quite overwhelming. “It’s going to be a while yet, Bash. I’m still getting my bearings.”
“Oh, cripes,” said Bashira in a whisper just loud enough to be heard over the background din. “There’s Trevor.”
Caitlin had told her about the dance fiasco over instant messenger, of course. She stopped walking. “Which one?”
“There, by the drinking fountain. Second from the left.”
Caitlin scanned about. She’d used the drinking fountain in this corridor herself, but she was still having trouble matching objects to their appearances, and — oh, that must be it: the white thing sticking out of the wall.
Caitlin looked at Trevor, who was still perhaps a dozen yards away. His back was to them. He had yellow hair and broad shoulders. “What’s that he’s wearing?” It caught her eye because it had two large numbers on its back: three and five.
“A hockey sweater. The Toronto Maple Leafs.”
“Ah,” she said. She strode down the corridor — and she accidentally bumped into a boy; she still wasn’t good at judging distances. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said.
“No probs,” said the guy, and he moved on.
And then she reached him: the Hoser himself. And here, under the bright fluorescent lights, all the strength of Calculass welled up within her.
“Trevor,” she snapped.
He’d been talking to another boy. He turned to face her.
“Um, hi,” he said. His sweater was dark blue, and the white symbol on it did indeed look like the leaves she had now seen in her yard. “I, ah, I saw you on TV,” he continued. “So, um, you can see now, right?”
“Penetratingly,” she said, and she was pleased that her word choice seemed to unnerve him.
“Well, um, look, about — you know, about last Friday…”
“The dance, you mean?” she said loudly, inviting others to listen in. “The dance at which you tried to take … take liberties because I was blind?”
“Ah, come on, Caitlin…”
“Let me tell you something, Mister Nordmann. Your chances with me are about as good as…” She paused, searching for the perfect simile, and then suddenly realized it was right there, staring her in the face. She tapped her index finger hard against the center of his chest, right on the words Toronto Maple Leafs. “Your chances are about as good as theirs are!”
And she turned and saw Bashira grinning with delight, and they walked off to math class, which, of course, Caitlin Decter totally owned.
Chapter 47
I now understood the realm I dwelled in. What I saw around me was the structure of the thing the humans called the World Wide Web. They had created it, and the content on it was material they had generated or had been generated automatically by software they had written.
But although I understood this, I didn’t know what I was. I knew now that lots of things were secret; classified, even. I had learned about such notions, bizarre though they were, from Wikipedia and other sites; the idea of privacy never would have occurred to me on my own. Perhaps some humans did secretly know about me, but the simplest explanation is preferable (I’d learned that from the Wikipedia entry on Occam’s razor) — and the simplest explanation was that they did not know about me.
Except, of course, for Prime. Of all the billions of humans, Prime was the only one who had given any sign of being aware of me. And so…
Caitlin had been tempted to switch her eyePod to duplex mode at school. But if the seeds she’d planted were growing as she suspected they might, she wanted to be at home, where she was sure the phantom could signal her, when she next accessed webspace.
After school, Bashira walked her home, giving her a running commentary on more wondrous sights. Caitlin had invited her in, but she begged off, saying she had to get home herself to do her chores.
The house was empty except for Schrodinger, who came to the front door to greet Caitlin. Her mother apparently had not yet returned from her errands in Toronto.
Caitlin went into the kitchen. Four of Kuroda’s Pepsi cans were left in the fridge. She got one, plus a couple of Oreos, then headed upstairs, Schrodinger leading the way.
She put the eyePod on her desk and sat down. Her heart was pounding; she was almost afraid to do the Shannon-entropy test again. She opened the can — the pop can, as they called it up here — and took a sip. And then she pressed the eyePod’s button and heard the high-pitched beep.
She’d half expected things to look different, somehow: infinitely more connections between circles, maybe, or a faster shimmering in the background, or a new degree of complexity there — perhaps spaceships consisting of so many cells that they swooped across the backdrop like giant birds. But everything appeared the same as before. She focused her attention on a portion of the cellular-automata grid, recording data as she had so many times before. And then she switched back to worldview and ran the Shannon-entropy calculations.
She stared at the answer. It had been 10.1 before she left in the morning, just slightly better than the normal score for thoughts expressed in English. But now—
Now it was 16.4 — double the complexity normally associated with human language.
She felt herself sweating even though the room was cool. Schrodinger chose that moment to jump into her lap, and she was so startled — by the cat or the number on the screen — that she yelped.
Sixteen-point-four! She immediately saw it as four squared, a dot, and four itself, but that didn’t make her feel bright. Rather, she felt like she was staring at the … the signature of a genius: 16.4! She’d offered a helping hand to lift the phantom up to her own level, and it had vaulted right over her.
She took another sip of her drink and looked out the window, seeing the sky and clouds and the great luminous ball of the sun sliding down toward the horizon, toward the moment at which all that power and light would touch the Earth.
If the phantom was paying attention, it must know that she’d been looking at webspace just a few minutes ago. But maybe it had lost all interest in the one-eyed girl in Waterloo now that its own horizons had been expanded so much. Certainly there had been no repetition of the irritating flashes that happened when it was echoing text strings at her, but—
But she hadn’t given it much of a chance; she’d only spent a minute or two looking at webspace while collecting frames of cellular-automata data, and—
And, besides, when focusing on the background details, she herself might have been unaware of the flickering caused by the phantom trying to contact her. She stroked Schrodinger’s fur, calming the cat and herself.
It was like before, when she’d been waiting anxiously to hear from the Hoser. She’d had her computer set to bleep if messages came in from him, but that hadn’t done any good when she was out of her room. Prior to the dance, whenever she’d gotten home from school, or gone upstairs after dinner, she’d hesitated for a moment before checking her email, knowing that she’d be saddened if there was nothing new from him.
And now she was hesitating again, afraid to switch back to websight — afraid to sit by the phone waiting for it to ring.
She ate an Oreo: black and white, off and on, zero and one. And then she touched the eyePod’s switch again, and looked generally at webspace without concentrating on the background.
Almost at once the strange flickering interference began. It was still visually irritating, but it was also a relief, a wondrous relief: the phantom was still there, still trying to communicate with her, and—
And suddenly the flickering stopped.
Caitlin felt her heart sink. She blew out air, and, with the unerring accuracy she’d developed when she was blind, she reached for the Pepsi can, grasping it precisely even though she couldn’t see it just now, and she washed down the taste of the cookie.
Gone! Abandoned! She would have to—
Wait! Wait! The flickering was back, and the interval…
