Wake

Chapter 28

“Well, there’s no doubt now, is there?” said Shoshana, shifting her gaze from the painting to Dr. Marcuse and then back again. “That’s me again, all right.”

They were in the main room of the bungalow, watching the live video feed as Hobo painted away in the gazebo. Four LCD monitors were lined up on a workbench, one for each of the cameras; it reminded Shoshana of the security guard’s station in her apartment building’s lobby.

Marcuse nodded his great lump of a head. “Now, if he’d just paint something other than you.” A pause. “Note that he’s doing your same profile again: you looking off to the right. If he’d done it the other way, that might have torpedoed my thought about it reflecting brain lateralization.”

“Well,” said Shoshana, “it is my good side.”

He actually smiled, then: “Okay. Let’s put your video-editing skills to work.”

Shoshana had a not-so-secret hobby: vidding. She took clips of TV shows she’d snagged from BitTorrent sites and cut them to fit popular songs, making humorous or poignant little music videos that she shared with like-minded vidders on the Web. Her fandoms included the TV medical drama House, which had a lot of slashy subtext that was great for mixing to love songs, and the latest incarnation of Doctor Who. Marcuse had caught her working on these once or twice over lunch, using the fancy Mac the Institute had had donated to it.

“When Hobo’s done,” continued Marcuse, “take the footage from all four cameras and splice together a version that shows the whole thing as it happened. Real Hollywood-style, okay? Shot of Hobo, shot of canvas over Hobo’s shoulder, close-up on canvas, back to Hobo, like that. I’ll write up a voice-over commentary to go with it.”

“Sure,” Shoshana said, looking forward to the assignment. Timbaland has nothing on me.

“Good, good.” Marcuse rubbed his big hands together. “After this hits YouTube, the only cutting room our Hobo is going to be involved with is your edit suite.”

“What we really could use,” Kuroda said, down in the basement, “is an expert on self-organizing systems.”

“And there’s never one around when you need one!” Caitlin declared in mock seriousness. “But my dad’s a physicist. He must know something about them.” In fact, he knew something about just about everything, in her experience — at least in theoretical areas. “I’ll go get him.”

Caitlin headed upstairs. She took a detour, going all the way up to her bedroom first. It really was chilly in the basement, so she grabbed her PI sweatshirt, which her mom had thoughtfully run through the dryer after last night’s storm.

She found her dad in his den, which was a little room near the back of the house. It was easy enough tracking him down: he had a three-disc CD player in there, which seemed perpetually loaded with the same discs: Supertramp, Queen, and The Eagles. “Hotel California” was playing as she stepped through the open doorway. He was typing on his keyboard; he had an ancient, heavy IBM one that clicked loudly. She rapped her knuckles gently on the door jamb, in case he was too absorbed in his work to notice her arrival, and said, “Can you help Dr. Kuroda and me?”

She heard his chair pushing back against the carpet, which she took as a “yes.”

Once they got downstairs, Caitlin let her dad have the chair she’d been sitting in, and she leaned against the worktable; through the small window, she could hear a few of the neighborhood kids playing street hockey. A

“Even if there are lost packets persisting on the infrastructure of the Web,” her dad said, after Kuroda had briefed him, “why would Caitlin see them? Why would they be represented at all in the feed she’s getting from Jagster?”

Kuroda shifted noisily in his chair. “That’s a good question. I hadn’t—”

“It’s because of the special method Jagster uses to get its data,” A

“Sorry?” said Kuroda, and “What?” said Caitlin.

A

But that isn’t necessarily the best measure of how frequently a page is accessed. If you’re looking for info on a hot rock star, like, say, Lee Amodeo…”

“She’s awesome!” said Caitlin.

“So my granddaughter tells me,” said A

“Which it is,” Caitlin said.

“ — then that might be the most popular Lee Amodeo site even if no one links to it, and Google wouldn’t know it. And, in fact, if you upload a document to the Internet but don’t link it to any Web page, but you send a link to it to people via email, again, Google — and other search engines — won’t know it’s there, even if ten thousand people access the document through the email links.”

“Okay,” her dad said. Caitlin doubted A

A

“Isn’t that sort of like wiretapping?” Caitlin asked.

“Well, yes, exactly,” said A

Caitlin knew the NSA was the National Security Agency in the US. She nodded.

“It’s a tricky technical problem,” continued A

“And that’s where Jagster gets its data?” Caitlin asked. “From AT T?”

“No, no,” said A