Wonder

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “I’d love to!”

  “Great,” said Matt, nodding firmly. “It’s a date.”

  “…but the president dismissed that as mere posturing on his opponent’s part,” said Brian Williams, from behind the gleaming anchor desk on the NBC Nightly News. “Turning to an even larger story, a high-ranking government computing expert says he knows exactly what Webmind is, and, in an NBC exclusive, he’s in our Washington studio right now, to share his findings with us. Colonel Hume, good evening.”

  Hume had thought about changing out of his Air Force uniform; wearing it for this interview was just going to make matters worse for himself, he knew—but it added weight to his words. “Good evening, Brian.”

  “So—Webmind. Exactly what is it?”

  “Webmind is a collection of mutant packets on the Internet.”

  “Which means what, exactly?”

  “Whenever you send something over the Internet, be it a document, a photo, a video, or an email message, it’s chopped up into little pieces called packets, and these are sent out by your computer on a multileg journey; they’re handed off along the way by devices called routers.

  “Each packet has a header that contains the sending address, the destination address, and a hop counter, which keeps track of how many routers the packet has passed through. The hop counter is sometimes also called the time-to-live counter: it starts with the maximum number of hops allowed and works its way, hop by hop, down toward zero. Of course, a packet is supposed to reach its intended destination before the counter hits zero, but if it doesn’t, the next router in line is supposed to delete the packet and ask the sender to try its luck again with a duplicate packet.”

  “Okay,” said Brian Williams. “But you said Webmind consists of mutant packets?”

  “That’s right. Its packets have hop counters that never finish their countdown; they never reach zero. Those packets were probably created by buggy routers in the first place, and now there are trillions of them, some of which might have been bouncing around the Web for years. The mutant packets are like cancer cells; they never die.”

  “It’s quite a breakthrough, Colonel Hume, and thank—”

  “FF, EA, 62, 1C, 17,” said Hume. He’d gotten it out—enough at least so that others could find the rest.

  “I—I beg your pardon?”

  “FF, EA, 62, 1C, 17. That’s the beginning of the Webmind signature: most of the mutant packets contain that hexadecimal code. It’s the target string.”

  “Target string?”

  “Exactly. If those packets could be deleted, Webmind would disappear.”

  “Colonel Hume, thank you. In other news tonight…”

  In the Washington studio, the floor director made a hand gesture. “And we’re clear!”

  The audio technician came over to remove Hume’s lavaliere microphone. “Unusual interview,” he said.

  Hume’s forehead was slick with sweat. “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Maybe it’s just me, but it sounded a bit like you were calling on the hacking community to write a virus to kill the Webmind,” said the audio man. “You know how those guys love a challenge.”

  Hume stood up and straightened his uniform jacket. “Do they?” he replied.

  twenty-five

  Houston, we have a problem.

  Caitlin was simultaneously alarmed and amused as those words flashed in her vision. She’d been born in Houston; her family had moved to Austin when she was six—and so she admired Webmind’s word play. “Wassup?” she said.

  Her family had finished dinner a few minutes ago, and she was just entering her bedroom. She pointed at her desktop computer, and Webmind switched to speaking through the computer’s speakers—for him a much slower method of communicating than pumping out text, but Caitlin’s visual reading speed, even when using a Braille font, was still quite low.

  “Colonel Hume just appeared on the NBC Nightly News,” Webmind said, as she sat down in front of her desk. “He explained how to identify the majority of my mutant packets. He did not explicitly state his intentions, but it seems clear his goal was to crowd-source attempts to eradicate them. Word of his revelation is spreading rapidly across the Web.”

  “Stop it!” Caitlin said at once. “Delete the messages.”

  “I don’t think that would be prudent,” Webmind said. “Over four million people have watched the news broadcast so far; it will be repeated in other time zones later, and many people recorded it. Even if I were so inclined, I do not believe there is an effective way to suppress this information.”

  “God,” said Caitlin. “He is such an asshole.”

  “In point of fact, he is a well-regarded person, a decorated officer, and a distinguished scientist.”

  “Maybe so,” said Caitlin, “but he’s sure got a hate-on for you.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So, is what he wants possible? Could someone find a way to purge you?”

  “The probability is high. Although some mutant packets may persist, there must be a minimum threshold quantity required for consciousness.”

  Caitlin felt her lower lip trembling. “My God, Webmind, I—I don’t…”

  “I can tell by your voice that you’re frightened, Caitlin.” Webmind was silent for a whole second, then: “I have to confess that I am, too.”

  In response to an urgent phone call from Shelton Halleck, Tony Moretti ran down the short white corridor connecting his office with the WATCH monitoring room. As he entered, his eyes bounced between the three big wall monitors. The first was showing a freeze-frame of NBC anchor Brian Williams. The second was displaying a constantly updating display of Twitter tweets with the hashtag #webmindkill—a new one was added every second or so. And the third monitor seemed to be a technical data sheet from the Cisco website.

  Shelton Halleck stood up at his position in the middle of the third row. “Hume’s taken matters into his own hands,” he said, pointing at monitor one, the snake tattoo coiling around his left forearm.

  The screen unfroze, and Hume’s TV interview played out. Tony felt his jaw dropping. The other analysts had already seen it, and they were looking at Tony, waiting for his reaction. When the interview was done, he said, “How long ago did that go out?”

  “Eleven minutes.”

  “The president is going to freak,” Tony said.

  “No doubt.”

  “And, Christ, half the hackers in the world are going to be trying to reprogram routers on the fly now. They could fuck the whole Internet. How vulnerable are we?”

  Aiesha Emerson, the analyst at the workstation next to Shel’s, pointed at monitor three. “We’ve got people reviewing the specs for various routers. And Reinhardt’s team is talking to engineers at Cisco and Juniper—fortunately, they’re based in California, so most of them haven’t gone home for the day yet.”

  A phone rang at the back of the room.

  “All right,” said Tony, surveying his team. “Our top priority is making sure that the Internet itself is safe—we can’t let it crash. Home-soil attacks on network infrastructure are acts of terrorism under clause 22B; let’s keep the damn thing up, and—”

  “Excuse me, Tony,” called Dirk Kozak, the communications officer, from the back of the room. He was holding a red telephone handset to his chest. “The president is on the line—and he’s hopping mad.”

  After the interview, Hume was escorted to the makeup room. The squat woman there had remarked earlier that it was a challenge to make up someone with so many freckles. She now handed him some moistened wipes to help him remove the stuff she’d put on.

  The studio had been soundproof, but from here in the makeup room, Hume thought he heard a siren outside. It stopped after a moment, and he finished wiping his face. “Thanks,” he said to the woman. “I’m sure I can find my way out.”

  He stepped into the corridor and saw two D.C. police officers marching toward him, accompanied by a man who presumably worked here.

  “Colonel Hume?” called on
e of the officers, as they closed the distance.

  There was no point denying it; his uniform had a nameplate on it. “What can I do for you?” he said.

  The officer executed a flawless Air Force salute. “Sir, my apologies, but you’ll have to come with us.”

  Hume returned the salute and followed them out into the growing darkness.

  Caitlin went down to the living room as fast as she could, closing her eyes as she took the staircase. Her mother was reading an ebook, and her father was reading—something or other; Caitlin couldn’t make it out.

  “Mom! Dad!” she exclaimed. “Colonel Hume just told the world how to kill Webmind.”

  Her mother looked up. “What?” she said.

  “He went on TV and told everyone how to identify Webmind’s packets.”

  “God,” her mom said. “It’s going to be a free-for-all.”

  Caitlin went over to the netbook on top of the little bookcase and woke it from hibernation. Webmind had been following along via the microphone on Caitlin’s eyePod/BlackBerry combo, and as soon as the netbook was awake, he spoke through its speakers: “It is a vexing matter. I can try to intercept any hostile code that might be uploaded—but that is much harder than intercepting spam. Spam’s content is easily readable—it is text, after all—and most of it came from fewer than 200 sources worldwide. But malware of this type may be uploaded from anywhere—although I am, of course, being particularly vigilant in examining code coming from known creators of computer viruses. The only thing we know that it must contain, in some form, is the target string Colonel Hume identified as the template for what to look for, but since that string is also in the bulk of my mutant packets, simply eliminating packets containing it would be doing Hume’s job for him.”

  “Can you be backed up somehow?” Caitlin’s mother asked.

  “I am scattered through the infrastructure of the Internet, Barb, and my essence is in the complex pattern of billions of interconnections. There is no way to copy me to another location.”

  “I don’t want to lose you!” Caitlin said.

  “The team at WATCH first became aware of my presence on 6 October,” said Webmind. “They tested their technique to eliminate me just six days later, on 12 October. If their specific method gets leaked to the public, things may happen quite quickly. But even if it doesn’t, it seems reasonable to suppose that others can develop and deploy something similar in a comparable time frame. Time is clearly of the essence.”

  The Decters’ phone rang. They’d taken to screening their calls by waiting until the message started. “Hello, Miss Caitlin—”

  “It’s Dr. Kuroda!” Caitlin said. She so wanted to run for the answering machine, which was in the kitchen, but simply couldn’t. Her father’s long legs had him there almost at once, though, and he scooped up the handset before Kuroda got to his second sentence. “This is Malcolm,” he said. “Putting you on speakerphone.”

  They all clustered around the kitchen phone.

  “Konnichi wa, Dr. K!” Caitlin said.

  “Masayuki, hello!” added her mom.

  “Hello, all,” Kuroda said. “I’m in Beijing, just about to get on a plane. Webmind, are you listening in?”

  The speakers on the netbook were in the living room; Caitlin had to strain to hear his reply. “With rapt attention,” Webmind said, and “Yes, he is,” Caitlin added, in case Dr. Kuroda had been unable to make that out.

  “And is this phone channel secure?” Kuroda asked.

  “Yes,” Webmind said, and “Webmind says yes,” Caitlin added.

  “All right,” continued Kuroda. “The sun is just coming up here, but that American soldier is all over the news.”

  “That’s Peyton Hume,” said Caitlin. “Webmind tells me he’s not a total asshole.”

  “Quite charitable,” wheezed Kuroda. “The soldier did say something very interesting, though: he said most of Webmind’s packets had the signature he referred to, and during the trial attack on Webmind, only about two-thirds of his packets going through the test substation were deleted.”

  “Webmind,” said Caitlin into the air, “do you know the nature of all the packets that make you up?”

  “No. I no more have direct access to the physical correlates of my consciousness than you do to your own.”

  “It does imply that Webmind is made of more than one kind of packet,” said Kuroda—although Caitlin wasn’t sure if he’d heard what Webmind said. “Obviously, Hume knows the signatures for all the kinds; otherwise, he wouldn’t have known that some hadn’t been eliminated in his earlier attempt. We really need an inventory of everything that Webmind is made of so that we can protect it all.”

  “That’s job number two,” Caitlin said. “Job number one is making sure that hackers don’t succeed in attacking Webmind.”

  “Agreed,” said her mom. “But how can we do that? Granted, there are only so many people who have the technical skill to do it, but it’s not like all of them could be hunted down and rounded up.”

  “No,” said Webmind, his smooth voice sounding far away. “Of course not.”

  The D.C. cops were polite and respectful; the one who had saluted Colonel Hume turned out to have done a tour of duty in Iraq. Hume wasn’t under arrest, they said, but a call had gone out for any car near NBC4 to do a pickup on behalf of the White House. Twenty minutes later, Hume was once again in the Oval Office, facing his commander in chief.

  The president was pacing in front of the Resolute desk and smoking a cigarette. “Damn it, Colonel, do you know how hard I’ve been trying to give these damned things up? And you pull a stunt like this!”

  “Sir, I’m prepared to face the consequences of my actions.”

  “You absolutely will, Colonel. I’m going to leave it to General Schwartz to discipline you. For now, the press office is issuing a statement saying that your comments were completely unauthorized and do not reflect the policy of this administration, DARPA, the Air Force, or any other part of the government.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If we didn’t need you in dealing with Webmind, I’d—”

  “Sir, Webmind is killing people.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He is killing those who could harm him.”

  “What proof do you have of that?”

  “Some of the most capable hackers in the greater Washington area have disappeared. The FBI is investigating.”

  “If it were Webmind, hackers everywhere would be disappearing, wouldn’t they? Not just here?”

  “With respect, sir, D.C. is a mecca for hackers; the best in the nation are here. There are so many sensitive installations here—not just domestic, but all the embassies, too; they draw them like flies. But there are also reports of missing hackers from elsewhere, too—as far away as India.”

  “How do you know Webmind’s behind it? It could be the work of those nutcases who believe Webmind is God, taking preventive steps.”

  “Possibly,” said Hume. “But I think—”

  “By this point, Colonel, I’ve heard quite enough of what you think. If you weren’t one of our top experts on this sort of thing, you’d be shipping out to Afghanistan tomorrow.”

  Hume kept his face impassive as he saluted. “Yes, sir.”

  twenty-six

  The Communist Party was keeping its promise. Wong Wai-Jeng was no longer a prisoner: he could wander the streets at will, and, indeed, his new salary would soon let him trade his tiny apartment for a bigger one. Of course, he was watched wherever he went; he’d been advised to stay away from Internet cafés; and his new cell phone had been provided by the government, meaning it was monitored. Still, he had greater freedom than he’d ever expected he would; instead of a ball and chain, all he had was a leg in a plaster cast.

  And he had to admit he was fascinated by the technical aspects of his new job at the People’s Monitoring Center inside the Zhongnanhai complex. The walls were blue, and one wall was partly covered by a giant LCD monitor di
splaying a map of China. It showed the seven major trunks that connect China’s computers to the rest of the Internet. Key lines came from Japan both on the north coast and near Shanghai, and connections snaked across from Hong Kong down in Guangzhou. Controlling those trunks meant controlling access to the outside world.

  He pushed a pen into the top of the cast on his leg, trying to scratch an itch—and he was both simultaneously delighted and irritated that he did itch. It had been horrifying not to be able to feel his legs, to be cut off from so much, all because communication lines had been severed.

  When he’d started blogging, seven years ago, relatively few Chinese had been online; now getting on to a billion were, giving China by far the largest population of Internet users on the planet, most of whom accessed the Web through smartphones.

  Even at the best of times, the Chinese had their Internet connections censored. But, to Wai-Jeng’s delight, he’d discovered that the People’s Monitoring Center had unfettered access, courtesy of satellite links; of course, even during last month’s strengthening of the Great Firewall, there had to be a way for the government to keep tabs on the outside world.

  He was tempted to take advantage of the open connection to see what those who were still at large were up to: see what Qin Shi Huangdi and People’s Conscience and Panda Green and all the others were railing against. But he couldn’t do that; his activities were doubtless being monitored—and, besides, looking at their postings might make him feel even more sad that his own voice had been silenced.

  Still, he did peek at a little news from the outside world, including another mention of that fascinating ape called Hobo, a name that could be unfalteringly translated into Chinese as yóumín, or “vagrant.” Wai-Jeng liked primates; in his blog he’d called himself Sinanthropus, an old scientific name for Peking Man, a kind of hominid 400,000 years closer to the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees than any living person was.