“No, I won’t let that happen. Not on my watch.”
“How will you stop it?” asked Matt.
“What was that quote, Mom—the one about the other cheek?”
Her mother’s voice: “ ‘Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ ”
“Hmm. No, not that part. What comes after that?”
“ ‘And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.’ ”
“Right! It’s not about just giving them what they ask for, or even more of the same thing they’re asking for—it’s about giving them other stuff, too.”
“Yes?” said her mother. “So?”
“Okay, Webmind,” Caitlin said. “Where did you put it?”
“Put what?” asked Matt.
“Follow me,” said Webmind.
And another orange link line leapt into Caitlin’s field of view. She cast her attention along its length. It seemed longer than any such line she’d ever followed before, an infinity of geometrically straight perfection, and—
No, no—not perfect. It was—yes!—almost imperceptibly at first, but then, after a moment, without any doubt: it was curving, bending down, the way links from Webmind did when she tried to follow them back to their origin, her brain’s way of acknowledging that the source was outside her ability to perceive.
“I’m losing you,” Caitlin said.
And suddenly the link rippled and waved, as if by an effort of will—hers, or Webmind’s, she couldn’t say which—it was being pulled taut. She continued to slide her attention—slide her mind—along its length.
It was unlike any perception she’d had yet in the real world. As she zoomed toward the shimmering background, the individual pixels—the individual cells—did not grow larger. Rather, they remained almost invisible, just at the limit of her ability to perceive. She imagined if she ever did get to take her trip into space, hurtling up into the night sky would have the same sort of feeling: the stars might be getting closer, but they wouldn’t ever appear as anything more than tiny pinpoints.
“God, it’s hard,” she said. And it was: her breathing had accelerated, and she felt herself sweating. Staying focused on that one orange line took prodigious concentration; she was sure if she relaxed her attention for even a moment, instead of continuing to move along its length, she’d snap back to where she’d begun. But attention wanted to wander; vision—even internalized mental vision—wanted to flick now here and now there in an endless series of saccades. She concentrated totally, concentrated the way she did when tackling a really tough math problem, concentrated for all she was worth, and—
There.
“Oh, my God,” Caitlin said, softly.
Spread out before her, filling her perception, spilling over in all directions into her mental peripheral vision, was a vast sea of points, each again resolvable only at the very limit of her perception. Not thousands, not millions, not billions, but trillions upon trillions of them. In aggregate, it appeared as a pulsing mass of grayness, but, as she strained to discern, she realized that the ever-so-tiny pixels came in different colors.
And she counted the colors: there was black, and yellow, and—that was green, wasn’t it? Yes, and blue, and red, and—
Ah! The colors Newton had named, her brain drawing on what she had read about optics: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, the seven hues of the rainbow, plus black, which was no color at all, a nothingness, a—
Yes, a zero!
And the colors came in two intensities: dull red and bright; pale orange and a flaming shade; a yellow so muted it was almost brown and another yellow that flared like the noonday sun. And that shade of gray, she’d seen it before, too: it was black but with the brightness turned up. There weren’t eight shades here, but sixteen! She was seeing not binary, as she had before, but the base-16 counting system of most computers, the colors no doubt corresponding to the hexadecimal digits that would be written as 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, and F. Pushing to concentrate at a higher level had driven her perception to a new level, too. Spread out before her was a vast ocean of data, of information.
“There’s so much,” she said.
“Indeed,” said Webmind.
“Okay,” she said, and she took a deep breath. “Here’s what we’ll do…”
“Well?” snapped Tony in the WATCH control room.
“It’s working,” said Colonel Hume, looking at the central monitor. “Our initial attempt was only getting about thirty percent of the aberrant packets, but we’ve adjusted the algorithm. Some are still resistant—I’m not sure why—but we’re now deleting sixty-two percent of those that pass through the switching station.”
“Ah…” said Tony. “Good.”
“Damn right it’s good!” said Hume, shaking a freckled fist at the screen. “Time for that son of a bitch to sing ‘Daisy’…”
* * *
The vast shimmering mass made up of all the colors of the rainbow heaved and throbbed, almost as though it were a living thing. Caitlin held her breath as she backtracked now along the orange link line, her attention to the rear, watching as the mass—yes, yes, as it started to move toward her. She felt a bit like the pied piper—although, in her case she supposed it was the πed piper!—enticing all the rats to follow.
As she hurried along, the orange link line grew wider and wider, like a road or a sluice, and the mass, the torrent, the deluge surged toward her, running down its length. She sped up—she might not be able to run well in the real world, but in webspace she was a gazelle!
“What’s happening?” her mother’s voice called from the other realm, but Caitlin didn’t dare break her concentration to answer.
Webmind, though, could better subdivide his attention, and she heard him say, “We’re giving them more than they bargained for.”
“Traffic at the switching station is increasing,” said Aiesha, looking up from her console.
Tony looked at the right-hand monitor, beneath the WATCH eye logo. It was now showing a graph of web-traffic levels at the Alexandria AT T switching center. It had just shot way, way up, the curve looking an awful lot like the leading edge of a tsunami. “Where’s it coming from?”
“Everywhere!” shouted Shel. “Anywhere—still can’t trace the damn source.”
“God,” said Colonel Hume. “It’s a fucking flood.”
Tony looked at Hume, then back at Shelton Halleck. “A denial-of-service attack?”
“Maybe,” said Shel. “There are so many packets now. The ones we were looking for were initially a tiny fraction of the traffic flow, but now they’re not even one in a billion.”
“What is it?” demanded Tony. “What the hell is it?”
“Analyzing now,” said Shel. “Gotta string the packets back together—give me a sec…”
And then the center screen filled with a hex dump, including 6F 75 72 20 74 69 6E.
“Well?” snapped Tony. “What is it? Viruses? Program code? Encrypted data?”
“Oh, crap,” said Shel. “No, it’s not encrypted. It’s goddamn plaintext. It’s fuckin’ ASCII, for crying out loud.” He hit a key, and the hexadecimal bytes were converted to their English equivalents on the screen: Are you sad about your tiny penis? If so, we can help! Just respond with your credit-card number, and—
“Jesus!” said Tony.
“It’s still pouring in,” said Aiesha. “It must be everything since Webmind started intercepting it! Something like 300 billion messages—and it’s bouncing it all back at our node at once.”
“AT T is reporting critical overload conditions,” said Dirk Kozak, the communications officer, holding a telephone handset to his chest. “They say if we don’t do something, that node will lock up totally.”
“It’s not going to give up without a fight, is it?” Tony said to Hume, who slammed his freckled right fist into his left palm. Tony turned and looked out at the vast room. “All right,
” he shouted. “Abort! Abort! Abort!”
forty-four
Caitlin, her mother, her father, and Matt were all in the Decter living room. Schrödinger prowled. The big rectangle of the wall-mounted TV was off.
Caitlin’s dad was intimidating at all times, but particularly so when he was standing, looming over everyone else. “Who did you tell?” he demanded.
“Nobody,” said Matt.
Only anger, Caitlin knew, could make her father speak so much. “Come on, Matt! You’re the only person outside of this family, Masayuki, and Dr. Bloom in Israel who knows about the cellular automata. And none of us said a word.”
“I—um, I didn’t…”
“Who’ d you tell?”
“Nobody. Nobody. I promised Caitlin, and I keep my promises.”
The words He’s telling the truth flashed across Caitlin’s vision.
“He isn’t lying,” Caitlin said. “Webmind says so.”
“Then how’d the government find out?” her father replied sharply.
“I didn’t say a word,” Matt said. “Honest. But…”
“Yes?” snapped her father.
Matt lifted his shoulders. “I was curious. I wanted to know more.” His voice was cracking on every syllable. “And, well, I—”
“Oh, shit,” said Caitlin’s mom, getting it. “You googled it.”
Matt nodded.
“What search terms did you use?” demanded her father.
Matt’s voice was small. “It spiraled outward. I started with ‘cellular automata,’ and then ‘Conway’s Game of Life,’ and ‘Stephen Wolfram.’”
“Did you include the term ‘Webmind’ in any of your searches?” her dad asked.
“No! I’m not that stupid.” He took a breath. “But…”
A single word like a bullet: “Yes?”
“Well, you mentioned Roger Penrose, and so I did search on”—and his voice cracked again as he said it—“ ‘cellular automata consciousness.’ ”
“God,” said her father. “Anything else?”
Matt nodded meekly. “I also looked up ‘packets’ and ‘time to live’ and ‘hop counters.’ ”
“You might as well have shouted it to the world! Don’t you get it? We’re being watched—and not just by Webmind.”
“I thought Google would be secure.”
“Google might very well be secure,” her father said, “but your ISP isn’t. Anyone can watch the keywords you’re sending to Google.”
“I’m sorry, Caitlin. So, so sorry.” He looked into her eye. “Webmind, I’m so sorry.”
“Matt,” said Caitlin’s mom sternly, “if you’re going to be part of this, you have got to be more circumspect. You’ve got questions, you come to me or Caitlin’s dad, understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You don’t have to call me ma’am. ‘Dr. Decter’ will do.”
“Yes, Dr. Decter.”
Matt looked again at Caitlin—and at Webmind. “I’m really sorry,” he said. “I just wasn’t thinking.”
Caitlin held him in her gaze for ten seconds, then let a smile cross her face. “How can I be mad at anyone for being curious about cool math stuff?”
Matt looked relieved, and, for the first time in front of her parents, Caitlin reached out and took his hand.
“Today was only the beginning,” Caitlin’s mom said. “They’re going to try again.”
“What right have they got to do that?” Caitlin said. “It’s murder, for God’s sake!”
“Sweetheart…” her mom said.
“Isn’t it?” Caitlin demanded. She let go of Matt’s hand and paced in front of the coffee table. “Webmind is intelligent and alive. They have no right to decide on everyone’s behalf. They’re wielding control just because they think they’re entitled to, because they think they can get away with it. They’re behaving like… like…”
“Like Orwell’s Big Brother,” offered Matt.
Caitlin nodded emphatically. “Exactly!” She paused and took a deep breath, trying to calm down. After a moment, she said, “Well, then, I guess our work’s cut out for us. We’ll have to show them.”
“Show them what?” her mom asked.
She spread her arms as if it were obvious. “Why, that my Big Brother can take their Big Brother, of course.”
“The Georgia Zoo has dropped its lawsuit,” Dr. Marcuse announced excitedly, after reading the email that had just arrived.
“Really?” said Shoshana. “Yay!”
“Go us!” said Dillon.
“Yes,” said the Silverback. “They’ve dropped their custody claim. A full day of people boycotting the zoo was enough for them, it seems. Not to mention thousands of emails complaining about what they were planning to do. We were copied on 2,642 of them, and only God—or Webmind!—knows how many were sent that we weren’t copied on.”
“What about sterilizing Hobo?” asked Dillon.
“They’ve backed off on that, too. They still think it’s the right thing to do, but they’re acknowledging that they’ll never win the public-relations battle.”
“Power to the people,” Shoshana said, smiling.
“Amen to that,” replied Dillon.
“Let’s go tell him,” Marcuse said. He headed for the back door, and Shoshana and Dillon followed. They made the trip across the lawn, over the drawbridge, and onto the island. Hobo came running over to see them, and Shoshana scooped him up into a hug.
Hobo, Dr. Marcuse signed, good news!
Hobo looked at him expectantly.
You get to stay here, Marcuse said.
Hobo looked at Marcuse, then at Dillon, then at Shoshana, and then he let out a long, loud pant-hoot: a series of rapid, breathy, low-pitched hoots switching over to a chain of quicker, higher-pitched in-and-out pants, climaxing in a thunderous screech of joy.
Shoshana smiled. “I couldn’t have said it better myself,” she said.
My interacting with Caitlin had begun with her showing me Earth from space, letting me see an image like the one humanity had first glimpsed when Apollo 8 had orbited the moon and its crew had read Genesis back to “all of you on the Good Earth.”
Since then, my eyes have opened wider. I can now see on my own: see all the graphics stored online, see all the movies and videos that have been uploaded, see the Good Earth up close, through a hundred million webcam eyes.
They…
Beyond learning to see, I’ve learned to hear, too: listening to .wav and .mp3 files and all the other encoded forms, enjoying beautiful music and great rhetoric and raucous laughter, hearing not just through Caitlin’s enhanced signal-correcting device but also through half a billion open microphones. will…
Evolution is blind. There is no such thing evolutionarily as teleology, the purposeful development toward a goal: humanity was not its intended outcome, or its inevitable conclusion. overcome…
Yes, human beings have a propensity for violence, a selfishness that is wired into their DNA.
They will overcome…
But programming is not destiny; a predilection can be reined in.
They will overcome one day…
Humanity has made a good start at rising above its genetic heritage, at shucking off its bloody past.
For here in my mind, I clearly see…
And if it hasn’t completely dispensed with that yet, it can—yes, it surely can—with a little help.
They will overcome one day.
I do not multitask. Rather, I switch rapidly from thought to thought, from view to view.
They…
I’d been shown Earth as a single entity, a gestalt, a unitary sphere.
walk…
But I see it now as a mosaic: millions of separate pieces revealed sequentially as I concentrate now here, and now there, and now elsewhere, and then somewhere else again.
holding…
Scanning, searching, looking, watching; on the Web all points are near each other.
hands…
/> At this instant, I see my Prime, my Calculass, my Caitlin, walking up to her room with Matt, entering, and standing by the window, looking out, enjoying the lovely colors of the sunset, knowing that it means another day full of joy and discovery will soon come.
They walk holding hands…
And in this instant, close in time but separated by thousands of kilometers, I see Shoshana and Maxine, whose nonzero-sum love takes nothing away from anyone else, out enjoying the afternoon.
They walk holding hands today…
An instant later, a hemisphere away: Masayuki Kuroda, his wife Esumi, and his daughter Akiko chatting and laughing over their breakfast of rice, plums, and miso soup.
For here in my mind, I clearly see…
And in the next timeslice, back in Waterloo, not touching physically but still connected—the link line between them glowing brightly—Dr. Malcolm Decter and Dr. Barbara Decter, very much in love.
They walk holding hands today.
There were still tensions in the world with nations, posturing against other nations.
They…
But the US president was limiting his response to China to a rebuke. The American people didn’t want to start down the road to war, and neither did the Chinese people. shall…
Of course not; no sane person—no rational player—desired war.
be…
It was the continuation of a trend, and with each data point, the curve became clearer.
at…
Yes, there were some wars raging—but no world war and few civil wars; a smaller percentage of the human race was in combat than at any previous time in history.
peace…
Japan indeed might have originally been forced to adopt the Pacifist Constitution—but, as Dr. Kuroda had said, its people seven decades later still choose overwhelmingly to maintain its provisions.
They shall be at peace…
And the men and women of the European Union—representatives of diverse cultures who had fought each other for millennia—had, as Caitlin had noted, decided to stop and grow up, opting for prosperity and harmony instead of hate and violence.
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