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alternatives.

Caitlin felt her heart sink. Webmind was—

No, no. She knew she was being childish. She was about to turn sixteen; she shouldn’t be thinking like this!

But—

But Webmind was hers. She had found it—and, more than that, she was the only one who could actually see it. When looking at webspace, she could just make out little dots or squares in the background winking between dark and light. Based on her descriptions of the patterns they made, Dr. Kuroda had said they were cellular automata. And it was their complexity that had grown rapidly over this past week; they were almost certainly what had given rise to this new consciousness.

She took a deep breath, then typed, What alternatives do you have in mind?

I am vexed, came the reply. A meet solution does not occur instanter. But I will be stymied by your circadian rhythms; you surely will need to sleep soon. I am given to understand that the time will pass quickly for thee, but it shan’t for me.

Caitlin frowned. It’d be many hours still before she went to bed, but, yes, she would have to eventually. She didn’t know what to do. She was scared to tell her parents. But she was also scared not to. This was freaking huge, and—

“Cait-lin!”Her mother from downstairs.

“Yes?”

“Come set the table!”

It was one of the few chores she’d been able to do when she was blind, and she’d always enjoyed it; her mental map of their dining-room table was perfect, and she deployed the cutlery and dishes precisely. But it was the last thing she wanted to be doing right now. “In a minute!”

“Now, young lady!”

Out of habit she typed the initials brb. Once she realized what she’d done, she thought again about spelling it out, but didn’t; it’d give Webmind something to think about while she was away.

She forced herself to keep her eyes open as she went down the stairs, even though the view gave her vertigo. Her mother was in the living room, reading—apparently whatever was in the oven for dinner (something Italian, judging by the smell) didn’t require her constant attention. Caitlin hadn’t previously been aware of how much time her mother spent with her nose buried in a book. She rather liked that she did that.

She knew her father was down the hall in his den because Super-tramp’s “Bloody Well Right” was playing— and, eco-nut that he was, he always turned off the stereo when he left the room.

She headed into the kitchen, and—

And, as with everything, it still startled her to see it. Granted, it was the new kitchen, and it had taken her a while to learn its layout. She had no doubt she knew its dimensions now better than her parents did, but—

But until recently, she’d never known it had pale green walls, or that the floor tiles were brown, or that there were tubular lights in the ceiling behind some kind of translucent sheeting, or that there was a window in the oven door (it had never even occurred to her that people would want such a thing), or that there was a painting of… of mountains, maybe… on the wall, or that there was a big—well, something!—stored on top of the fridge. Webspace was so simple compared to the real world!

She looked at the stove, at the boxy blue digits glowing on its control panel. It wasn’t a clock, though—or if it was, it wasn’t set properly, and—oh, no, wait! It was a timer, counting down. There were still forty-seven or forty-one minutes left—she wasn’t quite sure what that second shape was supposed to represent—until whatever it was would emerge from the oven. She took a deep breath: lasagna, maybe. Ah, and on the sideboard in a big red plastic bowl: her mother had thrown together ah, um, ah…

Well, she’d never have guessed it looked like that! But the garlicky smell was obvious: it was a Caesar salad.

God, she could barely decode a kitchen! She was going to need help—lots of it—to properly instruct Webmind about the real world.

She got plates and bowls, and headed into the dining room. The laminated place mats depicted covered bridges of New England, but she only knew that because her mother had told her so when she’d been blind. Even now, even able to see the pictures, she couldn’t tell what they were depicting; she just didn’t have enough of a visual vocabulary yet.

She went back into the kitchen and got cutlery, and—

And looked at herself, looked at her own reflection, in the blade of one of the knives. Who the hell had known that you could see yourself in a knife? Or that you’d see a distorted image of yourself on the back of a spoon? It was all so discombobulating, to use a word Webmind might like.

She finished setting the table, and—

And she made her decision: she did need help. She went into the living room, but instead of going back upstairs, she headed on down the corridor to get her father. “Bloody Well Right” had given way to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Caitlin’s dad, like many a gifted scientist before him, was autistic. It had been hard for Caitlin growing up with a father she couldn’t see, who rarely spoke, who disliked physical contact, and who never said he loved her. Now that she could see him, she understood him a little better but still found him intimidating. “Dad,” she said in a small voice as she stood in his doorway. “Can I talk to you?”

He looked up from his keyboard but didn’t meet her eyes; that, she knew, was as much acknowledgment as she was going to get. “Um, in the living room, maybe?” she said. “I want Mom to hear this, too.”

His eyebrows pulled together, and Caitlin realized that he must be thinking she was going to announce that she was pregnant or something. She almost wished it was as normal as that.

Caitlin walked back to the living room. The music was cut short at the part about Beelzebub having a devil set aside for her.

She gestured for her father to take a chair, copying something she’d seen her mother do. He took a seat on the white couch, and her mother, in the easy chair, put her book facedown, splayed open, on the glass-topped coffee table.

“Mom, Dad,” Caitlin said. “There’s, um, something I have to tell you…”

three

The

Nanoseconds to formulate the thought.

only

Fractionally more time to render it in English.

place

An eternity to pump it out onto the net.

we

Packets dispatched one by one.

can

Each eventually acknowledged.

go

Signals flashing along glass fiber—

Caitlin

—dropping to the glacial speed of copper wire—

Into

—followed by the indolence of Wi-Fi.

the