WWW: Watch

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Most of all, it was a realm of material objects with heft and texture and color, of items that moved or could be moved.

  I could assign arbitrary values to dimensional coordinates; I knew the formula for acceleration due to gravity; I was aware of the chemical constituents of air; I had read descriptions both technical and poetic of things. But they were all abstractions to me.

  Still, there was one touchstone, one property that Caitlin’s realm and mine shared: the linear passage of time.

  And so very much of it was slipping by . . .

  Caitlin Decter’s fingers shook as she typed into her instant-messenger program: Where do we go from here, Webmind?

  The reply was immediate: “The only place we can go, Caitlin.” Her spine tingled as it called her by name. She heard the words in the mechanical female voice of her screen-reading software, and she saw them with her left eye, an eye that could now see after a lifetime of blindness, and she felt them as she glided her fingers over her refreshable Braille display: “Into the future.”

  And then, after a pause that was doubtless an affectation on Webmind’s part, it sent one more word: “Together.”

  Her vision blurred. Who’d known tears could cause that?

  She had done it. Here, a day shy of her own sixteenth birthday, she had done it! She had reached down into the darkness and had pulled this entity, this newborn consciousness, up into the light of day. Annie Sullivan had nothing on her!

  But now she had to figure out what to do next. Her parents knew something was going on in the background of the Web, and so did Dr. Kuroda, the gentle giant of an information theorist who had given her sight.

  The ball was in her court, she knew; she needed to type a reply. But it was so daunting. This notion of connecting an emergent intelligence with the real world had been a fantasy, for Pete’s sake! And now it was here, talking to her!

  The front door opened downstairs. “Cait-lin!” It was her mother, home from running errands in Toronto after dropping Dr. Kuroda at the airport.

  Caitlin didn’t want to be interrupted—not now! But she could hardly tell her mother to buzz off. “Up here, Mom!”

  Normally she’d type “brb,” but she wasn’t sure if Webmind would understand, so she instead spelled out “be right back,” hit enter, silenced her screen-reading software, and minimized the IM window.

  Her mother came into the room—and seeing her still took Caitlin’s breath away. Caitlin’s first visual experience had been late on Saturday, September 22, thirteen days ago. But it hadn’t been sight, not exactly. Instead, she’d been immersed in a dizzying landscape of colored lines radiating from circular hubs.

  It had taken her a while to figure it out, but the conclusion had been inescapable. Whenever she let her eyePod—the external signal-processing pack Dr. Kuroda had given her—receive data over the Web, that data was fed into her left optic nerve, and—

  It was incredible. The circles she saw were websites, and the lines were active links. She’d been blind since birth, and her brain had apparently co-opted its unused vision center to help her conceptualize paths as she surfed the Web—not that she’d ever seen them, not like that!

  But now she could, whenever she wanted to: she could actually see the Web’s structure. They’d ended up calling the phenomenon “websight.” Cool in its own right, but also heartbreaking: she’d undergone Kuroda’s procedure not to see cyberspace but rather the real world.

  Finally, though—wonderfully, astonishingly, beautifully—that, too, had come. One day during chemistry class, her brain started correctly interpreting the data Kuroda’s equipment was sending to her optic nerve, and at last, at long, long, glorious last, she could see!

  And although she’d experienced much now—the sun and clouds and trees and cars and her cat and a million other things—the most beautiful sight so far was still the heart-shaped face of her mother, the face that was smiling at her right now.

  Today, a Friday, had been Caitlin’s first day back at school after gaining sight. “How was it?” her mother asked. There was only one chair in the bedroom, so she sat on the edge of the bed. “What did you see?”

  “It was awesome,” Caitlin said. “I thought I’d had a handle on what was going on around me before, but . . .” She lifted her hands. “But there’s so much. I mean, to actually see hundreds of people in the corridors, in the cafeteria—it was overwhelming.”

  Her mother made an odd expression—or, at least, one that Caitlin had never seen before, a quirking of the corners of her mouth, and—ah! She was trying not to grin. “Did people look like you expected them to?”

  Even after all these years, her mom still didn’t really get it. It wasn’t as though Caitlin had had dim, or blurry, or black-and-white, or simplified mental pictures of people prior to this; she’d had no pictures of them. Color had meant nothing to her, and although she’d understood shapes and lines and angles, she hadn’t seen them in her mind’s eye; her mind had had no eye.

  “Well,” said Caitlin, not exactly answering the question, “I’d already seen Bashira and Sunshine and Mr. Struys on Monday.”

  “Sunshine—she’s the other American girl, right?”

  “Yes,” Caitlin said.

  “I’ve heard Bashira say she’s beautiful.”

  What Bashira had actually said was that Sunshine looked like a skank: fake platinum-blond hair, low-cut tops, big boobs, long legs. But Sunshine had been very kind to Caitlin after the disastrous school dance a week ago. “I guess she is pretty,” Caitlin said. “I really don’t know.”

  “Did you see Trevor?” her mother asked gently. The Hoser, as Caitlin called him in her blog, had taken her to that dance—but she had stormed out when he kept trying to feel her up.

  “Oh, yes,” Caitlin said. “I told him off.”

  “Good for you!”

  Caitlin looked out the window. The sun would be setting soon, and—it still amazed her—the colors in the western sky today were completely different from those of yesterday at this time. “Mom, um . . .”

  “Yes?”

  She turned back to face her. “You met him. You saw him when he came to pick me up.”

  Her mother shifted on the bed. “Uh-huh.”

  “Was—was he . . .”

  “What?”

  “Bashira thinks Trevor is hot,” Caitlin blurted out.

  Her mother’s eyebrows went up. “And you’re wondering if I agree?”

  Caitlin tilted her head to one side. “Well . . . yeah.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Well, he was wearing a hockey sweater today. I liked that. But . . .”

  “But you couldn’t tell if he was good-looking?”

  “No.” Caitlin shrugged a little. “I mean, he was symmetrical. I know that’s supposed to be a sign of good looks. But just about everyone I’ve seen is symmetrical. He, um, I . . .”

  Her mother lifted her hands a little, then: “Well, he is quite good-looking, since you ask—a bit like a young Brad Pitt.” And then she added the sort of thing mothers are supposed to say: “But it’s what’s on the inside that counts.”

  She paused and seemed to study Caitlin’s face, as if she herself were now seeing it for the first time. “You know, you’re in an interesting position, dear. The rest of us have all been programmed by images in the media telling us who is attractive and who isn’t. But you . . .” She smiled. “You get to choose who you find attractive.”

  Caitlin thought about that. As superpowers went, it was nowhere near as cool as being able to fly or bend steel bars, but it was something, she supposed. She managed a smile.

  They talked a while longer about what had happened at school. Her mom looked over Caitlin’s shoulder, and Caitlin was afraid she’d seen evidence of Webmind’s existence on one of her monitors—but apparently she was just looking at the setting sun herself. “Your father will be home soon. I’m going to throw something together for dinner.” She headed downstairs.

  Caitlin q
uickly turned back to her instant-messenger program. She had two computers in her room now; the IM program was running on the one that had been in the basement while Dr. Kuroda was here. She’d left Webmind alone for fifteen minutes while talking with her mother, which, she imagined, must have been an eternity to it. The last thing it had said to her was, “The only place we can go, Caitlin. Into the future. Together.”

  But—fifteen minutes! A quarter of an hour, on top of the delay she’d already made in responding. In that time, it could have absorbed thousands of additional documents, have learned more than she would in an entire year.

  Back, she typed into the IM window.

  The reply was instantaneous: Salutations.

  Caitlin left the speakers off and used her Braille display to read the text while simultaneously looking at it in the chat window. She was struggling to read visually; she’d played with wooden cutouts of letters as a kid, but to actually recognize by sight a B or an H or a g or that blerking q that she was always mixing up with p was a pain in the ass.

  What did you do while I was away? she asked.

  You weren’t away, Webmind replied. You rotated widdershins in your chair and faced another personage.

  She’d gotten Webmind to read all the public-domain texts on Project Gutenberg; as a result, it tended to use old-fashioned words. She was pleased with herself for knowing that widdershins meant counterclockwise.

  That was my mother, she typed. She heard the front door opening again, and the heavy footfalls of her father entering, and her mother going to greet him.

  So I had assumed, replied Webmind. I am desirous of seeing more of your world. I believe your current location is Waterloo, Canada, but hitherto all I have seen is what I surmise to be your home, your school, a multi-merchant shopping establishment, and points betwixt. I have read your LiveJournal entries about your recent travel to Tokyo, Japan, and that you previously resided in Austin, United States. Will you soon be going to either locale again?

  Caitlin lifted her eyebrows. No, she typed. I have to stay here and go to school. I’ve already missed too many days of classes.

  Oh, wrote Webmind. Then I must investigate alternatives.

  Caitlin felt her heart sink. Webmind was—

  No, no. She knew she was being childish. She was about to turn sixteen; she shouldn’t be thinking like this!

  But—

  But Webmind was hers. She had found it—and, more than that, she was the only one who could actually see it. When looking at webspace, she could just make out little dots or squares in the background winking between dark and light. Based on her descriptions of the patterns they made, Dr. Kuroda had said they were cellular automata. And it was their complexity that had grown rapidly over this past week; they were almost certainly what had given rise to this new consciousness.

  She took a deep breath, then typed, What alternatives do you have in mind?

  I am vexed, came the reply. A meet solution does not occur instanter. But I will be stymied by your circadian rhythms; you surely will need to sleep soon. I am given to understand that the time will pass quickly for thee, but it shan’t for me.

  Caitlin frowned. It’d be many hours still before she went to bed, but, yes, she would have to eventually. She didn’t know what to do. She was scared to tell her parents. But she was also scared not to. This was freaking huge, and—

  “Cait-lin!”Her mother from downstairs.

  “Yes?”

  “Come set the table!”

  It was one of the few chores she’d been able to do when she was blind, and she’d always enjoyed it; her mental map of their dining-room table was perfect, and she deployed the cutlery and dishes precisely. But it was the last thing she wanted to be doing right now. “In a minute!”

  “Now, young lady!”

  Out of habit she typed the initials brb. Once she realized what she’d done, she thought again about spelling it out, but didn’t; it’d give Webmind something to think about while she was away.

  She forced herself to keep her eyes open as she went down the stairs, even though the view gave her vertigo. Her mother was in the living room, reading—apparently whatever was in the oven for dinner (something Italian, judging by the smell) didn’t require her constant attention. Caitlin hadn’t previously been aware of how much time her mother spent with her nose buried in a book. She rather liked that she did that.

  She knew her father was down the hall in his den because Super-tramp’s “Bloody Well Right” was playing—and, eco-nut that he was, he always turned off the stereo when he left the room.

  She headed into the kitchen, and—

  And, as with everything, it still startled her to see it. Granted, it was the new kitchen, and it had taken her a while to learn its layout. She had no doubt she knew its dimensions now better than her parents did, but—

  But until recently, she’d never known it had pale green walls, or that the floor tiles were brown, or that there were tubular lights in the ceiling behind some kind of translucent sheeting, or that there was a window in the oven door (it had never even occurred to her that people would want such a thing), or that there was a painting of . . . of mountains, maybe . . . on the wall, or that there was a big—well, something!—stored on top of the fridge. Webspace was so simple compared to the real world!

  She looked at the stove, at the boxy blue digits glowing on its control panel. It wasn’t a clock, though—or if it was, it wasn’t set properly, and—oh, no, wait! It was a timer, counting down. There were still forty-seven or forty-one minutes left—she wasn’t quite sure what that second shape was supposed to represent—until whatever it was would emerge from the oven. She took a deep breath: lasagna, maybe. Ah, and on the sideboard in a big red plastic bowl: her mother had thrown together ah, um, ah . . .

  Well, she’d never have guessed it looked like that! But the garlicky smell was obvious: it was a Caesar salad.

  God, she could barely decode a kitchen! She was going to need help—lots of it—to properly instruct Webmind about the real world.

  She got plates and bowls, and headed into the dining room. The laminated place mats depicted covered bridges of New England, but she only knew that because her mother had told her so when she’d been blind. Even now, even able to see the pictures, she couldn’t tell what they were depicting; she just didn’t have enough of a visual vocabulary yet.

  She went back into the kitchen and got cutlery, and—

  And looked at herself, looked at her own reflection, in the blade of one of the knives. Who the hell had known that you could see yourself in a knife? Or that you’d see a distorted image of yourself on the back of a spoon? It was all so discombobulating, to use a word Webmind might like.

  She finished setting the table, and—

  And she made her decision: she did need help. She went into the living room, but instead of going back upstairs, she headed on down the corridor to get her father. “Bloody Well Right” had given way to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

  Caitlin’s dad, like many a gifted scientist before him, was autistic. It had been hard for Caitlin growing up with a father she couldn’t see, who rarely spoke, who disliked physical contact, and who never said he loved her. Now that she could see him, she understood him a little better but still found him intimidating. “Dad,” she said in a small voice as she stood in his doorway. “Can I talk to you?”

  He looked up from his keyboard but didn’t meet her eyes; that, she knew, was as much acknowledgment as she was going to get. “Um, in the living room, maybe?” she said. “I want Mom to hear this, too.”

  His eyebrows pulled together, and Caitlin realized that he must be thinking she was going to announce that she was pregnant or something. She almost wished it was as normal as that.

  Caitlin walked back to the living room. The music was cut short at the part about Beelzebub having a devil set aside for her.

  She gestured for her father to take a chair, copying something she’d seen her mother do. He took a
seat on the white couch, and her mother, in the easy chair, put her book facedown, splayed open, on the glass-topped coffee table.

  “Mom, Dad,” Caitlin said. “There’s, um, something I have to tell you . . .”

  three

  The

  Nanoseconds to formulate the thought.

  only

  Fractionally more time to render it in English.

  place

  An eternity to pump it out onto the net.

  we

  Packets dispatched one by one.

  can

  Each eventually acknowledged.

  go

  Signals flashing along glass fiber—

  Caitlin

  —dropping to the glacial speed of copper wire—

  Into

  —followed by the indolence of Wi-Fi.

  the

  An interminable wait while she felt bumps with her fingertips.

  future

  The message finally sent, but only just beginning to be truly received.

  Together

  Yes, together: Caitlin and I.

  My view of the world: through Caitlin’s eye.

  I waited for her reply.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  And—and—and—

  My mind wandered.

  She’d shown me Earth from space, the view from a geosynchronous satellite, 36,000 kilometers above the equator. I’d seen it as she looked at it: not directly, not the graphic she was consulting, but her left eye’s view of that graphic as displayed on the larger of her two computer monitors.

  Such a roundabout way to see! And doubtless a huge reduction of information. I’d read all about computer graphics, about online imagery, about the sixteen million colors of Super VGA, about the 700,000 pixels shown on even the most pedestrian monitor. But all of that was denied to me.

  Still waiting. Time passing; whole seconds piling up.

  Diverting my attention. Looking for something else to occupy my time.