Watch

In his left hand, he was holding something large and rectangular. He held it out.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“A card—everyone in math class signed it. They were all sorry to hear you’re leaving school.”

She took it. It was quite large, and clearly handmade: a big piece of Bristol board folded in half, with a color printout pasted to the front. She looked at the image. “Who’s that?”

He seemed surprised for a second, then: “Lisa Simpson.”

“Oh!” She’d never have guessed she looked like that! She opened the card. The caption, written in thick block letters, was easy to read: “Brainy Girls Rule!” And surrounding it were things, in various colors of ink, that must have been the students’ signatures, but she couldn’t read them; she had almost no visual experience with cursive writing. “Which one’s yours?”

He pointed.

“Do you do that on purpose?” she said. He’d printed his name in capitals, but the two Ts touched, looking like the letter pi, which she knew because it was also the Perimeter Institute’s logo.

“Not normally,” he said. “But I thought you’d like it.” There was an awkward silence for a moment, then: “Umm, would you like to go for a walk? Timmy’s isn’t that far…”

Her parents had forbidden her going out on her own while there might still be Federal agents waiting to abduct her, and she suspected they wouldn’t think Matt was buff enough to be a bodyguard; in fact, Caitlin thought she’d have no trouble taking him herself. “I can’t,” she said.

That same look Bashira had made: crestfallen. “Oh.” He took a half step backward, as if preparing to leave.

“But you can come in for bit,” Caitlin blurted out.

He smiled that lopsided smile of his.

Screw symmetry, Caitlin thought, and she moved aside to let him enter.

They could head up to her bedroom, she supposed, but she’d never had a boy in her room in this house, and, besides, her mother was right across the hall and would hear everything they said.

Or they could stay on the ground floor, in the kitchen, or the living room, but—

No, just as with Bashira, the basement was the place to go: private, and no way her mother could hear.

She led the way down. The two black office chairs were side by side, tucked under the worktable. Matt took the one on the right, which meant he’d be on her blind side. This time she did speak up about it. “I can’t see out of my right eye, Matt.”

“Oh, um, actually, I know that.”

She was startled—but, well, it was public knowledge; video of the press conference was online, and there’d been a lot of news coverage about Dr. Kuroda’s miracle.

And then she had a sudden thought: he knew she couldn’t see him when he was on her right, and yet he’d chosen twice now to position himself there. Maybe he was self-conscious about his appearance; living in a world of Bashiras could do that to a person, Caitlin supposed.

He switched chairs, and Caitlin took the other one, and she opened the big card and placed it on the table in front of them. “Read what people wrote to me,” she said.

“Well, that’s mine, like I said. I wrote, ‘Math students never die—they just cease to function.’ ”

“Hah! Cute.”

“And that one’s Bashira’s.” He pointed to some bold writing in red ink. “She wrote, ‘See if you can get me sprung, too!’ ”

She laughed.

“Most of the others just say, ‘Best wishes,’ or ‘Good luck.’ Mr. Heidegger wrote, ‘Sorry to see my star pupil go!’ ”

“Awww!”

“And that one’s Sunshine’s—see how she makes the dot above the i look like the sun?”

“Holy crap,” Caitlin said.

“She wrote, ‘To my fellow American: keep the invasion plans on the DL, Cait—these Canadian fools don’t suspect a thing.’ ”

Caitlin smiled; that was more clever than she’d expected from Sunshine. She was feeling twinges of sadness. She’d still see Bashira, but she was going to miss some of the others, and—

“Um, where’s Trevor’s?” she asked.

Matt looked away. “He didn’t want to sign.”

“Oh.”

“So, what do you think about Webmind?” Matt asked.

Caitlin’s heart jumped. Her first thought was that he knew—knew that she was the one who had brought Webmind forth, knew that it was through her eye that Webmind focused his attention, knew that at this very moment Webmind was looking at him while she did the same thing.

But no, no. Surely all he wanted to do was get away from talking about another boy—and who could blame him?

“Well,” she said, closing the card, “I’m convinced.”

“You believe it’s what it says it is?”

She bit her tongue and didn’t correct him on the choice of pronouns—even with three occurrences of it in an eight-word sentence. “Yes. Why, what do you think?”

He frowned, considering—and Caitlin was surprised at how tense she became waiting for his verdict. “I buy it,” he said at last. “I mean, what else could it be? A promo for something? Puh-leeze. A scam?” He shook his head. “My dad doesn’t believe it, though. He says Marcello Truzzi used to say, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.’ ”

“Who’s that?”

“My male parent; my mother’s husband.”

She laughed and whapped him on the arm. “Not your dad, silly. Marcello whoever.”

Matt grinned—he clearly liked her touching him. “He was one of the founders of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. My dad says Truzzi originally said that about things like UFOs, and he thinks it applies here, too.”

“Ah.”

“But, thing is,” said Matt, “I don’t think this is an extraordinary claim. It’s something that should have happened by now. In fact, if anything, it’s overdue.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever read Vernor Vinge?” Matt asked.

“Is that how you say it? ‘Vin-jee’? I always thought it rhymed with hinge.”

“No, it’s vin-jee.Anyway, so you’ve read him?”

“No,” said Caitlin. “I keep seeing his name on the list of Hugo winners; I know I should read him, but…”

“Oh, he’s great,” said Matt. “But you should really read this essay he wrote called—wait for it—‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.’ Just google on ‘Vinge’ and ‘singularity’; you’ll find it.”

“Okay.”

“He wrote that in, um, 1993, I think,” Matt said.

Caitlin frowned. She had a hard time believing that anything written before she’d been born could have a bearing on what was going down right now.

Matt went on. “He said in it that the creation of intelligence greater than our own would occur sometime between 2005 and 2030—and I’ve always been expecting it to be at the earlier end.”

They sat in silence for a few moments. The headlong rush of Webmind’s progress had made Caitlin think things didn’t have to take a long time to unfold. But there was more to it than that. She was no longer going to see Matt every day at school. If she didn’t make an impression, he’d lose interest, or move on to someone else. Yes, yes, yes, she knew what Bashira said about his looks, but she couldn’t be the only one