WWW 2: Watch (17 page)

It was definitely a message film, Caitlin thought. Broderick and the chick—Ally-something—tracked down the original programmer of the NORAD computer, and, with his aid, they tried to teach the computer that nuclear war was as futile as tic-tac-toe. After a gorgeous series of graphic computer simulations—a light show that reminded Caitlin of her own glimpses of webspace—the computer spoke to its creator with a synthesized voice, not unlike the one JAWS produced: “Greetings, Professor Falken.”

The Ally character had observed earlier in the film that the programmer, Stephen Falken, was “amazing-looking.” She hadn’t meant that he was hot, but rather that he had a captivating face . . . and he did, Caitlin thought, at least in her limited experience. She’d often read the phrase “intelligent eyes,” but had never known what it had meant before. Falken’s gaze took in everything around him.

He typed his response to the computer, and also spoke it aloud. “Hello, Joshua.”

The computer replied: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

The text was shown on a big computer monitor in the movie, and again in the closed-captioning box:
The only winning move is not to play.

The ending music—which, surprisingly, was mostly a harmonica—played as the credits rolled, but they were in red text on black in some font that Caitlin couldn’t read at all.

“What did you think?” her dad asked.

Caitlin was surprised that her heart was pounding. She’d listened to many movies before, and read tons of books, but—my goodness!—there
was
something special about the rush of visual images.

“It was incredible,” she said. “But—but was it really like that?”

Her dad nodded. “My father had an IMSAI 8080 at his office, just like the one Matthew Broderick had in the movie, with eight-inch floppy drives. I did my first programming on it.”

“No, no,” said Caitlin. “I mean, you know, living in fear like that? Afraid that the superpowers were going to blow up the world?”

“Oh,” said her father. “Yes.” He was quiet for a time, then he said softly, “I’d thought all that was in the past.”

Caitlin, of course, had heard the news about the rising tensions between the US and China. She looked at the screen and listened to the sad harmonica play.

 

 

 

 

After watching
WarGames,
Caitlin and her father went up to her room to see how Webmind was doing; Caitlin’s mother was talking separately to Webmind across the hall.

Did you follow along with the movie?
Caitlin typed into the IM window.

She turned on JAWS so her father could listen in, and—now that Webmind was a
he
—she switched it to using a male voice. “Yes,” came the immediate reply.

What did you think?
Caitlin typed.

Webmind didn’t miss a beat. “Best movie I’ve ever seen.”

Caitlin laughed.
Has Dr. Kuroda managed to let you watch online video yet?

“Yes. Just eight minutes ago, we finally had success with the most popular format. It is astonishing.”

You’re telling me,
Caitlin replied.

She opened another chat window and used the mouse—she
was
getting used to it!—to select Dr. Kuroda.
Webmind says you’ve got it working! W00t!

Caitlin slipped on her Bluetooth headset and switched to her IM session with Webmind. “Do you hear me?”

No response.

It’s not working,
she typed to Kuroda.

It can’t do speech recognition yet,
Kuroda wrote back,
but it should be picking up the audio feed.

Are you hearing sounds from my room?
Caitlin typed to Webmind.

“Yes,” said Webmind.

OK, good,
Caitlin typed. She went back to Kuroda.
What about when I’m not in my room?

Caitlin was surprised at how viscerally she reacted to the notion of being blind for an extended period again.
I wouldn’t want to be without it.

To her astonishment, her father tapped her on the shoulder. “Tell him I can get one of the engineers at RIM to do it.” RIM was Research in Motion, makers of the BlackBerry; Mike Lazaridis, one of the founders of that company, had provided the initial $100 million funding for the physics think tank her father worked at—not to mention a fifty-million-dollar booster shot a few years later.

“That would be fabulous,” Caitlin said. She typed a message to that effect in the IM window.

“Tell him I’ll get Tawanda to do the work,” her dad said. Tawanda was a RIM engineer who had attended Dr. Kuroda’s press conference; Kuroda had spent a lot of time showing her the eyePod hardware then.

Oh,
he replied, after Caitlin had passed on her father’s message.
Well, if it’s Tawanda doing it, I suppose that would be all right. It must be almost midnight there, no? I’ll work up some notes for her, and email them to you.

ty!
Caitlin sent.
That’s awesome!

Caitlin’s mother came into the room and stood leaning against a wall, with her arms crossed in front of her chest. “I’m beat,” she said. “Who’d have thought you could work up a sweat
typing? ”

“What did you and Webmind talk about?” Caitlin asked.

“Oh, you know,” her mother said in a light tone. “Life. The universe. And everything.”

“And the answer is?”

Her mother’s voice became serious. “He doesn’t know—he was hoping
I
would know.”

“What did you tell him?”

She shrugged. “That I’d sleep on it and let him know in the morning.”

“I’m going to send an email to Tawanda,” her father said abruptly, and he headed downstairs. By the time he’d returned, Caitlin’s mom had gone off to take a shower.

“You’re still having trouble reading the Latin alphabet,” her dad said to Caitlin in his usual abrupt manner; whatever segue between topics had gone through his mind had been left unspoken.

It took her a moment to get what he was saying—the Latin alphabet was what English and many other languages used—but when she did get it, she was pissed. Her dad was not big on praise—even when Caitlin brought home a report card with all As, he simply signed it and handed it back to her. She’d learned to accept that, more or less, but any criticism by him was crushing. For Pete’s sake, she’d only just begun seeing! Why did he have to say
still
having trouble as though she were making poor progress instead of remarkable progress?

“I’m doing the best I can,” she said.

He moved toward her desk. “Caitlin, if I may . . . ?”

“If . . . ? Oh!” She got out of her chair and let him sit down in front of the keyboard. He brought up Word and navigated over the household network to a document on his own computer. He—ah, he had highlighted the whole document now—and he did something to make the type bigger. “Read that,” he said.

She loomed over his shoulder, smelling his sweat, and she adjusted the way her glasses were sitting on her nose. “Umm, A-t, f-i—‘At first I was,’ ah, i-n-c-a . . . um . . . , is that a p? ‘Incapa . . . incapable.’ ”

He nodded, as if such poor performance were only to be expected. He then hit ctrl-A to highlight the text again, and he moved the mouse, then clicked it, and the text was replaced with—well, she wasn’t quite sure with what. “Now read that,” he said.

“It’s not even
letters,”
Caitlin replied, exasperated. “It’s just a bunch of dots.”

Her father smiled. “Exactly. Look again.”

She did and—

It was strange seeing them like this instead of feeling them, but it was
Braille!

“Can you read that?” he asked.

“A-t, f-i-r-s-t, I, was, as incapable as a . . . s-w-a-t-h-e-d, swathed . . .” She paused, looked again, stared at the dots. “. . . infant, um, stepping with . . . limbs! With limbs I could not see . . .”

She had never visualized the dots before, but her mind knew the patterns. Beginners read Braille a letter at a time, using just one finger, but an experienced reader like Caitlin used both hands, recognizing whole words at once with a different letter under each fingertip.

“Keep trying,” her father said. “I’ll be back.”

He left the room, and she did keep trying.

And trying.

And trying.

And at last the penny dropped, and she ceased to see the individual dots and saw instead the letters they represented, and—and—and—yes, yes, yes, more than that, she saw the
words
they spelled, taking in whole words at a glance. Good-bye, C-a-i-t-l-i-n; hello, Caitlin!

When her father returned, she proudly read aloud, “ ‘At first I was as incapable as a swathed infant—stepping with limbs I could not see.’ ” She was reading as rapidly as JAWS did when she had it set to double speed. “ ‘I was weak and very hungry. I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing save where an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist.’ ”

Her father nodded, apparently satisfied.

“What is it?” Caitlin asked, gesturing at the screen.

“The Invisible Man,”
her father said.

Right. Caitlin had read a lot of H.G. Wells—it was easy to feed Project Gutenberg texts into her refreshable Braille display—but she’d never made it past the first chapter of
The Invisible Man;
the notion of invisibility had been too abstract for her when she’d been blind.

She realized that she shouldn’t be surprised that her computer could display Braille on its screen; the system had Braille fonts installed for use by her embossing printer; the Texas School for the Blind gave away the TrueType fonts.

“You’ll still have to learn to read Latin characters,” her father said. “But you might as well leverage the skill you’ve already got.” He did some more things on the computer. “Okay, I’ve set Internet Explorer to use Braille as its default for displaying Web pages, and left Firefox using normal fonts.”

“Thanks, Dad—but, um . . .”

“But you can read Braille just fine with your fingers, right?”

She nodded. “I mean, it is cool to do it with my eyes, but I’m not sure it’s
better.”

“Wait and see,” her father said. He fished something out of his pocket, and—ah! The distinctive tah-
dum!
sound of a USB peripheral being recognized: it was a memory key. “Let me copy the Braille fonts,” he said. “We’ll need them tomorrow.” And when he was done he headed out the door—with Caitlin wondering, as she often did, just what was going through his mind.

 

 

 

 

LiveJournal:
The Calculass Zone

Title:
Zzzzzz . . .

Date:
Saturday 6 October, 11:41 EST

Mood:
Exanimate

Location:
Lady C’s Bedchamber

Music:
Blind Guardian, “Mr. Sandman”

 

 

I wonder if Canadians call them “zees” when referring to sleep? “Gotta catch me some zees,” we say down South, and “zees” sounds like soft snoring, so it makes sense. But “need me some zeds” is just crazy. No wonder they lost the War of 1812 (you would
not
believe what they teach in history class about that war up here, my American friends!).

Anyway, whether they’re zees or zeds, I need a metric ton of them! Just gonna get my poop in a group for tomorrow, then hit the hay, eh?

I had indeed enjoyed watching
WarGames
through Caitlin’s eye. The part of the film that interested me the most was the young hacker’s attempts to compromise password-protected systems. Early in the film he got into his school’s computer, in order to change his grades, by consulting a list of passwords kept hidden on a sheet of paper taped to a desk’s slide-out shelf. Later, when he was trying to compromise NORAD’s WOPR computer, he set out to learn all he could about its programmer, Stephen Falken, in hopes of figuring out what password Falken might have used; the correct term, it turned out, was the name of his deceased son, Joshua.