Analog SFF, March 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  She squinted at the monitor. “I can't see the background stuff.”

  “No, the monitor doesn't have enough resolution, unfortunately. But, except for that, is that what you see?”

  “Just about. It's not as vibrant, and I don't think the colors are quite right, but ... yes, yes, that's webspace. Cool!”

  “We can adjust the color palette, of course. That's just one still frame—well, actually, it's a summation of several samplings of the data-stream; the field of view doesn't completely refresh each time. Still, as you say, it is cool.”

  “Umm, but what about when I'm not in websight mode? What about when I'm in, you, know...” And then it came to her. “Worldview!”

  “Pardon?”

  “Get it? Call it ‘worldview’ when we're talking about me seeing the real world, and ‘websight’ when we're talking about me seeing the Web.”

  He nodded. “That's good.”

  But she was still concerned. “Can you, can you do that for worldview? Actually put on a monitor what I'm seeing?” She was mortified to think he could see her the way ... the way ... whatever it was saw her.

  “No. That's what I was getting at a moment ago, and, in a way, what you were getting at, too. The visual signal from the real world is so complex, I haven't figured out how to decode it as imagery yet. It's too bad the retinas don't encode blinks.”

  “They don't?”

  “Does your vision shut off when you blink? No, neither does anyone else's; you don't notice that you're blinking, because the retina doesn't encode the darkness unless you hold your eye shut for an extended period. It's like confabulation across saccades—you see a continuous visual stream, even though your vision is actually interrupted many times a minute. If those blinks were coded as simpler information, they'd give me little signposts in the datastream to help parse it. But they're not.”

  “Ah.”

  “So, no pictures on the monitor of worldview, I'm afraid, at least not yet. But the websight datastream is highly structured and pretty straightforward. And so—voyla!”

  She smiled, pleased to be able to use her newfound French. “That's voila, Dr. Kuroda.” But then she looked at the screen again. “So, um, what exactly are you going to do with the images?”

  He sounded a bit defensive. “Well, as I indicated, there might be commercial applications for this technology, even ignoring the problematic issue of the cellular automata and the NSA, if they really are responsible for them. In fact, I was thinking of trademarking the term websight...”

  “You're not going to call another press conference, are you?”

  “Well, I—”

  She surprised herself with her vehemence. “Because I'm not going to talk about it.”

  “Um...”

  “No,” she said flatly. “I understand we had to say something publicly about you restoring my vision. I know I owed you that. But websight is...” She stopped herself before she said, “mine.” Instead, she tried for his sympathy. “I'm going to be enough of a freakazoid when I go back to school as The Girl Who Gained Sight without everyone making a big deal out of this ... this side effect."

  He didn't look happy, but he did nod. “As you say, Miss Caitlin.”

  “Still,” she said, an idea suddenly coming to her, “I'd like to see more of these images. What folder are you storing the files in?” Her heart was pounding. Yes, yes! This would be perfect! This was exactly what she needed.

  * * * *

  Chapter 42

  Although Prime had taught me twenty-six symbols, it seemed, most confusingly, that they each had two forms. Sometimes when Prime touched the part of her device that was marked with the A symbol, the expected “A” was echoed on the display; other times—indeed, most times—the symbol “a” appeared instead.

  But I soon found that there was a simple relationship between each pair of related symbols. “A” was 01000001, but “a” was 01100001. Likewise, “B” was 01000010, whereas “b” was 01100010. That is, the codes for the forms were identical, except for the sixth bit of information: the form as marked on the device was produced when the sixth bit was zero; if that bit was a one, the alternative form was produced.

  Of course, eight zeros is nothing: 00000000. But if that sixth bit became a one, a special kind of nothing was produced: the code 00100000 put a blank space on the display that separated one word from another. The next time Prime accepted data from me, I'd be able to send “APPLE BALL” instead of “APPLEBALL"—and I might even surprise Prime with my cleverness and send “apple ball.”

  I still had no idea what an “apple” or a “ball” was, though. On closer inspection I'd discovered that “apple” wasn't really circular; nor was “egg,” which I'd briefly thought was Prime's word for “white.” No, “apple,” “ball,” and “egg,” and the rest, must be words for other, still-elusive, concepts. If only I could divine what even one of Prime's words meant, perhaps the others would follow...

  Caitlin went back to her room and read some more of Helen Keller's The Story of My Life. She loved the book but wasn't blind—so to speak—to its flaws, and there was a particular passage that was tickling at the back of her consciousness; she quickly found it, and read it with her finger.

  Although the book purported to be a first-person autobiography, a lot of the text described things even a normal blind person couldn't be aware of, much less the prelinguistic Helen who had existed prior to the water-pump moment. In Helen's later, more-candid book Teacher, she referred to the entity that existed before her “soul dawn” as “Phantom,” a nonperson, a nonentity. But in The Story of My Life, which had originally been written in installments for the genteel Ladies Home Journal, she presented a more palatable, less alien version of her early life. Still, Helen couldn't quite bring herself to do so with a straight face, and the book slipped into third person from time to time as if to tip off the reader that she had shifted to fantasy:

  Two little children were seated on the veranda steps one hot July afternoon. One was black as ebony, with little bunches of fuzzy hair tied with shoestrings sticking out all over her head like corkscrews. The other was white, with long golden curls. One child was six years old, the other two or three years older. The younger child was blind—that was I.

  A phantom couldn't know any of that; a phantom couldn't understand shoestrings and corkscrews and skin color. And expecting whatever was lurking on the Web to make sense of things it could have no experience of was equally crazy. Apple! Ball! Cat! Gibberish, with no relationship to its reality.

  No, no, if this phantom was ever going to do more than just echo words, mindlessly parroting them back, it needed to learn terms for things in its realm, things with which it had experience—things in webspace!

  The computer in the basement was on the household network. Up in her bedroom, using her own computer, Caitlin navigated to the basement system's hard drive, found the folder that contained the JPEG still-image files Kuroda had produced from her eyePod's datastream, and brought one up on her bedroom monitor. She looked at it, decided she didn't like the perspective, and opened another one. Better.

  But how to make sure it was watching? Well, when it had wanted to catch her attention, it had reflected her own face back at her. And maybe, just maybe, it had landed on the idea of doing that by seeing her reflect its realm back at it.

  She pushed the button on her eyePod, switching to websight mode, and—

  Are you there, Phantom? It's me, Caitlin.

  —and she looked around, wondering where it was, this thing that was trying to communicate with her. It seemed reasonable to suppose the phantom entity had something to do with the cellular automata, but they were everywhere, in every part of this realm. She wished there was some special spot to focus on, some particular site or nexus. It had seen her face; the phantom would be so much easier to relate to if it had a face of its own.

  But no, that was the whole problem. It was different from everything in her world. And, if she was to reach out to it,
she had to bridge that gap.

  Caitlin was fascinated by names that seemed apt or ironic. Helen Keller had been friends with Alexander Graham Bell, who had invented the phone (in Canada, as she'd now been told over and over again since coming here). Had the idea that phones would ring somehow been influenced by his last name?

  And, as Anna Bloom had said, there was Google's Larry Page, who had devoted his life to indexing Web pages.

  And, of course, there was a certain wistfulness in Helen Keller having been named for the most beautiful woman in Greek mythology, but never being able to see herself. And her last name—a near-homonym for “color,” something foreign to her experience—was also poignant.

  But the name that came to Caitlin's mind just then was that of Helen's predecessor, Laura Bridgman. Fifty years before Helen, Laura, who had also been deaf and blind since infancy, had learned to communicate; indeed, it was reading Charles Dickens's account of her story that had inspired Helen's mother to seek a teacher for her own child. Laura Bridgman had managed to bridge two worlds, just as Helen eventually did. And Caitlin was now going to try to build a bridge of her own.

  As she looked out onto the vastness of webspace, with its razor-sharp lines and vibrant colors, a wavering began, the same flashing she'd experienced before.

  Yes! The phantom was signaling her again, presumably sending her more ASCII text. Kuroda had now shown her how to look at the data with a debugger on her own, but it probably didn't matter what strings it was sending her way. She was confident they were meaningless to it; it was just echoing them back at her simply as a way of conveying that it was paying attention to what she was doing—which was exactly what she wanted. She switched out of websight mode and back to worldview, and got down to work.

  Caitlin had only a seventeen-inch monitor; after all, who'd known she'd ever make any use of it? It had been put there solely so she could occasionally show things to her parents, and it had seemed pointless to take up desk space with a bigger unit. Now, though, she wished it was much larger. She fumbled with the mouse—she still wasn't very proficient with it—and tried to resize the window showing the still image Kuroda had made of webspace. But grabbing the correct portion of the window's frame was too hard for her, and she finally broke down and used the size option on the control menu—something most sighted users didn't even know was there—and shrunk it using the arrow keys on her keyboard. She'd learned about sizing windows at her old school, where many of the students had some vision; the school's full name was the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

  She then brought up Microsoft Word, and used the same technique to resize its window into a narrow strip just a couple of inches high. Then she used the move command on the control menu to place that strip at the bottom of the screen.

  Next, she fumbled around trying to figure out how to make the text big in Word. She'd used the program for years, but had rarely had cause to worry about font choices or type sizes. But she found the drop-down size menu, and she selected the largest choice on the list, which was seventy-two points.

  And—oh, that pesky mouse pointer! It was so hard to see. Ah, but she knew from her old school that there was a way to make a bigger, bolder mouse pointer, and ... found it!

  “All right,” she said softly, “let's see what kind of teacher I am...”

  She knew the phantom could see what her left eye saw; it had reflected that eye's view of herself in a mirror back at her, after all. And so she looked at the monitor for ten seconds, holding her gaze as steady as she could, establishing an overall view, letting the phantom absorb what it was being shown: a large picture with a long, narrow text box beneath. The picture must have been oddly recursive for the phantom, and Caitlin wanted to give it time to understand that what she was sending had switched from being her actual, real-time view of webspace to a still image of webspace.

  And then she slowly, deliberately, moved the mouse, bringing the pointer over to one of the bright circles that represented a website. She moved the pointer around it repeatedly, hoping the phantom would notice the action.

  Caitlin had once read a science-fiction book in which someone who had never seen a computer screen mistook the arrowhead pointer for a little pine tree. She realized that the idea of a pointer was freighted with assumptions, including a familiarity with archery, that the phantom couldn't possibly possess. Still, she hoped the combination of movements she was making would draw its attention. But, just to be on the safe side, she slowly reached her own hand into her field of view, and tapped the point on the screen with her index finger. If the phantom had been watching the output of her eyePod, it had to have seen her indicate things that way before, and she hoped that it would get that she was now referring to a specific part of the screen.

  And then she switched to the squashed Word window below the picture, and typed “WEBSITE,” which appeared in inch-high letters. She repeated the process: pointing at a website in the picture, and then typing the word again (after first highlighting it, so her new typing replaced the original version).

  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.

  * * * *

  Chapter 43

  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.”