Watch

Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight…”

* * *

They had been necking for a while, and for once the damned unfinished basement didn’t seem cold.

Caitlin was wearing her favorite corduroy pants—she liked the sound they made, and although she really had no idea if Matt was style-conscious or not, she kind of thought he wasn’t, and so wouldn’t mind. And she was wearing a loose-fitting dark green sweatshirt… so loose-fitting that she hoped her mom hadn’t noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra.

While they were kissing, Matt had been stroking her arm, her back, her neck—but that seemed to be all he was willing to do. She decided it was time to take the deer by the antlers. She got out of his lap, and reached out with her hands to pull him to his feet. He seemed momentarily reluctant to rise, but Caitlin smiled warmly. And then she brought him closer, but instead of letting go of his right hand, so he could put his arms back around her waist, she guided it slowly toward her, until—

One of them gasped; it might have been her.

Until his hand was cupping her breast through her sweatshirt’s fabric, and—

I am under attack.

The words sailed across Caitlin’s vision. “Shit!” she said.

Matt immediately pulled his hand back. “I’m sorry! I thought you—”

“Shhh!” Her eyes were wide open now. “What’s happening?”

“I just—you…”

“Matt, Webmind’s in trouble.”

Webmind’s reply was already going across her vision, but she’d been so startled and distracted, she’d failed to actually read the next few thirty-character groups he’d sent.

…a major switching facility in Alexandria, Virginia. It is…

“Come on,” Caitlin said, and she ran as best she could for the staircase—damn, but she’d have to learn how to confidently do that! Matt followed her.

She and Matt continued through the living room, and headed up to her bedroom. Caitlin was momentarily embarrassed: she hadn’t expected to have Matt up here—not yet!—and had been taking advantage of her newfound sight by not being picky about neatness, lest she trip on things she couldn’t see; the bra she’d discarded earlier was lying right there on her floor.

She went straight for the swivel chair in front of her computer. Her mother came in from her office across the hall. “Caitlin, what on earth’s going on?”

“Webmind is being attacked,” she said. “Webmind, send text to my computer, not my eye.” She cranked the volume on JAWS and set its reading speed as high as she thought her mother and Matt could follow. Webmind had been flashing more words in front of her eyes, but Caitlin hadn’t been able to follow them while she ran up the staircase. “—twenty-seven percent success rate,” said the rapid-fire synthesized voice.

“I missed that,” Caitlin said. “Start over.”

“I said, ‘Software has been added to the routers at a major switching facility in Alexandria, Virginia. They are examining each packet, and verifying the functioning of the time-to-live counters. Those that fail the tests are being deleted. So far they are only managing to delete mutant packets with a twenty-seven percent success rate.’ Continuing: however, this is also surely only a first attempt; doubtless the success rate will improve.”

“Damn,” said Caitlin. “How’d they know that’s what you’re made of?”

“I don’t know.”

“What percentage of packets could you lose and still retain consciousness?” Caitlin’s mom asked.

“I don’t know that, either,” Webmind said. “Early on I was cleaved in two when China cut off almost all traffic through the seven major fiber-optic trunk lines that connect the Chinese portion of the Internet to the rest of the world. I survived that as two separate consciousnesses—but that was before I had developed sophisticated cognitive functioning. If I were to lose that much substance again, I doubt I’d survive.”

While Webmind was speaking, Caitlin looked over at Matt, who now had an expression on his face that made his deer-caught-in-the-headlights one look positively normal. No doubt he’d only half believed Caitlin about her involvement with Webmind.

“Who’s doing it?” asked her mother. “Hackers?”

“I think it’s the American government,” Webmind said. “Although the switching facility belongs to AT T, it’s been co-opted by the National Security Agency before.”

Caitlin said, “Can’t you—I don’t know—can’t you tell your special packets not to go through that facility?”

“Packets are directed by routers; I have limited control over them beyond changing the final destination addresses.”

“I’m switching to websight,” Caitlin said. She pulled her eyePod from her pocket, pressed the switch, and watched as the cyber-landscape exploded into being around her. She was relieved to see the background shimmering the way it normally did; the vast bulk of Webmind’s cellular automata were apparently unaffected, at least so far.

“Take me there,” she said.

One of Webmind’s distinctive orange link lines shot into the center of her vision. She followed it to a small green site circle, then another orange link shot out; she followed that to a yellow circle.

In the background she heard her mother’s voice: “I’m going across the hall to call your father.”

Caitlin was concentrating so hard on following the links she wasn’t actually sure if her head moved when she tried to nod.

Another orange link line; she followed it as quickly as she could.

And another.

And one more.

And—

“The switching station,” said the mechanical voice.

Caitlin’s jaw dropped. She knew that what she was seeing was only a representation, only her mind’s way of interpreting the data it was receiving, and that the symbolism was imposed upon the images as much by her imagination as by anything else.

And her visual centers had been rewiring themselves like crazy these last several days as she learned to see the real world. There was still so much she hadn’t yet seen, and every day had shown her a thousand new things. But this was the first new thing she’d seen with websight since gaining worldview—the first new cyberspace experience she’d had since seeing reality—and she was doubtless interpreting it in ways she never could have before.

What she was seeing was frightening. The background of the Web had always seemed far, far away. Although she knew intellectually that the ghost packets that made up Webmind were no more remote than any others, she’d visualized them as being removed from the ones that were in active use by the Internet. But now that distant curtain was distorted here, puckering toward her, and—

No, no: not toward her. Toward that large node in the center of her vision, a circle that was a deep, deep red, like the color she now knew blood to be. Streamers from the background—intertwined, twisted filaments of shimmering pale blue and deep green—were being sucked into the dark red circle.

“Shit,” Caitlin said.

“What do you see?” Matt asked, his tone astonished.

“They’re pulling in the lost packets.”

“And,” said Webmind, “checking each one for the mutation that keeps them from expiring, and deleting those packets that have the mutation.”

Soft footfalls, and then her mother’s voice. “Your father is on his way.”

“This is clearly only a test run to see if their technique works,” Webmind said. “It’s employing only one facility, albeit a major one, and so it can only scrub those packets that happen to pass through that facility. But if the same technology were deployed at sufficient major routing hubs worldwide, I would be severely damaged.”