She went to the help function and searched for “cache.” Nothing. She tried “buffer” and “memory,” and a bunch of other things … but none of the answers given seemed appropriate. No, unless she had specifically merged in previous data sets, they simply shouldn’t be included in the calculations she was doing now.

Which meant…

No, Caitlin thought. That’s ridiculous.

But—

But.

Oh, come on! she thought. She knew better than to try to extrapolate a trend from only three data points.

But…

But it was as though there was something emerging on the Web, and it was growing smarter hour by hour.

No.

No, it was crazy. She was tired; that’s all. Tired, and making mistakes.

She needed to clear her head, and so she went downstairs to get something to drink. She had to pass through the living room and the dining room to get to the kitchen. Her father was in the living room, sitting in his favorite chair, reading a magazine. After Caitlin got some water from the dispenser on the front of the fridge, she sat in the dining room — not in her usual seat, but the one opposite, so that she could look out at her father, hopefully without him being aware of it.

He was a good man, she knew that. He worked hard, and he was brilliant. And although she’d thanked her mother for all the sacrifices she’d made for her, Caitlin had never thanked him. She sat, thinking for a time, trying to decide what to say, and, at last, she got to her feet and crossed through the opening that separated the two rooms.

“Dad?”

He shifted his gaze — not to look at her, but at least he was no longer looking at the magazine. “Yes?”

He said it mechanically, coldly — as he said everything. Why couldn’t he be warmer? Why did he have to be so flat?

It just popped out, unbidden, and she regretted it as soon as she said it:

“You never say you love me.”

“Yes I do,” he said, again without looking at her. “I said it after you appeared in your school play as a koala bear.”

That had been when she was seven. And, she guessed, since he’d made the point then, and nothing had changed since, there was no need to belabor the issue.

“Dad…” she said again, softly, plaintively.

And he tried … he really tried. He shifted his gaze from the empty space he’d been looking at and, for just a moment, he looked at her. But then his eyes snapped away. Caitlin wanted to reach out to him, to touch his arm, to connect with him. But that would just make things worse, she knew. She looked at him a moment longer, then withdrew, heading up to her room while he returned to his magazine.

Once upstairs, she lay back on her bed, and, with an effort of will, she managed to stop thinking about her father, and instead focused on the anomalous Shannon-entropy results. She could hear her mother puttering around in the master bedroom, but she shut that out — she shut everything out — and tried to think rationally.

Something out there, something in webspace, had reflected her own face back at her. And that something had now also reflected back text strings at her. And, damn it all, she was a fine mathematician. She did not make mistakes, and it probably wasn’t a sampling error. No, there really was something out there, in the background of the Web, and it was getting smarter; the Shannon-entropy scores showed that.

She closed her eyes, but she could still see a pinkish haze: the overhead lights coming through her eyelids. She had an urge, all of a sudden, to … go home, to go back to where she’d come from, to experience blindness once more, just for a moment; after all, if you couldn’t see, it didn’t matter that other people couldn’t look at you.

She reached into her pocket, found the switch on the eyePod, and held it down until the unit shut off altogether. The vague notion of sight she had when her eyes were closed ceased. Yes, her mind was supplying the same gray haze as before, but that just made the experience of blindness she was having more like Helen Keller’s, and—

And it hit her then. It hit her like—

Not like a lightbulb going on; she knew that was the common metaphor, and now had even seen it happen.

And not like a lightning bolt — another metaphor she knew that applied to being struck by something unexpected.

No, it hit her like … like—

Like water! Like cold, clean water running out of a pump onto her hand…

She knew what she had to do. She knew why she’d been given this strange, strange gift of websight.

Poor Helen had been blind and deaf from the age of nineteen months. When she’d lost her vision and hearing, she had descended into animal-like behavior, undisciplined and unthinking; there was no external reason to believe that any rational being was left inside her. But when Annie Sullivan was hired to be Helen’s teacher and governess, she took it as an article of faith that somewhere, down deep in the silence and darkness, adrift in a void, was a mind. And she committed herself to reaching down to it, whatever it took, and pulling that mind up, literally and figuratively bringing it into the light of day.

Helen’s parents thought Annie was deluded — and, as they were quick to point out, they knew their wild child better than Annie did. But Miss Sullivan didn’t waver. She knew she was right and they were wrong, in part because of her personal experience of having been nearly blind in her own youth. Even cut off from much of the outside world, even isolated and alone, she knew a mind could exist, could grow.

And so Annie persevered — against ridicule, against opposition, weathering failure after failure, until she broke through to Helen.

And now, here, today, a century and a quarter later, Caitlin had what Miss Sullivan had lacked. Annie had only faith that Helen was down there. But Caitlin had evidence, in the Zipf plots, in the Shannon-entropy scores, that the background of the Web was more than just noise.

Helen Keller had been uplifted by Annie Sullivan. And the … the whatever it was … surely could also be brought forth.

Caitlin thought again about her father, so inaccessible, so cold, so trapped in his own realm. She now had her wondrous eyePod that let her overcome her inborn limitations — but there was no comparable device for autism; he was still stuck in his own kind of dark. She didn’t know how to reach out to him, and she had even less of an idea how to reach out to this strange lurking other.

Still, she did know one thing: if she tried and failed with the other, it couldn’t possibly hurt as much.

Caitlin stayed home on Thursday, October 4, as well. Her mother capitulated to the argument that Caitlin could do much better at school in the long run if she first spent a little more time right now mastering the art of reading printed text. Caitlin had dutifully started the morning by spending a few more hours with the literacy site, but then she headed down to the basement again.

Kuroda was delighted to see her. “Hello, Miss Caitlin,” he said warmly, swiveling his red chair to face her. “How are you feeling?”

She knew it was just a pleasantry, but she decided to answer anyway.

“Honestly?” she said. “I’m overwhelmed.” She moved closer to the worktable but did not sit down. “There was a … simplicity, I guess, in being blind. I mean, vision is full of things that you don’t need to know about right now, like…” She looked around the basement. “Well, like, over there: there’s a TV, right? It’s not even on, but I have to see it. And that bookshelf: I don’t need to know right now that it’s there, or that it’s got — say, how come all the spines are the same?”

Kuroda glanced at them. “They’re journals — your dad’s collection. That’s Physical Review D on the top shelf, for instance.”

“Well, right, exactly. I don’t need to know that they’re there right now, but every time I look in that direction, I see them; I can’t help seeing them.”