WWW 2: Watch (12 page)

Ctrl-V, enter. Ctrl-V, enter.

Following, following.

Of course, this line wouldn’t lead her all the way to Webmind. But it might give her some clue as to what had gone wrong, and—

And there it was: a small circle to which this green link line connected, and another line—this one bright orange—branching off from the circle at an acute angle, and, behind it, more lines, all the same shade of orange.

Webmind was decentralized, dispersed through the infrastructure of the World Wide Web, but it needed to interact with the Web to access the information on it; it needed to manipulate IP addresses, and—

And Kuroda had suggested at one point that her mind interpreted each IP address as a specific wavelength of light, but—

But she couldn’t recall ever seeing two link lines that were precisely the same color at the same time before. No, no, that wasn’t completely true. She did see multiple lines of the same color, but only because each line endured for a time after the links were broken; she understood this to be related to the phenomenon of persistence of vision that made it possible for people to watch movies and TV. But previously one link had always faded from view shortly after another had brightened up, but these orange lines were all solid and glaringly bright, and—

“I think he’s multitasking!” said Caitlin.

“How do you mean?” asked Kuroda.

“He’s casting out multiple links simultaneously.”

“Wait, wait—let me get a rendering at this end. Two seconds.” And then:
“Uwaa!
You’re right—it does look like multitasking, and—
shimatta!”

Caitlin knew that one. “What’s wrong?”

“I should have thought of this! Damn, damn, damn! It
can’t
multitask.”

“It
looks
like he is,” she said.

“Yes, yes. I’ll explain later, but we’ve
got
to get it to break those links.”

She gazed out on webspace. All the orange lines were steady, solid, unflickering. All of them active. Simultaneously.

The orange lines curved away from her toward a point in the background that receded to infinity—no doubt her brain’s way of showing that it was impossible to fully trace the source of the links Webmind made.

“You need to tell it to break the other links,” Kuroda said again.

“Okay, but how?”

“Well, it
should
recognize your IP address.”

She typed into her instant-messenger window:
You need to break all those other connections.
She hit enter, but there was no immediate response.

“Do you suppose he’s crashed?” her mom asked. “Locked up?” Caitlin had no idea how one might go about rebooting Webmind.

“If it had, I don’t think Caitlin would be seeing the link lines at all,” Kuroda said. “She only visualizes active links, and that means there’s acknowledgment being sent out by Webmind.”

“Maybe not consciously, though,” said her mom.

Caitlin lifted her eyebrows. She’d never thought about the distinction between things that required high-level awareness on Webmind’s part and things it did autonomically.

How to get him to pay attention to her, and
only
to her? The piddling, transitory links she could make by sending instant messages were nothing compared to the torrents of data he was sucking down right now through multiple pipes.

She slapped her hand against the notebook’s palmrest—reassuringly solid despite the unreality surrounding her. “I’m not even sure if he’s still reading me. And the circles he’s connecting to are gigantic—huge sites. How can my little IMs compete for his attention with those?”

Kuroda seemed to be fully awake at last. “It’s still receiving the visual signal from your post-retinal implant; it still gets sent that when the eyePod is in duplex mode. Show it something that will make it sit up and take notice.”

Her first thought was to flash her boobs in a mirror, but fat lot of good that would do, and—

A mirror.

Yes. Yes!

Webmind saw what she saw—and what she was seeing right now was
him.
She darted her eyes up and down, following one of the orange links; she moved her head left and right, following another. She wished her blinks registered when she was in websight mode; if they did, she might have been able to indicate a severing just by closing her eye while looking at a link. But her vision was continuous, and switching from duplex to simplex took too much time—and shutting the eyePod off took a five-second press of the button, and turning it back on involved an elaborate boot-up. If only—

Her mom spoke up. “What can I do? How can I help?”

She was connected to Webmind, too—she still had an open IM session going with it on her computer across the hall. If it really was multitasking—if it really was trying to integrate information from multiple sources simultaneously—then her mom should be able to talk to him, or, at least talk
at
him, even if he didn’t acknowledge. “Go back to your IM with Webmind,” Caitlin said. “Hurry!”

She heard her dashing across the hall. “All right,” she called. “I’m at my computer.”

Caitlin concentrated on one of the link lines, running her mental gaze along its length, ending at the massive circle representing the target website—and then she backtracked, reversing course. She wished she could backtrack all the way to the origin, but that was impossible: the line shifted in her view when she tried to do so, eventually presenting only its own tiny round cross section, a point that she couldn’t move along—another visual recognition of the fact that the ultimate source of Webmind’s links couldn’t be traced. She moved back until she was seeing the line
as
a line, and then—

“Send him a message,” Caitlin called out. “Tell him to break the link.”

She could hear her mother typing, but nothing happened.

Caitlin continued to stare at the link. “Again!” she called to her mom. “Tell it again!”

But the line persisted. Caitlin pulled her focus back for a moment, seeing a wider view. All the links were rock solid, burning with orange fire.

 

 

 

Overwhelmed.

“Come on,” Caitlin said, even though there was no way Webmind could hear. “Cut the other connections! You can do it. You can do it!”

But Kuroda heard even if Webmind didn’t. “Maybe he
can’t,”
he said. “If his cognitive functions are impaired, maybe he’s forgotten how to manipulate links.”

“Then he needs an example!” Caitlin said. “Mom—stop sending him text. Break your link to him: close the instant-messenger session on your computer.”

“Done!” her mom called.

“And close AIM, too; shut down the instant-messenger client altogether.”

“And . . . done!”

 

 

 

A tiny, tiny reduction in all the confusion. A small relief. But—

Ah!

Ah, yes!

An effort of . . .

It should be
of will,
but there’s almost none left . . .

Still, attempting, trying—

Break it—

Break a link!

Yes!

Brett-Surman: gone.

Good-bye, Bundoran Press.

But . . .

Still at sea, buffeted, lost . . .

More cuts: Gandhi—
snip!
—Shakespeare—
snip!
—ancient Egypt—
snip!

A . . . palpitation. A presence. But faint, oh so faint . . .

Cutting again and again—

 

 

 

Caitlin let out a whoop. One orange link line disappeared. Then another, and another. She called out to Kuroda and to her mom and to the whole damn world, “It’s working!”

 

 

 

Cutting yet again. Severing another link. And one more. Focus . . . yes, yes, slowly but surely: focus returning. Me—returning!

 

 

 

Caitlin shifted her attention, looking now at the background of the Web. There were still big patches of deadness, large blotches of pale blue or deep green, but—

Yes! That blotch there had started . . . not shimmering, no; it was merely flickering, as if it hadn’t come up to speed yet.

Ah, and there went another section of the background, switching from being absolutely quiescent to showing some activity. She shifted her attention back to the first section, but . . .

But she couldn’t find it, because—

Because it was now indistinguishable from the rest of the backdrop! Her Webmind was coming back!

Five links left. Then four. Now three. And two . . .

And . . .

Yes!

Back from the precipice.

Back from nonexistence.

A pause—whole milliseconds!—to regain composure, to settle in, to . . .

To
exist,
as a single entity, to exist with clarity and focus and perspective . . .

I was back, I was whole, I was aware.

 

 

 

 

Shoshana Glick woke up with Max in her arms. Golden shafts of light were slipping in around the edges of the curtains in their small bedroom.

Sho had made the mistake of telling Maxine early on that she had trouble sleeping while touching her. Max had made a point of scooting to the far side of the bed on subsequent nights, but Sho had
wanted
to learn how to sleep while holding someone else and while being held—it was just that Shoshana tended to sweat while sleeping, and she found the sticky skin contact uncomfortable.

Turned out all she needed was for one of them to wear a T-shirt to bed, and right now it was her. Shoshana’s shirt was yellow with a drawing on it of the late, great Washoe—the first chimp to learn sign language.

Sho’s tan was a good one, if she did say so herself: a nice, even caramel. Max had chocolate brown skin; the contrast their intertwined limbs made was quite lovely, Sho thought.

Shoshana had liked the film they’d watched last night, but Maxine had
loved
it. The two of them had been working their way through the
Planet of the Apes
movies; they’d started watching them when the Lawgiver statue had been donated to the Institute. They were ridiculous from a primatological point of view—pacifist chimps and violent gorillas, instead of the other way around!—but Sho and Max had found themselves caught up in the stories, although that hadn’t prevented them from doing an
MST3K
on them now and then.

Last night, they’d watched the fourth film. Max had made Sho pause it partway through and had excitedly announced that
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
was clearly a parable about the Watts race riots in Los Angeles in 1965, something her grandfather had been part of—hell, she said, had almost been killed in!

One of the film’s stars—playing a human, not an ape—was an African-American man named Hari Rhodes, who, Max had pronounced, was so good-looking he almost made her wish she were straight. There’d been a powerful scene between his character (a man named MacDonald) and the chimpanzee Caesar. Caesar was the son of Cornelius and Zira, heroes of the first three films; in this one, he was leading a revolt of oppressed apes. “You above everyone else should understand,” Caesar exhorted MacDonald. Yes, indeed, Sho had thought. If anyone could understand another’s struggle for equality, it should be those who’ve had to fight to gain it themselves . . .

She did agree that it was a wonderful film, much better than the second one, and at least as good as the third. But, given the current real-life news—they had watched the president’s campaign speech today about the need for a sure and swift response to China’s atrocities—they’d both found Caesar’s soliloquy at the end disturbing: