The next morning—after my bathroom showered me and my PIFFEN meter informed me I was 23.74 pounds overweight—I dragged myself back to the Netgorks office and stashed the headware under my desk. My proddings went crazy over that. They beat on my gut with a force greater than ever before, demanding that I put back on Trivers’ headware. "Do it, Peterson!" they screamed. "Or we’ll give you a virus that will blow you away!"

I didn’t take the threat too seriously. I’d been getting their weird messages for as long as I could remember, even if they’d never been this intense. And like I said before, I’d always considered my proddings to be mere random noise.

Still, I knew I had to come to terms with the headware sooner or later. Trivers would grill me if he found out I wasn’t using his device to capacity, and I certainly wasn’t about to let a big-time promotion slip by me. So I pushed aside my hesitation, and with one swift motion, at 9:17 AM, I remounted the unit on my head.

I immediately found Kale sound asleep in the bedroom of her Santa Monica Canyon condo. My first thought was to reprimand her, since she was supposed to have already left for Cambridge, but then I remembered not to reveal my extra headware capability.

I decided to spend the downtime examining her operating space. Mainly, I checked out her processing zones, which were all heavily scattered with leftover data, but I also tried puzzling over some of her more unusual linking routines and subfiling densities.

That was as far as I got. From that moment on everything changed. Because at exactly 9:19 AM—on Tuesday, September 28, 2077—Kale woke up from her sleep and started to laugh.

I should make clear, there were only 33,174 signals accumulated on her incoming queue when she woke up. It was hardly a number of any magnitude. Yet even so, she didn’t immediately intake her signals. She didn’t even consider intaking them. Instead, at her first moment of consciousness, she simply laughed at them. She simply opened her dark green eyes, arched her small back, and laughed at them.

All I could do was process the wave-form of her laughter. Otherwise, the behavior made no sense. Otherwise, by every analytical measure, the behavior was sheer lunacy.

It wasn’t until Kale’s laughing persisted for 7.44 seconds that my proddings suggested I step aside from my processing. As soon as I did that, I had no choice but to actually hear her laughter. The sound was so pure, so quixotic, so full of promise, that I felt like I was receiving a direct input from the Web. My pleasure level shot up 44.33 points, my spine produced a tingling sensation, and even my proddings applauded me, saying that if I played my cards properly, I might end up doing something useful for the human species.

That was when the data hit me: My proddings were the ones who demanded I put on the headware that morning. They were the ones who got me to properly witness Kale’s laughter. And that meant it was possible there might be some reason for their existence. That meant they might not be mere random noise.

When Kale stopped laughing 2.31 seconds later, I rushed to check the Public Netgorks channel data for all the probabilities, to see if my speculation was indeed true. But the funny thing was, the task turned out to be trivial—in a matter of a half a millisecond, I had my evidence. Because the data showed a startling thing. It showed that never before, in as long as there had been the Web, had there ever been a case of somebody laughing at their signals.

Not a single case. Not a single probability point.