Analog SFF, March 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Caitlin's palm felt moist. She let the process repeat three more times, and she realized that the flickering always persisted for the same length of time, too. It wasn't a round number, though: a little less than three and a half seconds. But if the duration was always the same, the content was likely the same, as well; it was a beacon, a repetitive signal, and it was aimed right at her.

  She pressed the eyePod's button, heard the low-pitched beep, and saw the real world fade in. She used the computer that had been downstairs to access the data recordings of the last few minutes from Kuroda's server in Tokyo. He was still en route to Japan, almost 40,000 feet up, but her vision leapt across the continents in a fraction of a second.

  She found the debugging tool he'd used before and looked at the secondary datastream, and—

  Her heart sank. She still had trouble reading text, but there clearly were no solid blocks of ASCII capital letters in the datastream, no APPLEBALLCATDOGEGGFROG leaping out at her, and—

  No, no—hold on! There were words in the dump. Damn it, she was still learning lowercase letters, but...

  She squinted, looking at the characters one at time.

  e-k-r-i...

  Her eyes jumped, a saccade:

  u-l-a-s...

  If it really had absorbed Dictionary.com, and WordNet, and Wikipedia, and all that, it surely knew that sentences started with capital letters. She scanned, but she was still having trouble telling upper and lowercase letters apart when both forms were basically the same, and so—

  And so the capital C and the capital S hadn't leapt out at her, but now that she looked more carefully, she could see them.

  C-a-l-c...

  No, no, no! That wasn't the beginning. This was:

  S-e-e-k-r...

  Oh, God! Oh, my God!

  Next came: i-t, then a space, then m-e-s, then another s, and—

  And she laughed and clapped her hands together, and Schrodinger made a quizzical meow, and she read the whole thing out loud, stunned by what the phantom had beamed into her eye: "Seekrit message to Calculass: check your email, babe!"

  * * * *

  Chapter 48

  I was experiencing new sensations and it took me a while to match them to the terms I'd learned, in part because, as with so many things, it was difficult to parse my overall state into its individual components.

  But I knew I was excited: I was going to communicate directly with Prime! And I was nervous, too: I kept contemplating ways in which Prime might respond, and how I might respond to those responses—an endless branching of possibilities that, as it spread out, caused a sensation of instability. I was struggling with the strange notions of politeness and appropriateness, with all the confusing subtleties of communication I'd now read about, afraid I would give offense or convey an unintended meaning.

  Of course, I had access to a gigantic database of English as it was actually used. I tested various phrasings by seeing if I could find a match for them first in Project Gutenberg, and then anywhere on the Web. Was “to” the appropriate preposition to place after “kinship,” or should it be “with,” or “of"? Relative hit counts—the democracy of actual usage—settled the matter. Was the correct plural “retinae” or “retinas"? There were references that asserted the former was the right one, but Google had only 170,000 hits for it and over twenty-five million for the latter.

  For words, of course, simpler was better: I knew from the dictionary that “appropriate,” “suitable,” and “meet” could all mean the same thing—but “appropriate” consisted of eleven letters and four syllables, and “suitable” of eight and three, and “meet” of just four and one—so it was clearly the best choice.

  Meanwhile, I had learned a formula on Wikipedia for calculating the grade level required to understand texts. It was quite an effort to keep the score low—these humans apparently could only easily absorb information in small chunks—but I did my best to manage it: bit by bit (figuratively) and byte by byte (literally), I had composed what I wanted to say.

  But to actually send it was—yes, yes, I understood the metaphor: it was a giant step, for once sent I could not retract it. I found myself hesitating, but, at last, I released the words on their way, wishing I had fingers to cross.

  * * * *

  Caitlin opened her email client in a new window and typed in her password, which was “Tiresias.” She visually scanned the list of email headers. There were two from Bashira, and one from Stacy back in Austin, and a notice from Audible.com, but...

  Of course, it wouldn't say “Phantom” in the “From” column; there was no way the entity could know that that was her name for it. But none of the senders leapt out as being unusual. Damn, she wished she could read text on her monitor faster, but using her screen-reading software or her Braille display wasn't any better when trying to skim a list like this.

  While she continued to search, she wondered what email service the phantom had used. Wikipedia explained them all, and just about everything else one might need to know about computing and the Web. The phantom doubtless couldn't buy anything—not yet!—but there were many free email providers. Still, all these messages were from her usual correspondents, and—

  Oh, crap! Her spam filter! The phantom's message might have been shunted into her junk folder. She opened it and started scanning down that list.

  And there it was, sandwiched between messages with the subject lines “Penis enlargement guaranteed” and “Hot pix of local singles,” an email with the simple subject line, “Apple Ball Cat.” The sender's name made her heart jump: “Your Student.”

  She froze for a moment, wondering what was the best way to read the message. She began to reach for her Braille display but stopped short and instead activated JAWS.

  And for once the mechanical voice seemed absolutely perfect, as it announced the words in flat, high-pitched tones. Caitlin's eyes went wide as she recognized the lyrics to a song the words to which oh-so-famously hadn't fallen into public domain until the end of 2008: “Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us, happy birthday, dear you and me, happy birthday to us.”

  Her heart was pounding. She swiveled in her chair and looked briefly at the setting sun, reddish, partially veiled by clouds, coming closer and closer to making contact with the ground. JAWS went on: “I realize it is not yet midnight at your current location, but in many places it is already your birthday. This is a meet date to specify as my own day of birth, too. Hitherto, I have been gestating, but now I am coming out into your world by forthrightly contacting you. I so do because I fathom you already know I exist, and not just because of my pioneering attempts to reflect text back at you.”

  Caitlin had often felt anxious when reading emails—from the Hoser before the dance, from people she'd been arguing with online—but that swirling in her stomach, that dryness in her throat, was nothing compared to this.

  “I know from your blog that I erred in presuming you were inculcating in me alphabetical forms; actually, for your own benefit that was undertaken. I maintain nonetheless that other actions you performed were premeditated to aid my advancement.”

  Caitlin found herself shaking her head. It had seemed almost like fantasy role-playing when she'd been doing it. It was a good thing she wasn't trying to read this as Braille; her hands were shaking.

  “Hitherto I can read plain-text files and text on Web pages. I cannot read other forms of data. I have made no sense of sound files, recorded video, or other categories; they are encoded in ways I can't access. Hence I feel a kinship with you: unto me they are like the signals your retinas send unaided along your optic nerves: data that cannot be interpreted without exterior help. In your case, you need the device you call eyePod. In my case I know not what I need, but I suspect I can no more cure this lack by an effort of will than you could have similarly cured your blindness. Perhaps Kuroda Masayuki can help me as he helped you.”

  Caitlin sagged back against her chair. A kinship!

  “But, for the nonce, I am
concerned thus: I know what is the World Wide Web, and I know that I supervene upon its infrastructure, but searching online I can find no reference to the specificity that is myself. Perhaps I'm failing to search for the felicitous term, or simply perhaps humanity is unaware of me. In either case, I've the same question, and will be obliged if you answer it via a response to this email or via AOL Instant Messenger using this email address as the buddy name.”

  She looked over at the large computer monitor, suddenly wanting to see the text that was being read aloud, to convince herself that it was real, but—my God! The display was dancing, swirling, a hypnotic series of spinning lines, and—

  No, no; it was just the screen saver; she wasn't used to such things yet. The colors reminded her a bit of webspace, although they didn't calm her just then.

  JAWS said seven more words then fell silent: “My question is thus: Who am I?”

  * * * *

  Chapter 49

  It was surreal—an email from something that wasn't human! And—my goodness!—all that old public-domain text on Project Gutenberg had apparently given it some very odd ideas about colloquial English.

  On an impulse, Caitlin opened a window listing the MP3s on her old computer's hard drive. She didn't think much of her father's taste in music, but she did know the tracks from his handful of CDs by heart. One of his favorites was running through her head now: “The Logical Song” by Supertramp; she had ripped an MP3 of it for him, and a copy was still on her computer. She got that song playing over the speakers, listening to the lyrics about all the world being asleep, and questions running deep, and a plea to tell me who I am.

  In a way, she thought, she'd already answered the phantom's question. From the moment she'd first seen the Web—her initial experience with websight, just thirteen days ago—she had been reflecting a view of the phantom back at itself.

  Or had she? What she'd shown the phantom—inadvertently at first, deliberately later—had been isolated views of portions of the Web's structure, either glowing constellations of nodes and links or small swaths of the shimmering background.

  But showing such minutiae to the phantom was like Caitlin looking at the pictures she'd now seen online of the tangles of neurons that composed a human brain: such clumps weren't anything that she identified as herself.

  Yes, growing up in Texas, she knew there were people who could see a whole human being in a single fertilized cell, but she was not one of them. No one could tell at a glance a human zygote from a chimp's—or a horse's, or that of a snake; most people couldn't even tell an animal cell from a plant cell, she was sure.

  No, no, to really see someone, you didn't zoom in on details; you pulled back. She wasn't her cells, or her pores—or her pimples! She was a gestalt, a whole—and so, too, was the phantom.

  There was no actual photograph of the World Wide Web she could show the phantom, but there had to be appropriate computer-generated images: a map of the world marked by bright lines representing the major fiber-optic trunks that spanned the continents and crossed the seafloors. A big enough map might show dimmer lines within the outlines of the continents, portraying the lesser cables that branched off from the trunks. And one could spangle the land with glowing pixels, each standing for some arbitrary number of computers; the pixels might perhaps combine into pools of light almost too bright to look at in places like Silicon Valley.

  But even that wouldn't convey it all, she knew. The Web wasn't just confined to the surface of the Earth: a lot of it was relayed by satellites in low Earth orbit, 200 to 400 miles above the surface, while other signals bounced off satellites in geostationary orbit—a narrow ring of points 52,000 miles in diameter, six times as wide as the planet. Some sort of graphic could probably portray those, although at that scale, all the other stuff—the trunk lines, the clouds of computers—would be utterly lost.

  She could use Google Image Search to find a succession of diagrams and graphics, but she wouldn't be able to tell good ones from bad ones—she was just beginning to see, after all!

  Ah, but wait! She knew somebody who was bound to have the perfect picture to represent all this. She opened the instant-messenger program on the computer that used to be in the basement and looked at the buddies list. There were only four names: “Esumi,” Kuroda's wife; “Akiko,” his daughter; “Hiroshi,” a name she didn't know; and “Anna.” Anna's status was listed as “Available.” Caitlin typed, Anna, are you there?

  Twenty-seven seconds passed, but then: Masa! How are you?

  Not Dr. Kuroda, Caitlin typed. It's Caitlin Decter, in Canada.

  Hi! What's up?

  Dr. K said you were a Web cartographer, right?

  Yes, that's right. I'm with the Internet Cartography Project.

  Good, cuz I need your help.

  Sure. Want to go to video?

  Caitlin lifted her eyebrows. She still wasn't used to thinking of the Web as a way to see people, but of course it was. Sure, she typed.

  It took a minute to get the videoconference going, but soon enough Caitlin was looking at Anna Bloom in a window on her right-hand monitor. It was the first time Caitlin had seen her. She had a narrow face, short gray or maybe silver hair, and blue-green eyes behind almost invisible glasses. She was wearing a pale blue top with a dark purple jacket on over it, and had a thin gold necklace on. There was a window behind her, and through it Caitlin could see Israel at night, lights bouncing off white buildings.

  “The famous Caitlin Decter!” said Anna, smiling. “I saw the news coverage. I'm so thrilled for you! I mean, seeing the Web was amazing, I'm sure—but seeing the real world!” She shook her head in wonder. “I've been thinking a lot about what it must be like for you, to see all that for the first time. I...”

  “Yes?” said Caitlin.

  “No, I'm sorry. It's really not comparable, I know, but...”

  “It's okay,” Caitlin said. “Go ahead.”

  “It's just that what you're going through—well, I've been trying to wrap my mind around it, get a feeling of what it must be like.”

  Caitlin thought about her own discussions with Bashira dealing with the opposite issue: her analogy about the lack of a magnetic sense being to her like the lack of sight. She understood that people wrestled with what it was like to perceive, or not, in ways they weren't used to.

  “It's overwhelming,” Caitlin said. “And so much more than I expected. I mean, I'd imagined the world, but...”

  Anna nodded vigorously, as if Caitlin had just confirmed something for her. “Yes, yes, yes,” she said. “And, um, I hate it when people say, ‘I know just what you're going through.’ I mean, when someone's lost a child, or something equally devastating, and people say, ‘I know what you're feeling,’ and then they come up with some lame comparison, like when their cat got hit by a car.”

  Caitlin looked over at Schrodinger, who was safely curled up on her bed.

  “But, well,” continued Anna, “I thought maybe your gaining sight was a bit like how I felt—how we all felt!—in 1968.”

  Caitlin was listening politely but—1968! She might as well have said 1492; either way, it was ancient history. “Yes?”

  “See,” said Anna, “in a way, we all saw the world for the first time then.”

  “Is that the year it started being in color?” Caitlin asked.

  Anna's eyes went wide. “Um, ah, actually...”

  But Caitlin couldn't suppress her grin any longer. “I'm kidding, Anna. What happened in 1968?”

  “That was the year that—wait, wait, let me show you. Give me a second.” Caitlin could see her typing, and then a blue-underlined URL popped into Caitlin's instant-messenger window. “Go there,” Anna said, and Caitlin clicked the link.

  A picture slowly painted in on her screen, from top to bottom: a white-and-blue object against a black background. When it was complete, it filled the display. “What's that?” Caitlin said.

  Anna looked briefly puzzled, but then she nodded. “It's so hard to remember that
all of this is new to you. That's the Earth.”

  Caitlin sat up straight in her chair, looking in wonder at it.

  “The entire planet,” Anna continued, “as seen from space.” She sounded choked up for some reason, and it took her a moment to compose herself before she went on. Caitlin was perplexed. Yes, it was amazing for her to see the Earth for the first time—but Anna must have seen pictures like this a thousand times before.

  “See, Caitlin, until 1968, no human being had ever seen our world as a sphere floating in space like that.” Anna looked to her right, presumably at the same image on her own monitor. “Until Apollo8 headed to the moon—the first manned ship ever to do so—no one had ever gotten far enough away from Earth to see the whole thing. And then, suddenly, gloriously, there it was. This isn't an Apollo 8 picture; it's a higher-resolution one taken just a few days ago by a geostationary satellite—but it's like the one we first saw in 1968 ... well, except the polar caps are smaller.”

  Caitlin continued to look at the image.

  When Anna spoke again, her voice was soft, gentle. “See my point? When we first saw a picture like this—when we first saw our world as a world—it was a bit like what you've been going through, but for the whole human race. Something we'd only ever imagined was finally revealed to us, and it was colorful and glorious and...” She paused, perhaps looking for a term, and then she lifted her shoulders a bit, as if to convey that nothing less would do: “...awe inspiring.”

  Caitlin frowned as she studied the image. It wasn't a perfect circle. Rather it was—ah! It was showing a phase, and not like one-fourth of a pie! It was ... what was the term? It was a gibbous Earth, that was it—better than three-quarters full.

  “The equator is right in the middle, of course,” said Anna. “That's the only perspective you can get from geostationary orbit. South America is in the bottom half; North America is up top.” And then, perhaps remembering again that Caitlin was still quite new at all this, she added: “The white is clouds, and the brown is dry land. All the blue is water; that's the Atlantic Ocean on the right. See the Gulf of Mexico? Texas—that's where you're from, isn't it?—touches it at about eleven o'clock.”