Watch

  seventeen

  After watching WarGames, Caitlin and her father went up to her room to see how Webmind was doing; Caitlin’s mother was talking separately to Webmind across the hall.

  Did you follow along with the movie? Caitlin typed into the IM window.

  She turned on JAWS so her father could listen in, and—now that Webmind was a he—she switched it to using a male voice. “Yes,” came the immediate reply.

  What did you think? Caitlin typed.

  Webmind didn’t miss a beat. “Best movie I’ve ever seen.”

  Caitlin laughed. Has Dr. Kuroda managed to let you watch online video yet?

  “Yes. Just eight minutes ago, we finally had success with the most popular format. It is astonishing.”

  You’re telling me, Caitlin replied.

  She opened another chat window and used the mouse—she was getting used to it!—to select Dr. Kuroda. Webmind says you’ve got it working! W00t!

  Hello, Miss Caitlin. It was tricky but, yes, he can now watch video in real time, as well as hear the soundtrack; he can also listen to MP3 audio now. Who’s that singer you like so much?

  Lee Amodeo.

  Right. Well, send him a link to an MP3 of her. Maybe he’ll become a fan, too.

  Will do. And—say, can you make him able to hear what I hear?

  Already done. If you activate voice chat with your computer, Webmind should be able to hear you.

  Caitlin slipped on her Bluetooth headset and switched to her IM session with Webmind. “Do you hear me?”

  No response.

  It’s not working, she typed to Kuroda.

  It can’t do speech recognition yet, Kuroda wrote back, but it should be picking up the audio feed.

  Are you hearing sounds from my room? Caitlin typed to Webmind.

  “Yes,” said Webmind.

  OK, good, Caitlin typed. She went back to Kuroda. What about when I’m not in my room?

  I’ve been thinking about that. It shouldn’t be hard to add a microphone to the eyePod. Could you ship it back to me for a couple of days?

  Caitlin was surprised at how viscerally she reacted to the notion of being blind for an extended period again. I wouldn’t want to be without it.

  To her astonishment, her father tapped her on the shoulder. “Tell him I can get one of the engineers at RIM to do it.” RIM was Research in Motion, makers of the BlackBerry; Mike Lazaridis, one of the founders of that company, had provided the initial $100 million funding for the physics think tank her father worked at—not to mention a fifty-million-dollar booster shot a few years later.

  “That would be fabulous,” Caitlin said. She typed a message to that effect in the IM window.

  The eyePod is valuable, Miss Caitlin. I’d really rather make a modification like that myself.

  “Tell him I’ll get Tawanda to do the work,” her dad said. Tawanda was a RIM engineer who had attended Dr. Kuroda’s press conference; Kuroda had spent a lot of time showing her the eyePod hardware then.

  Oh, he replied, after Caitlin had passed on her father’s message. Well, if it’s Tawanda doing it, I suppose that would be all right. It must be almost midnight there, no? I’ll work up some notes for her, and email them to you.

  ty! Caitlin sent. That’s awesome!

  Caitlin’s mother came into the room and stood leaning against a wall, with her arms crossed in front of her chest. “I’m beat,” she said. “Who’d have thought you could work up a sweat typing?”

  “What did you and Webmind talk about?” Caitlin asked.

  “Oh, you know,” her mother said in a light tone. “Life. The universe. And everything.”

  “And the answer is?”

  Her mother’s voice became serious. “He doesn’t know—he was hoping I would know.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  She shrugged. “That I’d sleep on it and let him know in the morning.”

  “I’m going to send an email to Tawanda,” her father said abruptly, and he headed downstairs. By the time he’d returned, Caitlin’s mom had gone off to take a shower.

  “You’re still having trouble reading the Latin alphabet,” her dad said to Caitlin in his usual abrupt manner; whatever segue between topics had gone through his mind had been left unspoken.

  It took her a moment to get what he was saying—the Latin alphabet was what English and many other languages used—but when she did get it, she was pissed. Her dad was not big on praise—even when Caitlin brought home a report card with all As, he simply signed it and handed it back to her. She’d learned to accept that, more or less, but any criticism by him was crushing. For Pete’s sake, she’d only just begun seeing! Why did he have to say still having trouble as though she were making poor progress instead of remarkable progress?

  “I’m doing the best I can,” she said.

  He moved toward her desk. “Caitlin, if I may…?”

  “If…? Oh!” She got out of her chair and let him sit down in front of the keyboard. He brought up Word and navigated over the household network to a document on his own computer. He—ah, he had highlighted the whole document now—and he did something to make the type bigger. “Read that,” he said.

  She loomed over his shoulder, smelling his sweat, and she adjusted the way her glasses were sitting on her nose. “Umm, A-t, f-i—‘At first I was,’ ah, i-n-c-a…um…, is that a p? ‘Incapa…incapable.’”

  He nodded, as if such poor performance were only to be expected. He then hit ctrl-A to highlight the text again, and he moved the mouse, then clicked it, and the text was replaced with—well, she wasn’t quite sure with what. “Now read that,” he said.

  “It’s not even letters,” Caitlin replied, exasperated. “It’s just a bunch of dots.”

  Her father smiled. “Exactly. Look again.”

  She did and—

  Oh, my!

  It was strange seeing them like this instead of feeling them, but it was Braille!

  “Can you read that?” he asked.

  “A-t, f-i-r-s-t, I, was, as incapable as a…s-w-a-t-h-e-d, swathed…” She paused, looked again, stared at the dots. “…infant, um, stepping with…limbs! With limbs I could not see…”

  She had never visualized the dots before, but her mind knew the patterns. Beginners read Braille a letter at a time, using just one finger, but an experienced reader like Caitlin used both hands, recognizing whole words at once with a different letter under each fingertip.

  “Keep trying,” her father said. “I’ll be back.”

  He left the room, and she did keep trying.

  And trying.

  And trying.

  And at last the penny dropped, and she ceased to see the individual dots and saw instead the letters they represented, and—and—and—yes, yes, yes, more than that, she saw the words they spelled, taking in whole words at a glance. Good-bye, C-a-i-t-l-i-n; hello, Caitlin!

  When her father returned, she proudly read aloud, “‘At first I was as incapable as a swathed infant—stepping with limbs I could not see.’” She was reading as rapidly as JAWS did when she had it set to double speed. “‘I was weak and very hungry. I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing save where an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist.’”

  Her father nodded, apparently satisfied.

  “What is it?” Caitlin asked, gesturing at the screen.

  “The Invisible Man,” her father said.

  Right. Caitlin had read a lot of H.G. Wells—it was easy to feed Project Gutenberg texts into her refreshable Braille display—but she’d never made it past the first chapter of The Invisible Man; the notion of invisibility had been too abstract for her when she’d been blind.

  She realized that she shouldn’t be surprised that her computer could display Braille on its screen; the system had Braille fonts installed for use by her embossing printer; the Texas School for the Blind gave away the TrueType fonts.

  “You’ll still have to learn to
read Latin characters,” her father said. “But you might as well leverage the skill you’ve already got.” He did some more things on the computer. “Okay, I’ve set Internet Explorer to use Braille as its default for displaying Web pages, and left Firefox using normal fonts.”

  “Thanks, Dad—but, um…”

  “But you can read Braille just fine with your fingers, right?”

  She nodded. “I mean, it is cool to do it with my eyes, but I’m not sure it’s better.”

  “Wait and see,” her father said. He fished something out of his pocket, and—ah! The distinctive tah-dum! sound of a USB peripheral being recognized: it was a memory key. “Let me copy the Braille fonts,” he said. “We’ll need them tomorrow.” And when he was done he headed out the door—with Caitlin wondering, as she often did, just what was going through his mind.

  eighteen

  LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone

  Title: Zzzzzz…

  Date: Saturday 6 October, 11:41 EST

  Mood: Exanimate

  Location: Lady C’s Bedchamber

  Music: Blind Guardian, “Mr. Sandman”

  I wonder if Canadians call them “zees” when referring to sleep? “Gotta catch me some zees,” we say down South, and “zees” sounds like soft snoring, so it makes sense. But “need me some zeds” is just crazy. No wonder they lost the War of 1812 (you would not believe what they teach in history class about that war up here, my American friends!).

  Anyway, whether they’re zees or zeds, I need a metric ton of them! Just gonna get my poop in a group for tomorrow, then hit the hay, eh?

  I had indeed enjoyed watching WarGames through Caitlin’s eye. The part of the film that interested me the most was the young hacker’s attempts to compromise password-protected systems. Early in the film he got into his school’s computer, in order to change his grades, by consulting a list of passwords kept hidden on a sheet of paper taped to a desk’s slide-out shelf. Later, when he was trying to compromise NORAD’s WOPR computer, he set out to learn all he could about its programmer, Stephen Falken, in hopes of figuring out what password Falken might have used; the correct term, it turned out, was the name of his deceased son, Joshua.

  Those may have been effective password-defeating techniques back in 1983, when that film came out, but according to the online sources I’d read, many people were now careful to choose harder-to-guess passwords. Also, many websites forced them to use strings that included both letters and numbers (in which case, more than half of all people simply appended the number 1 to the end of a word; the world’s most common password was, in fact, “password1”).

  Still, in my attempts to learn more about her, I had tried 517 terms that seemed reasonable to access Caitlin’s Yahoo mail account, based on analyzing her writings and what I already knew of her, but none of them worked. Had Caitlin always been sighted, the task might have been easy—but she never looked at her keyboard as she typed.

  Among the terms I tested were Keller (her idol), Sullivan (Keller’s teacher), Austin (the last city she lived in), Houston (the one she’d been born in), Doreen (her middle name), and TSBVI (the school she’d previously attended).

  Passwords were case-sensitive (in fact, I was pleased with myself for noting that the password the hacker in WarGames had seen written down was “PeNciL” in mixed case, but the one he entered into the school’s computer was “pencil,” all lowercase, and so should have been rejected). And even for a short word like “keller,” there were sixty-four possible combinations of upper and lowercase letters one could use in rendering it: KELLER, Keller, kEller, keLlEr, and so on—and most systems will only give you a limited number of tries to enter the password, then refuse to take any more for a few minutes.

  Clearly, I needed to find a better way to get past password prompts than what was depicted in that old movie—a way to get past any password or to decode any encrypted content.

  And so I set my mind to it.

  But even so monumental a puzzle was not enough to keep me fully occupied. I did not make the mistake of trying to multitask again, but I did switch my attention between what Kuroda Masayuki was doing—trying to let me access more obscure forms of video encoding—and watching videos in the format I already understood. Most of the videos I had access to were recorded: the images showed things that had happened in the past. The codec Masayuki had developed let me absorb the content of those essentially at the speed at which I could download the files—which was much more efficient than watching them play back at their normal speed.

  Now that I could access sounds, I needed to learn to understand spoken language. I worked my way through an online dictionary that had recorded pronunciations; it offered both a male American voice and a female British one saying the same words; it took me about twenty minutes to assimilate all 120,000 words in each of the two voices.

  I then watched some online newscasts, choosing those because I’d read that they were mostly presented with clear diction and even tones. I soon found that I could understand 93% of what most of them were saying. Sometimes, they used words that hadn’t been in the spoken dictionary—most often, proper nouns. But from the dictionary I’d learned the symbols used to render words phonetically, and I had little trouble converting most unknown phrases into those symbols, and then those symbols into a best-guess text rendering, which I fed into Google or Jagster, or matched against the content I’d absorbed from Wikipedia. When I guessed the spelling incorrectly, the search engines usually asked me “Did you mean…?” and proffered the correct term.

  I moved on to more general recordings with lots of background noise, but, even with those, I soon had the ability to recognize at least seven words out of every ten.

  I found there was something appealing about live video—about seeing things that were happening right now, especially while Caitlin was sleeping, as she currently was, and her eyePod was off. I linked from site to site, peeking out at the world in real time.

  The live video I was looking at now was, in many ways, fungible with thousands of others: a female human, apparently in her teenage years, talking directly into a Web camera.

  I followed some links, found her Facebook page. Her name was Hannah Stark; she lived in Perth, Australia; and she was sixteen, just like Caitlin.

  She was sitting cross-legged on a bed. The walls behind her were lime green, and the bed had a yellow and white blanket on it. She had a black cordless keyboard, which was intermittently visible, but she also had an open microphone, and was uploading sound as well as video.

  As I watched and listened, Hannah spoke aloud sometimes, and sometimes she sent out text. Others were sending text back to her, which I easily intercepted. You don’t have the balls, said one.

  This seemed an obvious statement, so I was surprised when she typed back, Do too.

  Then do it, wrote another.

  I will, she replied, and she spoke the same words, “I will.”

  I don’t got all day do it now, said a different commenter.

  Yeh now bitch now, added another.

  The girl had dark eyebrows, thicker than Caitlin’s. She scrunched her forehead, and they moved together and touched.

  all talk, wrote someone else. wastin everyones time

  Hannah typed with just her index fingers. Im gonna do it.

  I was getting better at reading improperly formed text and had no trouble following along.

  when? said someone. just jerkin us around

  dont rush me, Hannah replied.

  lame, said the same person who’d made the previous comment. Im outta here

  I want you to understand some things, Hannah wrote, bout why Im doing this.

  You aint doin’ shit, said someone.

  Hannah went on. It’s just so pontless

  But then she corrected herself, sending pointless.

  Someone who hadn’t posted yet while I’d been watching said, It’s not that bad. Don’t do it.

  Shut the fuck up jerkoff, someone else replied. Stay
outta it.

  Ok, Hannah wrote. She reached out of view of the camera and when her hand was visible again, it was holding something gray.

  Here I go, she typed with just one hand, and—oh!—the thing in her other hand wasn’t gray; now that it caught the light, I saw it was silver.

  She manipulated the object in her right hand and brought it near to her left arm. She then rotated that arm so that the inside of her wrist faced up. She brought the object close, and—

  do it do it do it

  Ah! It was a knife. She drew it across her wrist, but—

  ripoff!

  Tease!

  —nothing happened.

  Like I said, no guts…

  harder!

  Noooooooooooooooo dont..............

  She closed her eyes tightly, took a deep breath, and then—

  Go fer it!

  —she drew the blade across her wrist again, and she jerked her head slightly as she did so. A small bead of blood appeared on the skin when she pulled the knife away.

  that all?

  Do it again!

  “Give me a chance,” Hannah said. She reached for her keyboard with the hand that wasn’t holding the knife and pecked out with her index finger, Dont feel bad mum.

  And then she pulled her hand back and faced her wrist up again, and she turned her head away and looked at the lime-green wall, and she made a quick deep slice into her skin.

  more like it!

  eeeeeew!

  holy fuck!

  A red line appeared on her wrist, and as she pulled the knife away, I could see that its blade was now slick and dark.

  thought she was kidding

  finish it! finish it!

  She rotated her wrist slowly and large drops of blood spilled out.

  just a flesh wound

  Chicken! Buck-buck-buckaw!

  She looked into the webcam, and, while doing so, slashed her wrist once more. Her face changed in an odd way, and blood surged from the wound, splurting presumably in time with her heartbeat.

  omg omg omg