Www: Wake

The delicious irony (or coincidence? I never know which one is appropriate and I blame Alanis Morrisette and that terrible song entirely for this confusion) about this novel is that it's about the spontaneous emergence of an intelligence on the internet, called Webmind, and its popularity exploded on Twitter, which can be considered a Webmind of another kind. Wake is set in 2012 and follows the story of Caitlin Decter, a pretty 15-year-old girl, who is blind and a bit of a math genius. Her family move from Texas to Ontario so her father can take a job at the Perimeter Institute. Caitlin undergoes a medical procedure where a signal processing device called an "eyePod" which reprocesses signals and sends them back to an implant in her eye. The correct data is passed on to her optic nerve and she should be able to see, but for some reason her pupils only respond to light but she still has no sight. Dr. Kuroda who installed the implant works on a software update which he hopes will give Caitlin her sight back instead of giving her sight, it allows her to visualize the World Wide Web and she sees a background in websight that looks like a chess board. A final software patch allows Caitlin to see. An artificial intelligence spontaneously emerges from the Web and takes Caitlin's learning of Websight and her eyePod to be attempts to communicate with it. Caitlin realizes something is trying to communicate with her and teaches it until she finds its intelligence is double that of a human's. It wishes her happy birthday and tells it to call her Webmind. The novel is part of the Wake, Watch and Wander Trilogy and was nominated for the 2010 Hugo Award.