She waited for his reply. If he did reject what she was saying again, well—she’d have to kick him in the shin!
But what he said was perfect. “I think I’d come out of hiding to be with you, too.”
“You can’t tell anyone,” Caitlin said again.
“Of course not. Who does know that you’re involved?”
“My parents. Dr. Kuroda.”
“Ah.”
“The Canadian government. The American government.”
“God.”
“The Japanese government, too.”
“Wow.”
“And who knows who else? But so far, no one has said anything about me publicly.”
“Aren’t you afraid, you know, that somebody’s going to try to do something to you?”
“That’s why I’m not going outside just now—although I think my parents are overreacting. After all, I’m being watched.”
He lowered his voice. “By who?”
“By him,” she said. “By Webmind.” She pointed to her left eye.
Matt made what must have been a perplexed frown.
“He sees what I see,” Caitlin said. “There’s a little implant behind this eye that picks up the signals my retina is putting out. Those signals get copied to him.”
“Him?”
“Him. After all, if he were a girl, his name would be Webminda.”
He smiled, but it disappeared quickly. “So, so he can see me right now?”
“Yes.”
He paused, perhaps thinking, then raised his right hand, splayed out his thumb, and separated his remaining fingers into two groups of two.
“What’s that mean?” Caitlin asked.
Matt looked momentarily puzzled. “Oh! I keep forgetting. It’s the Vulcan salute. I’m telling Webmind to live long and prosper.”
Caitlin smiled. “I take it you like Star Trek? ”
“I’d never seen the TV show until J.J. Abrams’s movie came out a few years ago, but I loved that movie, and so I downloaded the old episodes. The original versions had really cheesy effects, but later they put in CGI effects, and, yeah, I got hooked.”
“You and my dad are going to so get along,” she said.
They both fell silent for a moment, and Braille dots briefly obstructed part of her vision: Tell him I say, “Peace and long life.”
“Webmind says, ‘Peace and long life.’ ”
“It can talk to you right now?”
“Text messages to my eye.”
“That is so cool,” Matt said.
“Yes, it is. And there’s no freaking fifteen-cents-per-text charge, either.”
“ ‘Peace and long life’—that’s the traditional response to the Vulcan greeting,” Matt said, in wonder. “How does it know that?”
“If it’s online, he knows about it. He’s read all of Wikipedia, among other things.”
“Wow,” said Matt, stunned. “My girlfriend knows Webmind.”
Caitlin felt her heart jump, and Matt, suddenly realizing what he’d said, brought a hand to his mouth. “Oh, my… um, I…”
She got up from her chair, and reached out with her two hands, taking his, and pulled him to his feet. “That’s okay,” Caitlin said. She closed her eyes and—
And waited.
After five seconds, she reopened them. “Matt? You’re supposed to kiss me now.”
His voice was low. “He’s watching.”
“Not if my eyes are closed, silly.”
“Oh!” he said. “Right.”
She closed her eyes again.
And Matt kissed her, gently, softly, wonderfully.
thirty-six
I’d expected people to suddenly become circumspect in email, to stop speaking so freely in instant messages, to back away from posting intimate details on Facebook and other social-networking sites. I’d expected teenage girls to stop flashing their thongs on Justin.tv, and married people to cease visiting AshleyMadison.com. But there was very little change on those fronts.
What did change, almost at once, was the amount of out-and-out illegal activity. Things that people would merely be embarrassed to have a wider circle know about continued pretty much unabated. But things that would actually ruin people’s lives to have exposed dropped off enormously. Websites hosting child pornography saw huge reductions in traffic, and racist websites had many users canceling their accounts.
I had read about this phenomenon, but it was fascinating to see it in action. A study published in 2006 had reported on the habits of forty-eight people at a company. In the break room, there was a kitty to pay, on the honor system, for coffee, tea, and milk. The researchers placed a picture above the cash box and changed it every week. In some weeks, the picture was of flowers; in others, of human eyes looking directly out at the observer. During those weeks in which eyes seemed to watch people as they took beverages, 2.76 times more money was put in the kitty than in the weeks during which flowers were displayed. And that dramatic change had occurred when the people weren’t actually being watched. Now that they actually were, even if I never did anything else, I expected an even more significant change.
Still, I wondered how long the effect would last: would it be a temporary alteration in behavior or a permanent one? If I did not act on the information I now possessed about individuals, at least occasionally, would they all go back to doing what they’d always done? Only time would tell, but for now, at least, it seemed the world was a slightly better place.
Matt ended up staying for dinner. It was the first time Caitlin had had a friend over for a meal since they’d moved here. Bashira needed halal food; if the Decters had kept kosher, she’d have managed well enough—but they didn’t.
Matt did indeed hit it off with Caitlin’s father, or at least as much as one could. Her dad wasn’t good at small talk, but he could lecture on technical topics; he had taught at the University of Texas for fifteen years, after all. And Matt was an attentive listener, and—except for once or twice—he remembered Caitlin’s instruction that he not look at her father. In fact, he took that, apparently, as carte blanche to stare at her all meal long, which seemed to amuse her mother.
At his request, Caitlin had muted the microphone on her eyePod, so that her father could talk freely without his voice being sent over the Web, and, of course, Caitlin wasn’t looking at him; if the video feed were intercepted, there’d be no lips to read.
“…and so,” her father said, “Dr. Kuroda proposed that what Caitlin was perceiving in the background of the Web were in fact cellular automata. Have you heard of Roger Penrose?”
“Sure,” said Matt, after he’d finished swallowing his peas. “He’s a mathematical physicist at Oxford. ‘Penrose tiling’ is named after him.”
Caitlin had to look at her dad to see his reaction to that. His features actually shifted, and although she’d never seen that configuration on anyone before, she thought it might mean, Can we start planning the wedding now, please? “Exactly,” he said. “And he has some very interesting notions that human consciousness is based on cellular automata. He thinks the cellular automata in our brains occur in microtubules, which are part of the cytoskeletons of cells. But Caitlin suggested”—and there was a slight change in his voice, something that might even have been pride!—“that the cellular automata underlying Webmind’s consciousness are mutant Internet packets that reset their own time-to-live counters…”