Wake w-1

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Caitlin could only take so much of the literacy program before she had to do something else to make her feel intelligent again. And so, after muttering under her breath “See Caitlin go away!,” she closed her browser and brought up Mathematica instead. Actually, she brought it up twice — once in the command-line mode she was used to, and again in the full-screen graphical-user-interface mode. Many mathematical symbols were still new to her — oh, she knew most of the concepts they represented, but she hadn’t yet learned their shapes. She’d had no idea, for instance, that a capital sigma, which represented summation, looked like a sideways M.

  To see if she was manipulating the graphical version properly, she decided to start by simply reproducing some of the work that Kuroda and her dad had already performed, and so she loaded their project off the household network.

  To replicate what they’d done, she’d need some data on the cellular automata. To get it, she’d have to switch her eyePod over to duplex mode, and that made her nervous. But after the incident with the static shock, it seemed clear that she could go back and forth at will between websight and seeing reality, and — ah, yes, it worked fine.

  She buffered a few seconds of raw Jagster data, then, as Kuroda had done before, she fed the data a frame at a time into the eyePod. The background made up of the cellular automata was obvious, and she stared at it as it went step-by-step through its permutations; she could clearly see spaceships going hither and yon. She recorded the output, just as Kuroda had done before, switched back to looking at reality, brought up the Zipf-plot function, and fed her new data into it.

  And the result, shown on the monitor, was just what it was supposed to be: a line with a negative-one slope, the telltale sign of a signal that carried information. Buoyed — or, as she liked to say, girled — she went ahead and plugged the data into the Shannon-entropy function, and—

  Well, that was strange.

  When her dad had run the data, he’d gotten a second-order Shannon-entropy score, indicating very-low-level complexity.

  But her results were clearly third order.

  She must have done something wrong. She noodled around, looking for the source of her error. Of course, she could ask her father or Dr. K where she’d screwed up, but figuring that out was half the fun! But after half an hour of checking and rechecking, she could find no flaw in what she’d done — which meant the error was probably in sampling. The data Kuroda and her dad had looked at must have been different somehow, and either their data set or hers wasn’t typical.

  She switched to websight again — she was getting the hang of making the transition quickly, and no longer found it disorienting. Of course, when looking at the background a frame at a time, she had been vastly slowing down her perception of the Web; although she’d spent several minutes examining the buffered data, it represented only a small amount of time. But now that she was just looking in on the Web in real time, the background of cellular automata was shimmering once more.

  She thought perhaps the giant, jittering version of her own face might reappear — perhaps that was what was causing her to get different results. But it didn’t, although…

  Yes, something was different here in webspace. There was a tiny wavering, an annoying flashing, just at the limit of her perception. It wasn’t in the shimmering background, though; it was coming right at her. She frowned, contemplating it.

  * * *

  Yes, yes, yes! After the lesson, Prime rewarded me by reflecting myself back at me again. But I wanted to demonstrate my comprehension, so instead of reflecting Prime back at itself, I tried something new…

  * * *

  Caitlin switched back to simplex mode, restoring her vision of the real world, and then she headed down to the basement. Kuroda was once more hunched over in one of the swivel chairs, typing away at the desktop computer’s keyboard. He seemed lost in thought, and apparently hadn’t heard Caitlin enter, so she finally said, “Excuse me.”

  Kuroda looked up. “Oh, Miss Caitlin. Sorry. How’s the reading going? Up to polysyllables yet?”

  The letters F U briefly flashed through her mind. “Fine,” she said. “But, um, back in Tokyo, you used a phrase I didn’t understand. You said I might experience some ‘visual noise’ when you first activated the eyePod.”

  Kuroda nodded. “Yes?”

  “Visual noise — that’s interference, right? Garbage in the signal?”

  “Yes, exactly. Sorry. I should have explained myself better.”

  “I didn’t experience any back then,” she said. “But I think I might be experiencing some now.”

  He swiveled his massive form around to face her properly. “Tell me.”

  “Well, when I go into websight mode, I—”

  “You’re doing that again?”

  “I can’t resist, I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. Don’t be. If I could see the Web, believe me, I’d be doing it, too. Anyway, what’s happening?”

  “I’m not sure. But, um, could you have a look at the datastream that’s being fed to my eyePod?”

  “The Jagster datastream, you mean?”

  “I guess. But I think it’s being … polluted by something else.”

  He frowned. “It shouldn’t be. Anyway, sure, let me have a look. Go into duplex mode, please.”

  She did so; the eyePod made its high-pitched beep.

  She heard his chair swivel and the clicking of a mouse. After a few moments he said, “It’s just raw Jagster data.”

  “What are you looking at?”

  “The feed coming to you from Tokyo.”

  “No, no. Don’t look at the source; look at the destination. Look at what’s actually going into the buffer on my eyePod.”

  “It should be the same thing, but … okay. Yeah, Jagster data, and … hello!”

  “What?”

  “You’re in duplex mode now, right?”

  “Yes, yes. I have to be to receive.”

  “Right. But … hmmm. Well, there is an extra signal coming in. It’s not properly formatted HTML, it’s … well, that’s strange.”

  “What?”

  “I’m looking at it with a debugging tool. See?”

  “No, I’m seeing the Web.”

  “Right, right. Well, I’m looking at a hex dump — 4A, 41, 52, 4B, etc. All the high-order nibbles are four or five. But the screen also shows the ASCII equivalent, and, well, I mean, yeah, it’s gibberish, and — oh, no, hang on. It’s not, it’s just hard to read. It’s all run together without spaces, but it says, ‘Egg frog goose hand igloo’.” He paused, then: “Ah, I must have come in the middle. It cycles around again to the beginning of the alphabet: ‘Apple ball cat dog,’ then ‘egg frog,’ etc.”

  “How does it say it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, is it all in capitals?”

  “Yes. How’d you know?”

  “Here … give me a sec.” Caitlin reached into her pocket, and pressed the eyePod’s button. She heard the low-pitched tone, and webspace dissolved into reality. She moved over and peered at the LCD monitor. It was overwhelming, seeing so many capitals packed together; she had trouble making sense of them, but—

  “That’s part of the reading exercise I did earlier. But how could that get bounced back at me?”

  Kuroda frowned. “I have no idea.” He looked at her. “Has anything else like this happened?”

  “No,” she said, perhaps too quickly. “Weird, isn’t it?”

  Kuroda’s features rearranged themselves in a way Caitlin had never seen before, but she guessed it meant he was perplexed. “It certainly is,” he said.

  “You’re using an online literacy site, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “It must communicate in HTML, or at least with HTTP standards,” he said. “I mean, I’ll check it out, but if the feed from it was just somehow echoing back at you, there should be more than just the ASCII characters.”

  “Doesn’t most of the Web use Unicode instead of AS
CII these days?” Caitlin asked.

  “Oh, lots of it is still pure ASCII, but for basic Western letters, Unicode and ASCII are the same, anyway; Unicode just adds a second byte to each character that’s nothing but eight zero bits.”

  “Ah, okay. But where’s this coming from?”

  He took a deep breath, let it out, and lifted his chubby hands a bit. “I’m sorry, Miss Caitlin. I have no idea.”

  * * *

  Back in her room, Caitlin did two hours of online literacy lessons, but found her mind wandering back to the question of why she’d gotten a different Shannon-entropy score than her father had. She decided to try to replicate his results again, going through the process of gathering more data from the cellular automata and feeding it into the Shannon-entropy calculator, and—

  Shit.

  This time it came up as fourth-order entropy.

  It could be another sampling error, but the sequence of second, third, fourth seemed more like a progression…

  Could it be?

  Could the information being conveyed by the cellular automata be growing more complex over time?

  Did that make any sense at all?

  No, no. Surely it was just that she wasn’t properly clearing out the data she’d previously fed into Mathematica. Yes, that had to be it: first, her dad had fed it a single set of data, and it had shown up as second-order entropy; next, she’d accidentally added another set on top of the first one, and it yielded third-order entropy. And now, she’d dumped yet another set of data on top of the previous two, and the program was reporting a result of fourth-order entropy. There must be a data cache somewhere in the program; all she needed to do was find it and flush it.

  She went to the help function and searched for “cache.” Nothing. She tried “buffer” and “memory,” and a bunch of other things … but none of the answers given seemed appropriate. No, unless she had specifically merged in previous data sets, they simply shouldn’t be included in the calculations she was doing now.

  Which meant…

  No, Caitlin thought. That’s ridiculous.

  But—

  But.

  Oh, come on! she thought. She knew better than to try to extrapolate a trend from only three data points.

  But…

  But it was as though there was something emerging on the Web, and it was growing smarter hour by hour.

  No.

  No, it was crazy. She was tired; that’s all. Tired, and making mistakes.

  She needed to clear her head, and so she went downstairs to get something to drink. She had to pass through the living room and the dining room to get to the kitchen. Her father was in the living room, sitting in his favorite chair, reading a magazine. After Caitlin got some water from the dispenser on the front of the fridge, she sat in the dining room — not in her usual seat, but the one opposite, so that she could look out at her father, hopefully without him being aware of it.

  He was a good man, she knew that. He worked hard, and he was brilliant. And although she’d thanked her mother for all the sacrifices she’d made for her, Caitlin had never thanked him. She sat, thinking for a time, trying to decide what to say, and, at last, she got to her feet and crossed through the opening that separated the two rooms.

  “Dad?”

  He shifted his gaze — not to look at her, but at least he was no longer looking at the magazine. “Yes?”

  He said it mechanically, coldly — as he said everything. Why couldn’t he be warmer? Why did he have to be so flat?

  It just popped out, unbidden, and she regretted it as soon as she said it:

  “You never say you love me.”

  “Yes I do,” he said, again without looking at her. “I said it after you appeared in your school play as a koala bear.”

  That had been when she was seven. And, she guessed, since he’d made the point then, and nothing had changed since, there was no need to belabor the issue.

  “Dad…” she said again, softly, plaintively.

  And he tried … he really tried. He shifted his gaze from the empty space he’d been looking at and, for just a moment, he looked at her. But then his eyes snapped away. Caitlin wanted to reach out to him, to touch his arm, to connect with him. But that would just make things worse, she knew. She looked at him a moment longer, then withdrew, heading up to her room while he returned to his magazine.

  Once upstairs, she lay back on her bed, and, with an effort of will, she managed to stop thinking about her father, and instead focused on the anomalous Shannon-entropy results. She could hear her mother puttering around in the master bedroom, but she shut that out — she shut everything out — and tried to think rationally.

  Something out there, something in webspace, had reflected her own face back at her. And that something had now also reflected back text strings at her. And, damn it all, she was a fine mathematician. She did not make mistakes, and it probably wasn’t a sampling error. No, there really was something out there, in the background of the Web, and it was getting smarter; the Shannon-entropy scores showed that.

  She closed her eyes, but she could still see a pinkish haze: the overhead lights coming through her eyelids. She had an urge, all of a sudden, to … go home, to go back to where she’d come from, to experience blindness once more, just for a moment; after all, if you couldn’t see, it didn’t matter that other people couldn’t look at you.

  She reached into her pocket, found the switch on the eyePod, and held it down until the unit shut off altogether. The vague notion of sight she had when her eyes were closed ceased. Yes, her mind was supplying the same gray haze as before, but that just made the experience of blindness she was having more like Helen Keller’s, and—

  And it hit her then. It hit her like—

  Not like a lightbulb going on; she knew that was the common metaphor, and now had even seen it happen.

  And not like a lightning bolt — another metaphor she knew that applied to being struck by something unexpected.

  No, it hit her like … like—

  Like water! Like cold, clean water running out of a pump onto her hand…

  She knew what she had to do. She knew why she’d been given this strange, strange gift of websight.

  Poor Helen had been blind and deaf from the age of nineteen months. When she’d lost her vision and hearing, she had descended into animal-like behavior, undisciplined and unthinking; there was no external reason to believe that any rational being was left inside her. But when Annie Sullivan was hired to be Helen’s teacher and governess, she took it as an article of faith that somewhere, down deep in the silence and darkness, adrift in a void, was a mind. And she committed herself to reaching down to it, whatever it took, and pulling that mind up, literally and figuratively bringing it into the light of day.

  Helen’s parents thought Annie was deluded — and, as they were quick to point out, they knew their wild child better than Annie did. But Miss Sullivan didn’t waver. She knew she was right and they were wrong, in part because of her personal experience of having been nearly blind in her own youth. Even cut off from much of the outside world, even isolated and alone, she knew a mind could exist, could grow.

  And so Annie persevered — against ridicule, against opposition, weathering failure after failure, until she broke through to Helen.

  And now, here, today, a century and a quarter later, Caitlin had what Miss Sullivan had lacked. Annie had only faith that Helen was down there. But Caitlin had evidence, in the Zipf plots, in the Shannon-entropy scores, that the background of the Web was more than just noise.

  Helen Keller had been uplifted by Annie Sullivan. And the … the whatever it was … surely could also be brought forth.

  Caitlin thought again about her father, so inaccessible, so cold, so trapped in his own realm. She now had her wondrous eyePod that let her overcome her inborn limitations — but there was no comparable device for autism; he was still stuck in his own kind of dark. She didn’t know how to reach out to him, and she had even les
s of an idea how to reach out to this strange lurking other.

  Still, she did know one thing: if she tried and failed with the other, it couldn’t possibly hurt as much.

  Chapter 41

  Caitlin stayed home on Thursday, October 4, as well. Her mother capitulated to the argument that Caitlin could do much better at school in the long run if she first spent a little more time right now mastering the art of reading printed text. Caitlin had dutifully started the morning by spending a few more hours with the literacy site, but then she headed down to the basement again.

  Kuroda was delighted to see her. “Hello, Miss Caitlin,” he said warmly, swiveling his red chair to face her. “How are you feeling?”

  She knew it was just a pleasantry, but she decided to answer anyway.

  “Honestly?” she said. “I’m overwhelmed.” She moved closer to the worktable but did not sit down. “There was a … simplicity, I guess, in being blind. I mean, vision is full of things that you don’t need to know about right now, like…” She looked around the basement. “Well, like, over there: there’s a TV, right? It’s not even on, but I have to see it. And that bookshelf: I don’t need to know right now that it’s there, or that it’s got — say, how come all the spines are the same?”

  Kuroda glanced at them. “They’re journals — your dad’s collection. That’s Physical Review D on the top shelf, for instance.”

  “Well, right, exactly. I don’t need to know that they’re there right now, but every time I look in that direction, I see them; I can’t help seeing them.”

  Kuroda nodded. “Your brain will sort that out as time goes on, I think. Do you know about frog vision?”

  “What about it?”

  “They see only moving objects. Static things — trees, plants, the ground — simply don’t register; their retinas don’t bother encoding them into the signal being passed on to their optic nerves. Now, in humans, the sorting out of relevant from irrelevant happens in the brain, not the eye, but for most of us it does happen.”