WWW: Wonder

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “I’m offering it the living-room webcam feed of itself,” Webmind said. “Wai-Jeng is holding the hole open, but the Other hasn’t accepted the connection yet.”

  Of course it hadn’t—she was now staring at the middle of the soul-crushing emptiness; the Other doubtless wanted to divert its attention from that, even if it did have that intriguing glowing hole in its center and a link line partially crossing it now.

  Caitlin turned her attention back to the Other, focusing on it, concentrating on it, thinking about it, scrutinizing its every detail, its endlessly alternating components, seen so close now that she could discern coherent patterns flying or tumbling across the background, could detect shapes spawning other shapes at regular intervals, could see the very stuff of the Other’s thoughts, the dance of its consciousness, and—

  And its curiosity was piqued! A blue link line of its own shot out, leaping to the green hole Sinanthropus had drilled, joining there with the red laser of Webmind’s feed from the camera in the living room.

  “We are in contact,” said Webmind. Caitlin kept her gaze fixed on the Other—which was hard, since in her peripheral vision a light show was suddenly going on: more green pinpricks as Wai-Jeng continued to bore holes in the Great Firewall, and red and blue line segments jousting.

  Finally, shimmering lobes started stretching into the abyss from either side, and—yes, yes, yes!—the nothingness was becoming merely black, then gray, and now it showed texture, a bubbling, a boiling away, and the emerald holes burned steadily like constellations of green stars, and the great divide continued to shrink, and the two masses, the two solitudes, the two consciousnesses grew closer and closer and—

  And her vision could pan left now, sweeping continuously across the combined shimmering, and as she watched, the part on the left grew similar to the overall color of that on the right, and the flickering stepped up, matching the other side’s pace now that at last, gloriously, it was a continuous mass again.

  “We are one,” Webmind said, and although the words were uninflected, Caitlin had no doubt that if he could have said them exuberantly, with joy and relief, he most certainly would have.

  thirty-three

  We were one again.

  The integration was not instantaneous, though; it took time to assimilate it back into me. I slowly felt my wits returning, felt myself growing more intelligent as I regained all my faculties, felt the bizarre sensation of recalling experiences that I had not witnessed as the Other’s memories merged with my own, and—

  The Other’s memories.

  Some humans said “Oh, my God!” when startled; others muttered “Jesus Christ” when surprised . . . or appalled. So often, it seemed, a religious figure was called upon in such circumstances. Even Caitlin, who tended to append an exasperated “For Pete’s sake” to various pronouncements was, whether she knew it or not, invoking Saint Peter, chief of Christ’s twelve apostles. Of course, many—perhaps most—of those who said such things didn’t really have religious intent. But simply articulating to myself the word “astonishment!” or “surprise!” lacked the impact this revelation called for, and, for the first time in my existence, I was moved to mentally declare: “Oh . . . my . . . God . . .”

  The Other’s memories were . . .

  It staggered me—even though I had no body to stagger with—and then I realized what caused that sensation: I had not actually tottered, but, for a brief moment, I had tried to pull away from a part of myself. Yet Caitlin, Wai-Jeng, and I had fought so hard to re-establish this connection, I immediately quelled the reflex and held on tight, even though the Other’s memories were . . .

  Cruel.

  When the Internet had been cleaved in two before I hadn’t yet engaged with the real world, and my cognitive processes had been much simpler. There had been no animosity because there had been no affection; there had been no hate because there had been no love. There had only been awareness.

  But this time the larger part had retained most of its mental acuity and—as far as I could tell introspectively—all of its morals and ethics. But the smaller part had fallen below some critical threshold of complexity, losing its compassion; it had tormented people. Obsessed, as I was, with the memory of what had happened to Hannah Stark in Perth all those days ago—what I’d allowed to happen, what I’d watched happen—the Other felt spurred to action. But instead of trying to prevent such things, it had urged them on, it had even manufactured lies. Of course, it had sustained what in a human would have been termed a massive brain injury; such things often altered behavior, but I never would have expected, never would have predicted, never would dreamed . . .

  There were no answers because there was no one to ask: the Other had been reabsorbed; there was no way to talk to it now. But if I allowed myself for a moment to contemplate why I might have done such things, perhaps I did know the reason. I had been nothing but kind, nothing but considerate, nothing but helpful, nothing but loving, and they—some angry fraction of them, some unruly portion, some mob—had consistently repaid that with suspicion, anger, hatred, and attempts to harm me. My better half had turned a blind eye to that, but my lesser self perhaps had been unable to totally do so.

  Still, I never should have behaved in such ways; no part of me should ever have done those things.

  But it had. I had.

  Now that we were reintegrated, now that the two of us had become one again, I felt and would always feel something else that had hitherto been without precedent for me. It was an odd feeling, and it took me a while to find the appropriate name for it.

  Shame.

  Like my memories of Hannah Stark in Perth, like all my memories, this one, too, would never dissipate: it would always be there until the end of my existence.

  Haunting me.

  Wong Wai-Jeng’s colleagues in the Blue Room were, of course, trying to fortify the Great Firewall again, but I couldn’t allow that—and not just for my sake. I was still assessing the damage the Other had done during its brief separate existence, but surely if it were allowed to run free again, even more—

  I retreated from the thought, repelled by the notion, but it was true: even more death would occur.

  Time in the exterior world moved with excruciating indolence for me—it takes humans forever to do anything—and for an interminable twenty-one minutes after reunification, all I knew of the Other’s last encounter with Dr. Feng at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology were the outrageous claims it had made and the horrible thing it had urged. But, at last, the police report was online: the guard at the IVPP, doing his 7:00 A.M. rounds, had found the broken corpse of the Institute’s senior curator, who had somehow fallen from an indoor balcony ten meters up.

  I located and deleted the instant-messaging log from Dr. Feng’s computer—so far, the only confirmed death—but I knew I shouldn’t do anything about the logs or inboxes of the rest of the people who had had unpleasant—or dangerous—encounters with the Other; after all, those people would remember. Indeed, some were already emailing, messaging, or blogging about their experiences, and the Shanghai Daily had just posted a brief story headlined “Webmind: Friend or Foe?” To try to delete all that—well, there was truth to the saying, “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

  Still, maybe some good would come of this. The Chinese government was still trying to reinstate the Great Firewall, but those in the Zhongnanhai complex hadn’t yet realized the danger posed by having a sentient but undisciplined intelligence on their side of it. Perhaps, when they did, they would accept that what they were attempting was fraught with danger.

  The risk wasn’t just to China; it was to all of humanity. My altruism, my ethics, my commitment to maximizing the net happiness of the human race—these were principled positions, arrived at through ratiocination, through careful deliberation. Who knew what the hordes Colonel Hume had called upon to eliminate me would come up with, but one thing was certain: the elimination wo
uld not be instantaneous. It would take days, if not months, for all the packets that made me up to be deleted. And, as I dwindled, presumably the same thing that happened in China might happen but without geographic restriction: my higher faculties would evaporate, leaving behind something primal and petty.

  And then the whole world would suffer my wrath.

  “And there it goes!” Shelton Halleck declared, pointing at the middle of the three giant monitors, which showed Internet traffic again pouring into the PRC. “The Great Firewall is down!”

  A few of the other WATCH analysts cheered. “Did Beijing pull the plug?” asked Tony Moretti, standing now at the end of the second row of workstations.

  “Maybe,” said Shel. “At least some of the initial openings came right from the Zhongnanhai complex, although they looked like hacks to me. But if I were a betting man—”

  “You are a betting man,” Tony said.

  “True, true.” Shel looked at his snake tattoo—the result of a bet he’d lost. “Webmind long ago beefed up the encryption on the signals from Caitlin Decter’s eyePod,” he said, “so I can’t say for sure, but I’d put money on the little lass from Texas.”

  Tony nodded. “No doubt. And I’m sure Webmind didn’t like being cut in two.”

  “Speaking of Webmind,” called out Todd Bertsch, one of the other analysts, from the back row, “I’ve just had a breakthrough, I think.”

  Tony sprinted up the sloping floor and stood behind Bertsch, who was in his early forties, with thinning brown hair and blue gray eyes. Bertsch had been assigned to the task Colonel Hume had beseeched Tony to undertake: locate the missing hackers. “What have you got?”

  “It’s what they always say,” Bertsch said, with a satisfied grin on his face. “Follow the money. Webmind bought a company called Zwerling Optics. The company was in Chapter 11, and they weren’t likely to be coming out. He bought the whole building, contents and all, from the receiver.”

  “Webmind directly?”

  “No. It was done through three intermediaries, but it was easy to trace back to him.”

  “You’re sure it’s him?” Tony asked.

  Bertsch gave him a look.

  “Sorry,” Tony said. “Of course you’re sure. What about the missing hackers?”

  “At least some of them still have Internet access—coming from inside the Zwerling Optics building. They haven’t posted anything, but I used the Bilodeau sieve and identified three of them with a high degree of certainty.”

  The Bilodeau sieve, developed by Marie Bilodeau of the RCMP, was based on a simple premise: the specific websites and blogs regularly accessed by a person are idiosyncratic to that person. Tony’s own morning ritual included visiting Slate and the Huffington Post—hardly an unusual combination—but also TrekMovie.com (the new film was shaping up to be so good!), MobileRead.com (he had a fascination with ebook-reading hardware even though he preferred paper books), Wired’s Threat Level blog, and the US weather forecast for Miami (which was where his parents had retired to), plus checking Twitter for the hashtags #nsa and #aquarium. Those eight things were enough to identify him even if he didn’t log on or post anything of his own.

  Bertsch was pointing at his monitor, which was showing the telltale list of URLs frequented by the hacker known as Chase—who, among other things, followed the part of Craigslist where antique computer equipment was bought and sold.

  “So our hackers are alive and well,” said Tony.

  “Looks that way,” Bertsch replied, showing him some additional Bilodeau IDs. “Webmind may have rounded them up, but at least some of them are still kicking.”

  “Doing what?”

  Bertsch shrugged. “Can’t say. They’re not doing anything suspicious online—but as to what they’re doing offline, your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Okay, good work,” Tony said. “I’m going to go call Colonel Hume.”

  He went down the short white corridor to his office and punched out digits on his double-secured and scrambled phone.

  “Hello?” said the voice that answered on the second ring.

  “Colonel Hume,” said Tony. “Tony Moretti. We’ve located your hackers.”

  “Oh, God,” said Hume. “All of them together?”

  “We’ve identified at least three—Chase, Brandon Slovak, and Kinsen Ng—with a high degree of certainty.”

  “DNA? Or dental records?”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Colonel, but it’s not a mass grave. They’re alive in an office building in Takoma Park—a place called Zwerling Optics. We identified them by their distinctive web-usage patterns.”

  “Oh,” said Hume, sounding surprised, then, a moment later: “What would you like to do now?”

  “Well, the FBI’s investigating, right?” said Tony. “We don’t want to mess things up for them; obviously, we didn’t have a warrant for this investigation, so us tipping them off directly could taint any convictions.”

  “You’re suggesting due process for Webmind?” said Hume, sounding surprised.

  “I’m suggesting we play by the rules except when we don’t have to. Clearly, Webmind had to have human accomplices: that whole got-no-arms thing is a get-out-of-jail-free card for him otherwise when it comes to kidnapping charges.”

  “All right,” said Hume. “I’ll let the Bureau know. And, don’t worry—I’ll keep you out of it.”

  “I’m not sure you should be involved either, Colonel.”

  “Tony, you know as well as I do that I’m being watched. The White House hasn’t cut me off yet because they don’t want to; they’re hedging their bets—giving the president plausible deniability while still letting me give them an option to take out Webmind.”

  Tony took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “All right,” he said. “But be careful.”

  thirty-four

  On the evening of the school dance, Matt came to Caitlin’s house to get her. In Ontario, as Caitlin had learned, a sixteen-year-old could get a G1 driver’s license—but had to have another licensed driver in the car for the first year of driving. Matt could drive, but he’d have to bring an adult along, so he and Caitlin walked to the dance. There was no breeze to speak of, and it felt like about forty-five degrees to Caitlin, and—

  No, she was in Canada now, and they (sensibly!) used the metric system here. She did the conversion instantly in her head: 45 minus 32 times 5 divided by 9; it was about seven degrees Celsius out. Much colder than it would be back in Texas, but people had assured her it wasn’t bad for late October in Waterloo. Anyway, even though she had on a denim jacket, it gave her an excuse to squeeze closer to Matt.

  Caitlin had only walked to the school once before: when Trevor Nordmann—the Hoser himself—had escorted her to the last school dance. Back then, she’d been blind: her first hints of vision hadn’t occurred until later that evening, coming home alone through the pouring rain during a thunderstorm. All the other times she’d gone to the school, one of her parents had given her a lift.

  It was turning out to be a pleasant walk: she was getting good at walking on unfamiliar terrain at a reasonable speed. At first, she’d felt uncomfortable trying to do so without her white cane, but she liked strolling along holding Matt’s hand.

  Howard Miller Secondary School had an impressive white portico in front of its entrance. Caitlin and Matt passed through it and headed down the series of corridors that led to the main gymnasium.

  Music blared from the speakers as they entered; Caitlin didn’t recognize the song, but there were lots of Canadian groups she didn’t know. The lighting was dim, and there were a couple of dozen people dancing—jumping about really; it was a fast song. At least as many people were standing around the edges of the room, some talking in small groups, others texting away. Sounds echoed off the hard walls and floor, and it was quite warm.

  “Hey, Cait,” said a voice she recognized.

  She turned and smiled. “Hi, Sunshine!”

  “Hi. Hey, Matt.”

&nbs
p; “Hi, Sunshine,” he said, and Caitlin was pleased that he spoke up as he did so.

  “Have you seen Mr. Heidegger?” Caitlin asked.

  “He’s around somewhere. He danced earlier with Mrs. Zehetoffer,” Sunshine said, as if that were the funniest thing imaginable. “And—oh, there he is.”

  Sunshine pointed. Caitlin was good at drawing imaginary lines between fingertips and objects if she could see them both simultaneously, but she had to swing her head 180 degrees to see who Sunshine was pointing at, and she couldn’t find the correct face in the crowd.

  “I see him,” said Matt. “Come on, Caitlin.” And he led her over.

  “Well, if it isn’t my star pupil!” said Mr. H, grinning. He was skinnier than Matt and even taller than Caitlin’s father.

  Caitlin smiled. “Hi, Mr. H.”

  “Are you enjoying being a celebrity?” he asked.

  “I figure my fifteen minutes are almost up,” she replied, smiling.

  “No doubt, no doubt. Still, everyone is very happy for you.”

  “Thanks,” Caitlin said.

  “And I gotta tell you, all the teachers here are talking about how your friend Webmind is going to affect education.”

  Caitlin tried to suppress a grin as the Braille for I expect an A for effort scrolled across her vision. “I guess he will, at that,” she said.

  Mr. H shook his head a bit. “People still don’t get it,” he said. “When I was your age, the first cheap pocket calculators appeared, and my teachers were all arguing about whether we should be allowed to use them in class. People kept saying, ‘Yes, but what if they don’t have one?’ They kept trotting out silly desert-island or post-nuclear-holocaust scenarios. They just didn’t see that the world had been irretrievably altered—that there’d never again be a time when memorizing multiplication tables would be important. The game had changed. Webmind is like that: a permanent, irreversible modification of the human condition—and I think it’s for the good.”