The interval between the end of the last set of flickering and this one had been…
She still counted passing time. It had been exactly ten seconds, and—
And the flickering stopped once more, and she found herself counting out loud this time: “…eight, nine, ten.”
And it started again. Caitlin felt her eyebrows going up. What a simple, elegant way for the phantom to say it understood a lot about her world now: it had mastered timekeeping, the haphazard human way of marking the passing of the present into the past. Ten seconds: a precise but arbitrary interval that would be meaningless to anything but a human being.
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
