Wake

She looked over at the large computer monitor, suddenly wanting to see the text that was being read aloud, to convince herself that it was real, but — my God! The display was dancing, swirling, a hypnotic series of spi

No, no; it was just the screen saver; she wasn’t used to such things yet. The colors reminded her a bit of webspace, although they didn’t calm her just then.

JAWS said seven more words then fell silent: “My question is thus: Who am I?”

Chapter 49

It was surreal — an email from something that wasn’t human! And — my goodness! — all that old public-domain text on Project Gutenberg had apparently given it some very odd ideas about colloquial English.

On an impulse, Caitlin opened a window listing the MP3s on her old computer’s hard drive. She didn’t think much of her father’s taste in music, but she did know the tracks from his handful of CDs by heart. One of his favorites was ru

In a way, she thought, she’d already answered the phantom’s question. From the moment she’d first seen the Web — her initial experience with websight, just thirteen days ago — she had been reflecting a view of the phantom back at itself.

Or had she? What she’d shown the phantom — inadvertently at first, deliberately later — had been isolated views of portions of the Web’s structure, either glowing constellations of nodes and links or small swaths of the shimmering background.

But showing such minutiae to the phantom was like Caitlin looking at the pictures she’d now seen online of the tangles of neurons that composed a human brain: such clumps weren’t anything that she identified as herself.

Yes, growing up in Texas, she knew there were people who could see a whole human being in a single fertilized cell, but she was not one of them. No one could tell at a glance a human zygote from a chimp’s — or a horse’s, or that of a snake; most people couldn’t even tell an animal cell from a plant cell, she was sure.

No, no, to really see someone, you didn’t zoom in on details; you pulled back. She wasn’t her cells, or her pores — or her pimples! She was a gestalt, a whole — and so, too, was the phantom.

There was no actual photograph of the World Wide Web she could show the phantom, but there had to be appropriate computer-generated images: a map of the world marked by bright lines representing the major fiber-optic trunks that spa

But even that wouldn’t convey it all, she knew. The Web wasn’t just confined to the surface of the Earth: a lot of it was relayed by satellites in low Earth orbit, 200 to 400 miles above the surface, while other signals bounced off satellites in geostationary orbit — a narrow ring of points 52,000 miles in diameter, six times as wide as the planet. Some sort of graphic could probably portray those, although at that scale, all the other stuff — the trunk lines, the clouds of computers — would be utterly lost.

She could use Google Image Search to find a succession of diagrams and graphics, but she wouldn’t be able to tell good ones from bad ones — she was just begi

Ah, but wait! She knew somebody who was bound to have the perfect picture to represent all this. She opened the instant-messenger program on the computer that used to be in the basement and looked at the buddies list. There were only four names: “Esumi,” Kuroda’s wife; “Akiko,” his daughter; “Hiroshi,” a name she didn’t know; and “A

Caitlin typed, A

Twenty-seven seconds passed, but then: Masa! How are you?

Not Dr. Kuroda, Caitlin typed. It’s Caitlin Decter, in Canada.

Hi! What’s up?

Dr. K said you were a Web cartographer, right?

Yes, that’s right. I’m with the Internet Cartography Project.

Good, cuz I need your help.

Sure. Want to go to video?

Caitlin lifted her eyebrows. She still wasn’t used to thinking of the Web as a way to see people, but of course it was. Sure, she typed.

It took a minute to get the videoconference going, but soon enough Caitlin was looking at A

“The famous Caitlin Decter!” said A

“Yes?” said Caitlin.

“No, I’m sorry. It’s really not comparable, I know, but…”

“It’s okay,” Caitlin said. “Go ahead.”

“It’s just that what you’re going through — well, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around it, get a feeling of what it must be like.”

Caitlin thought about her own discussions with Bashira dealing with the opposite issue: her analogy about the lack of a magnetic sense being to her like the lack of sight. She understood that people wrestled with what it was like to perceive, or not, in ways they weren’t used to.

“It’s overwhelming,” Caitlin said. “And so much more than I expected. I mean, I’d imagined the world, but…”

A

“Yes, yes, yes,” she said. “And, um, I hate it when people say, ‘I know just what you’re going through.’ I mean, when someone’s lost a child, or something equally devastating, and people say, ‘I know what you’re feeling,’ and then they come up with some lame comparison, like when their cat got hit by a car.”

Caitlin looked over at Schrodinger, who was safely curled up on her bed.

“But, well,” continued A

Caitlin was listening politely but — 1968! She might as well have said 1492; either way, it was ancient history. “Yes?”

“See,” said A

“Is that the year it started being in color?” Caitlin asked.

A

But Caitlin couldn’t suppress her grin any longer. “I’m kidding, A

“That was the year that — wait, wait, let me show you. Give me a second.”

Caitlin could see her typing, and then a blue-underlined URL popped into Caitlin’s instant-messenger window. “Go there,” A

A picture slowly painted in on her screen, from top to bottom: a white-and-blue object against a black background. When it was complete, it filled the display. “What’s that?” Caitlin said.

A

Caitlin sat up straight in her chair, looking in wonder at it.