Saturday morning always meant pancakes and sausages in the Decter household. Now that they were living in Waterloo, the sausages were, of course, Schneider’s brand, and the syrup was real maple syrup Caitlin’s mom had bought from Mennonites in the nearby town of St. Jacob’s.

“I was up at 5:00 A.M.,” Caitlin’s dad said, as soon as they’d started eating.

“There’s a 5:00 a.m.?” Caitlin joked.

“I set up a workspace for you and Professor Kuroda in the basement,” he continued.

“Thank you, Dr. Decter,” Kuroda said, sounding relieved — apparently everybody but the Hoser was worried about her virtue! But she guessed it probably would be more comfortable downstairs than in her bedroom.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” her mom said. “You’re staying in our house; you can call him Malcolm.”

Her father neither confirmed nor denied this assertion, Caitlin noted. Instead, he said, “I bought a new computer at Future Shop yesterday. It’s set up downstairs for the two of you; I put it on the household network.”

“Thank you,” she said. “And I have some news of my own — I saw the lightning last night.”

The words were simultaneous, overlapping. Her dad, matter-of-fact: “Your mother told me.” And Kuroda, amazed: “You saw lightning?”

“That’s right,” Caitlin said.

“What — what did it look like to you?” Kuroda said.

“Jagged lines against darkness. Bright lines — white, right? Stark against a pure black background.”

Kuroda was clearly eager to look at the data from the eyePod: he had only one extra helping of pancakes.

Caitlin had been in the basement just a few times in the three months they’d lived in this house, mostly back in August, when it had been surprisingly hot and muggy outside — almost like Texas. The basement had been cool then (and still was), and although her mother had complained about how little light there was down there — apparently, just a single bulb in the middle of the room — it hadn’t bothered Caitlin.

“What’s the 4-1-1?” she asked, hands on hips.

Kuroda’s English was excellent, but the information number must be different in Japan. “Sorry?”

“What’s the setup? Tell me about the room.”

“Ah. Well, it’s an unfinished basement — I suppose you know that. Bare insulation between the slats; cement floor. There’s an old TV — the kind with a picture tube — and some bookcases. And your dad has set up the new computer on one of those worktables with metal folding legs; it’s pushed up against the far wall, the one opposite the staircase. The computer is a mini-tower, and he’s got an LCD screen attached to it. There’s a little window above the table and a couple of comfortable-looking swivel chairs in front of it.”

“Sweet! I wonder where he got the chairs.”

“They have a logo on them — kind of like the Greek letter pi.”

“Oh, he borrowed them from work. Speaking of which, let’s get to it.”

Kuroda helped guide her to one of the chairs, and he settled into the other; she could hear it squeaking a bit. “Let me log onto my servers in Tokyo,” he said. “I want to examine the datastream you sent them during the lightning storm — see if we can isolate what it was that caused your primary visual cortex to respond.”

She could hear him typing away and, as he did, she realized she’d forgotten to mention something over breakfast. “After the lightning flashes,” she said, “webspace looked different.”

“Different how?”

“Well, I could still see the structure of the Web clearly, like before, but the … the background, I guess, was different.”

He stopped typing. “What do you mean?”

“It used to be dark. Black, I guess.”

“And now?”

“Now it’s, um, lighter? I could see details in it.”

“Details?”

“Yeah. Like — like…” She struggled to make the connection; the pattern did remind her of something she was familiar with, but — got it! “Like a chessboard.” She had a blind person’s chessboard, with squares that were alternately raised and lowered, and Braille initials on the top of each piece; she sometimes played her dad. “But, um, not quite. I mean, it was made of lighter and darker squares, but they’re not in the same pattern as a chessboard, and they go on, like, forever.”

“How big are they?”

“Tiny. If they were any tinier, I don’t think I could see them. In fact, I can’t swear that they were squares, but they were packed tightly together and made rows and columns.”

“And there were thousands of them?”

“Millions. Maybe billions. They’re everywhere.”

Kuroda sat as quietly as was possible for him, then: “You know, human vision is made of pixels, just like a computerized image. Each axon in the optic nerve provides one picture element. Now, most people aren’t conscious of them, but if you have decent focus, and you look at a blank wall, some people can see them. Your brain is processing Web information as if it were coming from your eye; it may be hardwired to see it all as a mesh of pixels at the limits of resolution, but…”

He trailed off. After ten seconds she prodded him.

“But?”

“Well, I’m just thinking. You’ve described seeing circles, which we’ve taken to be websites, and lines connecting them, which we’ve assumed represent hyperlinks. And that’s it — that’s the World Wide Web, right? That’s all of it. So, what could make up the background to the Web? I mean, in human vision, the—”

“Don’t say that.”

“Pardon?”

“‘Human vision.’ Don’t say that. I’m human.”

A sharp intake of breath. “I’m so sorry, Miss Caitlin. May I say ‘normal’ vision?”

“Yes.”

“All right. In normal vision, the background is — well, it’s the distant reaches of the universe if you’re looking up at the night sky. But what would be the background for the Web?”

“Background radiation?” she suggested. “Like the cosmic microwave background?”

Kuroda was quiet for a moment. “How old are you again?”

“Hey,” she said, “my father is a physicist, you know.”

“Well, the cosmic microwave background is uniform to a fraction of a degree in all directions. But what you’re seeing is mottled in black and white, you say?”

“Yeah. And it keeps shifting.”

“Pardon?”

“Shifting. Changing. Didn’t I mention that?”

“No. What do you mean precisely?”

Something brushed against her legs — ah, Schrodinger! Caitlin scooped him up into her lap. “The dark squares switch to light, and the light ones to dark,” she said.

“How rapidly?”

“Oh, really fast. Makes the whole thing shimmer.”

The springs on Kuroda’s chair squeaked as he stood up. She heard him walking across the room and then walking back toward her, then repeating the process: pacing. “It can’t be…” he said at last.

“What?”

He ignored her question. “How clearly could you see the individual cells?”

She scratched Schrodinger behind the ears. “Cells?”

“Pixels. I mean pixels. How clearly could you see them?”

“It was really hard.”

“Can you try again? Can you put the eyePod in duplex mode now?”

She fumbled to get the device out of her pocket without sending Schrodinger to the floor. Once it was free, she pressed the switch; the eyePod made its usual high-pitched beep, which Schrodinger answered with a surprised meow, and—

And there it was, spreading out before her: the World Wide Web.

“Can you see the background now?” Kuroda asked.

“Yes, if I concentrate…”

He sounded surprised. “You’re squinting.”

She shrugged. “It helps. But, yeah, if I really try, I can focus on a small group — a few hundred squares on a side.”

“Okay. Do you have a Go board?”

“What?”

“Um, okay — do you have any money?”

She narrowed her eyes again, but this time in suspicion. “Fifty bucks, maybe, but…”