“Everything worked fine until just before 4:00 p.m., when the seminar was scheduled to end. Suddenly, one of the teams turned on the other and kept defecting. That team won, but the first team felt so betrayed, IBM had to send its members off for therapy, and it was months before they’d work at all with members of the other team again.”
“Wow,” said Caitlin.
“But if you take the whole of humanity as the field of players, then your interaction doesn’t end even if any one specific player drops out. That’s why reputation is so important, see? You’ve bought things on eBay, right? Well, that’s a perfect example: how you’ve treated other people shows up in your Feedback rating. The world knows if you defect. We’re all interconnected in a…”
“…a worldwide web?” said Caitlin.
She smiled. “Exactly.” She gobbled the last of her sandwich. “Speaking of which, we should get back upstairs…”
“All right,” said Tony Moretti, pacing down one side of the control room at WATCH. “Reports. Shel, you first.”
Shelton Halleck was leaning forward in his chair, his arms crossed in front of him on the workstation, the one with the snake tattoo on top. He was plainly exhausted. “We’ve been through everything Caitlin Decter has written with a fine-toothed comb,” he said. “And everything Malcolm and Barbara Decter and Kuroda have written, too, but there’s nothing about how Exponential actually works—nothing that contradicts what Decter told the CSIS agents, but nothing that confirms it, either.”
“All right,” said Tony. “Aiesha, what have you got?”
She looked more awake than Shel, but her voice was raw. “Maybe something, maybe nothing,” she said. “Caitlin set up a webcam chat with an Internet cartographer at the Technion a while ago: Anna Bloom is her name.” A dossier came up on the middle of the three big screens, showing a picture of an elderly gray-haired woman. “We weren’t monitoring Caitlin’s traffic back then, so we don’t have a recording of the video chat—but I can’t think of any reason for a girl in Canada to talk to a Web scientist in Israel except to discuss the structure of Exponential.”
“We could get the Mossad to speak to this Bloom,” said Tony. “The Technion is in Jerusalem?”
“No, Haifa,” Aiesha said. She turned and looked at the series of digital clocks on the back wall. “It’s almost 11:00 p.m. there.”
“There’s no time to waste,” Colonel Hume said. “Let me call her directly—one computer expert to another. It’s time to cut through all the bull.”
Caitlin’s instant messenger bleeped and the words Mind-Over-Matter is now available popped up. She felt her heart racing.
Hi, she typed.
Hey! Matt replied. How was your day?
Fine, ty.
I’ve got the stuff from your locker, he replied. OK if I come by?
Caitlin was surprised to find her heart pounding. She paused, trying to think of something suitably witty or sexy to say, but then she mentally kicked herself for hesitating, because poor Matt must have been on tenterhooks. Sure! she wrote, and then, to take the sting out of her delay, she added a trio of smiley faces.
W00t! he wrote. ’Bout half an hour, OK?
This time she replied immediately: Yes.
Heading out. *poof *
Caitlin crossed the hall to speak to her mother, who was typing away with Webmind in her study.
“A friend’s coming over,” Caitlin said.
Her mother looked up from her keyboard. “Who is it?”
Caitlin found herself slightly embarrassed. “They were in my math class.”
But the pronoun obfuscation did not get past her mom. “It’s a boy,” she said at once.
“Um, yes.”
“Is it Trevor?”
“No! Don’t worry, Mom. He won’t be back.”
“Well, okay,” she said, and—
And there it was, that look she’d seen before: her mother trying to suppress a grin. “But, sweetheart,” she added, “you might want to clean yourself up a bit.”
Cripes! She’d been so intent on Webmind that she hadn’t brushed her hair today, and she looked down now and saw that she was wearing just about the rattiest T-shirt she owned. And—gak!—she hadn’t showered for two days. She hurried down the hall to the bathroom.
thirty-five
The doorbell rang, and Caitlin found herself running to it. She was now wearing a silky blue shirt—one her mother said was too low-cut for school. But she was not going to school anymore; she was pleased with her impeccable logic. Her shoulder-length brown hair was still wet, but at least she’d brushed it.
She opened the door. “Hi, Matt!”
And—wow!—boy’s eyes really did do that. She’d read about it, but hadn’t yet seen it: straight to the boobs, and only apparently with an effort of will coming up to the face.
His voice cracked. It was so cute! “Hi, Caitlin!”
He had a—a sack, or something in his right hand. “Here’s your stuff,” he said, setting it down on the tiled floor.
“Thanks!”
In his left hand, he was holding something large and rectangular. He held it out.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“A card—everyone in math class signed it. They were all sorry to hear you’re leaving school.”
She took it. It was quite large, and clearly handmade: a big piece of Bristol board folded in half, with a color printout pasted to the front. She looked at the image. “Who’s that?”
He seemed surprised for a second, then: “Lisa Simpson.”
“Oh!” She’d never have guessed she looked like that! She opened the card. The caption, written in thick block letters, was easy to read: “Brainy Girls Rule!” And surrounding it were things, in various colors of ink, that must have been the students’ signatures, but she couldn’t read them; she had almost no visual experience with cursive writing. “Which one’s yours?”
He pointed.
“Do you do that on purpose?” she said. He’d printed his name in capitals, but the two Ts touched, looking like the letter pi, which she knew because it was also the Perimeter Institute’s logo.
“Not normally,” he said. “But I thought you’d like it.” There was an awkward silence for a moment, then: “Umm, would you like to go for a walk? Timmy’s isn’t that far…”
Her parents had forbidden her going out on her own while there might still be Federal agents waiting to abduct her, and she suspected they wouldn’t think Matt was buff enough to be a bodyguard; in fact, Caitlin thought she’d have no trouble taking him herself. “I can’t,” she said.
That same look Bashira had made: crestfallen. “Oh.” He took a half step backward, as if preparing to leave.
“But you can come in for bit,” Caitlin blurted out.
He smiled that lopsided smile of his.
Screw symmetry, Caitlin thought, and she moved aside to let him enter.
They could head up to her bedroom, she supposed, but she’d never had a boy in her room in this house, and, besides, her mother was right across the hall and would hear everything they said.
Or they could stay on the ground floor, in the kitchen, or the living room, but—
No, just as with Bashira, the basement was the place to go: private, and no way her mother could hear.