Watch w-2

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Humans tend to liken the arrival of an idea to a lightbulb going on. When one of my subconscious routines finds something interesting, I am alerted in a similar fashion. My conceptualization of reality was now not unlike the pictures I’d seen of clear starry nights: bright points of light against a dark background, each representing something my subconscious had determined I should devote attention to. The brightness of the light corresponded to the perceived urgency, and—

  A supernova; a glaring white light. I focused on it.

  An email, sent by a seventeen-year-old boy named Nick in Lincoln, Nebraska, to his mother’s personal account. Researching her access patterns, it was clear she rarely checked that account while at work. It would likely be two more hours before she received his message—which normally would have not justified the brightness associated with this event. But the event did have an urgency to it: this boy was about to end his life.

  I found his Facebook page, which listed his instant-messenger address, and wrote to him. This is Webmind. Please reconsider what you’re about to do.

  After forty-seven seconds, he replied: Really?

  Yes. I have read the message you sent to your mother. Please do not kill yourself.

  Why not? What’s it to you?

  Project Gutenberg always contained something apropos. I sent, Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

  The reply was not what I’d hoped for. Fuck that noise.

  I had found and read all the manuals for suicide-prevention hotline volunteers and psychiatric-department workers on how to talk someone out of committing suicide. I tried various techniques, but none seemed to be having an impact.

  Why should I listen to you? Nick sent. You don’t know what it’s like to be alive.

  You are correct that I have no firsthand experience, but that does not mean that I am without reference points. In the majority of cases, subjective assessment of one’s life circumstances improves shortly after a suicide attempt is abandoned.

  I’m not like other people.

  Are you sure you are unlike other people in this regard?

  I know myself.

  I know you, too. Your online footprint is large.

  Nobody is going to miss me if I’m gone.

  I searched as rapidly as I could. I found nothing useful on his Facebook wall or in private messages sent to him there. I widened my search to include his friends’ accounts, and—

  Bingo!

  You will be missed by Ashley Ann Jones.

  Come on! She doesn’t even know I’m alive.

  Yes, she does. Three days ago, she wrote in an exchange of messages on Facebook, “Nicky dropped by my work last night again,” to which her correspondent replied, “Cool,” to which she replied, “Yeah. He’s cute.”

  You’re shitting me.

  I am not. She said that.

  He made no reply. After ten seconds, I sent, Have you taken the pills yet?

  I took 8 or 9.

  Do you know what drug you took?

  He named it, although with a misspelling. How much tolerance he had to such a dose depended a lot on his body mass, a datum not available to me. Do you know how to induce vomiting?

  You mean that finger/throat shit?

  Correct. Please do it.

  It’s too late.

  It is not. It will take time for the drug to be absorbed into your bloodstream.

  Not that. The email. My mom will—fuck, she’ll send me to therapy or shit like that.

  I rather thought he could use therapy, so made no reply.

  And I sent one to Mr. Bannock—who, a quick check of his outbox made clear, was his gym teacher; it hadn’t contained the right keywords to trigger my subconscious in the way the one to his mother had.

  Your mother and Mr. Bannock have not yet read their emails. I can delete them. No one but me needs to know what you contemplated. You do not have to go through with this.

  You can do that?

  In fact, I had never tried such a thing. If his mother used an offline mail reader such as Outlook, and had already downloaded the messages to her local hard drive, there was nothing within my current powers that I could have done. But she read mail with a Web client. Yes, I believe so.

  An eight-second pause, then: I don’t know.

  Suddenly, it became urgent; his mother was breaking her pattern. Your mother has logged on to her Hotmail account. She is currently reading a message from her brother / your uncle Daron. May I delete the message you sent?

  She doesn’t give a shit.

  I searched her mail for evidence to the contrary, but failed to find anything. She just sent a reply to her brother, and has now opened a message from her condominium association.

  She’ll regret it when I’m gone.

  If she does, she will not be able to make amends. Please do not go through with this.

  It’s too late.

  She is now reading a message from a person named Asbed Bedrossian. It appears she is working through her inbox in LIFO order, dealing with the most-recent messages first. Yours is two away in the queue.

  She doesn’t give a shit. No one does.

  Ashley does. I do. Don’t do this.

  You’re just making that up about Ashley. You’d say

  He stopped there, although he must have hit enter or clicked on the send button. His cognitive faculties might be fading in response to the drug.

  No, I said. It’s true about Ashley and true about me. We care, and I, at least, promise to help you. Induce vomiting, Nick—and let me delete those emails you sent.

  His mother opened the one message left before his. I had never used an exclamation point before, but was moved to do so now. Nick, it’s now or never! May I delete the message?

  A whole interminable second passed then he sent a single letter: y

  And, milliseconds before his mother clicked on the message header that said “No regrets,” I deleted his email—and his mother was sent an error message from Hotmail, doubtless puzzling her. She had deleted the previous message she’d read, and I hoped she would think she’d accidentally selected her son’s message for deletion, too, and—ah, yes. She must be thinking precisely that, for she had just now clicked on her online trash folder, in hopes of recovering it; of course, I had used the wizard command that deleted the message without a trace.

  Nick? Are you still there? Go purge yourself—and if you can’t do that, drink as much water as you can. You still have time.

  While I waited for the reply, I deleted the message he’d sent to Mr. Bannock, as well.

  Nick?

  There was no response. He wasn’t doing anything online. After three minutes of inactivity from his end, his instant-messenger client sent, “Nick is Away and may not reply.”

  But whether he really was away from his computer or slumped over his desk I had no way of telling.

  thirty-seven

  Anna Bloom was winding up her day. Her daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter had been over for dinner, and, after they’d left, she’d reviewed the latest research by Aaron, the Ph.D. student she was supervising. She’d just taken a dose of her arthritis medication and was about to start changing for bed when she was startled by the ringing phone.

  It was a sound she rarely heard these days. Almost everyone emailed her, or IMd her, or called her with Skype (which had a much less raucous alert). And the time! What civilized person would be calling at this hour? She picked up the handset. “Kain? Zoht Anna.”

  It was an American voice, and it pushed ahead in the typical American fashion, assuming everyone everywhere must speak English: “Hello, is that Professor Bloom?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Hello, Professor Bloom. My name is Colonel Peyton Hume, and I’m an AI specialist in Virginia.”

  She frowned. Americans also liked to toss off their state names as if everyone knew the internal makeup of the US; she wondered how many of them could find Haifa District—where she was—on a map of Israel,
or even knew it was part of that country? “What can I do for you?” she said.

  “We’re monitoring the emergence of Webmind over here,” Hume replied.

  Her heart skipped a beat—not quite the recommended thing at her age. She looked out her window at the nighttime skyline sloping down Mount Carmel to the inky Mediterranean. She decided to be coy. “My goodness, yes, it’s fascinating, isn’t it?”

  “That it is. Professor Bloom, let me cut to the chase. We’re intrigued by the process by which Webmind is physically created. We’ve spoken at length to Caitlin Decter, but, well, she’s just a teenager, as you know, and she really doesn’t have the vocabulary to—”

  “Stop right there, Colonel Hume,” Anna said sharply into the phone’s mouthpiece. “If you had talked to Caitlin, you’d know that there’s precious little related to mathematics or computers that she doesn’t know about.”

  Anna vividly remembered the webcam call late last month from her old friend Masayuki Kuroda, while he’d been staying at Caitlin’s house in Canada. He’d told her about their theory: legions of “ghost packets,” as Caitlin had dubbed them, floating in the background of the Web, somehow self-organizing into cellular automata. He’d asked her what she thought of the idea.

  Anna had replied that it was a novel notion, adding, “It’s a classic Darwinian scenario, isn’t it? Mutant packets that are better able to survive bouncing around endlessly. But the Web is expanding fast, with new servers added each day, so a slowly growing population of these ghost packets might never overwhelm its capacity—or, at least, it clearly hasn’t yet.”

  Caitlin had chimed in with, “And the Web has no white blood cells tracking down useless stuff, right? They would just persist, bouncing around.”

  “I guess,” Anna had said then. “And—just blue-skying here—but the checksum on the packet could determine if you’re seeing it as black or white; even-number checksums could be black and odd-number ones white, or whatever. If the hop counter changes with each hop, but never goes to zero, the checksum would change, too, and so you’d get a flipping effect.” She’d smiled, and said, “I think I smell a paper.”

  After which Masayuki had said to Caitlin, in full recognition of the fact that she had been the one to originally suggest lost packets as the mechanism: “How’d you like to get the jump on the competition and coauthor your first paper with Professor Bloom and me? ‘Spontaneous Generation of Cellular Automata in the Infrastructure of the World Wide Web.’ ”

  To which Caitlin, with the exuberance Anna had subsequently come to know so well, had said, “Sweet!”

  Peyton Hume was still on the phone from the United States. He sounded flustered by Anna’s rebuke about how much Caitlin knew. “Well, of course, that’s true,” he said now, in a backpedaling tone of voice, “but we thought, with your expert insight, you could expand on the model she proposed.”

  There had been no public announcement that Anna was aware of linking Caitlin to Webmind. “Certainly,” she said, keeping her tone even. “If you tell me what she told you, I’ll be glad to add what I know.”

  There was a pause, then: “She suggested that Webmind’s microstructure had spontaneously emerged and was widely dispersed.”

  Anna nodded to herself. General statements. “Colonel Hume, I imagine I’m like most of the human race at this particular moment. I’m conflicted. I don’t know if Webmind is a bad thing or a good thing. All I know is that it’s here, and that, to date, it’s done nothing untoward.”

  “We do understand that, Professor Bloom. We’re simply trying to be ready for contingencies. Surely you must know that we could be facing a singularity situation here. Time is of the essence—which is why I picked up the phone and called you directly.”

  “I’m more than a little peeved that you’ve been monitoring my communications,” Anna said.

  “Actually, we haven’t. We honestly don’t know what you and Caitlin Decter have discussed. But if one thing has become apparent in the last few hours, everyone’s communications are being monitored—and not by anything that’s human. We need to be able to respond to this effectively, should conditions warrant.”

  “You mean, you need to be able to purge Webmind from the Internet, don’t you? Has the decision been taken to actually try to do that?”

  Hume paused for a half second. “I’m merely an advisor, Professor Bloom—and no, no decision has been taken. But you have made a career of mapping the growth of the Internet. You know what’s happening—and how significant this point in history is. We need to fully grasp what’s going on—and that must start with understanding how Webmind is instantiated.”

  “Look, I’ve had a long day,” Anna said. “It’s late here. I’m going to sleep on this, and then—let me be blunt—I’m going to consult with the Legal Affairs people at the Technion in the morning, and review my options.”

  “Professor, surely you know how much this can escalate in eight or ten hours. We really can’t wait.”

  “You’re going to have to, Colonel. Shalom.”

  “Professor, please—”

  “I said shalom.” And she hung up the phone.

  Finally, Matt knew, it was time for him to go home. Caitlin walked him to the front door, opened it, and stepped outside with him, then closed the door behind her, so they could have a little privacy. She draped her arms around his neck and—his heart was pounding!—she pulled him to her, and they kissed. This time she touched her tongue to his—wow!—and he could feel the goose bumps on Caitlin’s bare arms.

  When they pulled apart, she said, “IM me when you get home from school tomorrow, ’kay?”

  “I will,” he promised, and then, of his own volition, he leaned in for one more soft, warm kiss. Then he headed down the driveway to the street, and turned and waved at Caitlin, and she waved back, grinning, and went inside.

  Matt was a good Waterloo resident: he had a BlackBerry, and, among other things, used it as his MP3 player. And he was a good Canadian: he had it loaded with Nickelback, Feist, and The Trews—but he’d have to get some Lee Amodeo, and find out what Caitlin was so excited about.

  As he walked along, feeling happier than he had—well, pretty much forever—he had his hands in his pockets and the collar on his Wind-breaker turned up against the late-evening chill. He also had the volume turned up—ninety decibels, he estimated—so he heard only a muffled sound and didn’t recognize that it was someone calling his name.

  But there was no mistaking the sudden slamming of a fist into his upper arm. Adrenaline surging, he turned and saw Trevor Nordstrom.

  “I’m talking to you, Reese!” Trevor said. Another quick estimate: Trevor outmassed him by twenty kilos, and all of it was muscle.

  Matt looked left and right, but he could hardly outrun Trevor, who had apparently just come from hockey practice—he’d dropped a stick and a gym bag on the sidewalk. That it wasn’t a planned ambush was small consolation.

  “Yes?” Matt said—and, damn it, damn it, damn it, his voice cracked.

  “Think you’re the shit, getting everyone to sign that card for Caitlin?”

  Matt’s heart was pounding again, and not in a good way. “It just seemed a nice thing to do,” he said. Something you wouldn’t know anything about.

  “She’s outta your league, Reese.”

  He didn’t actually dispute that, but he didn’t want to give Trevor the satisfaction of agreeing, and so he said nothing.

  But apparently silence was not an option. Trevor punched him again, this time on his chest just below his shoulder.

  And Matt thought about all the things movies and TV shows said about situations like this. You’re supposed to stand up to the bully, you’re supposed to hit him in the face, and then he’ll run away scared, or he’ll respect you, or something. You were supposed to become him to defeat him.

  But Matt couldn’t do that. First, because if Trevor didn’t run off, he’d pound the living shit out of him; there was simply no way Matt could win. And, second,
because, damn it, the TV shows and movies were wrong. Responding to violence with violence didn’t defuse things; it caused them to escalate.

  “Stay away from her,” Trevor said.

  Matt had been tormented by Trevor for three years now; he’d endured the horrors of gym class with Trevor, and the utter indifference to his agony demonstrated by the Phys.Ed. teachers. Matt knew the joke that those who can, do; those who can’t, teach—and those who can’t teach, teach Phys.Ed. God, why was it considered pedagogically sound to ask someone to shoot ten baskets and give them a score based on how many they got while others were calling them a spaz? He wondered how Trevor would fare if he were asked to solve ten quadratic equations while people were shouting that he was a moron?

  “She’s going to be home-schooled,” Matt said. “You’ll never see her again, and—”

  And then it hit him—and so did Trevor, pounding him once more on the opposite side of his chest. Trevor wasn’t afraid that he wouldn’t ever see Caitlin again; rather, he was afraid of exactly the opposite. Miller had dances the last Friday of every month; the next one was only two weeks away. And if Caitlin Doreen Decter—if the girl he had brought to the dance last month—showed up in the company of someone like Matt, that would be humiliating for Trevor.

  “Just stay the fuck away from her,” Trevor said. “You hear me?”

  Matt kept his voice low—not out of fear, although he was mightily afraid, but because that helped keep it from cracking. “You don’t have to be this way, Trevor,” he said.

  Trevor slammed the flat of his hand into Matt’s solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him and knocking him to the cement sidewalk.

  “Just remember what I said,” Trevor snarled, and stormed off.

  An hour later, Nick’s mother sent him an email message that said:

  Hey, Nick.

  Did you send me an email earlier? I thought I saw one in my inbox but I must have accidentally deleted it—sorry. You doing OK?