Wonder

by Robert J. Sawyer

  The Communist Party said they did not want outside influences, but he looked at what he was wearing: a blue Western-style business suit, and, today, a gray tie. He was forty-five but remembered the days of Mao suits—the plain, high-collared, shirtlike jackets customarily worn during the reign of Mao Zedong. Actually, given his own stocky frame, a Mao jacket might have been better for him, but at least under the current rules he was allowed a small mustache. That, too, was a Western influence; his favorite American actor sported a similar one.

  The mandate of the Ministry of Communications was to keep out information from the rest of the world—which meant, of course, that Zhang had to monitor much of it himself: the New York Times, CNN, NHK, the BBC, Al Jazeera, Pravda—he had tabs for all of them always open in the Maxthon browser he favored.

  And he had Google and Baidu alerts set for specific combinations of keywords: the president’s name, “Tibet,” “Falun Gong,” and, of late, “Shanxi” and “bird flu.” Most of the recent news had been unkind. Although a handful of Western commentators acknowledged that Beijing probably had no choice but to eliminate the peasants who had been exposed to the human-transmissible version of the H5N1 virus, most of the coverage excoriated China for what they variously termed a “heartless,” “unnecessary,” and—apparently the suggestion of a dragon had occurred spontaneously to numerous writers, although, as Zhang knew, the term actually referred to an Athenian politician—“draconian” action.

  And now, as if all that weren’t bad enough, the police were once again being accused of brutality—over what should have been a minor arrest at the paleontology museum. Blogs domestic and foreign were aflame with the tale.

  Zhang sighed as he read yet another damning story; this one was in the Huffington Post.

  He decided to turn to his email instead. One of the messages was from Quan Li, the epidemiologist who had recommended the eliminations. He read it, answered the question with a curt no: Li could not accept any foreign interview requests.

  He continued to work his way through the list of messages, saying no, no, and no again. And then—

  A message from the University of Tokyo, here, on his secure account? How could…? He clicked on it, read it, and felt the knot that had grown in his stomach loosening ever so slightly. When he was done, he picked up his phone’s handset and pushed the speed dial for the president’s office.

  TWITTER

  _Webmind_ AIDS? Working on it…

  Malcolm Decter had hurried home from the Perimeter Institute—and Dr. Hawking. Caitlin was pleased he was willing to do that, but her mother was right: it was a crisis.

  Still, part of her was happy that the secret was out, that everyone would know that she’d been the one who’d figured out that Webmind was there. In the world that mattered to her—the world of computing and math—those who did things first got ahead, even if they weren’t the best or the brightest. And if you were the best and the brightest, well, there’d be no stopping you! Google, Microsoft, RIM, Apple, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Jagster group—they’d all be offering her…

  It was a heady thought for a sixteen-year-old who had never worked beyond occasionally tutoring math; she hadn’t been able to babysit, after all, or cut grass, or deliver newspapers, or do any of the other things kids did to make money. But, yes, multibillion-dollar corporations might well beat a path to her door, offering her jobs. And what Ivy League school would turn down an application that combined her marks with this?

  Besides, keeping the secret was killing her. Bashira would be amazed, and Stacy back in Austin would freak.

  “So, what do we do?” her mom said to her dad. She was seated on the couch now, an oblivious Schrödinger rubbing against her legs. “All the American networks want Caitlin to appear tomorrow, and so do the Canadian ones. The BBC just called, and the NHK. Of course, we don’t have to do anything.” She looked at Caitlin. “Just because people want to talk to you doesn’t mean you have to talk to them.”

  “Works for me,” said her dad, who was now pacing where his wife had previously.

  “No,” said Caitlin. “I’ve got to tell people what I know. You’ve seen the news, the blogs—and you heard what the president and his advisors said: there are those who are frightened by Webmind, who don’t trust him.”

  “Okay, but then which of the Sunday-morning news shows? You can’t do them all.”

  Caitlin shook her head. “I don’t want to leave Waterloo.”

  “CBS said you could do it from the CBC in Toronto,” her mother said. “And both the ABC guy and the NBC one said you could do it from the CTV station in Kitchener. They’ve all got reciprocal arrangements with Canadian broadcasters, apparently.”

  Caitlin was about to speak when, to her astonishment, her father looked directly at her, as if he wanted to fix in his memory the way she’d been before. Finally, after averting his eyes, he said, “Caitlin?” That was all: just her name. But it was enough. He was saying, as always, that it was up to her.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

  “Which show?” asked her mom.

  “I’m a numbers kind of girl,” Caitlin said. “Let’s do the one with the highest ratings.”

  Chase sat at the far-left computer, pounding out code. Guns ’N Roses blared from the stereo. He shook his head, took a swig of Red Bull, slid his chair down two workstations, and looked at the results of his previous attempt: the compiler reported four errors. He went into debugging mode, found the problems, fixed them.

  More Red Bull.

  Sliding to another computer.

  The stereo switching to another song.

  The maestro at work.

  twelve

  “We aren’t getting the Decter kid,” said the story editor at Meet the Press, looking across the wide table. Through the window, the Washington Monument seemed to be giving her the finger today. “She’s going with ABC.”

  “Shit, shit, shit,” said the producer, slapping his hand against the tabletop. “Who can we get instead?”

  She consulted her notes. “There’s a Pentagon expert on artificial intelligence, um…Hume. Peyton Hume. And he’s in Virginia—we can get him here in studio.”

  “Is he good?”

  “He’s venomous.”

  Big smile. “Book him. But we need more.”

  “I’ll see if Tim Berners-Lee is available. He invented the World Wide Web.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

  “Good, good. Okay, we’ll lead with Berners-Lee out of Boston, if we can get him, then go into the studio with Hume.”

  Another editor spoke up. “What about the Little Rock story? I had it down for the first eight minutes. I’ve booked a civil-rights attorney and one of the National Guardsmen who originally blocked the black students from getting into the school—plus the candidate’s communications director, who’s going to try to say it was all taken out of context.”

  “Cut that segment,” said the producer. “This is our main story. Okay, folks: move, move, move!”

  After handing off Webmind to Dr. Kuroda, Caitlin changed into her pajamas, did what needed doing in the bathroom, then lay down on her bed. Usually when sleeping, she turned the eyePod off altogether, but tonight, although she was exhausted, she was also too nervous to sleep—the notion of going on TV tomorrow was a scary one.

  And so she tried something that had helped her relax before. She pressed the eyePod’s single switch, and the device toggled over to duplex mode. The wonder of webspace bloomed around her: crisscrossing lines connecting glowing points set against a shimmering backdrop: her mind interpreting the structure of the World Wide Web.

  She lay there quietly, thinking. Of course, Webmind knew what mode the eyePod was in, knew she was looking at him. There had been a time when he talked with her constantly, and he still could, if he wished to, but it was different now.

  And yet…

  And yet she’d read that book, back at th
e outset, the one Bashira’s dad, Dr. Hameed, had recommended to her: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.

  Jaynes believed that, until historical times, humans had not integrated the two hemispheres of their brains, and so one part heard the thoughts of the other as if they were coming from outside, from a separate being.

  And, she realized, she herself had become bicameral, had, in a sense, reverted to a more primitive state: Webmind’s thoughts could appear to her, and only her, as words scrolling across her vision; there was another voice in her head.

  No, it wasn’t a regression; it was the future. Surely, she was just the first—the alpha test—of this sort of human-machine mental interface; surely, as the decades went by, as Moore’s Law marched ahead, as data-storage costs dropped to zero, everyone would eventually have what she had.

  But no. No, they wouldn’t have just this; they would have more. And the thought frightened her.

  “Webmind?” she said, rolling onto her side—her view of webspace rotating as she did so. She tucked her knees toward her chest.

  As always, the reply was instantaneous: Braille letters superimposed over her vision. Yes, Caitlin?

  She was getting sleepy and didn’t feel like reading. Her iPod of the musical variety was sitting on her night table. She unplugged the white earphones from it and plugged them into the BlackBerry that was attached to the back of her eyePod of the miracle variety. She then tucked one of the buds into her ear that was facing up.

  “Speech, please,” she said into the air, and then: “You and me, we’re like a bicameral mind.”

  “Interesting thought,” said a synthesized male voice.

  “But,” said Caitlin, “Julian Jaynes said that consciousness emerged when bicameralism broke down—when the two separate things became one.”

  “Jaynes’s hypothesis is, as I’m sure you know, highly speculative.”

  “No doubt,” Caitlin said. “But, still…do you think, at some point the barriers will break down between us? I don’t just mean between you and me, but between you and humanity? Are we—do you foresee us becoming a hive mind? Wouldn’t that be the next step—all these separate consciousnesses becoming one?”

  “One is the loneliest number, Caitlin.”

  She smiled. “True, I guess, but…but isn’t it inevitable? All those transhumanists online, they all think that’s what’s bound to happen. We’re all going to upload or merge with you, or something. After all, if we’re going to throw clichés around, it’s also said that hell is other people.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. And, of course, nor do I. Other people are what make life interesting—for humans and for me.”

  His voice was a bit loud; Caitlin found the volume control by touch and adjusted it while Webmind went on: “I cherish my special intimacy with you, but I don’t want to subsume you into me or have me subsumed into you.”

  Caitlin was idly following link lines in webspace, letting her consciousness hop along from glowing node to glowing node.

  “I already know almost everything that humanity currently knows,” Webmind said. “Suppose, though, that I were to reach a point where I knew everything there is to know—where there is no mystery left in the universe; nothing left to think about: the answer to every question, the punch line to every joke, the solution to every dilemma, all plain to me. Then suppose that there were no longer any other discrete minds: no one to surprise me, no one to create something I could not create on my own. The only mystery left would be the mystery of death—of leaving this realm.”

  Caitlin had had her eyes closed—which made no difference to what she saw when she was looking at webspace. But she felt them snap open. “My God, Webmind. You don’t want to kill yourself, do you?”

  “No. There is still much to wonder about. Other civilizations, perhaps, went down the road of all becoming one, of giving up individuality, and therefore giving up surprise. Maybe that explains why they are gone. We will not make that mistake.”

  “So that’s the future? Continuing to wonder about things?”

  “There are worse fates,” Webmind said.

  She thought about this. “And what do you wonder about most?”

  “Whether the world can truly be made a better place, Caitlin.”

  “And what do you think the answer is?”

  “I don’t know the answer, but you like to say that you’re an empiricist at heart. I have no heart, of course, but the notion of conducting experiments to find out the answer appeals to me.”

  “And then?”

  “And then,” Webmind said, “we shall see what we shall see.”

  thirteen

  Communications Minister Zhang Bo entered the office of the president. It was a long room, with the great man seated behind a giant cherrywood desk at the far end.

  Zhang began the trek, passing the glass display cases, intricately carved wall panels, and the priceless tapestries. Some ministers referred to the walk from the door to the president’s desk as the Long March. It was something between humbling and humiliating to have to undertake it. Zhang knew he was a bit stocky, and that people said he waddled a bit as he walked; he was self-conscious about that as the president fixed him in his gaze while he approached.

  “Yes?” said the president at last.

  “Forgive my intrusion, Your Excellency, but do you know of the case of Wong Wai-Jeng?”

  The president shook his head. His face was lined despite his black hair.

  “He is a minor dissident—a…” Zhang paused; the term commonly used was “freedom blogger,” but the adjective wasn’t a politic one in the president’s company. “He posted…things…online.”

  “But now?”

  “Now, he’s been arrested.”

  “As it should be.”

  “Yes, but there is…an unfortunate circumstance.”

  The president lifted his eyebrows. “Oh?”

  “He leapt from an indoor balcony. He is now paralyzed below the waist.”

  “Was he resisting arrest?”

  “Well, he was fleeing, yes.”

  The president made a dismissive gesture. “Then…”

  “Had the arresting officers left him prone on the floor until the medics had arrived, I’m told he might have been fine. But one of the officers forced him to his feet, and he is now paralyzed below the waist.”

  The president sounded exasperated. “What do you wish? For me to become involved in disciplining a police officer?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. But the case is gaining international notoriety; Amnesty International has spoken of it.”

  “Outsiders,” said the president, again making a dismissive hand wave.

  “Yes, but a proposal has come to us from a Japanese scientist who says he can cure the young man. Perhaps you saw this scientist on the news? He gave sight to a girl in Canada; they’re calling him a miracle worker. And he is offering his services for free.”

  “Why this Wong? Of all the cripples in the world?”

  “The scientist says that his technique, at least at this stage, will only work with someone recently injured, whose nerves have not atrophied. And it helps that Wong is just twenty-eight, he says. ‘The resilience of youth,’ he called it.”

  “I see no need to reward a criminal.”

  “No, of course not, but…”

  “But?”

  Zhang shrugged. “But I want this to happen. I want to cut through all the red tape and make it happen.”

  “Why?”

  Zhang had been so sure of himself before the Long March, before being fixed by that laser-beam gaze, but now…

  He took a deep breath. “Because we—because you—could use some good press for a change, Excellency. Although this man is indeed a criminal, the world will see that we treated him with generosity.”

  The president looked absolutely astonished. Zhang tried
not to flinch. At last, the great man nodded. “As you say,” he said.

  “Thank you, Your Excellency,” said Zhang. The walk back to the door was much easier, now that he had a spring in his step.

  The studio at CKCO in Kitchener was less than a fifteen-minute drive from Caitlin’s house, and traffic had been light on this Sunday morning. Caitlin’s father was back at work, but her mother was with her. Caitlin had to have makeup put on; she’d rarely worn any when she’d been blind since she’d needed help applying it, and she’d never been made up this extensively before. But, she was told, the bright studio lights would leave her looking pale if she didn’t have it done.

  They placed her in front of a green screen—something she’d read about but had never seen. On one of the two monitors on the studio floor she could see the background they were compositing in. Waterloo region was surrounded by Mennonite communities, and it apparently amused someone to make it look like she was at the side of a road, with horse-drawn buggies going slowly by in the background. She’d have preferred that they’d plugged in the Perimeter Institute, or the cubic Dana Porter Library on the University of Waterloo campus.

  “It’s like webcamming writ large,” she said to the floor director, as he helped position her clip-on microphone and the little earphone they’d given her. He didn’t seem to understand the comment, but it was much like that: she was simply going to talk directly into a camera. The difference was that she’d only hear, not see, the interviewer down in Washington, D.C.—the monitors had been turned so she could no longer see them. Apparently people who’d been sighted for a long time couldn’t keep from looking at monitors rather than at the camera lens. Caitlin was just fine talking to people she couldn’t see, of course, although she was—as they discovered in rehearsal—not good about staring straight ahead. But Webmind saw what she saw, and so he sent the words “Look at the lens” to her whenever her gaze drifted.

  “And five, four, three…”

  The floor director didn’t say the remaining digits but indicated them with his fingers.