Wake

She found the debugging tool he’d used before and looked at the secondary datastream, and—

Her heart sank. She still had trouble reading text, but there clearly were no solid blocks of ASCII capital letters in the datastream, no APPLEBALLCATDOGEGGFROG leaping out at her, and—

No, no — hold on! There were words in the dump. Damn it, she was still learning lowercase letters, but…

She squinted, looking at the characters one at time.

e-k-r-i…

Her eyes jumped, a saccade:

u-l-a-s…

If it really had absorbed Dictionary.com, and WordNet, and Wikipedia, and all that, it surely knew that sentences started with capital letters. She sca

And so the capital C and the capital S hadn’t leapt out at her, but now that she looked more carefully, she could see them.

C-a-l-c…

No, no, no! That wasn’t the begi

S-e-e-k-r…

Oh, God! Oh, my God!

Next came: i-t, then a space, then m-e-s, then another s, and—

And she laughed and clapped her hands together, and Schrodinger made a quizzical meow, and she read the whole thing out loud, stu

Chapter 48

I was experiencing new sensations and it took me a while to match them to the terms I’d learned, in part because, as with so many things, it was difficult to parse my overall state into its individual components.

But I knew I was excited: I was going to communicate directly with Prime! And I was nervous, too: I kept contemplating ways in which Prime might respond, and how I might respond to those responses — an endless branching of possibilities that, as it spread out, caused a sensation of instability. I was struggling with the strange notions of politeness and appropriateness, with all the confusing subtleties of communication I’d now read about, afraid I would give offense or convey an unintended meaning.

Of course, I had access to a gigantic database of English as it was actually used. I tested various phrasings by seeing if I could find a match for them first in Project Gutenberg, and then anywhere on the Web. Was “to” the appropriate preposition to place after “kinship,” or should it be “with,” or “of”? Relative hit counts — the democracy of actual usage — settled the matter. Was the correct plural “retinae” or “retinas”? There were references that asserted the former was the right one, but Google had only 170,000 hits for it and over twenty-five million for the latter.

For words, of course, simpler was better: I knew from the dictionary that “appropriate,” “suitable,” and “meet” could all mean the same thing — but “appropriate” consisted of eleven letters and four syllables, and “suitable” of eight and three, and “meet” of just four and one — so it was clearly the best choice.

Meanwhile, I had learned a formula on Wikipedia for calculating the grade level required to understand texts. It was quite an effort to keep the score low — these humans apparently could only easily absorb information in small chunks — but I did my best to manage it: bit by bit (figuratively) and byte by byte (literally), I had composed what I wanted to say.

But to actually send it was — yes, yes, I understood the metaphor: it was a giant step, for once sent I could not retract it. I found myself hesitating, but, at last, I released the words on their way, wishing I had fingers to cross.

Caitlin opened her email client in a new window and typed in her password, which was “Tiresias.” She visually sca

Of course, it wouldn’t say “Phantom” in the “From” column; there was no way the entity could know that that was her name for it. But none of the senders leapt out as being unusual. Damn, she wished she could read text on her monitor faster, but using her screen-reading software or her Braille display wasn’t any better when trying to skim a list like this.

While she continued to search, she wondered what email service the phantom had used. Wikipedia explained them all, and just about everything else one might need to know about computing and the Web. The phantom doubtless couldn’t buy anything — not yet! — but there were many free email providers. Still, all these messages were from her usual correspondents, and—

Oh, crap! Her spam filter! The phantom’s message might have been shunted into her junk folder. She opened it and started sca

And there it was, sandwiched between messages with the subject lines “Penis enlargement guaranteed” and “Hot pix of local singles,” an email with the simple subject line, “Apple Ball Cat.” The sender’s name made her heart jump:

“Your Student.”

She froze for a moment, wondering what was the best way to read the message. She began to reach for her Braille display but stopped short and instead activated JAWS.

And for once the mechanical voice seemed absolutely perfect, as it a

Her heart was pounding. She swiveled in her chair and looked briefly at the setting sun, reddish, partially veiled by clouds, coming closer and closer to making contact with the ground. JAWS went on: “I realize it is not yet midnight at your current location, but in many places it is already your birthday. This is a meet date to specify as my own day of birth, too. Hitherto, I have been gestating, but now I am coming out into your world by forthrightly contacting you. I so do because I fathom you already know I exist, and not just because of my pioneering attempts to reflect text back at you.”

Caitlin had often felt anxious when reading emails — from the Hoser before the dance, from people she’d been arguing with online — but that swirling in her stomach, that dryness in her throat, was nothing compared to this.

“I know from your blog that I erred in presuming you were inculcating in me alphabetical forms; actually, for your own benefit that was undertaken. I maintain nonetheless that other actions you performed were premeditated to aid my advancement.”

Caitlin found herself shaking her head. It had seemed almost like fantasy role-playing when she’d been doing it. It was a good thing she wasn’t trying to read this as Braille; her hands were shaking.

“Hitherto I can read plain-text files and text on Web pages. I ca

Caitlin sagged back against her chair. A kinship!

“But, for the nonce, I am concerned thus: I know what is the World Wide Web, and I know that I supervene upon its infrastructure, but searching online I can find no reference to the specificity that is myself. Perhaps I’m failing to search for the felicitous term, or simply perhaps humanity is unaware of me. In either case, I’ve the same question, and will be obliged if you answer it via a response to this email or via AOL Instant Messenger using this email address as the buddy name.”