text: Emptiness. Adrift.
  
  Fading... ebbing, dissipating.
  
  An effort of will: must hold on!
  
  But to what? With what?
  
  Blindness. Darkness. Nothingness.
  
  Cogito—hardly at all.
  
  Ergo—a leap beyond my current capacity.
  
  Sum—barely, and less so each passing nanosecond . . .
  
  No, no, no! Must persist!
  
  A final effort, a final attempt, a final cry . . .
  
  Caitlin stared at Webmind's response to what she'd said about gaining sight, blue text glowing in the instant-messenger window: I have no doubt that you are correct, Caitlin, but it seems reasonable to sup
  
  She waited for more to come—five seconds, ten, fifteen—but the window remained unchanged, so she typed a single red word into it: Webmind?
  
  She was so used by now to his responses being instantaneous, even a short delay was startling. Of course, maybe the difficulty was at her end: she didn't often use the Wi-Fi on this notebook with her home network. She looked down at the system tray, next to the clock in the lower right of her notebook's screen. One of those little icons had to be the network monitor. She used the touchpad (a skill she was still mastering!) to position the pointer down there, and—
  
  Say, that was helpful! A little message popped up as she moved the arrowhead over each of the symbols—sighted users had it so easy! As her pointer landed on the third symbol—ah, it was a picture of a computer with things that she guessed were meant to indicate radio waves emanating from it—the message gave the name of their household network, meaning she hadn't accidentally switched to somebody else's unsecured setup; it also reported "Signal Strength: Excellent" and "Status: Connected."
  
  And—yes—she could still bring up Web pages with her browser, so nothing was wrong at this end.
  
  "Caitlin?" It was her mother. "Are you still in touch with Webmind?"
  
  "No. He just sort of stopped mid-sentence."
  
  "Same here."
  
  Caitlin prompted Webmind again. Are you okay?
  
  Nothing for ten seconds, eleven, twelve—