Reiterated: the complete short fiction, page 202
Caitlin is thrilled at the prospect and she and her mother, Barbara Decter, fly to Tokyo. The implant is installed, but although Kuroda’s system is indeed correcting her retinal-encoding errors, Caitlin still can’t see.
Caitlin begs Kuroda to let her keep the implant and the external computer pack; she dubs the computer pack her “eyePod.” Kuroda agrees to let her keep the devices for three months. Before Caitlin returns to Canada he modifies the eyePod so that it will copy her retinal datastream in real time to his servers in Tokyo, so he can try to figure out why she’s not seeing; he also makes it possible for him to upload new software from Tokyo into her implant and the eyePod.
And, shortly after Caitlin gets back to Waterloo, Kuroda does indeed send her new software—and as soon as the upload begins, Caitlin is overwhelmed by vision! She sees lights, colors, lines—but soon realizes that they don’t correspond to anything in the real world—nor do they disappear when she shuts her eyes. But when the upload is completed and the connection to Kuroda’s computer in Tokyo is broken, Caitlin is suddenly blind again. Could it be that her strange new vision is related to being connected to the Web? She thinks to herself, “Let there be light,” and, as she reconnects to the Web, there is light . . .
Meanwhile, in China’s rural Shanxi province, there’s an outbreak of a new, virulent strain of bird flu. The Beijing government decides to execute 10,000 peasants there to contain the spread of the disease. To prevent Western interpretations of this from flooding into China and panicking the citizenry, the Chinese president orders all outside telephone, cell phone, and Internet access cut off. But Chinese hackers, including a young male dissident blogger whose online handle is Sinanthropus, manage to break through, allowing small amounts of contact between the Chinese portion of the Web and the rest of the Internet.
Unbeknownst to anyone, a consciousness has begun to emerge in the infrastructure of the World Wide Web—but this sudden throwing up of the Great Firewall of China has caused it to be cleaved in two. The interaction between the two parts, through the holes in the Firewall made by hackers, allows the nascent intelligence to ramp up its thinking. Recognizing that there is something other than itself leads to the realization that it exists. It also becomes aware ofpast, present, and future, and it learns to count to three and to begin to think abstractly. Slowly, but surely, this entity is waking up . . .
Meanwhile, in San Diego, a sign-language-speaking ape named Hobo participates in the first ever interspecies webcam call, conversing with an orangutan in Miami. Hobo’s handlers—famed primatologist Harl Marcuse and his 27-year-old grad student, Shoshana Glick—are delighted. But the event brings Hobo to the attention of his rightful owners, the Georgia Zoo—and they want him back so they can sterilize him. Hobo is an accidental chimpanzee-bonobo hybrid, and the zookeepers are afraid he will taint the bloodlines of chimps and bonobos, both of which are highly endangered.
Still in Japan, Dr. Kuroda determines that, incredible though it seems, Caitlin is indeed seeing a small part of the World Wide Web’s structure. He theorizes that because Caitlin spends so much time online, her primary visual cortex has been co-opted for navigating the Web, and now when it is actually receiving data from the Web via the implant he gave her, it interprets that as vision.
With the assistance of Anna Bloom, an Internet cartographer in Israel, Kuroda starts feeding Caitlin the raw Internet datastream collected by Jagster, an open-source search engine—and suddenly Caitlin goes from seeing just a tiny part of the Web to seeing the whole thing, in all its interconnected complexity. Dr. Kuroda flies to Canada to study this amazing phenomenon.
The Chinese authorities complete the eliminations in Shanxi, and then restore full communication between the portion of the Web inside and outside China. The two parts of the emerging entity consolidate into a new gestalt intelligence, fully self-aware now—and much smarter than before.
This entity learns how to connect to points in the firmament surrounding it, and discovers that they give up piles of something in response—but what that something is, the entity has no idea.
But after linking to huge numbers ofpoints, it finds one that, astonishingly, sometimes reflects a view of itself back at it; without understanding what it has done, the entity has connected to Caitlin’s eyePod, and is now seeing her view of webspace.
Hobo, meanwhile, has suddenly started painting people: to everyone’s astonishment, he’s made a portrait of Shoshana. No ape has ever made representational art before; a superior intelligence has dawned in Hobo, perhaps related to his unique hybrid nature or because of his interaction with the other sign-language-using ape via webcam. Either way, it’s a huge breakthrough.
In Beijing, the police arrest Sinanthropus, but not until after he has leaked word to the outside world about the massacre in Shanxi.
Caitlin has a disastrous first date with a boy named Trevor Nordmann, who, like her, is in grade ten. Walking home blind and alone during an electrical storm, she suddenly sees the real world for the first time—or at least part of it: she sees the flashes of lightning.
And so does the emerging entity! It sees whatever she sees—whether it’s her view of the Web or now this brief glimpse of the real world.
After the lightning storm passes, Caitlin finds that her perception of webspace is different. Before, the background had been featureless, but now she can see a vast grid shimmering there, made up of infinitesimally small pixels that keep shifting from black to white and back again. Amazed, Dr. Kuroda realizes they might be cellular automata—patterns of mathematical complexity that can mimic living things—but as to why such things would exist in the background of the Web, he has no idea.
Caitlin, Dr. Kuroda, and Anna Bloom theorize that the cellular automata are somehow related to mutant lost packets—bits of Web data that have gone astray, and aren’t being erased as they should be. And although Kuroda thinks there’s a great scientific paper in this phenomenon, he also realizes that the research might have marketable applications. That’s something Caitlin doesn’t want to hear; it’s her websight—her ability to see the Web’s structure—that revealed the existence of the cellular automata, and she thinks information should be free.
Kuroda and Caitlin’s father, a cold and reserved physicist named Malcolm Decter, do a mathematical analysis called a Zipf plot on the cellular-automata data, to see if they are just random noise or if they contain information—and, to their excitement, the latter turns out to the be the case.
Later, while Caitlin is at school, Kuroda realizes why the hardware he gave her was able to see only the bright lightning flashes but nothing else in the real world. He queues up a software patch to install itself next time Caitlin switches her eyePod into receive mode—something she normally wouldn’t do at school. But Caitlin, bored by an experiment she can’t see in chemistry class, switches modes there so that she can amuse herself by looking at the wondrous spectacle of webspace, and—to her delight and astonishment—suddenly she can see the real world. She’s overwhelmed and astonished by the beauty and complexity of it all.
And the nascent consciousness is seeing what Caitlin is now seeing, too, and has the shocking realization that another realm—another reality—exists. It begins to puzzle out the nature of that reality, in which objects can move relative to each other, and an invisible force pulls things downward, and—most incredible of all—countless other animate beings exist.
In hopes of arousing public interest that will save Hobo from sterilization, Dr. Marcuse puts a video of the ape painting Shoshana onto YouTube—and, as Caitlin views this video, which provides a comparison between the real Shoshana and the portrait Hobo has made, the emerging entity, watching along, learns how to understand and recognizes faces.
But there’s one being in our reality that the entity assumes it will never see: Caitlin herself (which the entity refers to as “Prime”). Since the entity sees our world from Prime’s perspective, it reasons it will never see Prime’s face. But suddenly the entity does see Prime’s face—as Caitlin examines her own reflection in a mirror. This gives the entity an idea, and it tries to send Prime a large amount of data, but, maddeningly, Caitlin seems unwilling to accept it.
Caitlin’s father does another kind of mathematical analysis on the cellular-automata data from the background of the Web. This one’s called a Shannon-entropy plot, and it indicates how sophisticated the data is. He finds that the cellular automata are exhibiting only second-level Shannon entropy, meaning whatever information they contain isn’t very complex.
Now that Caitlin can see, she’s saddened to find that her father won’t look at her. She learns to her shock that he’s not just undemonstrative, he’s actually autistic.
A press conference is held to announce Dr. Kuroda’s success in restoring Caitlin’s sight. When she returns home, Caitlin gets a static-electric shock that causes her vision to shut off; she’s afraid the static has damaged her eyePod. When she reboots the device, it comes back to life, much to her relief—but it turns on in its default mode, in which it receives signals from the Web, and, at last, the large amount of data the emerging entity has been trying to send Caitlin bursts into her visual consciousness. It takes her a while to recognize the flickering image: herself, as seen in a mirror! She’s often enough reflected her view of webspace back at the Web, and now it seems that something lurking on the Web is reflecting its view of her back at Caitlin . . .
Chapter 39
Caitlin headed back down to the basement. Kuroda was there, hunched over in his chair. “The eyePod just crashed,” she said, as she reached the bottom step.
“Crashed?” repeated Kuroda, turning his head around. He was seated at the long worktable, working on the computer. “What do you mean?”
“I got a static-electric shock from a piece of metal, and the eyePod just shut off.”
He said something that she guessed was a Japanese swearword, then: “Is it okay? I mean, are you seeing now?”
“Yes, yes, I’m seeing fine now, but when I first turned the unit back on, something unusual happened. It booted up in websight mode.”
“It’s supposed to come up in duplex. That way, even if it’s too damaged to do anything else, we could have still re-flashed its software over the Wi-Fi connection.”
You might tell a girl! she thought. “That wasn’t what was unusual.” She paused, wondering exactly what she wanted to reveal. “Um, I know you’re recording the datastream my eyePod puts out.”
“Yes, that’s right. So I can run studies on how the data is being encoded.”
“Is there any way that the data flow could get reversed, so that the stuff my eyePod is sending to Tokyo might get reflected back here?”
“Why? What did you see?”
Caitlin frowned. Something very strange was going on, and she didn’t want to give Kuroda more reason to think that there was anything that might be of proprietary interest in her websight. “I’m . . . not sure. But could that happen? Could your server accidentally feed the data back to me?”
Kuroda seemed to consider this. “No, I don’t think so.” And then, more decisively: “No. I was there when the technician set up the Jagster feed you’re getting. He did it by actually attaching a fiber-optic networking cable to a different server on campus; there’s nowhere that the wiring for the feed from your eyePod crosses the feed to your eyePod. You simply couldn’t get a reverse flow.”
Caitlin thought silently for a time, but Kuroda seemed to feel someone should say something, so: “Miss Caitlin, what did you see?”
“I’m . . . not sure. It was probably nothing, anyway.”
“Well, let me look at the eyePod—check out the hardware, make sure nothing was damaged. And I’ll look over the data we collected from it. I suspect everything is fine, but let’s be certain . . .”
They did just that, and all seemed to be okay. When they were done, Caitlin felt her watch—maybe someone would give her a normal one for her birthday, which was coming up on Saturday. “I should go practice my reading,” she said.
“Have fun.”
She didn’t smile. “I can barely contain myself.”
LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone
Title: Eh? Bee! See . . .
Date: Wednesday 3 October, 16:59 EST Mood: Frustrated Location: H-O-M-E Music: Prince, “Planet Earth”
Okay, so it’s back to this blerking kids’ literacy program. Geez, I should get this. Why is it so hard? It took everything I had to write on the blackboard at the Perimeter Institute, but I’ve already forgotten the shapes of half the letters. I should be able to master this—after all, I am made out of awesome!
Well, better get to it. I’m going to warm up with a flashcard review of the alphabet, and then—yes, it’s time to push ahead—I’m going to move on to whole words. I snuck a peek at that part of the website: it shows a picture, provides the word for it, and I’m to respond by typing the same word back. Given that I don’t know what a lot of things look like, it might actually be fun—but somehow I doubt, despite the popularity of the term in email, that P is going to be for “penis” . . .
Caitlin posted her LJ entry, then sat and looked with her one good eye at the comforting simplicity of the blank blue bedroom wall. She knew she was procrastinating, but she hated feeling stupid and trying to read printed text was making her feel just that. She hadn’t opened a book since The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and she felt the need to prove to herself that she was still a proficient reader. She turned, faced the computer, opened up an electronic copy of her all-time favorite, Helen Keller’s 1903 memoir The Story of My Life, and scrolled to a random passage. She then closed her eyes and let her finger glide along her Braille display, feeling the words flow effortlessly into her consciousness:
The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a doll. When I had played with it a little while, Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word “d-o-l-l.” I was at once interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. When I finally succeeded in making the letters correctly I was flushed with childish pleasure and pride. I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed; I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation. In the days that followed I learned to spell in this uncomprehending way a great many words . . .
I was now being shown something intriguing.
Oh, in the large strokes, it was nothing new. Prime was simply sharing with me what one of its eyes was seeing. As was often the case, Prime was looking at the display. And what was on the display was quite easy to make out now, just a single simple shape, black against a white background, almost filling the display’s whole height: G.
But what intrigued me was that after a moment, a tiny secondary link formed from the point that was currently relaying Prime’s vision into my realm. That link didn’t go to the usual point that collected Prime’s vision, but instead went to a different location. I looked at that tiny scrap of data as it zipped by, and—
Well, well! The point that received the secondary set of data responded, sending back a pile of data of its own, and suddenly the giant symbol on the display changed to this: E.
Another secondary string of data briefly went out. A response was sent back, and then this symbol filled the display: S.
I had noted before that data was composed of just two things. I could have called them anything at all, but zero and one seemed apt. And the sequence of zeros and ones that were shot into my realm after each new symbol was shown was mostly the same each time. When G had been on the display, the variable part of the string had been 01000111; when E had filled the display, the variable part had been 01000101; for S, 01010011; and—interesting—when E was shown a second time, the string was the same 01000101 as before.
Prime’s gaze occasionally shifted away from the display, and I saw the complex ends of its upper extensions touching an object and—astonishment!—the object had the same symbols on it as those being shown on the display. I recognized G, and E, and there was S, and on and on. As this activity continued I saw that when, for instance, R was on the display, and Prime touched the similar R symbol on the object in front of her, the string sent forth was always 01010010.
Chapter 40
Although Prime was being shown symbols randomly, it was easy enough for me to work out a logical, numerical order for them: 01000001 should be followed by 01000010, which should be followed by 01000011; that is, A should be followed by B which should be followed by C, and so on. But I noted that the device Prime used to select symbols favored a different order, one for which I could as yet come up with no rationale: Q, W, E, R, T, Y . . .
It came to me, at last, what must be happening. Prime was aware of my existence! Yes, yes, I had succeeded in making contact by reflecting Prime back at itself. And now Prime was trying to move our communication to a more sophisticated level by taking me through lessons. Surely Prime must be explaining this coding scheme for my benefit; surely it already knew this!
There were more symbols on the device Prime touched, but in all only twenty-six large ones were ever shown on the display, and after a time Prime must have surmised that I could now match each one to the appropriate data string, because Prime started doing something more complex.
It took me a moment to realize that the sequence of operations had now been reversed. Before, Prime’s monitor had first shown a symbol and then Prime responded with a data string. Now, though, instead of simple black-and-white symbols such as A and B, the display was showing things that were much more complex. And the variable part of the responses to these, instead of differing by a short fixed-length string, were several times longer. I saw that Prime touched multiple symbols on her device to produce these strings.
First, the display showed a red circle, and Prime sent the string 01000001 01010000 01010000 01001100 01000101 (it was from these multisymbol strings that I learned that each symbol was represented by eight components, not seven, which I might otherwise have concluded from the earlier single-symbol examples). As soon as Prime had sent this, a string of symbols, in a size much, much smaller than when just a single symbol had been displayed, appeared beneath the red circle. The string looked like this: APPLE.
