Read WWW 2: Watch for Free Online Page B

girls who were destined for secretarial jobs, and the young, feisty, brilliant Barbara Geiger had had much higher ambitions. She would have gone out of her way not to cultivate what were, back then, traditionally female skills.
    Caitlin’s mother had a Ph.D. in economics; her specialty was game theory. She had been an associate professor at the University of Houston until Caitlin was born. She’d spent the next six years looking after her daughter at home, and then nine more volunteering at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, where Caitlin had been enrolled until this past June.
    Her mother knew a lot about math and computers. In fact, Caitlin had once heard her quip that the difference between her and her husband was that while the math he did as a theoretical physicist described things that might not even exist, the math economists did described things that people wished didn’t exist: inflation, deficits, taxes, and so on.
    Now that Caitlin was in a regular school, she knew her mother hoped to get a job at one of Waterloo’s universities. But her Canadian work permit hadn’t come through yet, and so—
    And so she was cooking, and cleaning, and doing all the other crap she’d never in her life wanted to do. Caitlin’s heart went out to her.
    She looked at her father, hoping he would say something— anything —while they waited for her mom to return. But he was his usual silent self.
    Her mother came back less than a minute later. “I think the lasagna can wait,” she said. “Now, where were we?”
    “It wants to know you better,” Caitlin’s dad said.
    She made no move, Caitlin noted, to return to the swivel chair in front of the computer screens. “So, what do we do now?” she said. “Do we have another press conference?”
    There’d been a press conference two days ago, held at the Mike Lazaridis Theatre of Ideas at the Perimeter Institute, at which Dr. Kuroda had announced his success in giving Caitlin vision—although no mention had been made of her ability to see the structure of the Web.
    “No!” said Caitlin. “No, we can’t tell anyone—not yet.”
    “Why not?” asked her mother.
    “Because it’s not safe.”
    “Oh, I don’t think anything bad will happen to us,” her mom said.
    “No, no. It’s not safe—it, Webmind.” She looked at her father, who was staring at the floor, and then back at her mother. “As soon as word gets out, people will try to find exploits—vulnerabilities, holes, whatever. They’ll try to bring it down, to hack it. That’s what people like that do, for the challenge, for the street cred, for the glory. And it probably has no defenses or security. We don’t know how it came into being, but I bet it’s fragile.”
    “All right,” said her mother. “But we should inform the authorities.”
    To Caitlin’s surprise, her father lifted his head and spoke up. “Which authorities? Do you trust the CIA, the NSA, or goddamned Homeland Security? Or the Canadian authorities—some Mountie with a Commodore 64?” He shook his head. “Nobody has authority over this.”
    “But what if it’s dangerous?” her mom replied.
    “It’s not dangerous,” Caitlin said firmly.
    “You don’t actually know that,” her mother said. “And, even if it’s not dangerous right now, it might become so.”
    “Why?” said Caitlin in as defiant a tone as she could muster.
    Her mother looked at her father, then back at Caitlin. “Terminator. The Matrix. And so on.”
    “Those are just movies,” Caitlin said, exasperated. “You don’t know that it’s going to turn out like that.”
    “And you,” her mother said sharply, “don’t know that it isn’t.”
    Caitlin crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Well, I’ll tell you this: it’s far more likely to develop to be peaceful and kind with us as its . . . its mentors than it is with the military or a bunch of spies trying to control it.”
    She hoped her father would jump in again on her