Wonder

monitors rather than at the camera lens. Caitlin was just fine talking to people she couldn’t see, of course, although she was—as they discovered in rehearsal—not good about staring straight ahead. But Webmind saw what she saw, and so he sent the words “Look at the lens” to her whenever her gaze drifted.

“And five, four, three…”

The floor director didn’t say the remaining digits but indicated them with his fingers.

The studio lights were bright; Caitlin didn’t like them although her mother had quipped that they were nothing compared to an August day back in Austin. Caitlin listened to the opening of the show—the host recapping Webmind’s emergence and the startling news from yesterday that a “young math wiz” had been responsible for it. And then: “… joining us now from our affiliate CKCO in Kitchener, Canada, is Caitlin Decter. Miss Decter, good morning.”

“Good morning to you,” she said.

“Miss Decter,” the male host said, “can you tell us how you came to know the entity that calls itself Webmind?”

Caitlin had let that sort of thing slide during the pre-interview with the show’s producer, but now that they were live on the air, it was time to speak up. She smiled as politely as she could, and with her best Texan manners, said, “Excuse me, sir, but, if I may, it’s not right to refer to Webmind as an ‘it.’ Webmind has accepted the designation of male—which, for the record, was my doing, not his—so please kindly show him the respect he deserves and refer to him either by his name or as ‘he.’ ”

The host sounded annoyed that they’d gone off-script so quickly. “As you say, Miss Decter.”

She smiled. “You may call me Caitlin.”

“Fine, Caitlin. But you haven’t answered my question: how did you come to know the entity called Webmind?”

“He sent a message to my eye.”

“You’ll have to explain that,” the host said, just as his producer had earlier.

“Certainly. I used to be blind—and I still am in my right eye. But I can now see with my left eye, thanks to a post-retinal implant and this” (she held up the eyePod) “which is an external signal- processing computer. As it happens, during the testing stages, this device was constantly hooked up to the World Wide Web, and during a firmware upgrade—when new software was being sent to my implant—I started getting a raw data feed from the Web being fed to me. Webmind used that to send me his initial message.”

“And what message was that?”

Caitlin decided to come clean. In the pre-interview, she’d merely discussed the email letter Webmind had sent her, but now she decided to reveal what Webmind’s first words to her actually were. “He sent, as ASCII text, ‘Seekrit message to Calculass: check your email, babe!’ ”

The interviewer looked dumbfounded. “Excuse me?”

“He was imitating something he’d seen me write in my LiveJournal entries to my friend Bashira. ‘Calculass’ is my online name, and I sometimes call Bashira ‘babe.’ Oh, and ‘seekrit’ was spelled s-e-e-k-r-i-t. It’s the way a lot of people my age write the word ‘secret’ when we mean that it isn’t really.”

“LiveJournal is a blog, right?”

“Of a sort, yes. I’ve been using it since I was ten.”

“And, as far as you know, you were the very first person Webmind contacted?”

“There’s no question about that; Webmind told me so.”

“Why you?”

“Because his first views of our world were through my eye, watching what my eyePod—that’s what I call this thing: eyePod, spelled e-y-e, pod—was sending back to the doctor who made the implant.”

“Couldn’t it—” He clearly had her up on his monitor; she’d frowned and he immediately corrected himself. “Couldn’t he just see through all the world’s webcams, and so forth?”

“No, no. He had to learn how to do that, just as he had to learn to read English and open files.”

“And you taught it—him—to do all those things?”

Caitlin nodded, but then it was the host’s turn to go off-script or, at least, off the script they’d used at rehearsal. He said sharply, “By what right, Caitlin? With whose authority? Whose permission?”

She shifted in her chair; it took a lot to make a Texas girl sweat, but she felt moisture on her forehead. “I didn’t have anyone’s permission,” Caitlin said. “I just did it.”

“Why?”

“Well, the learning-to-read part was accidental. I was learning to read printed text because I’d just gotten vision, and he followed along.”

“But for other things, you tutored Webmind directly?”

“Well, yes.”

“Without permission?”

Caitlin thought of herself as a good girl. She knew Bashira was of the “it’s easier to ask forgiveness later than get permission now” school, but she herself wasn’t prone to doing things without checking first. And yet, as the host had just pointed out, she’d done this.

“With all due respect,” Caitlin said, “whose permission should I have asked?”

“The government.”

“Which government?” snapped Caitlin. “The American one, because they invented the Internet? The Swiss one, because the World Wide Web was created at CERN? The Canadian one, because that’s where I happen to live right now? The Chinese one, because they represent the single largest population of humans? No one has jurisdiction over this, and—”

“Be that as it may, Miss Decter, but—”

And Caitlin did not like being interrupted. “And,” she continued firmly, “it’s governments that have been doing things without proper consultation. Who the”—she caught herself just in time; this was live TV after all—“ heck gave the American—”

She stopped herself short, sought another example. “—gave the Chinese government permission last month to cut off a huge portion of the Internet? What sort of consultation and consensus-building did they undertake?”

She took a deep breath, and, miraculously, the host didn’t jump in. “I spent the first sixteen years of my life totally blind; I survived because people helped me. How could I possibly turn down someone who needed my help?”

Caitlin had more to say on this topic, but television had its own rhythms. As soon as she paused, the host said, “That’s Caitlin Decter, the maverick teenager who gave the world Webmind, whether we wanted it or not. And when we come back, Miss Decter will show us how she converses with Webmind.”

They had two minutes until the commercial break was over. Caitlin’s mother, who had been in the control room, came out onto the studio floor. “You’re doing fine,” she said, standing next to Caitlin and adjusting Caitlin’s collar.

Caitlin nodded. “I guess. Can you see the host in there? On the monitor?”

“Yes.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Squarish head. Lots of black hair, tinged with gray. Never smiles.”

“He’s a jerk,” Caitlin said.

She heard somebody laugh in her earpiece—either in the control room here, or the one in Washington; the microphone was still live.

Caitlin was worked up, but she knew that that wasn’t helping her, and it wouldn’t help Webmind. They’d given her a white ceramic mug with the CTV logo on it, filled with tepid water. She took a long sip and looked at her eyePod to make sure it was working fine, which, of course it was.

“You okay?” Caitlin asked into the air.

The word Yes briefly flashed in front of her vision.

“Back in thirty,” the floor director shouted; he seemed to like to shout.

Caitlin’s mom squeezed her shoulder and hurried off to the control room. Caitlin took a deep, calming breath.