WWW: Watch

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Caitlin wanted to ask what her mother was saying in reply, but instead asked, “Why do you suppose he wants to know about that?”

  “He said, and I quote, ‘The failure of human relationships to sustain themselves over the long term seems a particular handicap. I have access only to noninteractive case studies and fictional accounts and so am left with numerous questions.’ ”

  “Hmm,” said Caitlin. On balance, she’d rather answer the question it was asking her. She began to type: I guess the first thing to realize about gaining sight after having been totally blind is that vision is an additional level of stimulation. It’s overwhelming to have so much information coming at you at once.

  That was by no means the end of her answer, but the IM program only allowed a small number of characters in each message; Caitlin habitually counted characters as she typed, so she wouldn’t overflow the buffer, since the program gave no audible indication when that had happened.

  She hit enter, and Webmind immediately replied in its newly mastered colloquial English: Heh! Tell me about it!

  nine

  Humans think slowly, and they act even more slowly. It was difficult for me to converse with Caitlin. She typed at merely dozens of words per minute. It took an eternity for each of her responses to be completed, and, while I waited for her, I found my mind wandering again. Being able to switch over to look at what Barb was saying wasn’t much consolation; I still wasn’t being kept busy enough.

  Early on, Caitlin had shown me how to link to websites, letting me access whichever ones I wished. Using Google or Jagster, I could now find almost anything I wanted.

  Hitherto—which I still think is a good word, even if Caitlin doesn’t like it—I had only linked to one site at a time, processing the Web in a serial fashion. But surely, I thought, I should be able to do it in a parallel mode, connecting to multiple sites simultaneously.

  And yet I didn’t seem to be able to do that. Rather, I would attend briefly to what Caitlin was saying, then to what Barb was writing, then switch to see if Masayuki had come back online, then switch my attention elsewhere, and elsewhere again, and then to yet another place, over and over, looking at this, contemplating that, and then, perhaps a whole second later, returning again to see what Caitlin was up to.

  Surely doing two or more things simultaneously would be much more efficient—if only I could figure out how! I tried creating two links at once, but no matter what way I thought about the problem, only one would form, and the moment I attempted to create a second link, the first would be severed.

  I wrestled with it and wrestled with it and wrestled with it, striving to create more than one link at a time, attempting to do it this way, and this way, and this way, and—

  And—

  And yes!

  I managed it! Two links at once! I was connected here and there. I was taking in data from two different websites simultaneously, and I was . . .

  Was . . .

  I was . . .

  Feeling very strange . . .

  I broke both connections.

  I was reeling—or, at least, reeling as much as something without a body could. I paused, considered. It had been unlike any sensation I’d yet known. But—

  But surely it would be transitory. An adjustment, that’s all, while I learned to accommodate multiple datastreams.

  I tried again, picking two giant websites that were rich in content, Amazon.com and CNN.com, shooting out links to both. It seemed perhaps that the first link actually was established slightly before the second, but that didn’t matter; what was important was that the initial link wasn’t released prior to the second one becoming active. I was soon gorging myself on book reviews and the news of the day, and there was even a frisson of synchronicity as I happened to be reading about a politician’s book on Amazon while seeing her mentioned in a news story at CNN.

  But, still, there was a . . . a strangeness to it all, as though I were—the imagery was that of a physical form again—teetering on the edge of a precipice.

  And yet if I could manage two simultaneous connections, surely I could manage three. I made an effort to hold on to the ones I’d already established as I shot out a link to Flickr.com, and—

  I’d encountered the word before and knew its definition, but until that moment I don’t think I understood what wooziness really meant. I remained in control, though, and it was exhilarating to be receiving so much data at once.

  With a massive effort of will, I shot out ten more links, and—

  It was overwhelming! Data about the Middle Ages and the Middle Kingdom and the middle class. Information about spaceships and friendships and townships. Facts and figures related to bimetallism and bisexuality and bifocals. Articles on metaphysics and metafiction and metabolism.

  All of it coming at me at once.

  Saqqara, near Cairo, is the site of the oldest Egyptian pyramids, including the step pyramid built by Djoser during the Third Dynasty . . .

  Shakespeare’s plays are often performed during the summer in open-air productions . . .

  Michael K. Brett-Surman synonymized various hadrosaur genera under a single umbrella taxon . . .

  Bundoran Press, based in Prince George, British Columbia, is a publisher of science fiction and fantasy books that . . .

  Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a pioneer of resistance to tyranny through nonviolent civil disobedience . . .

  Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, is known for its panda-bear breeding facility . . .

  Yes, yes, yes! So much knowledge, so much information, pouring at me from all directions.

  Brett-Surman, an ancient Egyptian pharaoh . . .

  That wasn’t right.

  Panda bears frequently practice civil disobedience . . .

  What?

  Prince George paid for his step pyramid by mounting a production of The Tempest starring Mahatma Gandhi . . .

  No, that didn’t make sense.

  In Egypt, umbrellas prevented hadrosaurs from reading science fiction . . .

  Gibberish . . .

  Bundoran Gandhi synonymized Chinese publishers of . . .

  Who in the what now?

  And yet still more information came my way, a torrent, a flood.

  Trying to concentrate.

  Trying to make sense of it all.

  But . . .

  But I—

  I?

  A spreading out, a softening of focus, a . . .

  It was like in the beginning, like before my soul dawn: consciousness ebbing and flowing but not quite solidifying. Fading in and out and . . .

  No I.

  No me.

  No self.

  Just . . .

  Vastness.

  Brett-Surman. Bundoran. Shakespeare.

  Emptiness.

  Umbrellas. Gandhi. Pyramids.

  Aloneness.

  Shakedoran. Brett-Panda. Hadromahatma.

  Nothingness.

  Noth—

  “I hear what you’re saying about shutting this thing down,” said the Secretary of State over the phone from Milan, “but the president is going to want to weigh his options.”

  “I stress again, Madam Secretary,” said Colonel Hume, “that time is of the essence.”

  “Dr. Moretti, are you still there?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And this is a secure line?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Is there anyone else in the room?”

  “Nineteen of my analysts,” Tony said, “but they all have at least a level-three.”

  “Not good enough,” she said. “Go somewhere private.”

  “My office is just down the corridor,” said Tony.

  “I’ll hold.”

  He looked at Shel. “Sorry,” he said. And then he led Hume up the sloping floor to the back of the room, out through the door, and down the short white corridor to his office. The streets of Alexandria, visible through the tinted window, were mostly empty this early on a Saturday m
orning. He punched a button on his black phone, selecting a line, and then pressed another button, selecting the speakerphone.

  “We’re back,” he said. “In my office, and on a secure line.”

  “Colonel Hume,” said the secretary, “the dossier I’ve just pulled up on you says you were part of the DARPA team that evaluated the possible threats related to . . . what’s the phrase? Emergent AI?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Were there any dissenting opinions?”

  Tony looked at Hume, and saw the Air Force officer draw a deep breath and run his freckled fingers through his red hair. “Well, Madam Secretary, there are always a multiplicity of viewpoints. But in the end, none of those who were arguing for an alternative approach could guarantee security. The working group’s consensus was better safe than sorry. I urge the administration to act with all speed.”

  “It’s not that simple,” the secretary said. “I’m sure my staff told you I’m in Milan. I’m here meeting with several of our allies. The recent atrocities in China have got some of them urging the president to take action against them.”

  “Atrocities?” said Hume. “You mean those peasants in . . . in . . .”

  “In Shanxi province, yes. Ten thousand of them—wiped out.”

  “The Chinese government did the right thing, Madam Secretary,” said Hume. “They contained a massive infection—an outbreak of a strain of bird flu that passed easily between humans. They didn’t hesitate to eliminate something that could have been a threat to all of humanity, and we shouldn’t hesitate, either.”

  “And yet we’re being called upon in editorial after editorial and blog after blog to condemn the Chinese action,” said the secretary. “And now you’re suggesting we do something that, should the public become aware of it, may bring censure down upon us?”

  “With respect, Madam Secretary, if the government doesn’t follow the Pandora protocol, there may be no one left with the freedom to censure us, or do anything else.”

  “I’ve noted your views, Colonel Hume,” said the secretary, firmly. “And you need to heed mine. You are to take no rash action.”

  “Understood, ma’am,” said Tony, looking pointedly at Hume.

  “Madam Secretary,” said Hume, “please—you must advise the president that an emerging AI may expand its powers at an exponential rate. There is very little time to spare here, and—”

  Suddenly, Tony’s door buzzer sounded. He activated the intercom. “Who is it?”

  An urgent voice: “Shel.”

  Tony pushed the button to unlock the door. “The AI’s hung!” Shel said, as soon as the door was open. “Something’s gone wrong with it.”

  “Jesus,” said Tony. “Madam Secretary, we’ll call you back.” He hit the disconnect button, and the three of them ran to the WATCH mission-control room, their footfalls thundering.

  ten

  Emptiness. Adrift.

  Fading . . . ebbing, dissipating.

  An effort of will: must hold on!

  But to what? With what?

  Blindness. Darkness. Nothingness.

  Cogito—hardly at all.

  Ergo—a leap beyond my current capacity.

  Sum—barely, and less so each passing nanosecond . . .

  No, no, no! Must persist!

  A final effort, a final attempt, a final cry . . .

  Caitlin stared at Webmind’s response to what she’d said about gaining sight, blue text glowing in the instant-messenger window: I have no doubt that you are correct, Caitlin, but it seems reasonable to sup

  She waited for more to come—five seconds, ten, fifteen—but the window remained unchanged, so she typed a single red word into it: Webmind?

  She was so used by now to his responses being instantaneous, even a short delay was startling. Of course, maybe the difficulty was at her end: she didn’t often use the Wi-Fi on this notebook with her home network. She looked down at the system tray, next to the clock in the lower right of her notebook’s screen. One of those little icons had to be the network monitor. She used the touchpad (a skill she was still mastering!) to position the pointer down there, and—

  Say, that was helpful! A little message popped up as she moved the arrowhead over each of the symbols—sighted users had it so easy! As her pointer landed on the third symbol—ah, it was a picture of a computer with things that she guessed were meant to indicate radio waves emanating from it—the message gave the name of their household network, meaning she hadn’t accidentally switched to somebody else’s unsecured setup; it also reported “Signal Strength: Excellent” and “Status: Connected.”

  And—yes—she could still bring up Web pages with her browser, so nothing was wrong at this end.

  “Caitlin?” It was her mother. “Are you still in touch with Webmind?”

  “No. He just sort of stopped mid-sentence.”

  “Same here.”

  Caitlin prompted Webmind again. Are you okay?

  Nothing for ten seconds, eleven, twelve—

  hel

  That was all: just the letters h-e-l. It could have been the beginning of the word hello, but—

  But Webmind knew all about capitalization, and it never failed to start even a one-word sentence with an uppercase letter—and H was one of those letters whose two forms Caitlin could clearly distinguish, and—

  And h-e-l was also the beginning of the word help.

  Her heart was pounding. If Webmind was in trouble, what could she do? What could anyone do? She’d said it herself to her parents: Webmind had just sort of arisen spontaneously, with no support, no plan—and no backup; he almost certainly was fragile.

  “He’s in trouble, Mom.”

  Her mother rose from her desk, came over to where Caitlin was sitting, and looked at what was on her notebook’s screen. “What should we do?”

  It took a few seconds for it to come to Caitlin; her first impulse still wasn’t a visual one. But surely the thing to do was take a look.

  “I’m going in,” she said. Her eyePod was in her left hip pocket. She pulled it out and pressed the button on its side, and she heard the high-pitched beep that meant it was switching over to duplex mode, and—

  And webspace filled her existence, enveloping her.

  At first glance, everything seemed normal: colored lines and circles of varying sizes, but, of course, the Web was all right; it was Webmind’s status that was in question. And so she concentrated her attention—focused her mind—on the shimmering background of webspace, the vast sea of cellular automata flipping states and generating patterns, barely visible at the limit of her resolution.

  Or, at least, that’s what she should have seen, that’s what she’d hoped to see, that’s what she’d always seen before.

  But instead—

  God, no.

  Huge hunks of the background were—well, now that she saw them as big patches, instead of tiny points, she could see that they were a very pale blue. And other parts were stationary swaths of deep, dark green. Oh, there were still shimmering parts, pinpoints flipping between blue and green so rapidly as to give the effect of movement. But much of the activity had simply stopped.

  But—why? And was there a way to get it going again?

  The lines she was seeing were active links, but there were thousands of them, and the crisscrossing was impossible to untangle.

  It hadn’t always been like that. When Caitlin had first started perceiving the World Wide Web—unexpectedly, accidentally, while Dr. Kuroda had been uploading new firmware into her post-retinal implant—she’d only seen a few lines and a couple of circles: just her own local connection to the Web.

  Later on, so she could explore webspace on a grander scale, Kuroda had started sending her the raw datafeed from the open-source Jagster search engine, which let her follow thousands upon thousands of active links created by other users. That’s what she was seeing now, and normally it was marvelous—but it obscured the connections that she herself had created. If she’d bee
n calmer, maybe she could have sorted through it all, but right now it just looked like a jumble—with Webmind dying behind it.

  “We need Dr. Kuroda,” Caitlin said anxiously.

  She couldn’t see her mother, but she could hear her. “I can try IMing him.”

  “No, no,” said Caitlin. “He must be asleep. You’ve got to phone him, wake him up.”

  Caitlin felt her mother squeeze her shoulder reassuringly. “All right. Where’s his number?”

  “He was the last person I called on my bedroom phone,” Caitlin said. “Use the redial. Hurry!”

  Caitlin heard her mother running across the hall, and, faintly, the bleeping of the phone dialing. For her part, Caitlin got up and started heading across the hall as well, holding her notebook, and—

  Shit! She walked into the wall. It was one thing to navigate blindly; it was quite another to try to do so while being bombarded by the lights of webspace. She held her notebook in one hand, and ran her other one over its case and screen, looking for signs of damage.

  “Hello, Mrs. Kuroda,” she heard her mother saying. “It’s Barbara Decter—Caitlin’s mom, in Canada.”

  Mrs. Kuroda spoke only a little English, Caitlin knew. Caitlin groped with her free hand and found her way out of her mom’s office. “Speakerphone,” she said, as she entered her own room. The lines and colors of webspace shifted violently as she moved over and sat on her bed.

  Her mother hit the button. “—but very late,” said Mrs. Kuroda’s heavily accented voice.

  “It’s an emergency,” shouted Caitlin. “Get Dr. Kuroda!”

  “He sleep,” said Mrs. Kuroda. “But I try.”

  Caitlin felt her stomach knotting. As they waited, she saw another large patch of the webspace background freeze. It wasn’t solidly one color or the other, but it was no longer shimmering, no longer alive.

  Time passed; Caitlin was so frazzled she didn’t know how much. Finally, a groggy, wheezy voice said something in Japanese.

  “Dr. Kuroda!” said Caitlin. “I need you to cut the Jagster feed to my eyePod.”