WWW: Wonder

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Caitlin laughed, amused that it had taken poor Sunshine over two weeks to come up with that.

  But what a two weeks it had been! That very night, just after Sunshine had left her, Caitlin had had her first experience of vision, seeing lightning zigzag across the sky.

  Sunshine had taken off her Tim Hortons smock and cap and was carrying them in a canvas bag. She was now wearing a black leather jacket that hugged her figure. They continued to walk along. The sky was cloudless and more silver than blue.

  As it turned out, Sunshine’s house was on the way to Caitlin’s, and when they got to it, Sunshine asked her if she wanted to come in. Of course, Sunshine now knew she had no other plans, and although Caitlin might have otherwise begged off—they had exhausted what little they had to talk about while walking the four blocks here—she was curious about what Sunshine’s place looked like. She’d only seen inside two houses so far: her own and Bashira’s.

  No one else was home. Sunshine threw her leather jacket over the back of the couch, and Caitlin followed suit with her own jacket. She couldn’t really judge such things yet, but this house looked less neat than her parents’ place, and something was missing, but . . .

  Of course. There were no bookcases in the living room.

  “What do your parents do?” Caitlin asked.

  “Insurance stuff,” Sunshine said.

  Well, that made sense: Kitchener-Waterloo’s biggest nontech area of business was, in fact, insurance. “Ah.”

  Sunshine’s bedroom turned out to be downstairs. She led the way but went much too fast for Caitlin, who still needed to go very carefully on unfamiliar staircases. Still, soon enough she was down in Sunshine’s room.

  “So—you and Matt!” Sunshine said, grinning, as she sat on the edge of her unmade bed.

  “Yeah,” Caitlin said, smiling.

  Sunshine shook her head slightly, and Caitlin was afraid she was going to say what Bashira kept saying: that Caitlin was out of Matt’s league, that she should be dating someone better-looking than him. But, to her relief, what Sunshine said was, “He’s too smart for me. But he seems nice.”

  “He is,” Caitlin said firmly. She was still standing. There was an empty chair, but she rather liked that it was unremarked upon. When she’d been blind, the first thing people had done whenever she’d entered an unfamiliar room was make a fuss over getting her seated, as if she were infirm.

  “Too bad he had to go. He’ll probably be tied up all day now, I guess.” Sunshine smiled then said, “Know what you should do?”

  Caitlin shook her head.

  Sunshine stood and, to Caitlin’s astonishment, she pulled her red T-shirt up over her head, exposing a pair of quite large breasts held up by a frilly beige bra; two seconds later, the bra was undone and had slipped down her flat belly.

  Caitlin was surprised by what Sunshine had just done—and also half-surprised that Webmind hadn’t popped a comment into her eye, but, then again, if you’d looked at every picture on the World Wide Web, you’d probably be bored to death of breasts.

  Sunshine then took something—her cell phone, that was it—out of her jeans pocket. She held the phone in one hand and—ah, that fake camera-shutter sound: she took a picture, presumably of her own chest. Then she tapped quickly away at the phone’s keyboard, and said, triumphantly, “There!”

  “What?” said Caitlin.

  “I just sent him a picture of my boobs.”

  “Matt?” said Caitlin, incredulously.

  Sunshine laughed. “No, my boyfriend, Tyler.” She lifted her breasts in her palms, then let them fall. “No offense, Caitlin, but I don’t think Matt’s ready for these babies.”

  Caitlin grinned. She knew Sunshine was sixteen, and that Tyler was nineteen and worked as a security guard somewhere.

  Sunshine went on. “Helps to let him know I’m thinking of him while he’s at work.”

  Caitlin knew about the practice, of course: sexting, the sending of suggestive photos via cell phones. But she’d never seen it before, and it was hardly a topic that had come up often at the Texas School for the Blind.

  Sunshine hooked her bra back up and pulled down her T-shirt. Then she gestured at Caitlin—or, more precisely, Caitlin realized belatedly, at her chest. “You should flash Matt. He’ll love it.”

  The BlackBerry attached to the back of her eyePod was mounted in such a way that the camera was covered, and it was slaved to sending data to Dr. Kuroda’s servers in Tokyo, and, of course, to Webmind.

  And so her parents had gotten her another BlackBerry—a different and somewhat larger model with a red casing. She carried the eyePod in her left hip pocket, and the other BlackBerry in her right one. She fished it out, turned it over so she could see—yes, that was it: the camera lens.

  “I haven’t taken any pictures with it yet,” Caitlin said.

  Sunshine held out her hand and sounded pleased that she could teach something to Caitlin. “Here, I’ll show you how.”

  Caitlin considered. Webmind had seen her in various states of undress now, when she’d looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, so that certainly wasn’t an obstacle—and, besides, he’d assured her that her BlackBerry was now secure; no way those voyeurs at WATCH could be sneaking a peek.

  And, well, she had been thinking just yesterday about the fact that American girls lose their virginity on average at 16.40 years of age—meaning she had just 142 days left if she wasn’t going to end up on the trailing edge. And Matt was someone she really cared about, and she could tell he really cared about her, too.

  “Why the heck not?” she said, and she started unbuttoning her shirt.

  ten

  Masayuki Kuroda looked at the webcam. “So,” Anna Bloom said, “the biggest threat to Webmind is probably BGP hijacking. Of course, there are safeguards, and anyone wanting to do it would have to figure out how to identify your special packets—and then figure out how to get routers to distinguish those mutants from the regular kind.”

  “Colonel Hume managed that in his test run,” Kuroda said. “So it’s doable.”

  “It’s doable by modifying router hardware,” Anna said. “We can hope it’s not something that could easily be done with BGP routing tables—but if it is . . .” She shook her head, then: “Look, it’s getting awfully late here. I’ve got to call it a night. Webmind, I wish you luck.”

  “Thank you,” Webmind said.

  She leaned forward, and then her camera went off.

  “Well,” said Dr. Kuroda, “let’s hope your foes aren’t as clever as Anna.”

  Of course, despite the gravity of the conversation, I had been cycling through communication with many others during it. And so I had learned that Malcolm Decter’s colleague in China had succeeded where I had failed, locating Sinanthropus in a hospital in Beijing. I’d accessed his medical records—and was distressed to learn of his condition. But a course of action immediately occurred to me, and, now that Professor Bloom was offline, I broached the topic with Dr. Kuroda.

  “I have become aware of a young man,” I said, “who has recently suffered a spinal-cord injury, leaving him a paraplegic.”

  “That’s awful,” Kuroda said, but I could tell by his vocal inflection that it was merely a reflex reply—an autoresponder, if you will.

  I pressed on. “It is, yes. And I was hoping you might help him.”

  “Um, Webmind, I’m not a medical doctor; I’m an information theorist.”

  “Of course,” I said patiently. “But I have examined his medical records, including his digitized X-rays and MRI scans. I know precisely what’s wrong with him—and it is an information-processing issue. I can suggest straightforward modifications to the eyePod and the post-retinal implant you created for Caitlin that will almost certainly cure his condition.”

  “Really? That's . . . wow.”

  “Indeed. And yes: really.”

  “Wow,” he said again. But then, after a moment, he added, “But why him? There are—I don’t know—there must b
e millions of people with spinal-cord injuries worldwide. Why help this person first?”

  It was not instinctive for me to do so, but I was nonetheless learning to employ the technique of answering a question with a question—especially when I was not yet ready to be forthcoming, something else that was new to me. I’d been amused to learn that this approach had fooled many into thinking the first chatbots were actually conscious, for they replied to questions such as, “What should I do about my mother?” with questions of their own, such as, “Why do you worry about what other people think?”

  I threw a version of Dr. Kuroda’s question back at him: “Why did you decide to give Caitlin sight first, before all the other blind people in the world?”

  He lifted his rounded shoulders. “The etiology of her blindness. She had Tomasevic’s syndrome, and that’s a simple signal-encoding difficulty—clearly up my street.”

  “Indeed. Your equipment intercepts signals being passed along nerves, modifies the signals, and then passes them back to the nerve tissue. That’s applicable to any number of situations—as you yourself alluded to at the press conference at which you announced your success with Caitlin. So why her?”

  “Well, there was one other factor. You see . . .”

  By the time humans had finished speaking—or typing—a sentence, I had often already leapt far ahead of them. Kuroda was, I’m sure, pointing out that the reason he’d chosen a blind person for his first human test, rather than a spinal-cord injury, or treating a Parkinson’s patient, is that the optic nerve could be reached by sliding instruments around the eyeball; no incision had to be made, and, under Japanese law, that meant it wasn’t surgery—and thus the procedure that had given Caitlin a post-retinal implant wasn’t subject to the kind of drawn-out approval process that often delayed human trials for years.

  I’d experimented with interrupting people as they spoke, to indicate that I knew what they were going to say, in hopes that we could move the conversation along more quickly. But I found that disrupting their train of thought, besides being bad manners (which I might be forgiven, not being human, after all), actually made them take longer to get to their ultimate point. And so I simply shunted my attention elsewhere for the interval I calculated it would take Kuroda to say his piece.

  When I returned to him, I said, “True. And that’s why this is an ideal opportunity for you to move to surgery. The person in question is in China, where rules about informed consent are lax, especially under his current circumstances.”

  “Which are?” said Kuroda.

  “The gentleman happens to be under arrest.”

  “For what crime?”

  “Indirectly, for creating me.”

  Kuroda’s tone was one of astonishment. “Really? But I thought you emerged accidentally.”

  “I did; this person’s actions were in no way designed to lead to my birth. He was simply poking holes in the Great Firewall of China during the crackdown on Web access last month.”

  “And so you feel beholden to him?” he asked.

  “No. But I wish him to feel loyalty to me.”

  “Why?”

  I thought for a millisecond about further dodging the question, but I did trust Kuroda. “Because, for the things I wish to accomplish, I need someone with his skills inside the People’s Republic.”

  Kuroda’s tone now conveyed nervousness. “Um, what are you planning to do?”

  I told him. And, then, since I calculated he’d sit in stunned silence for at least six seconds, I busied myself for that interval with other things.

  Matt sat next to his mother in the waiting room at St. Mary’s General Hospital, while his father was off getting his ankle X-rayed. Suddenly, his BlackBerry vibrated in his jeans. He fished it out and saw that the incoming message was from Caitlin. He looked at it, and—

  Holy cow!

  He shifted in his chair and moved the phone so his mother couldn’t see the screen.

  He’d felt one of Caitlin’s breasts for the first time yesterday, but had never seen them—but he was pretty sure these must be hers. His heart was pounding. She’d added the text, “Miss you, baby!” beneath the photo.

  His thumbs shook as he tapped out a reply. “Awesome!” He then added a colon and a capital D, which his phone dutifully turned into the giant openmouthed grin he himself was struggling to suppress.

  Kuroda leaned back in his chair, which groaned in response. “Incredible,” he said. “Just incredible.”

  “I realize it is without precedent.”

  “Webmind, I don’t know—”

  “I am not committed yet to any course of action although this one seems worth pursuing. But I do need operatives in the PRC regardless. And this man seems an ideal candidate. And so, I ask again: will you help him? It is something only you can do.”

  When humans spoke, I could divine much from their vocal patterns. When they just sat, motionless, I was left guessing. But after four seconds, Kuroda nodded. “Yes.”

  “Good. I have prepared a document outlining the modifications to your equipment.” I didn’t use Word or other programs to create documents ; I simply assembled them byte by byte—and I stored my documents online; this one was at Google Docs. “Please read this,” I said, sending him the URL.

  Kuroda skimmed through the file—judging by how often he tapped his PgDn key—then went back to the beginning and began reading it over carefully.

  “That does look like it’ll mostly do the trick,” he said at last in a tone that I believe was called “grudging admiration.” “But this part here—with the echo shunts, see? That won’t work the way you’ve outlined it. You’d need to do this.” He began typing a revision into the document.

  “I defer to your expertise,” I said.

  “No, no, don’t worry. I didn’t document that part of the design well; there was no way for you to know.” He was quiet for seven seconds, then: “Yes, yes, that will work, I think, assuming you’re right about the specifics of his injury.” He paused, considering the magnitude of this. “My goodness, something like this could help a lot of people.”

  “Indeed,” I said. “Will you create the necessary equipment?”

  “Well, as you say, it’s really just a modification of the design I used for Miss Caitlin. There is a second unit partially complete in my lab. I’ll use that one; it would probably take no more than a couple of days to make the modifications, but . . .”

  “Yes?”

  He shook his head. His breathing was always noisy, and his sighs, at least as conveyed by the webcam’s microphone, were thunderous. “It’s pointless, Webmind. You said this man is under arrest. The Chinese government will never let me come visit him.”

  “Our Caitlin likes to say she is an empiricist at heart, Kuroda-san, and that seems a good policy to me. We won’t know until we try.”

  eleven

  Sunshine did ultimately walk Caitlin back to her house, but she declined an invitation to come in; her boyfriend Tyler was getting off work, and she wanted to follow up on the promise made by the picture she’d sent.

  Caitlin came in the front door, and her mom came swooping into the room. “Where the hell is Matt?”

  “Don’t worry, Mom. Sunshine walked me home. Matt had to go to the hospital; his dad twisted his ankle.”

  “Sit down.”

  “Mom! I didn’t do anything wrong! I told you—Sunshine walked me home.”

  “Just—sit down.”

  Caitlin was trying to decode her mother’s face, but it was contorted in ways she’d never seen before. Caitlin moved over to the white couch, flopped herself down, and crossed her arms in front of her chest.

  Her mother took a deep breath, then: “I hope you enjoyed your trip to the donut shop, Caitlin, because it’s the last normal afternoon you’re ever going to have.”

  Caitlin was anxious. Did her mom know about the picture she’d sent Matt? No, that wasn’t possible; surely Webmind wouldn’t have ratted her out. “Mom, you can’t ground me
!”

  Her mother stopped pacing and—Caitlin’s eyes went wide—she dropped to her knees in front of Caitlin, and took Caitlin’s hands in hers; her mother’s were shaking. She looked right into Caitlin’s eyes.

  “They know.”

  “What?”

  “About you and Webmind.”

  “Who knows?”

  “Soon—everyone: everyone on the whole damn planet. I got a call just before you came in—from ABC News. They know you’re the one who brought Webmind forward.”

  Caitlin felt her mouth dropping open.

  “How . . . how did they find out?”

  Her mother got to her feet again, and when she was standing, she spread her arms. “God, we were stupid to think it would stay a secret. We knew that the US government was onto you—and that they’d told CSIS and the Japanese government, too. It was only a matter of time before someone leaked it, and—”

  The phone rang. Caitlin’s mother looked briefly at her, then picked it up. “Hello?” Then: “May I ask who’s calling?” Then: “Look, I’m her mother. She’s only sixteen, for God’s sake. What? No, no, we don’t want to fly to Washington tonight. Jesus. Yes, yes, I know she has to talk to somebody . . . Look, ABC already called, and—no, no we haven’t committed to them. All right, all right. Yes, yes. No, I’ve got it—it’s right here on the call display. Yes, all right, if you must. Yes, good-bye. I—no, no; good-bye.” She put down the phone.

  “NBC,” she said, looking at Caitlin. “Meet the Press.”

  The phone rang again. Caitlin’s mom went over to it, and did something that made the ringer stop—here, at least; it was still jangling away on the other phones in the house. “Let the machine get it,” she said. And, indeed, it did: Caitlin could hear the muffled sounds of a message from another journalist being left; the answering machine was in the kitchen.

  “I should call your father,” her mom said. “My cell’s upstairs; can I use yours?”