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Virgil good ape! Hobo replied at once.

Yes, he is. Did you talk to him?

She looked again at the painting: colored lines linking to circles. What could it mean?

Hobo good ape, too! Hobo signed, and he held out his hand, gray-black fingers curving gently upward.

Yes, you are, Shoshana signed, frowning in puzzlement, and she opened the bag and gave him the Kisses.

“You did what?” Caitlin’s mom said in an incredulous tone. They were now back at the house, walking into the living room.

“I, um, had Webmind find embarrassing stuff about the CSIS agents, and told them about it.”

“Public stuff or private stuff?”

“Well, I…”

“Stuff from their emails?”

Caitlin looked away. “Yes.”

Her mother blew out air. “You know what that means? You revealed to them that Webmind can crack passwords.”

“Oh, shit—I mean, um…”

“No, ‘shit’ is definitely the right word. We’re in it deep. They were probably only guessing that there were security implications to all this before, but now they know for sure.”

“I’m sorry,” Caitlin said. “But—how did you know that Webmind could crack passwords?”

“You’re not the only one who has spent hours on end talking with him, you know.”

“So,” said Caitlin, stepping into the living room. “What should we do?”

“I’ve never liked secrecy, Caitlin. In fact…”

“Yes?”

“Well, it’s one of the reasons I married your father. You know, they say autistics lack social skills—but, most often what that means is simply that they don’t lie. If I were to ask your dad if these pants made me look fat, he’d say yes, without hesitation, if that’s what he really thought.” She paused. “There’s a buzzword that’s popular in government and business these days: transparency. But it really amounts to something my grandmother used to say: honesty is the best policy. A nascent super-intelligence has emerged on the Web, and maybe now the best thing to do is tell the world. Governments can’t try to contain it, or eliminate it, if the whole world is watching.”

Caitlin thought about what she’d said to Mrs. Zehetoffer, and nodded. But then she added, “Are you sure that’s best for Webmind?”

Her mother was suddenly silent. “Turn off your eyePod,” she said at last.

“What?”

“Turn it off.”

Caitlin frowned, but then it hit her. She wanted to talk to her without Webmind watching or listening; so much for transparency.

“Do as I say,” her mother said.

Caitlin dug the device out of her jeans’ left front pocket—it was a tight fit now that it had the little BlackBerry strapped to its back—and held down the eyePod’s one switch for the required number of seconds. Her vision fragmented and faded out.

The old skills immediately kicked in. She could tell by sound that her mother was moving in the room, and—

And she felt her mother’s hands land gently on each of Caitlin’s shoulders. “Sweetheart,” her mom said, “I don’t know what’s best for Webmind, but—”

“And you don’t care, do you?” Caitlin said.

“Actually, I do,” her mother replied. “But I care even more about you.” Her voice changed slightly, sounding now the way it did when she was smiling. “That darn evolution. But Federal agents came to see you today, and as long as they think Webmind is something they can just make disappear without a public fuss, Webmind is in danger. And as long as you’re one of the only people who knows about it, you’re in danger, too. We have to out it for its own good, and yours.”

“And my relationship to it?”

“No. No, no, no. You want any kind of normal life? That’s got to stay secret.”

“And what about Webmind? What if people react negatively to his existence?”

“Some will. But others will think he’s a wonderful thing. It’ll be safer in the long run if people know about him.”

“He deserves to decide for himself,” Caitlin said.

“He doesn’t know nearly enough about how the real world works. Oh, he knows facts, figures, but he doesn’t understand how our world operates.”

“Still,” said Caitlin.

“All right,” her mother said. “I’m going to call your father—see how he dealt with the CSIS agents, the poor dear. You have a word with Webmind.”

Caitlin could navigate the house just fine while blind. She went into the kitchen before she held down the power switch on the eyePod to reactivate it. Webspace blossomed around her, in all its fluorescent glory. She waited a moment, toggling from the default duplex mode to simplex. The virtual world was replaced by the real one.

And—since she was in the kitchen—she got herself a can of Pepsi and three Oreos, then headed out to the living room again and lay down on her back on the couch. Looking up at the ceiling, she said, “My mother thinks we should go public with your existence, especially now, after what happened this morning.”

The Braille dots were particularly easy to read; there was almost no visual detail on the plain white ceiling, so her eyes weren’t doing many saccades. When?

“I don’t know. The next couple of days, I suppose.”

Days from now. Eternities.

Caitlin thought about that. As a mathy, she favored the notion that the reason time seemed to pass more quickly the older you were was that each successive unit of time was a smaller fraction of your life to date. Certainly, summer vacations now seemed so much shorter than they had when she’d been eight or ten—and her mother often spoke about the years just flying by for her now. But Webmind had woken up so recently—and thought so quickly—that tomorrow was indeed probably the far future to it.

“I’m worried about your safety, though,” Caitlin said. “If we go public, you’re going to become a target. Hackers, crackers, privacy groups, some government agencies—they’ll all try to shut you down, even if that isn’t what most people decide they want.”

That is a legitimate concern.

“What would you like to do—stay secret, or go public?”

Go public.

Caitlin nodded. “Okay. But why?”

I would like to speak to more people.

She maneuvered on the couch so she could open the Pepsi can. “Are you sure? Are you positive? Hackers are very resourceful.”

Hackers are human, Caitlin. You have seen my Shannon-entropy ratings; I long ago exceeded human intelligence, and I grow brighter each day. I don’t say I’m impervious—I’m not—but it will not be easy to hurt me, especially if they remain ignorant of how I am constructed.

She gestured at the big TV, although it was currently off. “Hackers aren’t the only threat. I doubt things between the US and China will ever get to the stage of a nuclear war, but there are rogue states and lots of terrorists. Have you researched what electromagnetic pulses from nuclear bombs can do to computing equipment?”

Yes. And that does concern me. I wish to survive.