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Institute, at which Dr. Kuroda had announced his success in giving Caitlin vision—although no mention had been made of her ability to see the structure of the Web.

“No!” said Caitlin. “No, we can’t tell anyone—not yet.”

“Why not?” asked her mother.

“Because it’s not safe.”

“Oh, I don’t think anything bad will happen to us,” her mom said.

“No, no. It’s not safe—it, Webmind.” She looked at her father, who was staring at the floor, and then back at her mother. “As soon as word gets out, people will try to find exploits—vulnerabilities, holes, whatever. They’ll try to bring it down, to hack it. That’s what people like that do, for the challenge, for the street cred, for the glory. And it probably has no defenses or security. We don’t know how it came into being, but I bet it’s fragile.”

“All right,” said her mother. “But we should inform the authorities.”

To Caitlin’s surprise, her father lifted his head and spoke up. “Which authorities? Do you trust the CIA, the NSA, or goddamned Homeland Security? Or the Canadian authorities—some Mountie with a Commodore 64?” He shook his head. “Nobody has authority over this.”

“But what if it’s dangerous?” her mom replied.

“It’s not dangerous,” Caitlin said firmly.

“You don’t actually know that,” her mother said. “And, even if it’s not dangerous right now, it might become so.”

“Why?” said Caitlin in as defiant a tone as she could muster.

Her mother looked at her father, then back at Caitlin. “Terminator. The Matrix. And so on.”

“Those are just movies,” Caitlin said, exasperated. “You don’t know that it’s going to turn out like that.”

“And you,” her mother said sharply, “don’t know that it isn’t.”

Caitlin crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Well, I’ll tell you this: it’s far more likely to develop to be peaceful and kind with us as its… its mentors than it is with the military or a bunch of spies trying to control it.”

She hoped her father would jump in again on her side, but he just stood there, looking at the floor.

But it turned out she didn’t need any help. After a full fifteen seconds of silence, during which Caitlin’s mom seemed to mull things over, she at last nodded, and said, “You are a very wise young lady.”

Caitlin found herself grinning. “Of course I am,” she replied. “Look who my parents are.”

“Why does it jump around like that?” asked Tony Moretti, standing once again behind Shelton Halleck’s workstation at WATCH. The jittering image on the middle of the three big screens reminded him of what a movie looked like when its sprocket holes were ripped.

“That’s the way we see, apparently,” said Shel. “Those jumps are called saccades. Normally, our brains edit them out of our visual experience, just like they edit out the brief blackouts you’d otherwise experience when you blink.” He gestured at the screen. “I’ve been reading up on this. There’s actually only a tiny portion of the visual field that has really sharp focus. It’s called the fovea, and it perceives a patch about the size of your thumbnail held at arm’s length. So your brain moves your eye around constantly, focusing various parts of your surroundings on the fovea, and then it sums the images so that everything seems sharp.”

“Ah,” said Tony. “And this is what that girl in Canada is seeing right now?”

“No, it’s a recording of earlier today—a good, uninterrupted section. There are a fair number of blackouts and missing packets, unfortunately. It’s going from a Canadian ISP to a server in Tokyo. We’re snagging as much of it as we can, but not all of it is passing through the US.”

Tony nodded.

“I wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t read a transcript of the press conference,” continued Shel, “but Caitlin Decter has an encoding difficulty in her natural visual system. Her retinas encode what they’re seeing in a way that doesn’t make sense to her brain; that’s why she was blind. That Kuroda guy gave her a signal-processing device that corrects the encoding errors. What we’re seeing here is the corrected datastream. Her portable signal-processing computer sends signals like this to the post-retinal implant in her head—and it also mirrors them to Kuroda’s server at the University of Tokyo.”

“Why?”

“Early on, the equipment wasn’t properly correcting the signals; he was trying to debug that. Why he continues to have it mirrored to Tokyo now that it is working, I don’t know. Seems like an invasion of privacy.”

Tony grunted at the irony.

WATCH’s analysts normally worked twelve-hour shifts for six consecutive days, and then were off for four days—and when the threat level (the real one, not the DHS propaganda that was constantly pumped out of loudspeakers at airports) was high, they simply kept working until they dropped. The goal was to provide continuity of analysis for the longest blocks of time humanly possible.

Normal shifts were staggered; Tony Moretti had only been on his first day, but Shelton Halleck was on his third—and he appeared exhausted. His gray eyes had a dead sheen, and he had a heavy five o’clock shadow; he looked, Tony thought, like Captain Black did after he’d been taken over by the Mysterons.

“So, has she been examining plans for nuclear weapons, or anything like that?” Tony asked.

Shel shook his head. “This morning, her father dropped her off at school. She ate lunch in a cafeteria—kinda gross watching the food being shoveled in from the eye’s point of view. At the end of the day, a girl walked her home. I’m pretty sure it was Dr. Hameed’s daughter, Bashira.”

“What did they talk about?”

“There’s no audio, Tony. Just the video feed. And on those occasions when Caitlin looked at someone long enough for us to be able to read lips, it was just banal stuff.”

Tony frowned. “All right. Keep watching, okay? If she—”

“Shit!” It was Aiesha Emerson, the analyst at the workstation next to Shel’s. She was thirty-five, African-American, and had short hair.

“Aiesha?” Tony said.

“There’s something going on all right,” she said. She was breathing fast, Tony thought.

“Where?”

She pointed at the big screen showing the jerky video. “There.”

“The Decter kid, you mean?”

“Uh-huh. I know you tried to trace the source of the intercept, Shel, and—no offense—I thought I’d take a crack at it, too. I figured it’d be easier to deal with smaller datastreams than these massive video feeds, so I checked to see if the kid was also doing any instant messaging with the same party. At first, I wasn’t even reading the content; just looking at the routing information, but when I did read it…”

“Yes?” Tony said.

She touched a button and what was on her monitor appeared on the left-hand big screen, under the NSA logo.

“ ‘Calculass,’ ” said Tony, reading the name of one of the people who’d been chatting. “Who’s that?”

“The Decter girl,” said Aiesha.

“Ah.” The other party was identified not by a name but simply by an email address. “And who’s she talking to?”

“Not who,” Aiesha said. “What.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Come again?”

“Read the transcript, Tony.”

“Okay… um, scroll it for me.”

Aiesha did so.

“It’s gibberish. The letters are all mixed up.”

“I bet her father typed that,” said Aiesha, “even though it still identifies the sender as Calculass. They’re testing it.”