text: Caitlin could only take so much of the literacy program before she had to do something else to make her feel intelligent again. And so, after muttering under her breath, "See Caitlin go away!" she closed her browser and brought up Mathematica instead. Actually, she brought it up twice—once in the command-line mode she was used to, and again in the full-screen graphical-user-interface mode. Many mathematical symbols were still new to her—oh, she knew most of the concepts they represented, but she hadn't yet learned their shapes. She'd had no idea, for instance, that a capital sigma, which represented summation, looked like a sideways M.
  
  To see if she was manipulating the graphical version properly, she decided to start by simply reproducing some of the work that Kuroda and her dad had already performed, and so she loaded their project off the household network.
  
  To replicate what they'd done, she'd need some data on the cellular automata. To get it, she'd have to switch her eyePod over to duplex mode, and that made her nervous. But after the incident with the static shock, it seemed clear that she could go back and forth at will between websight and seeing reality, and—ah, yes, it worked fine.
  
  She buffered a few seconds of raw Jagster data, then, as Kuroda had done before, she fed the data a frame at a time into the eyePod. The background made up of the cellular automata was obvious, and she stared at it as it went step-by-step through its permutations; she could clearly see spaceships going hither and yon. She recorded the output, just as Kuroda had done before, switched back to looking at reality, brought up the Zipf-plot function, and fed her new data into it.
  
  And the result, shown on the monitor, was just what it was supposed to be: a line with a negativeone slope, the telltale sign of a signal that carried information. Buoyed—or, as she liked to say, girled—she went ahead and plugged the data into the Shannonentropy function, and—
  
  Well, that was strange.
  
  When her dad had run the data, he'd gotten a second-order Shannonentropy score, indicating very-low-level complexity.
  
  But her results were clearly third order.
  
  She must have done something wrong. She noodled around, looking for the source of her error. Of course, she could ask her father or Dr. K where she'd screwed up, but figuring that out was half the fun! But after half an hour of checking and rechecking, she could find no flaw in what she'd done—which meant the error was probably in sampling. The data Kuroda and her dad had looked at must have been different somehow, and either their data set or hers wasn't typical.
  
  She switched to websight again—she was getting the hang of making the transition quickly, and no longer found it disorienting. Of course, when looking at the background a frame at a time, she had been vastly slowing down her perception of the Web; although she'd spent several minutes examining the buffered data, it represented only a small amount of time. But now that she was just looking in on the Web in real time, the background of cellular automata was shimmering once more.
  
  She thought perhaps the giant, jittering version of her own face might reappear—perhaps that was what was causing her to get different results. But it didn't, although …
  
  Yes, something was different here in webspace. There was a tiny wavering, an annoying flashing, just at the limit of her perception. It wasn't in the shimmering background, though; it was coming right at her. She frowned, contemplating it.