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Webmind might have wrestled mightily with what to do next—but its response appeared instantaneously. Greetings and felicitations.

Caitlin smiled. “It’s read all of Project Gutenberg,” she said. “Its language tends to be dated.”

“Sweetheart,” her mother said gently, “that could be anyone.”

“It’s read all of Wikipedia, too,” Caitlin said. “Ask it something that no human being could find quickly online.”

“The Wikipedia entry on any topic is usually the first Google hit,” her mom said. “If this guy’s got a fast enough connection, he could find anything quickly.”

“Ask it a question, Dad. Something technical.”

He seemed to hesitate, as if wondering whether to go along with this nonsense or not. Finally, he said, “Are heterotic strings open or closed?”

Caitlin started to type. “How do you spell that?”

“H-e-t-e-r-o-t-i-c.”

She finished typing the question, but didn’t press enter. “Now, watch how fast it answers—it won’t be searching, it’ll know it.” She sent the question, and the word closed appeared at once.

“Fifty-fifty shot,” said her mother.

Caitlin was getting pissed again. There had to be an easy way to prove what she was saying.

And there was!

“Okay, look, Mom—my webcam is off, see?”

Her mother nodded.

“Okay, now hold up some fingers—any number.”

Her mom looked surprised, then did what she was asked. Caitlin glanced at her, then typed, “How many fingers is my mom holding up?”

The numeral three appeared instantly.

“Which ones?” typed Caitlin.

The text “Index, middle, ring” popped into the window.

Her mother made that round-mouth look again. Caitlin had Webmind repeat the stunt three times, and it got the answers right, even when she made the devil’s horns gesture with her index and baby fingers.

Caitlin’s mother sat down on the edge of the bed, and her father crossed the room and leaned against one of the blank walls, which, she had learned, were a color called cornflower blue.

“Sweetheart,” her mother said, gently. “Okay, somebody is intercepting the signal your eyePod is putting out. I grant you that, but—”

“The eyePod signal is just my retinal datastream,” Caitlin said. “Even if someone was intercepting it, they wouldn’t be able to decode it.”

“If it’s somebody at the University of Tokyo, they might have access to Masayuki’s algorithms,” her mother said. “There are con artists everywhere. And, honey, this is exactly how a certain type of Internet crook works. They find people who are… misunderstood. People who are brilliant, but don’t fit in well in the regular nine-to-five world.”

“Mom, it’s real—really.”

Her mother shook her head. “I know it seems real. The standard ploy is to come on to such a person in email or a chat room saying they’ve noticed how clever and insightful they are, how they— forgive me—how they see things that others don’t. One version has the scammer pretending to be a recruiter for the CIA; I have a friend who had her bank account cleared out after she gave up information supposedly for a security check. It’s exactly what these people do: they try to make you feel like you’re special—like you’re the most special person on the planet. And then they take you for everything you’ve got.”

“Well, first, my bank account has, like, two hundred dollars in it, so who cares? And, second, Jesus, Mom, this is real.”

“That’s why it works,” her mother said. “Because it seems real.”

“For God’s sake,” Caitlin said. She swiveled in her chair. “Dad?” she said imploringly. Yes, he was hard to deal with; yes, he was a cold fish. But, as she’d once overheard a university student say about why he’d taken one of his courses, he was Malcolm Fucking Decter: he was a genius. He surely knew how to definitively test a hypothesis, no matter how outlandish it might seem. “You’re a scientist,” she said. “Prove one of us wrong.” She got out of her chair and motioned for him to sit down in front of the keyboard.

“All right,” he said. “Are you logging your IM sessions?”

“I always do,” said Caitlin.

He nodded. He clearly realized that if Caitlin was right, the record of the initial contact with Webmind would be of enormous scientific value.

“Do not watch me type,” he said, taking the seat. At first she thought he was being his normal autistic self —since acquiring sight, she’d had to train herself not to look at him—but he went on: “Stare at the wall while I do this.”

She sat down on the bed next to her mother and did as he’d asked.

“Where’s Word?” he said.

Silly man was probably looking for a desktop icon, but Caitlin hadn’t needed them when she was blind, and a Windows wizard had cleared most of them away ages ago. “It’s the third choice down on the Start menu.”

She heard keyclicks, and lots of backspacing—her backspace key made a slightly different sound than the smaller, alphabetic ones.

He worked for almost fifteen minutes. Caitlin was dying to ask what he was up to, but she kept staring at the deep blue wall on the far side of the room. For her part, her mother also sat quietly.

Finally, he said, “All right. Let’s see what it’s made of.”

Caitlin had audible accessibility aids installed on her computer, including a bleep sound effect when text was cut, and a bloop when it was pasted. She heard both sounds as her dad presumably transferred whatever he’d written from Word into the IM window.

She fidgeted nervously. He sucked in his breath.

Another cut-and-paste combo. He made a “ hmmm” sound.

Yet another transfer, this time followed by silence, which lasted for seven seconds, and then he did one more cut and paste, and then—

And then her father spoke. “Barb,” he said, “care to say hello to Webmind?”

four

Something else that was without analog in my universe: parents, relatives, shared DNA. Caitlin had half of her mother’s DNA, and a quarter of her mother’s mother’s, and an eighth of her mother’s mother’s mother’s, and so on. Degrees of interrelatedness: again, utterly alien to me, and yet so important to them.

The Chinese government had temporarily cut off Internet access to that country. It was an attempt to prevent its people from hearing foreign perspectives on the decision to eliminate 10,000 peasants in order to contain an outbreak of bird flu. And while the Internet was severed, there had been me and not me, a binary dichotomy with no overlap. But Caitlin was half her mother, and half her father, too, and also uniquely her own—and, yet, despite those ratios, she had more than 99% of her DNA in common with them and every other human being—and 98.5% in common with chimpanzees and bonobos, and at least 70% in common with every other vertebrate, and 50% in common with each photosynthesizing plant.

And yet that first trivial set of relatedness fractions—halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths—had driven evolution, had shaped history.

Kuroda and Caitlin had surmised that my mind was composed of cellular automata—individual bits of information that responded in some predictable way to the states of their neighboring bits of information as arrayed on a grid. What rule or rules were being obeyed—what formula gave rise to my consciousness—we didn’t yet know,