Caitlin was concentrating so hard on following the links she wasn’t actually sure if her head moved when she tried to nod.
Another orange link line; she followed it as quickly as she could.
And another.
And one more.
And—
“The switching station,” said the mechanical voice.
Caitlin’s jaw dropped. She knew that what she was seeing was only a representation, only her mind’s way of interpreting the data it was receiving, and that the symbolism was imposed upon the images as much by her imagination as by anything else.
And her visual centers had been rewiring themselves like crazy these last several days as she learned to see the real world. There was still so much she hadn’t yet seen, and every day had shown her a thousand new things. But this was the first new thing she’d seen with websight since gaining worldview—the first new cyberspace experience she’d had since seeing reality—and she was doubtless interpreting it in ways she never could have before.
What she was seeing was frightening. The background of the Web had always seemed far, far away. Although she knew intellectually that the ghost packets that made up Webmind were no more remote than any others, she’d visualized them as being removed from the ones that were in active use by the Internet. But now that distant curtain was distorted here, puckering toward her, and—
No, no: not toward her. Toward that large node in the center of her vision, a circle that was a deep, deep red, like the color she now knew blood to be. Streamers from the background—intertwined, twisted filaments of shimmering pale blue and deep green—were being sucked into the dark red circle.
“Shit,” Caitlin said.
“What do you see?” Matt asked, his tone astonished.
“They’re pulling in the lost packets.”
“And,” said Webmind, “checking each one for the mutation that keeps them from expiring, and deleting those packets that have the mutation.”
Soft footfalls, and then her mother’s voice. “Your father is on his way.”
“This is clearly only a test run to see if their technique works,” Webmind said. “It’s employing only one facility, albeit a major one, and so it can only scrub those packets that happen to pass through that facility. But if the same technology were deployed at sufficient major routing hubs worldwide, I would be severely damaged.”
“No,” said Caitlin.
“What?” said her mother and Matt and Webmind simultaneously.
“No, I won’t let that happen. Not on my watch.”
“How will you stop it?” asked Matt.
“What was that quote, Mom—the one about the other cheek?”
Her mother’s voice: “ ‘Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ ”
“Hmm. No, not that part. What comes after that?”
“ ‘And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.’ ”
“Right! It’s not about just giving them what they ask for, or even more of the same thing they’re asking for—it’s about giving them other stuff, too.”
“Yes?” said her mother. “So?”
“Okay, Webmind,” Caitlin said. “Where did you put it?”
“Put what?” asked Matt.
“Follow me,” said Webmind.
And another orange link line leapt into Caitlin’s field of view. She cast her attention along its length. It seemed longer than any such line she’d ever followed before, an infinity of geometrically straight perfection, and—
No, no—not perfect. It was—yes!—almost imperceptibly at first, but then, after a moment, without any doubt: it was curving, bending down, the way links from Webmind did when she tried to follow them back to their origin, her brain’s way of acknowledging that the source was outside her ability to perceive.
“I’m losing you,” Caitlin said.
And suddenly the link rippled and waved, as if by an effort of will—hers, or Webmind’s, she couldn’t say which—it was being pulled taut. She continued to slide her attention—slide her mind—along its length.
It was unlike any perception she’d had yet in the real world. As she zoomed toward the shimmering background, the individual pixels—the individual cells—did not grow larger. Rather, they remained almost invisible, just at the limit of her ability to perceive. She imagined if she ever did get to take her trip into space, hurtling up into the night sky would have the same sort of feeling: the stars might be getting closer, but they wouldn’t ever appear as anything more than tiny pinpoints.
“God, it’s hard,” she said. And it was: her breathing had accelerated, and she felt herself sweating. Staying focused on that one orange line took prodigious concentration; she was sure if she relaxed her attention for even a moment, instead of continuing to move along its length, she’d snap back to where she’d begun. But attention wanted to wander; vision—even internalized mental vision—wanted to flick now here and now there in an endless series of saccades. She concentrated totally, concentrated the way she did when tackling a really tough math problem, concentrated for all she was worth, and—
There.
“Oh, my God,” Caitlin said, softly.
Spread out before her, filling her perception, spilling over in all directions into her mental peripheral vision, was a vast sea of points, each again resolvable only at the very limit of her perception. Not thousands, not millions, not billions, but trillions upon trillions of them. In aggregate, it appeared as a pulsing mass of grayness, but, as she strained to discern, she realized that the ever-so-tiny pixels came in different colors.
And she counted the colors: there was black, and yellow, and—that was green, wasn’t it? Yes, and blue, and red, and—
Ah! The colors Newton had named, her brain drawing on what she had read about optics: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, the seven hues of the rainbow, plus black, which was no color at all, a nothingness, a—
Yes, a zero!
And the colors came in two intensities: dull red and bright; pale orange and a flaming shade; a yellow so muted it was almost brown and another yellow that flared like the noonday sun. And that shade of gray, she’d seen it before, too: it was black but with the brightness turned up. There weren’t eight shades here, but sixteen! She was seeing not binary, as she had before, but the base-16 counting system of most computers, the colors no doubt corresponding to the hexadecimal digits that would be written as 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, and F. Pushing to concentrate at a higher level had driven her perception to a new level, too. Spread out before her was a vast ocean of data, of information.
“There’s so much,” she said.
“Indeed,” said Webmind.
“Okay,” she said, and she took a deep breath. “Here’s what we’ll do…”
“Well?” snapped Tony in the WATCH control room.
“It’s working,” said Colonel Hume, looking at the central monitor. “Our initial attempt was only getting about thirty percent of the aberrant packets, but we’ve adjusted the algorithm. Some are still resistant—I’m not sure why—but we’re now deleting sixty-two percent of those that pass through the switching station.”
“Ah…” said Tony. “Good.”
“Damn right it’s good!” said Hume, shaking a freckled fist at the screen. “Time for that son of a bitch to sing ‘Daisy’…”
The vast shimmering mass made up of all the colors of the rainbow heaved and throbbed, almost as though it were a living thing. Caitlin held her breath as she backtracked now along the orange link line, her attention to the rear, watching as the mass—yes, yes, as it started to move toward her. She felt a bit like the pied piper—although, in her case she supposed it was the πed piper!—enticing all the rats to follow.