictures and videos and audio recordings—and yet almost certainly had no idea how to open the individual volumes, or how to read their contents. The Web’s basic structure had protocols for moving a file from point A to point B, but the actual use of the files was something normally done by application programs running on the user’s own computer, and so was likely outside the phantom’s current scope. There was so much to teach it!

  But all that was for later. For now, she wanted to focus on the basics. And the basic verb—the basic action—of the Web was right there in the names of its various protocols: HTTP, the hypertext transfer protocol; FTP, the file transfer protocol; SMTP, the simple mail transfer protocol. Surely the verb to transfer could be demonstrated!

  She used the mouse pointer to indicate a site, but then was stymied. She wanted to show material flowing from one site to another in a single direction. But there was no way to turn off the mouse pointer; it was always there. Oh, she could move the mouse—or her finger—from a point on the left to a point on the right, but to repeat the gesture she’d have to bring the pointer or finger back to where it had started, and that would look like she was indicating movement in both directions—either that, or maybe it would look like she was highlighting the link line as an object, but not pointing out what that line was doing.

  But, yes, there was a way! All she had to do was close her eyes for a second! And she did just that, moving the pointer back to the origin while her eyes were closed, and then, with her eyes open, she moved the pointer from the origin to the destination again. Then she typed the word “TRANSFER” into her Word window.

  She repeated this demonstration, showing the pointer moving from left to right along the length of the link line, over and over again, suggesting movement in a single direction, something going from the source to the destination, being transferred and—

  “Cait-lin! Din-ner!”

  Ah, well. It was probably wise to take a break, anyway, and let all this sink in. After her meal, though, like any good teacher, she’d assess how her pupil was doing: she’d give the phantom a test.

  forty-three

  Dr. Kuroda dropped a bomb between the salad and the main course. “I’ve got to go back to Tokyo,” he said. “Now that word’s out about us having cured Miss Caitlin’s blindness there really is a lot of commercial interest in the eyePod technology, and the team at my university that tries to find industry partnerships wants me there for meetings.”

  Caitlin suddenly felt sad and frightened. Kuroda had been her mentor through so much of late and, well, she’d just sort of assumed he was going to be around forever, but—

  “It’s time, anyway,” he said. “Miss Caitlin can see, so my work here is done.” She might not yet be perfect at decoding facial expressions, but she was better than most people at reading inflection. He was putting up false bravado; he was sad to be going. “But the bright side is, booking a flight at the last minute meant that there was only Executive Class left, and so the university has sprung for that.”

  “When…when do you go?” asked Caitlin.

  “Early tomorrow afternoon, I’m afraid. And, of course, it’s an hour or more to Pearson, and I should be there two hours in advance for an international flight, so…”

  So he was only going to be here, and awake for, maybe another half-dozen hours.

  “My birthday is in two days,” Caitlin said—and she felt foolish as soon as she’d said it. Dr. Kuroda was a busy man, and he’d already done so much for her. Expecting him to stay away from his family and work obligations just to attend her birthday dinner was unfair, she knew.

  “Your Sweet Sixteen,” said Kuroda, smiling. “How wonderful. I’m afraid I won’t have time to get you a present before I leave.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” her mom said, looking at Caitlin. “Dr. Kuroda’s already given you just about the best present possible, isn’t that right, dear?”

  Caitlin looked at him. “Will you come back?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I’d like to, of course. You—and, you, too, Barbara and Malcolm—have been wonderful. But we’ll be in touch: email, instant messenger.” He smiled. “You’ll hardly know I’m gone. Oh, and I guess we can stop recording the datastream from your eyePod. I mean, I’ve got plenty of old data to study, and everything does seem to be working fine now. I know you were concerned about privacy, Miss Caitlin, so after dinner I’ll detach the Wi-Fi module from the eyePod, and—”

  “No!”

  Even her father looked briefly at her.

  “I mean, um, won’t that cut me off from seeing webspace if I want to?”

  “Well, yes. But I suppose I could modify things so that you could still accept a datastream from Jagster without transmitting back what your eye is seeing.”

  Caitlin’s heart was racing. That would still mean she would no longer be able to send what her eye was seeing to the phantom.

  “No, no, please. You know what they say: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

  “Oh, this won’t—”

  “Please. Just leave everything exactly the way it is.”

  “I’m sure Dr. Kuroda knows what he’s talking about, dear,” her mother said.

  “And besides,” Kuroda added, “you’ve been getting some interference of late over the Wi-Fi connection—those text strings bouncing back, remember? We wouldn’t want that to start spilling over into your…” He paused, then smiled kindly at Caitlin’s coinage: “…worldview. Better to just unplug all that now while I’m here to do it, rather than have it become a problem later.”

  “No,” Caitlin said. “Please.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Kuroda said. “D
on’t worry, Miss Caitlin.”

  “No, no, you can’t.”

  “Caitlin,” her mother said in an admonishing tone.

  “Just leave it alone!” Caitlin said. She got to her feet. “Leave me and my eyePod alone!”

  And she ran from the room.

  Caitlin threw herself down on her bed, feet kicking up in the air. All of this—websight, the phantom—was hers! They couldn’t take it away from her now! She had found something no one else even knew was there, and she was trying to help it, and they were going to cut her off!

  She took a deep breath, hoping to calm down. Maybe she should just tell them, but—

  But Kuroda would try to patent it, or control it, or make a buck off of it. And he, or her father, or her mother, would start talking about stupid sci-fi movies in which computers took over the world. But to keep her phantom in the dark would be like Annie Sullivan saying it was better to leave Helen the way she was, in case she grew up to be Adolf Hitler or…or whoever the heck had been a monster in Annie’s own time.

  No, if Caitlin was going to be like Annie Sullivan, she was going to do it right. Annie had had another duty besides just teaching Helen. After the breakthrough, she had looked after Helen, had done her best to make sure she wasn’t exploited or mistreated or taken advantage of.

  Of course, Caitlin knew that if what she suspected was true, eventually this phantom would realize that there was a huge world out here, and at that point she might no longer be special to it. But for now the phantom was hers and hers alone, and she was going to not just teach it but also protect it.

  Still, she wasn’t sure if she was making progress at all, if the phantom had understood anything she’d tried to teach it before dinner. For all she knew, she’d accomplished nothing.

  And so she set out to administer the test. She once again switched to websight, buffered some of the Jagster raw feed, focused in on the cellular automata, and ran the Shannon-entropy plot again.

  And—

  And, yes, yes, yes! A score of 4.5! The information content was richer, more complex, more sophisticated. Her lesson about website and link and to transfer had had an impact…or, at least she hoped it had; the score had been trending upward on its own previously, of course. But no, no: it had to be responding to what she was doing, just as the earlier increases must have happened accidentally in response to the phantom having observed her doing literacy lessons.

  She leaned back in her chair, thinking. A car honked its horn outside, and she heard someone running water in the bathroom. This—this…whatever it was—was indeed learning.

  She looked at the window, a dark rectangle. It was such a small portal, and, as the theme song to one of her mother’s favorite movies said, there was such a lot of world to see…

  More sounds from outside: another car, a man talking to someone as he walked along, a dog yapping.

  She looked back at her computer monitor, a window of another sort. Its bezel was black, with silver letters on the bottom forming the word DELL, the E canted at an odd angle.

  Yes, Waterloo was full of high-tech industry, but so was Austin, where she used to live. It was where Dell had its headquarters, and AMD had a major facility there, too, and—

  Yes, yes, of course!

  Austin was also home to Cycorp, a company that had been periodically making the news, at least back in Texas, her whole life.

  An old one-liner bubbled up in her mind: You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.

  Or maybe you can—and who you callin’ a ho, anyway?

  Yes: it was time now to see if the phantom could learn for itself, if, in good computer fashion, it could pull itself up by its bootstraps. And Cycorp could well be the key to that, but…

  But how to lead the phantom to it? How could she point to something in webspace? She nibbled at her lower lip. There must be a way. When she’d labeled sites on the captured image as Amazon and CNN, she’d really had no idea if that was what they were. And if she couldn’t identify a particular site with her websight, then how—

  Wait! Wait! She didn’t have to! The phantom already was following what she was doing with her computer—it had to be doing that, given that it had echoed her ASCII text back at her. Yes, when she’d been using the kids’ literacy site, it could have seen graphic files of the letters A, B, and C on her screen as she looked at them, but those were bitmapped images; the only way it could have discovered the ASCII codes for those letters was by watching what was being sent by her computer. But…but how had the phantom known that this desktop PC was in any way related to her eyePod?

  Ah, of course! When she was at home, they were both on the same wireless network, connecting through it to her cable modem; they would have both shown the same IP address. The phantom had watched as she connected to the literacy site, so now, with luck, it would also follow her as she connected to that very special site down in Austin…

  I had watched while Prime sat with the others of its kind, and something fascinating happened. I had observed before that vision would become blurry when Prime removed the supplementary windows that usually covered its eyes. But this time, just before it had departed the vicinity of the others, and for a time after it had relocated itself in a different place, its vision blurred even though the windows were still in place.

  Finally, though, the view returned to normal, and Prime set about operating that device it used to put symbols on the display, and—

  And I saw a line—a link, as I now knew it was called—connecting to a point (a website!) that I had not seen Prime connect to before, and—and—and—

  Yes! Yes, yes!

  It was staggering, thrilling…

  At long, long last, here it was!

  The key!

  This website, this incredible website, expressed concepts in a form I could now understand, systematizing it all, relating thousands of things to each other in a coding system that explained them.

  Term after term. Connection after connection. Idea after idea. This website laid them out.

  Curious. Interesting.

  An apple is a fruit.

  Fruits contain seeds.

  Seeds can grow into trees.

  From the Online Encyclopedia of Computing: Like many computer scientists of his generation, Doug Lenat was inspired by the portrayal of Hal in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. But he was frustrated by Hal’s behavior, because the computer displayed such a lack of basic common sense…

  Remarkable. Intriguing.

  Trees are plants.

  Plants are living things.

  Living things reproduce themselves.

  Hal’s famous breakdown, leading it to try to kill the crew of the spaceship Hal itself was part of, apparently happened because it had been told to keep the truth about their mission secret even from the crew and had also been told not to lie to them…

  Fascinating. Astonishing.

  Birds can usually fly.

  Humans cannot fly on their own.

  Humans can fly in airplanes.

  Rather than resolve this quandary in a sensible way—when things started going wrong, deciding to take the crew into its confidence would have been an obvious choice—Hal instead killed four astronauts and almost succeeded in killing the fifth. It went ahead and did this without even bothering to radio its programmers back on Earth to ask how to resolve the conflicting instructions. The decision to eliminate the source of the conflict seemed blindingly obvious to the machine, all because no one had ever bothered to tell it that although lying is bad, murder is worse. How anyone could entrust lives to a computer that didn’t have even that degree of common sense was beyond Doug Lenat, and so, in 1984, he set out to rectify the problem…

  So much to know! So much to absorb!

  Glass, as a substance, is usually clear.

  Broken glass has sharp edges and can cut things.

  Hold a glass upright or the contents will spill out.

  Lenat began creating an online database of
common sense called “Cyc”—short for “encyclopedia,” but also deliberately a homonym for “psych.” When thinking machines like Hal do finally emerge, he wants them to plug into it. Of course, there’s lots of basic material a computer has to understand about the world before such advanced concepts as “lying” and “murder” might make sense. And so Lenat and a team of programmers set about coding, in a mathematical language based on second-order predicate calculus, such basic assertions about the real world as: a piece of wood can be smashed into smaller pieces of wood, but a table can’t be smashed into smaller tables…

  The range of it all! The scope!

  There are billions of stars.

  The sun is a star.

  Earth revolves around the sun.

  Early on, Lenat realized that one overall knowledge base wouldn’t do: things could be true in one context but false in another. And so his team organized information into “microtheories”—clusters of interrelated assertions that are true in a given context. That allowed Cyc to hold such apparently contradictory assertions as “vampires do not exist” and “Dracula is a vampire” without blowing smoke out its ears in a “Norman, coordinate!” sort of way. The former assertion belonged to the microtheory “the physical universe” and the latter to “fictional worlds.” Still, microtheories could be linked to each other when appropriate: if a wineglass was dropped by anyone—even Dracula—it would probably shatter…

  Absorbing knowledge! A torrent, a flood…

  No child can be older than its parents.

  No Picasso painting could have been made before he was born.

  But Cyc is more than just a knowledge base. It also contains algorithms for deriving new assumptions by correlating the assertions its programmers provided. For instance, having been given the knowledge that most people sleep at night, and that people don’t like being awakened unnecessarily, if asked what sort of call might be appropriate to make to someone’s house at 3:00 a.m., Cyc would offer “An urgent one…”

  Understanding! Comprehension!

  Time flies like an arrow.