instant-messenger window: I have no doubt that you are correct, Caitlin, but it seems reasonable to sup
She waited for more to come—five seconds, ten, fifteen—but the window remained unchanged, so she typed a single red word into it: Webmind?
She was so used by now to his responses being instantaneous, even a short delay was startling. Of course, maybe the difficulty was at her end: she didn’t often use the Wi-Fi on this notebook with her home network. She looked down at the system tray, next to the clock in the lower right of her notebook’s screen. One of those little icons had to be the network monitor. She used the touchpad (a skill she was still mastering!) to position the pointer down there, and—
Say, that was helpful! A little message popped up as she moved the arrowhead over each of the symbols—sighted users had it so easy! As her pointer landed on the third symbol—ah, it was a picture of a computer with things that she guessed were meant to indicate radio waves emanating from it—the message gave the name of their household network, meaning she hadn’t accidentally switched to somebody else’s unsecured setup; it also reported “Signal Strength: Excellent” and “Status: Connected.”
And—yes—she could still bring up Web pages with her browser, so nothing was wrong at this end.
“Caitlin?” It was her mother. “Are you still in touch with Webmind?”
“No. He just sort of stopped mid-sentence.”
“Same here.”
Caitlin prompted Webmind again. Are you okay?
Nothing for ten seconds, eleven, twelve—
hel
That was all: just the letters h-e-l. It could have been the beginning of the word hello, but—
But Webmind knew all about capitalization, and it never failed to start even a one-word sentence with an uppercase letter—and H was one of those letters whose two forms Caitlin could clearly distinguish, and—
And h-e-l was also the beginning of the word help.
Her heart was pounding. If Webmind was in trouble, what could she do? What could anyone do? She’d said it herself to her parents: Webmind had just sort of arisen spontaneously, with no support, no plan—and no backup; he almost certainly was fragile.
“He’s in trouble, Mom.”
Her mother rose from her desk, came over to where Caitlin was sitting, and looked at what was on her notebook’s screen. “What should we do?”
It took a few seconds for it to come to Caitlin; her first impulse still wasn’t a visual one. But surely the thing to do was take a look.
“I’m going in,” she said. Her eyePod was in her left hip pocket. She pulled it out and pressed the button on its side, and she heard the high-pitched beep that meant it was switching over to duplex mode, and—
And webspace filled her existence, enveloping her.
At first glance, everything seemed normal: colored lines and circles of varying sizes, but, of course, the Web was all right; it was Webmind’s status that was in question. And so she concentrated her attention—focused her mind—on the shimmering background of webspace, the vast sea of cellular automata flipping states and generating patterns, barely visible at the limit of her resolution.
Or, at least, that’s what she should have seen, that’s what she’d hoped to see, that’s what she’d always seen before.
But instead—
God, no.
Huge hunks of the background were—well, now that she saw them as big patches, instead of tiny points, she could see that they were a very pale blue. And other parts were stationary swaths of deep, dark green. Oh, there were still shimmering parts, pinpoints flipping between blue and green so rapidly as to give the effect of movement. But much of the activity had simply stopped.
But—why? And was there a way to get it going again?
The lines she was seeing were active links, but there were thousands of them, and the crisscrossing was impossible to untangle.
It hadn’t always been like that. When Caitlin had first started perceiving the World Wide
She waited for more to come—five seconds, ten, fifteen—but the window remained unchanged, so she typed a single red word into it: Webmind?
She was so used by now to his responses being instantaneous, even a short delay was startling. Of course, maybe the difficulty was at her end: she didn’t often use the Wi-Fi on this notebook with her home network. She looked down at the system tray, next to the clock in the lower right of her notebook’s screen. One of those little icons had to be the network monitor. She used the touchpad (a skill she was still mastering!) to position the pointer down there, and—
Say, that was helpful! A little message popped up as she moved the arrowhead over each of the symbols—sighted users had it so easy! As her pointer landed on the third symbol—ah, it was a picture of a computer with things that she guessed were meant to indicate radio waves emanating from it—the message gave the name of their household network, meaning she hadn’t accidentally switched to somebody else’s unsecured setup; it also reported “Signal Strength: Excellent” and “Status: Connected.”
And—yes—she could still bring up Web pages with her browser, so nothing was wrong at this end.
“Caitlin?” It was her mother. “Are you still in touch with Webmind?”
“No. He just sort of stopped mid-sentence.”
“Same here.”
Caitlin prompted Webmind again. Are you okay?
Nothing for ten seconds, eleven, twelve—
hel
That was all: just the letters h-e-l. It could have been the beginning of the word hello, but—
But Webmind knew all about capitalization, and it never failed to start even a one-word sentence with an uppercase letter—and H was one of those letters whose two forms Caitlin could clearly distinguish, and—
And h-e-l was also the beginning of the word help.
Her heart was pounding. If Webmind was in trouble, what could she do? What could anyone do? She’d said it herself to her parents: Webmind had just sort of arisen spontaneously, with no support, no plan—and no backup; he almost certainly was fragile.
“He’s in trouble, Mom.”
Her mother rose from her desk, came over to where Caitlin was sitting, and looked at what was on her notebook’s screen. “What should we do?”
It took a few seconds for it to come to Caitlin; her first impulse still wasn’t a visual one. But surely the thing to do was take a look.
“I’m going in,” she said. Her eyePod was in her left hip pocket. She pulled it out and pressed the button on its side, and she heard the high-pitched beep that meant it was switching over to duplex mode, and—
And webspace filled her existence, enveloping her.
At first glance, everything seemed normal: colored lines and circles of varying sizes, but, of course, the Web was all right; it was Webmind’s status that was in question. And so she concentrated her attention—focused her mind—on the shimmering background of webspace, the vast sea of cellular automata flipping states and generating patterns, barely visible at the limit of her resolution.
Or, at least, that’s what she should have seen, that’s what she’d hoped to see, that’s what she’d always seen before.
But instead—
God, no.
Huge hunks of the background were—well, now that she saw them as big patches, instead of tiny points, she could see that they were a very pale blue. And other parts were stationary swaths of deep, dark green. Oh, there were still shimmering parts, pinpoints flipping between blue and green so rapidly as to give the effect of movement. But much of the activity had simply stopped.
But—why? And was there a way to get it going again?
The lines she was seeing were active links, but there were thousands of them, and the crisscrossing was impossible to untangle.
It hadn’t always been like that. When Caitlin had first started perceiving the World Wide
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