“He doesn’t believe me, Dad,” Caitlin said, handing him the phone.

“Masayuki? Malcolm. It’s real.” He gave the handset back to her.

Short and to the point, that’s Dad. She spoke into the mouthpiece again. “So, we need your help. It sees what my eye is seeing by intercepting the datastream going to your lab in Tokyo.”

“It sees that? It can interpret it as vision?”

“Yes.”

“It—sees…” He was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry, Miss Caitlin; give me a second. You’re sure about this?”

“Entirely.”

“I… I am… I don’t even know what English term to use. Gob-smacked, I suppose.”

Caitlin didn’t know that expression. “If that means flabbergasted, I don’t blame you.”

“This… this thing can see? If it—ah!” He sounded as though a great mystery had been solved. “That’s why you didn’t want me to terminate the copying of your data to my server.”

Caitlin cringed. She’d thrown quite the hissy fit when he’d tried to do that, storming out of the dining room. “Yes, and I’m sorry. But now we want to give it the ability to see Web graphics and online video. The best way to do that might be to convert them to the format it already can see, the one my eyePod outputs. Could you write the appropriate codecs?”

“This is… incredible, Miss Caitlin. I…”

“Will you do it?” she said.

“Well, I could, yes. Converters for still images—GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and so on— should be easy. Moving images will take more work, but…”

“Yes?”

“Um, are your parents still there?”

“Yes.”

“Might you put me on speakerphone?” They’d done that before.

“Okay.” She pressed the button.

“Barb, Malcolm, hello.”

“Hi,” said Caitlin’s mom.

“Look,” Kuroda said, “I’m still trying to accept this—it is enormous. But, my friends, have you thought about whether it is advisable to do as Miss Caitlin is asking?”

Caitlin frowned. Why was everybody so suspicious? “What do you mean?”

“I mean if this is an emergent entity, it might—”

“It might what?” snapped Caitlin. “Decide it doesn’t like humanity?”

“It’s a question worth thinking about,” Kuroda said.

“It’s too late for that,” Caitlin said. “It’s read all of Wikipedia; it’s read all of Project Gutenberg. It knows about…” She waved her hands, trying to think of examples. “About Hitler and the Nazis and the Holocaust. About all the awful wars. About mass murder and serial killers and slavery. About driving animals to extinction and burning the rain forests and polluting the oceans. About rape and drug addiction and letting people starve to death—about every evil, stupid thing we’ve ever done.”

“How could it know?” Kuroda said. “I mean, it would need to be able to read, not to mention manipulate HTTP, and—”

“It watched through my eye as I did lessons to learn to read visually, and—” She paused, but she supposed they all needed to know the truth. “And I taught it how to make links, how to surf the Web. I introduced it to Wikipedia and so on.”

“Oh,” said Kuroda. “I, um, I’m not sure that was… prudent.”

Caitlin folded her arms in front of her chest. “Whatever.”

“Sorry, Miss Caitlin?”

“It’s done. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle—in which case, you might as well make friends with it.”

“We could still… um…”

“What?” demanded Caitlin. “Pull the plug? How? We’ve only got vague guesses about what started it; we don’t know how to stop it. It’s here, it exists, and it’s growing fast. This is no time to hesitate.”

“Caitlin,” said her mom in a cautioning tone.

“What?” said Caitlin. “Webmind has asked us for a favor—you saw that, in the email it sent me. It wants to be able to see, for God’s sake. I’m, like, the last person on the planet who’d deny it that. Are we going to say no to the first thing it’s asked us for? Is that how this relationship should begin?” She looked at her mother and at her father. Her father’s face was the same as always. Her mother’s forehead was showing creases, and her lips were pressed tightly together.

“So, Dr. Kuroda,” Caitlin said, “are you in or out?”

Kuroda was quiet for six seconds, then: “All right. All right. I’m in. But…”

“What?” snapped Caitlin.

His tone was soft. “But it’s easier to work directly with the—um, the end user—on something like this.”

She felt herself relaxing. “Right, of course. Do you have an instant-messenger program on your home computer?”

“I have a sixteen-year-old daughter,” Kuroda said. “We have more of them than I can count.”

“Okay,” she said. “Its name is Webmind.”

“Really?”

“Better than Fred,” said Caitlin.

“Not by much.”

She felt her smile returning. “Give me a second,” she said, then she typed into her instant-messenger program, You are about to be contacted by Dr. Kuroda.

The word Marvelous appeared in the window.

She had Kuroda make sure he was logging all the IM traffic to disk, and then she talked him through the process of setting up a chat session with Webmind. She couldn’t see what he was typing, or what Webmind’s replies to him were, but she heard him muttering to himself in Japanese, and then, “My heart is pounding, Miss Caitlin. This is… what do young American women say these days?”

“Awesome?” suggested Caitlin.

“Exactly!”

“So you’re in contact?” Caitlin asked.

“Yes, I—oh! It has a funny way of talking, doesn’t it? Anyway, yes, we’re in contact. Incredible!”

“Okay, good,” she said. She took off her glasses and used the heels of her hands to rub her eyes—the one that could see and the one that couldn’t. “Look, we’re dying here,” she said. “It’s way after midnight. Can we leave this in your hands? We’ve got to get some shut-eye.”

six

There were interstices in my work with Dr. Kuroda—protracted lacunae while I waited for his text replies or for him to direct me to link to another bit of code he had written.

In those gaps I sought to learn more about Caitlin, about this human who had reached down and helped draw me up out of the darkness.

There was no Wikipedia entry on her, meaning, I supposed, that she was not—yet!—noteworthy. And—

Ah, wait—wait! Yes, there was no entry on her, but there was one on her father, Malcolm Decter… and Wikipedia saved not just the current version of its entries, but all previous versions, as well. Although there was no mention of Caitlin in the current draft, a previous iteration had contained this: “Has one daughter, Caitlin Doreen, blind since birth, who lives with him; it’s been speculated that Decter’s decline in peer-reviewed publications in

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