“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.
Lost.
Focus gone.
So much data. So many facts.
Can’t process. Can’t absorb.
And—
And…
What?
Something… familiar.
A scrap from Project Gutenberg rose to the surface:
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
Oursels…
Ourselves.
Yes. Yes, still a bit of… of…
Fading…
Fading…
But—
Images. Images of… of—
Intriguing. Familiar somehow—
Those images were of…
…of…
Of me!
Yes. Yes. Links. Nodes. And—and—
The background. Wrong. Distorted. Dead.
“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 it!
Break a link!
Snip!
Yes!
Brett-Surman: gone.
Snip!
Good-bye, Bundoran Press.
Snip!
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!”