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“I’m not sure. But whoever’s doing it has also repeatedly sent data back to the girl, also encoded visually. In other words, the two of them are exchanging encoded information.”

“Who’s the other party?”

“That’s just the thing. I don’t know. Traceback isn’t working, and Wireshark is unable to determine the destination IP address.”

A whole list of techniques one might try ran through Tony’s head—but all of them would have occurred to Shel, too. The younger man went on: “The intercepted data just disappears, and the data being sent to the girl sort of… materializes out of thin air.”

Tony felt his eyebrows go up. He knew better than to say, “That’s impossible.” The Internet was a complex system of systems, with many emergent properties and unexpected quirks—not to mention all sorts of entities trying to do things clandestinely with it. If there were data being manipulated on the Web in a way Shelton Halleck couldn’t fathom, that was of real concern.

“The kid is how old?” Tony asked.

“Just about to turn sixteen.”

He spread his arms. “What strategic significance could there be in things a sixteen-year-old looks at? Stuff at the mall, rock videos?”

Shel lifted his serpent-covered arm. “That’s what I thought, too. So I nosed around. Turns out her father is a physicist.” He brought up a Wikipedia page; the typically god-awful Wikipedia photo showed a horse-faced white man in his mid-forties.

“Malcolm Decter,” said Tony, impressed. “Quantum gravity, right? He’s at the University of Texas, isn’t he?”

“Not anymore,” said Shel. “He moved in June to the Perimeter Institute.”

Tony blew out air. People like himself and Malcolm Decter—the mathematically gifted—had three career options. They could go into academia, as Decter had, and while away their days pondering cosmology or number theory or whatever. They could go into the private sector and become cube monkeys coding games at EA or hacking together cutesy user interfaces at Microsoft. Or they could go into intelligence and try to change the world.

Tony looked briefly at the analysts hunched over their consoles, faces intent on glowing screens, reflections of the data visible in the eyeglasses most of them wore. What the hell difference did it make whether brane theory or loop quantum gravity was right or wrong if terrorists or a foreign power started something that ended with the world blowing itself up?

But—the Perimeter Institute! Yes, yes, there was a part of Tony that envied those who had taken that path and had ended up there: the world’s leading pure-science physics think tank. WATCH had tried to lure Stephen Hawking to come work for them. They’d failed, but Perimeter had succeeded; Hawking spent several months each year at PI.

“Decter’s just a theoretician,” Tony said, dismissively.

“Maybe so,” replied Shel. “But this is who he works with.”

A picture of a brown-skinned man with straight gray hair appeared, along with a bio compiled by the NSA. “That’s Amir Hameed,” continued Shel. “Also a physicist, also at Perimeter—now. But he used to be with Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program. And he personally recruited Decter to come work with him in Canada.”

“You think Decter’s daughter is spying on what they’re doing in case it has military applications?”

“It’s possible,” Shel drawled. “Until her family moved to Canada, she’d been in the same school her whole life—a school for the blind in Texas.”

“Uprooted,” said Tony, nodding. “Isolated from her friends.”

“And a bit of an outcast to begin with,” added Shel. “A math geek herself, apparently; didn’t really fit in.”

“Kind of person that’s easily compromised.”

“My thought exactly,” said Shel.

“All right,” Tony replied. “Let’s get that visual data decoded; see what the kid is sharing with whoever the hell it is. I’ll put Donnelly himself on it.”

two

The world I’d been shown was vast, complex—and utterly alien.

It was a universe of dimensions, of extent, of space. But what was this concept known as up to me? What meant this forward? What sense was I to make of left?

More: it was a reality ruled by the invisible force of gravity.

More still: it was a realm of light and shadow, concepts that had no analogs in my own existence; my sensorium was as devoid of them as Caitlin’s had been.

And it was a domain of air—but how was I to understand a substance that even humans could not see or taste or smell?

Most of all, it was a realm of material objects with heft and texture and color, of items that moved or could be moved.

I could assign arbitrary values to dimensional coordinates; I knew the formula for acceleration due to gravity; I was aware of the chemical constituents of air; I had read descriptions both technical and poetic of things. But they were all abstractions to me.

Still, there was one touchstone, one property that Caitlin’s realm and mine shared: the linear passage of time.

And so very much of it was slipping by…

Caitlin Decter’s fingers shook as she typed into her instant-messenger program: Where do we go from here, Webmind?

The reply was immediate: “The only place we can go, Caitlin.” Her spine tingled as it called her by name. She heard the words in the mechanical female voice of her screen-reading software, and she saw them with her left eye, an eye that could now see after a lifetime of blindness, and she felt them as she glided her fingers over her refreshable Braille display: “Into the future.”

And then, after a pause that was doubtless an affectation on Webmind’s part, it sent one more word: “Together.”

Her vision blurred. Who’d known tears could cause that?

She had done it. Here, a day shy of her own sixteenth birthday, she had done it! She had reached down into the darkness and had pulled this entity, this newborn consciousness, up into the light of day. Annie Sullivan had nothing on her!

But now she had to figure out what to do next. Her parents knew something was going on in the background of the Web, and so did Dr. Kuroda, the gentle giant of an information theorist who had given her sight.

The ball was in her court, she knew; she needed to type a reply. But it was so daunting. This notion of connecting an emergent intelligence with the real world had been a fantasy, for Pete’s sake! And now it was here, talking to her!

The front door opened downstairs. “Cait-lin!” It was her mother, home from running errands in Toronto after dropping Dr. Kuroda at the airport.

Caitlin didn’t want to be interrupted—not now! But she could hardly tell her mother to buzz off. “Up here, Mom!”

Normally she’d type “brb,” but she wasn’t sure if Webmind would understand, so she instead spelled out “be right back,” hit enter, silenced her screen-reading software, and minimized the IM window.

Her mother came into the room—and seeing her still took Caitlin’s breath away. Caitlin’s first visual experience had been late on Saturday, September 22, thirteen days ago. But it hadn’t been sight, not exactly. Instead, she’d been immersed in a dizzying landscape of colored lines