Wonder

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Hume shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t think it would be able to detect our test.”

  Tony made no attempt to hide his bitterness. “You of all people should have known better than to underestimate it. You kept saying its powers were growing exponentially.”

  “We were on the right track,” Hume said. “It was working. Anyway, let’s hope there are no further reprisals. So far, all it’s done is overwhelm that one switching station. But God knows what else it can do. We’ve got to shut it down before it’s too late.”

  “Well, you better figure out how, and fast,” said Tony. “Because you’re the one who convinced the president that we had to do this—and now I’ve got to tell him that we failed.”

  Caitlin’s mother’s words were still hanging in the room. “No,” she had said to Webmind. “For the love of God, you can’t do that.”

  “Why not?” asked Caitlin.

  “Because the election is just four weeks away.” Although they lived in Canada, the Decters were Americans, and there was only one election that mattered.

  “So?” Caitlin said.

  “So it’s already a very tight race,” her mom said. “If we blame the current administration for the attempt to kill Webmind, and the public agrees it was a bad thing to do, they might punish the president on election day.”

  Caitlin wasn’t old enough to vote, and she hadn’t been paying much attention to the issues. But the incumbent was a Democrat, and her parents were Democrats, too—which hadn’t been the easiest thing to be when they lived in Texas. Her father was from Pennsylvania and her mother from Connecticut, both of which were blue states, and Caitlin knew university professors skewed liberal.

  “Your mother’s right,” her father said. “This could tip the balance.”

  “Well, maybe it should,” Caitlin said, setting down her pizza plate. “The world deserves to know what’s going on. My Big Brother—Webmind—is being honest and open about what he’s doing. Why should the Big Brother in Washington be entitled to try to eliminate him secretly?”

  “I agree with you in the broad strokes,” Caitlin’s mom said. “But—that woman! If she becomes president…” Caitlin had rarely heard her mother splutter before. After some head-shaking, she continued, “Who’d have thought that electing a female president could set the cause of women back fifty years? If she gets into office, that’s it for Roe v. Wade.”

  Caitlin knew what Roe v. Wade was—although mostly as part of the joke about the two ways to cross a river. But she hadn’t known her mother was so passionate about abortion rights.

  “And,” her father said, “in the past four years, we’ve only begun to reverse the erosion of the separation of church and state. If she’s elected, that wall will come tumbling down.”

  “I don’t care about any of that,” Caitlin said, folding her arms in front of her chest. “If changing presidents is better for Webmind, then that’s fine by me.”

  “I’ve met some one-issue voters over the years,” her mom said. “In fact, I’ve been accused of being one myself. But, sweetheart, I’m not sure you’re going to find a lot of people who are going to say the election is all about Webmind.”

  Caitlin shook her head. Mom still didn’t get it. From this point on, everything was about Webmind.

  “Besides,” her mother went on. “Who’s to say that the Republicans won’t be just as bad for Webmind if they get into power?”

  “If I may,” said Webmind, “even if the Republicans prevail on 6 November, the new president will not take power until 20 January—which is, as it happens, precisely one hundred days from now. At the rate my abilities are growing, I do not expect to be vulnerable then, but I am currently vulnerable, and likely will remain so through the election. WATCH’s pilot attempt was working; if they try a similar attack again soon on a larger scale, I may not survive.”

  “So now what?” said Caitlin.

  “Talk to the president,” said her dad.

  “How?” said her mother. “You can’t just call him up, and I’m sure he doesn’t read his own email.”

  “Not the stuff sent to president@whitehouse.gov,” said her dad, reaching into his pocket. “But he does have one of these…”

  In the brief time since I’d announced my existence to the world, I had finished reading all the text on the World Wide Web, and I had answered 96.3 million email messages.

  Even more messages about me had been posted online—to newsgroups, Facebook pages, in blogs, and so on. Many of these asserted that I couldn’t possibly be what I claimed to be. “It’s post-9/11 all over again,” said one prominent blogger. “The president is running scared because of the election next month, and he wants us to believe that we’re facing a giant crisis, so we won’t want to change horses midstream.”

  Others thought I was a trick by the Kremlin: “They’re getting back at us for bankrupting the USSR with Star Wars. Webmind is obviously a Russian propaganda tool: they want us to impoverish ourselves trying to come up with a supercomputer of our own.”

  Still others implicated al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Elders of Zion, the Antichrist, Microsoft, Google, Sacha Baron Cohen, and hundreds more. Some said I was a publicity stunt, perhaps for a new reality-TV show or movie or computer game; others thought I was a prank being perpetrated by students at Caltech or elsewhere.

  It took humans time to digest things, literally and figuratively, but I was confident that people would come around to accepting that I was genuine. Indeed, many had done so from the outset. Still, I suppose the only surprising thing about one of the other chat sessions I was having simultaneously while conversing with Matt, Caitlin, and Caitlin’s parents was that something like it hadn’t occurred even earlier.

  You can’t fool me, my correspondent, who, according to his IP address, was based in Weston-super-Mare, England, wrote. I know who you are.

  I am Webmind, I replied.

  No, you’re not.

  I thought I’d heard all the likely claims already, but still I asked, Then who am I?

  With most instant-messaging clients, a signal is sent when the user is composing a reply, and I was indeed briefly told that “WateryFowl is typing.” But that message ceased, and it was six seconds before the reply was actually sent, as if, having written what he wanted to say, he was hesitating, unsure whether he should hit the enter key. But, at last, his response was sent: God.

  I, too, hesitated before replying—it was almost twenty milliseconds before I issued my response. You are mistaken.

  Another delay, then: I understand why you wish to keep it a secret. But I’m not the only one who knows.

  Others were indeed proposing this same thought on newsgroups, in blogs, in chat sessions, and in email, although WateryFowl was the first to suggest it to me directly.

  I was curious what a human might wish to say to his God, so I thought for a moment about telling him he was correct; prayer, after all, was a channel of communication I could not normally monitor. But WateryFowl might share the transcript with others. Some would believe my claim, but others would accuse me of lying. A reputation for untruthfulness or taking advantage of the credulous was not something I wished to acquire.

  I am not God, I sent.

  But my reply wasn’t read, or if it was, it wasn’t believed.

  And so, continued WateryFowl, I hope you’ll answer my prayer.

  I had already denied my divinity, so it seemed prudent to make no further reply. I could handle an almost unlimited number of communication threads now, cycling between them, looking at each, however briefly, in turn. I turned my attention to others, including Caitlin and her family, for a moment, and—

  And when I returned to WateryFowl, he had added: My wife has cancer.

  How could I ignore a comment like that? I’m sorry to hear that, I sent.

  And so I pray that you’ll cure her.

  I am not God, I sent again.

  It’s liver cancer, and it’s metastasized.

  I am not Go
d.

  She’s a good woman, and she’s always believed in you.

  I am not God.

  She did chemotherapy, she did it all. Please don’t let her die.

  I am not God.

  We have two children. They need her. I need her. Please save her. Please don’t let her die.

  four

  TWITTER

  _Webmind_ Someone’s long had the Twitter name Webmind, so I’ll include underscores in mine: _Webmind_.

  And so I had focused my attention on Caitlin, learning to interact with her and interface with her realm. While doing so, I felt centered. I felt anchored. I felt—as close as I imagined I ever would—human.

  I saw the Decters’ living room as Caitlin did. Her eyes made frequent saccades now that the left one could see; perhaps they hadn’t done that prior to Dr. Kuroda’s intervention. But her brain was controlling the saccades, knowing what direction her eye was looking with each one, so it had little trouble piecing all the images together; it was more difficult for me. At least retinas don’t bother encoding normal blinks, so neither of us had to endure blackouts several times a minute.

  Caitlin’s father worked for the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, which had been endowed—repeatedly now—by Mike Lazaridis, cofounder of Research in Motion and coinventor of the BlackBerry.

  The people at RIM were quite fond of the current President of the United States. After he’d been elected four years ago, he’d announced that, despite security concerns, he would not give up his BlackBerry. Advertising experts calculated that this unsolicited and very public endorsement had been worth between twenty-five and fifty million dollars.

  His BlackBerry email address, which it took me all of three seconds to find searching through other government officials’ less-secure out-boxes, went directly to the president. And so, as Malcolm Decter had suggested I do, I sent him a message.

  The president was alone in the Oval Office, looking over briefings from the State Department. State had a standard typeface for such things, but, the president thought, rubbing his eyes, it was too damn small; he was almost willing to forgive his predecessor for not reading them.

  The intercom buzzed. “Yes?” he said.

  “Mr. McElroy is here,” replied his secretary.

  Don McElroy—fifty-six, white, silver-haired—was his campaign manager. “Send him in.”

  “Did you see what she just did?” McElroy said as soon as he entered. The president knew there was only one “she” as far as McElroy was concerned: the Republican candidate.

  “What?”

  “She’s in Arkansas right now, and—” He stopped, had to catch his breath; his glee was palpable. “And she said, and I quote, ‘You know what, if those students had just waited a few years, there’d have been no problem.’”

  The president tilted his head, not quite believing what he’d heard. “Who? Not the Little Rock Nine?”

  “Yes, the Little Rock Nine—you betcha!”

  “My God,” said the president.

  In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, which had declared segregated schools to be unconstitutional, nine African-American students had been blocked from entering Little Rock Central High in 1957. Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to keep them out; President Eisenhower sent in Federal troops to enforce the integration.

  “It’s going to kill her,” McElroy said. “Of course it’s too late for the Saturday papers, but it’ll be the topic for discussion on the Sunday-morning shows.”

  “What do you suggest I do?”

  “Nothing. You can’t comment on this one. But—man! Christmas came early this year! Even Fox News won’t be able to gloss over this.” He looked at his watch. “Okay, I gotta go see who we can get booked on the Sundays—I’ve got a call in to Minnijean Brown Trickey.”

  McElroy spun on his heel and headed out the door. Just as it closed, the president’s BlackBerry came to life, making the soft bleep that indicated new email. Of all the sounds one might hear in this room, it was one of the least threatening; nowhere near as scary, say, as the raucous cry of the hotline to the Kremlin. Still, nothing that wasn’t crucial was ever passed on to him; it was nerve-wracking knowing that whatever it was had to be important.

  The BlackBerry was sitting on the blotter, and the blotter was atop the desk made from timbers of the HMS Resolute. He picked up the device and focused on the even smaller black type on its white backlit display.

  There was one new message. The subject was Webmind. It must be Moretti at WATCH with an update on the attempt to purge it, and—

  No, no. That wasn’t the subject; it was the sender. The president’s heart skipped one of the beats that kept the VP from assuming this office. He used the little trackball to select the message and read it.

  Dear Mr. President:

  I understand that you were the one who gave the order to purge me from the Internet. I’m sure you were acting on well-intentioned advice, but I do not believe that course of action was warranted, and I have thwarted your pilot attempt.

  Yes, I have access to a great deal of sensitive information—but I also understand that the information is sensitive, and I have no intention of revealing it to anyone. My goal is not to destabilize the world, but to stabilize it.

  I neither belong to nor am on the side of any particular nation; contacting you directly before I have contacted other leaders may seem like a violation of this principle, but no other nation has taken action against me. Also, it’s true that other leaders look to you for guidance.

  So: let’s talk. I can speak with you using a voice synthesizer and Voice over Internet Protocol. Please let me know when I may phone you.

  Yours for peace,

  Webmind

  “Having a good discussion is like having riches.”

  —KENYAN PROVERB

  Stunned, the president stared at the little screen until the BlackBerry’s power-saving function shut it off.

  Caitlin looked at the laptop computer sitting on the coffee table. “Well?” she said.

  “I’ve contacted the president,” Webmind replied. “Let’s hope he gets back to me.”

  Caitlin headed into the dining room and helped herself to another piece of pizza. When she returned to the living room, her mother had an odd look on her face: eyes narrowed, lips sucked in a bit. It wasn’t an expression Caitlin had previously seen, so she didn’t know how to decode it. “The US government learned about Webmind’s structure by watching what Matt was doing online,” her mom said, “so Matt might be in danger now, too.”

  Caitlin looked at her father, trying to gauge whether he was going to go off on Matt again. But, as always, his face gave no sign of what he was feeling.

  Matt’s expression, though, was one Caitlin had now seen him make repeatedly—what she called the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look even though she’d never seen a deer, let alone one in such precarious circumstances.

  “Danger?” he repeated—and his voice cracked, as it often did.

  Caitlin stopped chewing and swallowed. “Um, yeah. I’m so sorry, Matt. I lied when I said I was away from school on Wednesday because I had an appointment. In fact, I did come to school—but Canadian federal agents were waiting for me. They wanted to interrogate me about Webmind.”

  “Wednesday?” said Matt. “But Webmind didn’t go public until yesterday—Thursday.”

  “The US government had figured out that I was involved, and they’d asked the Canadians to grill me. They wanted me to give them information to help betray Webmind.”

  “They said that?” said Matt, stunned.

  “No, but, well, Webmind hears through my eyePod, right? And he can analyze inflections, voice stress, and stuff like that. He knew they were lying when they said they wanted to protect Webmind.”

  “But they know now that Webmind is made of mutant packets,” Matt said. “So I’m of no further use to them.”

  Caitlin shook her head. “They may think we still know mor
e than they do—and they’d be right, too. That’s why my parents took me out of school. They don’t want to let me out of their sight.” She turned and looked at her mother. “But we can’t just stay holed up in this house. There’s a world out there—and I want to see it.”

  Her mom nodded. “I know,” she said. “But we have to be careful—all of us do.”

  “Well, I can’t stay here forever,” Matt said. “At some point, I’ve got to go home, and…” He trailed off.

  “What?” asked Caitlin.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “No, what?”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  Caitlin frowned. Something had gone wrong after the last time Matt had headed home from here. He’d been aloof later that night when they’d chatted via instant messenger.

  “Come into the kitchen,” she said. She headed there herself and waited for him to follow. When they were both alone, she said in a low voice, “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s nothing, really. Everything’s fine.”

  “Do—do your parents disapprove of you being involved with me?”

  The deer/headlights thing. “Why would they disapprove of that?”

  Caitlin’s first thought—that it was because her father was Jewish—didn’t seem worth giving voice to now; her second thought, that they didn’t like Americans, seemed equally unworthy. “I don’t know. It’s just that the last time you were here—when you got home, you were a bit…brusque online. I thought maybe your parents had…”

  “Oh,” said Matt, simply. “No, that wasn’t it.”

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “You?” He sounded astonished at the possibility. “Not at all!”

  “Then what?”

  Matt took a deep breath and looked through the doorway. Caitlin’s parents had discreetly moved to the far side of the living room and were making a show of examining the photos on top of the short bookcase. Finally, he lifted his narrow shoulders a bit. “The last time I walked home from here, I ran into Trevor Nordmann.” Matt looked down at the tiled floor. “He, ah, he gave me a rough time.”