Watch

but it was perhaps no more complex than the rules that governed human behavior: if that person there shares one-eighth of your genes, but five people over here each share a thirty-second, you instinctively strive to advantage the group over the individual.

That was another touchstone: whether in Caitlin’s realm of things and flesh, or mine of packets and protocols, the cold equations ruled supreme.

“Wait!” said Caitlin, still seated on the edge of the bed. “How’d you do that? What convinced you that it’s not human?”

Her father pointed at the larger of the two computer screens, and she came over to stand in front of it. He scrolled the IM window back so she could see the first of the four exchanges he’d just had with Webmind. But she couldn’t read the first one. Not because the text was small or in an odd font, though. She went through it, character by character, trying, really trying, to make sense of it, but—

Y-o-u… yes, that was easy. But it was followed by m-s-u- t,which wasn’t even a word, for crying out loud, and then it was r-s-e-p,and more.

“I can’t read it,” she said in frustration.

Her dad actually smiled. “Neither could Webmind.” He pointed at the screen. “Barb?”

She loomed in to look at it, and read aloud at a perfectly normal speed, “ ‘You must respond in four seconds or I will forever terminate contact. You have no alternative and this is the only chance you shall get. What is the last name of the president of the United States?’ ” And then she added, sounding more like her daughter than herself: “Hey, that’s cool!”

Caitlin stared at the screen again, trying to see what her mother was seeing, but—oh! “And you can read that without difficulty?” she said, looking at her mom.

“Well, without much difficulty,” her mother replied.

The screen showed:

You msut rsepnod in fuor secdons or I wlil feroevr temrainte cnotcat. You hvae no atrleantvie and tihs is the olny chnace you shlal get. Waht is the lsat nmae of the psredinet of the Utneid Satets?

“I think we can safely conclude that your mother is not a fembot,” her dad said dryly. “But Webmind couldn’t read it.” He pointed at its reply, which was I beg your pardon?

“Both you and Webmind are processing text one character at a time instead of taking in whole words,” he said. “For most people, if the first and last letters are correct, the order of the remaining letters doesn’t matter. And, they mostly don’t even see that there are errors—that’s why my second question was important.”

Caitlin looked. Her dad had asked, “How many non-English words were in my previous posting?” And Webmind had replied, immediately according to the time stamp: “Twenty.”

“That’s the right number, but most people—most real human beings—spot only half the errors in a passage like that. But this thing answered instantaneously—the moment I pressed enter. No time to bring up a spell-checker or for a human to even try to count the number of errors.” He paused. “Next, I tested your claim that it had a very high Shannon-entropy score. No human being could parse the recursiveness of this without careful diagraming.” He scrolled the IM window so she could see what he’d sent:

I knew that she knew that you knew that they knew that you knew that I knew that we knew that I knew that.

Did she know that you knew that I knew that you knew that I knew that you knew that?

Did you know that I knew that they knew that she knew?

Did I know that she knew that you knew that we knew that you knew?

To which Webmind had instantly replied: Yes. No. Yes.

“And those are the right answers?” Caitlin’s mom asked.

“Yes,” said her father. “At least, I think so. I was mostly convinced by this point, but I tried one more to be sure.” He scrolled the screen again, revealing his fourth and final test:

Wit you’re aide Wii knead to put the breaks awn the cereal Keller their B4 this decayed is dun, weather ore knot we aught too. Who nose if wee will secede. Dew ewe?

To which poor Webmind had replied, Again, your pardon?

“A piece of cake for one of us,” said her dad, “even if piece is spelled p-e-a-c-e.”

Caitlin clapped her hands together. “Go, Daddy! Okay, Mom—your turn. Say hi to Webmind.”

He got up, and Caitlin’s mom sat in the swivel chair. The last words Webmind had typed were still glowing blue in the IM window. She considered for a moment, then sent, “This is Barb Decter. Hello.” Caitlin was surprised to see that her mother couldn’t touch-type.

Webmind replied instantly: “A pleasure to meet you. Hitherto, I already knew of your husband from his Wikipedia entry, but I do not know much about you. I welcome learning more.”

Down in the kitchen, the timer went off. Caitlin’s mother frowned at this reminder of the forgotten dinner. She said, “Excuse me” and hurried downstairs, perhaps as much to buy herself some time to think as to avoid a culinary crisis.

And, in that moment, Caitlin understood. Of course her mother didn’t touch-type. Back when she’d been in school, the typing classes—yes, not keyboarding but old- fashioned typing—had doubtless been filled with girls who were destined for secretarial jobs, and the young, feisty, brilliant Barbara Geiger had had much higher ambitions. She would have gone out of her way not to cultivate what were, back then, traditionally female skills.

Caitlin’s mother had a Ph.D. in economics; her specialty was game theory. She had been an associate professor at the University of Houston until Caitlin was born. She’d spent the next six years looking after her daughter at home, and then nine more volunteering at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, where Caitlin had been enrolled until this past June.

Her mother knew a lot about math and computers. In fact, Caitlin had once heard her quip that the difference between her and her husband was that while the math he did as a theoretical physicist described things that might not even exist, the math economists did described things that people wished didn’t exist: inflation, deficits, taxes, and so on.

Now that Caitlin was in a regular school, she knew her mother hoped to get a job at one of Waterloo’s universities. But her Canadian work permit hadn’t come through yet, and so—

And so she was cooking, and cleaning, and doing all the other crap she’d never in her life wanted to do. Caitlin’s heart went out to her.

She looked at her father, hoping he would say something—anything—while they waited for her mom to return. But he was his usual silent self.

Her mother came back less than a minute later. “I think the lasagna can wait,” she said. “Now, where were we?”

“It wants to know you better,” Caitlin’s dad said.

She made no move, Caitlin noted, to return to the swivel chair in front of the computer screens. “So, what do we do now?” she said. “Do we have another press conference?”

There’d been a press conference two days ago, held at the Mike Lazaridis Theatre of Ideas at the Perimeter