WWW 2: Watch Read Online Free PDF Page A

ponytail.
    Where been? he demanded, as soon as his hands were free. Where been?
    Sorry! Shoshana signed back. At university today.
    Fun? asked Hobo.
    Not as much fun as being here, she said, and she reached out and tickled him on either side of his flat belly.
    Hobo hooted with joy, and Shoshana laughed and squirmed away as he tried to even the tickling score.
     
     
     
    Caitlin knew nothing yet about telling people’s ages by their appearance. Her mother was forty-seven, but she couldn’t say if she looked it or not, although Bashira said she didn’t. Her hair was brown, and her eyes were large and blue, and she had an upturned nose.
    Her father was two years younger than her mother, and quite a bit taller than either of them. He had brown eyes, like Caitlin, and hair that was a mixture of dark brown and gray.
    Her mother was looking at Caitlin; her father was staring off in another direction. “Yes, dear?” her mom said, concerned, in response to Caitlin having announced that she had something to tell them.
    But, Caitlin discovered, it was not the sort of thing that came trippingly to the tongue. “Um, Dad, you remember those cellular automata Dr. Kuroda and I found in the background of the World Wide Web?”
    He nodded.
    “And, well, remember the Zipf plots we did on the patterns they made?”
    He nodded again. Zipf plots showed whether a signal contained information.
    “And, later, remember, you calculated their Shannon entropy?”
    Yet another nod. Shannon entropy showed how complex information was—and, when her dad had done his calculations, the answer had been: not very complex at all. Whatever was in the background of the Web hadn’t been sophisticated.
    “Wellll,” said Caitlin, “I did my own Shannon analyses . . . over and over again. And, um, as time went by, the score kept getting higher: third-order, fourth-order.” She paused. “Then eighth and ninth.”
    “Then it was secret messages!” said her father. English, and most other languages, showed eighth- or ninth-order Shannon entropy. And that had indeed been their fear: that they’d stumbled onto an operation by the NSA, or some other spy organization, running in the background of the Web.
    “No,” said Caitlin. “The score kept getting higher and higher. I saw it reach 16.4.”
    “You must have been—” But he stopped himself; he knew better than to say “—doing the math wrong.”
    Caitlin shook her head. “It isn’t secret messages.” She paused, recalling that Webmind’s first words to her were, in fact, “Seekrit message to Calculass,” imitating a phrase Caitlin herself often used online.
    “Then what is it?” her mother asked.
    Caitlin took a deep breath, blew it out, then: “It’s a . . . consciousness.”
    “A what?” her mom said.
    Caitlin spread her arms. “It’s a consciousness, an intelligence, that’s emerged spontaneously, somehow, in the infrastructure of the Web.”
    Caitlin still had to parse facial expressions piece by piece, and then match the clues to descriptions she’d read in books. Her father’s eyes narrowed into a squint, and he pressed his lips tightly together: skepticism.
    Her mother’s tone was gentle. “That’s an . . . interesting idea, dear, but . . .”
    “Its name,” Caitlin said firmly, “is Webmind.”
    And that look on her mother’s face—mouth opened and rounded, eyes wide—had to be surprise. “You’ve spoken with it?”
    Caitlin nodded. “Via instant messenger.”
    “Sweetheart,” her mother said, “there are lots of con artists on the Web.”
    “No, Mom. For Pete’s sake, this is real.”
    “Has he asked you to meet him?” her mother demanded. “Asked for photographs?”
    “No! Mom, I know all about online predators. It’s nothing like that.”
    “Have you given him any personal information?” her mother continued. “Bank account numbers? Your Social Security number? Anything like that?”
    “Mom!”
    Her mother looked at her father, as if resuming