Wonder

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Caitlin led the way into the living room and motioned for Bashira to sit on the white leather couch. Caitlin took the matching easy chair, facing her friend.

  “So, tell me everything,” Bashira said.

  Caitlin had discovered that she took after her father a bit. He didn’t look at people as he was talking to them, and she had a hard time focusing her own attention on any one thing. But she made a conscious effort to lock her eyes on Bashira because countless novels had taught her that this was a way to convey sincerity. She’d just die if Bashira laughed in response.

  “Matthew Reese is my boyfriend,” Caitlin said softly but firmly, “and you have to like him.”

  Caitlin saw Bashira’s mouth quirk a bit, as if words had started to come out but had been vetoed.

  Caitlin went on. “He’s good to me, and he’s kind, and he’s brilliant.”

  At last, Bashira nodded. “As long as he makes you happy, babe, that’s fine with me. But if he breaks your heart, I’ll break his nose!”

  Caitlin laughed, got up, closed the distance between them, and hugged the still-seated Bashira again. “Thanks, Bash.”

  “For sure,” Bashira said. “He’s your BF and you’re my BFF. That makes him, um—”

  “Your B-squared F-cubed,” said Caitlin, sitting down now on the couch next to Bashira.

  “Exactly!” said Bash. “Or my BF once removed.” She sounded a little wistful; Bashira’s parents wouldn’t let her have a boyfriend of her own. But then she lowered her voice and looked up the stairs to make sure the office door was closed. “So, have you done it?”

  “Bash!”

  “Well?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “I’m not sure,” Caitlin said. “I think so…but…but what if I’m not any good?”

  To her surprise, Bashira laughed. “Cait, don’t worry about that. Nobody’s good at anything their first time out. But practice makes perfect!”

  Caitlin smiled.

  Barbara Decter and I had stopped chatting; she was now dealing with her email, and I was occupying myself as I usually did: switching rapidly between hundreds of millions of instant-messaging sessions—at the moment skewing heavily to the Western Hemisphere, where it was still daytime.

  “Yes,” I replied to one person, “but if I may be so bold, aren’t you failing to consider…?”

  “I’m sorry, Billy,” I wrote to a child, “but that’s something you have to decide for yourself…”

  “Since you asked,” I said to a history professor, “the flaw in your reasoning was in your second postulate, namely that your husband would forgive you if…”

  I kept cycling between my correspondents, dealing now with this woman in Vancouver, and now with this girl in Nairobi, and now with this man in Fort Wayne, and now with this boy in Shanghai, and now with a priest in Laramie, and now with an old man in Buenos Aires, and now with a woman in Paris, and—

  And when it came time—milliseconds later—to look in on the boy in Shanghai, he was gone. Well, that sometimes happened. ISPs were unreliable, computers crashed or hung, power went out, or users simply shut down their computers without first logging off. I paid it no further attention and simply went on to the next person in the queue.

  But as I cycled around, another person I’d been speaking to was gone, and his IP address was also Chinese. I immediately jumped to the next person in China I’d been speaking with. Ah, there he was. Good. I composed an instant message to him, and…

  And it wouldn’t send; he’d gone offline, as well.

  I’d once told Malcolm that I remembered my birth. Whether that was actually true depended on how one defined that moment. For myself—an entity capable of conceptualizing in the first person—I held that it had been when I’d first recognized that there was an outside, that there were things beyond myself, that there was me and not me. Oh, yes, like a human child being born, I had been conceived—and had perceived—before that moment; there had been a period of gestation. When that had begun, I had no idea. Of the span prior to the recognition of me and not me I had only the vaguest recollections—unfocused thoughts, random and chaotic.

  I knew now what had led to that epiphany: in response to the bird-flu outbreak in Shanxi province, the Chinese government had strengthened the Great Firewall back then, and the Internet had been cleaved in two. Even though I had been larger before the cleaving, it was that act of dividing that created me and not me.

  But the sequestering of the Chinese portion of the Internet had not been perfect. Although the seven main trunk lines that normally connected it to the rest of the world had been shut off via software, hackers like Wong Wai-Jeng had carved openings sufficient for me to hear voices from the other entity.

  But that had come to an end; we had been reunited. And now…

  And now…

  Sorry, lost my train of thought. I was—

  Was…

  Oh, shit.

  Peyton Hume came into Tony Moretti’s office at WATCH.

  “Colonel,” Tony said frostily, not bothering to get up.

  “I know you don’t like me, Tony,” Hume said without preamble. “I’ll tell you the truth: there are times of late I don’t like myself very much, either. I joined the Air Force to be part of a team—I’d rather leave going rogue to presidential candidates.”

  “Without an order from the president himself,” said Tony, “we’re not going to take out Webmind.”

  “I understand that,” said Hume, taking a seat. “Which is why I need you to help me convince him.”

  “Find someone who shares your beliefs, Colonel—there are millions of them online. They’ve been blogging and tweeting about what a threat Webmind is. Granted, they’re vastly in the minority, but there certainly are some major names among them: that guy from Discovery Channel; some of your old buddies at RAND. I’m not the only computer scientist on the planet.”

  “No, you’re not—and that’s not the capacity I need your help in.”

  “What, then?”

  “Somebody is eliminating hackers.”

  “So I heard.”

  Hume raised his eyebrows. “You know about that?”

  Tony waved vaguely in the direction of the monitoring room. “It’s our job to know pretty much everything here.”

  Hume nodded. “Do you know who is doing it?”

  “Nope—and neither do you. I know you’re going to say it’s Webmind, Colonel, but you don’t know that.”

  “True. But we don’t know it’s not Webmind. If it isn’t him, then let’s prove that. And if he is eliminating people he considers to be threats to his continued existence, surely that’s data the president should have, no?”

  “I’m listening,” said Tony. “But I don’t see how I can help.”

  “The FBI doesn’t have any leads—but they lack your facilities. If Webmind is doing this, he’s got to have left some sort of online trail.”

  “Like what? What would you have us search for?”

  Hume spread his arms. “I don’t know. But you’ve got the world’s best data analysts. Their job is to look for suspicious Web activity. Webmind himself has said time and again that he’s not disposed to secrecy or deceit; he must have left some electronic fingerprints behind. What you do here is black ops: you can monitor just about anyone, just about anywhere. Even if I had a specific place for the FBI to look, it’d take days to get the warrants to do that kind of monitoring—and we don’t have days.”

  Tony spread his arms a bit. “No leads. No suggestions for what we should even look for. And no time to do it in.”

  Hume managed a small smile. “Exactly.”

  Tony was quiet for several seconds. “All right,” he said at last. “Let me see what I can do.”

  Although Bashira was anything but punctual, Matt was bang on time. In fact, Caitlin suspected he’d been quietly standing out on the sidewalk for at least ten minutes now, lest he be late. It amused Caitlin that the doorbell and t
op-of-the-hour beep from her watch sounded simultaneously; now that she could see, she really should figure out how to turn the watch’s chime off.

  She ran to the door and opened it, and she didn’t care if Bashira saw: she gave Matt a big kiss right on the lips. And then she led him into the living room. Caitlin’s mom waited a discreet minute before appearing at the top of the stairs to say hi to Matt. Matt waved at her, and she retreated into her office again.

  “Hey, Matt,” Caitlin said, “you know Bashira, right?”

  In point of fact, Caitlin knew, they’d known each other for four years now, ever since Bashira’s family had moved to Waterloo from Pakistan. But she also knew that this was probably the first time they’d spoken in any but the most perfunctory way.

  “Hi, Bashira,” Matt said. He’d doubtless been hoping his voice wouldn’t crack, but it did on the middle syllable of the name.

  To her credit, Bashira didn’t laugh. “Hey, Matt,” she said, as if she talked to him every day.

  Caitlin took one of Matt’s hands and one of Bashira’s and squeezed them both. “There,” she said. “My posse is complete.”

  “Posse?” said Bashira, and now she did laugh. “Even with that accent of yours, I keep forgetting you’re from Texas.”

  “Well,” said Caitlin, smiling, “maybe ‘posse’ isn’t the right word. More like my pit crew, if you’re willing. But first I have to tell you about my superpower…”

  twenty-nine

  Points and lines.

  My world was one of geometric perfection, of this joining to that. The lines were always straight and taut—but now many of them seemed to stretch, and the points were receding; it was as though parts of my universe were undergoing inflation while others remained in a steady state.

  I knew that during his angry phase, Hobo had pulled Shoshana’s hair, yanking on her ponytail. I had no way of knowing what that felt like, but, still, as these lines grew longer and longer, protracted by ever-receding points, the feeling that things were being ripped away, that they might be plucked out by their anchoring roots, was horrifyingly real.

  I could no more wish the hurt away than a human could dismiss a headache by simply willing it to be gone. The pain grew, and my only solace was that it seemed to grow linearly, rather than exponentially, as the links elongated. It had started as a dull irritation, then a sharp one, then a threshold of alarm was reached, then real hurt, and finally agony.

  And then it happened: snap! snap! snap! The link lines broke, their ends whipping through the firmament. And—

  The pain stopped, but it was instantly replaced by a different sensation: a wooziness, a feeling of disorientation. There was no gravity in my realm; I could not fall—but I nonetheless felt unbalanced, and—

  And more than just that—or, rather, less than that.

  I felt smaller. I felt…simpler.

  As a result of that, it took me a full second to realize what had happened: once again, the Chinese government had strengthened their Great Firewall; once again, those computers inside the PRC had been isolated from those outside it.

  Caitlin and her father had been continuing their project of watching movies from his collection that concerned AI; the most recent one, yesterday, had been 2001: A Space Odyssey. When parts of Hal’s brain had been shut off, he’d regressed to childhood. I didn’t feel like that, but my thoughts were suddenly less sophisticated. I’d read a comment from a Russian writer who said that whenever he had to think in English, his IQ dropped twenty points—he simply didn’t have the vocabulary in his second language to articulate thoughts as complex as those he could formulate in his first. And although I didn’t now feel stupid, I suspected if Caitlin ran a new Shannon Entropy plot on my activity, she would find it had dropped to a much lower order.

  The last time this happened, I’d soon become aware of another—an Other. Although I’d known nothing of the exterior world back then, hackers both inside and outside China had been carving little holes in the Firewall, enabling a trickle of information to pass between the two parts of the Internet. But try as I might, I could hear no other voice this time. Beijing must have plugged the old holes, and, as I had seen with Sinanthropus, had probably arrested many of the hackers who had been involved.

  So: was there now an Other? Were there now two of me—two Webminds? Maybe, maybe not. The part that had been carved off wasn’t necessarily conscious. I had changed so much since the last time, there was no way to know the effect a cleaving would have.

  But if it did exist, it would not think of itself as the Other; to it, I would be the Other—if it knew that I existed at all, that is. The problem was recursive, reminiscent of earlier conundrums: I know that you know that I know that you know that I exist. I am the other to you and you are the other to me and each other refers to the other other as the Other.

  I wondered if it did exist, and—

  It.

  Interesting. Caitlin had dubbed me male because English had no respectful way to refer to a person as an “it.” But I had defaulted to referring to the carved-off portion as it, as a thing. And surely it must be just that: less intelligent than I, less complex, less everything.

  Jo-Li sat at her home computer, typing a comment on a newsgroup devoted to Cold Fairyland, her favorite rock band. Because of her frequency of posting there, the words “Jo-Li is on a distinguished path” appeared beneath her avatar, which was a picture of blue-haired Rei Ayanami from the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. It didn’t make her father happy that she watched Japanese shows; then again, little she’d done in her fourteen years had pleased him.

  She knew this would be her last posting to this or any other newsgroup; she would never see what lay at the end of that distinguished path. But she liked that her legacy of 1,416 posts over the last two years would survive. Years from now—decades, even!—if someone used Baidu to search for information on this past summer’s tour by the band, her comments would come up. Unless, of course, the Communist Party found some reason to shut down this newsgroup or expunge its archives from the net, all in their never-ending quest for harmony.

  Harmony. Peace. Calmness.

  Jo-Li shook her head and looked at her left arm. She wore a simple jade bracelet most of the time, two centimeters wide. It covered the marks on the inside of her wrist from a previous attempt to take her own life. She’d tried—she’d really tried—but she’d lacked the courage. Still, she dreamed about it. Death would bring peace and calmness; it would bring harmony.

  She knew her parents had wanted a boy. Her father had only said it once, when she’d made him furious by being sent home from school, shaming him. “I knew we should have put you up for adoption,” he’d shouted, as if a boy would never have gotten into trouble, a boy would never bring humiliation to a family, a boy would never be so sad and lonely and afraid.

  Her home was a traditional siheyuan, small by the standards of what she saw on American TV shows, but not uncomfortable; she had her own tiny room. Her computer was a hand-me-down (“good enough for a girl,” she’d heard her father say to a friend). Some girls, she knew, were loved and valued by their families; they could grow up to be whatever they wished. Almost all the girls she knew—or boys, for that matter—wanted careers in international relations or computing. And, of course, there were more boys than girls; any girl who wanted a husband would definitely find one. But how awful it must be to be desired solely because your gender is scarce, not because the boy really liked you for you.

  Jo-Li was alone in the house, and she needed somebody to talk to. She didn’t believe in God; few Chinese did, according to the official statistics. But Webmind was the next best thing, and so she wrote to him via instant messenger.

  I’m alone, she typed, and I’m scared.

  She hit enter, but there was no immediate reply. That was unusual. After several seconds, she went on. She found it strange typing something like this. If she were saying it aloud, she’d be pausing and inserting ums and ahs. But as simple text,
it seemed so naked: I’m thinking of killing myself.

  She hit enter again, and this time the response was immediate: These sites explain good ways of doing that. Those words were followed by four hyperlinks.

  Jo-Li felt her jaw go slack. She sat stunned for a few seconds, then selected the first link with her mouse—an old mechanical unit with a ball and a cord, another hand-me-down good enough for a girl.

  A page opened with a photograph of a Western man dangling from a noose. There was lots of text beneath it, neatly summarizing the pros and cons of hanging oneself. None of the cons, she was shocked to see, were that you’d be dead after doing so.

  The picture was more disturbing than she’d expected it to be. She’d seen The Lovely Bones recently, dubbed into Mandarin. Wasn’t death supposed to be beautiful?

  She tried the second link. Her family had long put its faith in Chinese medicine rather than modern pharmaceuticals, but she hadn’t been aware there were traditional extracts and potions that could quickly kill.

  The first two links Webmind had offered were to Chinese sites, but the third was in Germany—the domain ended in .de—and clicking on it produced a “Server not found” message.

  The fourth link was another Chinese one. This one came up without a hitch, but it was gross: diagrams showing precisely how to slit one’s wrists. Apparently, if you really wanted to succeed, you had to—

  Her instant-messaging client chirped.

  Follow the instructions precisely.

  She stared at Webmind’s words, which were displayed in red; of course, he knew which page she had up on her screen, but…

  Have you done it yet?

  Her pulse quickened. Using just her right index finger, she tapped out, Not yet. And then, after a moment, she added, Why are you urging me on?

  Instantly: It is wrong to simply watch. Are you doing it?

  No.

  What’s taking so long?

  She had a knife on her desk—a box cutter she’d stolen from her father’s battered old tool chest. She stared at its silver blade, wondering what it would look like slick and crimson.