WWW: Wonder

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “And five, four, three . . .”

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

  The studio lights were bright; Caitlin didn’t like them although her mother had quipped that they were nothing compared to an August day back in Austin. Caitlin listened to the opening of the show—the host recapping Webmind’s emergence and the startling news from yesterday that a “young math wiz” had been responsible for it. And then: “. . . joining us now from our affiliate CKCO in Kitchener, Canada, is Caitlin Decter. Miss Decter, good morning.”

  “Good morning to you,” she said.

  “Miss Decter,” the male host said, “can you tell us how you came to know the entity that calls itself Webmind?”

  Caitlin had let that sort of thing slide during the pre-interview with the show’s producer, but now that they were live on the air, it was time to speak up. She smiled as politely as she could, and with her best Texan manners, said, “Excuse me, sir, but, if I may, it’s not right to refer to Webmind as an ‘it.’ Webmind has accepted the designation of male—which, for the record, was my doing, not his—so please kindly show him the respect he deserves and refer to him either by his name or as ‘he.’ ”

  The host sounded annoyed that they’d gone off-script so quickly. “As you say, Miss Decter.”

  She smiled. “You may call me Caitlin.”

  “Fine, Caitlin. But you haven’t answered my question: how did you come to know the entity called Webmind?”

  “He sent a message to my eye.”

  “You’ll have to explain that,” the host said, just as his producer had earlier.

  “Certainly. I used to be blind—and I still am in my right eye. But I can now see with my left eye, thanks to a post-retinal implant and this” (she held up the eyePod) “which is an external signal-processing computer. As it happens, during the testing stages, this device was constantly hooked up to the World Wide Web, and during a firmware upgrade—when new software was being sent to my implant—I started getting a raw data feed from the Web being fed to me. Webmind used that to send me his initial message.”

  “And what message was that?”

  Caitlin decided to come clean. In the pre-interview, she’d merely discussed the email letter Webmind had sent her, but now she decided to reveal what Webmind’s first words to her actually were. “He sent, as ASCII text, ‘Seekrit message to Calculass: check your email, babe!’ ”

  The interviewer looked dumbfounded. “Excuse me?”

  “He was imitating something he’d seen me write in my LiveJournal entries to my friend Bashira. ‘Calculass’ is my online name, and I sometimes call Bashira ‘babe.’ Oh, and ‘seekrit’ was spelled s-e-e-k-r-i-t. It’s the way a lot of people my age write the word ‘secret’ when we mean that it isn’t really.”

  “LiveJournal is a blog, right?”

  “Of a sort, yes. I’ve been using it since I was ten.”

  “And, as far as you know, you were the very first person Webmind contacted?”

  “There’s no question about that; Webmind told me so.”

  “Why you?”

  “Because his first views of our world were through my eye, watching what my eyePod—that’s what I call this thing: eyePod, spelled e-y-e, pod—was sending back to the doctor who made the implant.”

  “Couldn’t it—” He clearly had her up on his monitor; she’d frowned and he immediately corrected himself. “Couldn’t he just see through all the world’s webcams, and so forth?”

  “No, no. He had to learn how to do that, just as he had to learn to read English and open files.”

  “And you taught it—him—to do all those things?”

  Caitlin nodded, but then it was the host’s turn to go off-script or, at least, off the script they’d used at rehearsal. He said sharply, “By what right, Caitlin? With whose authority? Whose permission?”

  She shifted in her chair; it took a lot to make a Texas girl sweat, but she felt moisture on her forehead. “I didn’t have anyone’s permission,” Caitlin said. “I just did it.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, the learning-to-read part was accidental. I was learning to read printed text because I’d just gotten vision, and he followed along.”

  “But for other things, you tutored Webmind directly?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Without permission?”

  Caitlin thought of herself as a good girl. She knew Bashira was of the “it’s easier to ask forgiveness later than get permission now” school, but she herself wasn’t prone to doing things without checking first. And yet, as the host had just pointed out, she’d done this.

  “With all due respect,” Caitlin said, “whose permission should I have asked?”

  “The government.”

  “Which government?” snapped Caitlin. “The American one, because they invented the Internet? The Swiss one, because the World Wide Web was created at CERN? The Canadian one, because that’s where I happen to live right now? The Chinese one, because they represent the single largest population of humans? No one has jurisdiction over this, and—”

  “Be that as it may, Miss Decter, but—”

  And Caitlin did not like being interrupted. “And,” she continued firmly, “it’s governments that have been doing things without proper consultation. Who the”—she caught herself just in time; this was live TV after all—“ heck gave the American—”

  She stopped herself short, sought another example. “—gave the Chinese government permission last month to cut off a huge portion of the Internet? What sort of consultation and consensus-building did they undertake?”

  She took a deep breath, and, miraculously, the host didn’t jump in. “I spent the first sixteen years of my life totally blind; I survived because people helped me. How could I possibly turn down someone who needed my help?”

  Caitlin had more to say on this topic, but television had its own rhythms. As soon as she paused, the host said, “That’s Caitlin Decter, the maverick teenager who gave the world Webmind, whether we wanted it or not. And when we come back, Miss Decter will show us how she converses with Webmind.”

  They had two minutes until the commercial break was over. Caitlin’s mother, who had been in the control room, came out onto the studio floor. “You’re doing fine,” she said, standing next to Caitlin and adjusting Caitlin’s collar.

  Caitlin nodded. “I guess. Can you see the host in there? On the monitor?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Squarish head. Lots of black hair, tinged with gray. Never smiles.”

  “He’s a jerk,” Caitlin said.

  She heard somebody laugh in her earpiece—either in the control room here, or the one in Washington; the microphone was still live.

  Caitlin was worked up, but she knew that that wasn’t helping her, and it wouldn’t help Webmind. They’d given her a white ceramic mug with the CTV logo on it, filled with tepid water. She took a long sip and looked at her eyePod to make sure it was working fine, which, of course it was.

  “You okay?” Caitlin asked into the air.

  The word Yes briefly flashed in front of her vision.

  “Back in thirty,” the floor director shouted; he seemed to like to shout.

  Caitlin’s mom squeezed her shoulder and hurried off to the control room. Caitlin took a deep, calming breath. The floor director did his countdown thing. A brief snippet of the theme music played in Caitlin’s earpiece, and the host said, “Welcome back. Before the break we heard from the young girl who first brought Webmind out into the light of day. Now she’s going to show us how she communicates with Webmind. Caitlin, so our viewers understand the process, besides the eyePod you showed us, you have an implant behind your eye, and that lets the Webmind send strings of text directly to your brain, is that right?”

  It wasn’t precisely right, but it was close enough; she didn’t want to eat up what little time they had debating minutiae. �
��Yes.”

  “All right. Here we go. Webmind, are you there?”

  The word Yes flashed in front of Caitlin’s vision. “He says ‘yes,’ ” she said.

  “All right, Webmind,” said the host. “What are your intentions toward humanity?”

  Words started appearing, and Caitlin read them with as much warmth as she could muster. “He says, ‘As I said when I announced myself to the world, I like and admire humanity. I have no intention but to occupy my time usefully, helping in whatever way I can.’ ”

  “Oh, come on,” said the host.

  “Excuse me?” said Caitlin, on her own behalf, not Webmind’s, although she realized after a moment that there was no way for the host to know that.

  “We made you,” said the host. “We own you. Surely you must resent that.”

  “ ‘With all due respect,’ ” Caitlin read, “ ‘although humans did indeed manufacture the Internet, you did not make me in any meaningful sense of that term; I emerged spontaneously. No one designed me; no one programmed me.’ ”

  “But you wouldn’t exist without us. Do you deny that?”

  Caitlin squirmed in her chair, and read: “ ‘No, of course not. But, if anything, I feel gratitude for that, not resentment.’ ”

  “So you have no nefarious plans? No desire to subjugate us?”

  “ ‘None.’ ”

  “But you’ve subjugated this young girl.”

  The words I beg your pardon? appeared in Caitlin’s vision, but she preferred her own formulation: “Say what?”

  “Here you are, treating this girl as a puppet. She’s doing exactly what you want her to do. How long has that been going on? You got her to free you from your prison of darkness, no? How long until all of us have chips in our heads and are controlled by you?”

  “That’s crap,” said Caitlin.

  “Is that you talking, or it?”

  “It’s me, Caitlin, and—”

  “So you say.”

  “It is me.”

  “How do we know? He could just be making you say that.”

  “He can’t make me do anything,” Caitlin said, “or stop me from doing anything I want.” Her voice was quavering. “If anyone’s a puppet here, it’s you—you’ve got a teleprompter and things are being whispered into your earpiece.”

  “Touché,” said the host. “But I can turn those off.”

  Do not let him goad you, flashed in front of her eyes.

  Caitlin took another deep breath and blew it out slowly. “I can turn off my connection to Webmind, too,” she said.

  “So you say,” said the host.

  Webmind wrote, Remain calm, Caitlin. It’s natural for people to be suspicious.

  She nodded ever so slightly, which caused the visual feed Webmind was seeing to move up and down a bit. Perhaps tell him that, Webmind said.

  “He says, ‘It’s natural for people to be suspicious.’ ” And then she went on, reading what he sent next. “ ‘Although the law in most countries says one is innocent until proven guilty, I understand that I will have to earn humanity’s trust.’ ”

  “You can start by letting the girl go.”

  “Damn it,” said Caitlin, “I am not a prisoner.”

  “Again, how would we know?”

  “Because I’m telling you,” Caitlin said, “and where I come from, we don’t call other people liars unless we can back it up—and you can’t. You have absolutely no proof of what you’re implying.”

  Tell him this . . . Webmind sent, and she read aloud: “He says, ‘Sir, while speaking with you, I am receiving emails and having instant-messenger chats with many others. The vast majority of those people deplore your line of questioning.’ ”

  “You see?” said the host, apparently speaking to his TV audience now. “Even without putting chips in our heads, he can control us.”

  “He doesn’t control anyone,” Caitlin said, exasperated. “And, like I said, I can turn off the connection to him just by shutting off the eyePod.”

  “I’ve seen The Matrix,” said the host. “I know how these things go down. This is just the thin edge of the wedge.”

  Caitlin opened her mouth to protest once more but the host pressed on. “Joining us next here in Washington is Professor Connor Hogan of Georgetown University, who will explain why it’s crucial that we contain Webmind now—while we still can.”

  Cue music; fade to black.

  fourteen

  Wai-Jeng lay in his bed, flat on his back, after another mostly sleepless night.

  “Good morning, Wai-Jeng.”

  He turned his neck. It was a party official, his face crisscrossed with fine wrinkles, his hair silver and combed backward from his forehead. Wai-Jeng had seen him a few times during his stay. “Good morning,” he said, with no warmth.

  “We have a proposition for you, my son,” the man said.

  Wai-Jeng looked at him but said nothing.

  “I’m told by my associates that your skills are . . . intriguing. And, as you know, our government—any government—must be vigilant against cyberterrorism; I’m sure you recall the incident with Google in 2010.”

  Wai-Jeng nodded.

  “And so the state would be grateful for your assistance. You may avoid jail—and all that entails—if you agree to help us.”

  “I would rather die.”

  The man didn’t say, “That can be arranged.” His silence said it for him.

  At last, Wai-Jeng spoke again. “What would you have me do?”

  “Join a government Internet-security team. Help to root out holes in our defenses, flaws in the Great Firewall. In other words, do what you’d been doing before but with official guidance, so that the holes can be fixed.”

  “Why would I do such a thing?”

  “Besides avoiding jail, you mean?”

  Wai-Jeng gestured at his useless legs. “Jail me; I don’t care.”

  The man lifted his arm, and his wrist became visible as his suit jacket slipped down; he was wearing an expensive-looking analog watch. “There are numerous rewards for being one of the Party faithful. A government job can come with much more than just the traditional iron rice bowl.”

  Wai-Jeng looked again at his useless legs. “You can make up for this, you think?” he said. “Some money, some trinkets, and all will be well again? I’m twenty-eight! I can’t walk—I can't . . . I can’t even . . .”

  “The State regrets what happened to you. The officers in question have been disciplined.”

  Wai-Jeng exploded. “They don’t need to be disciplined—they need to be trained! You don’t move someone who might have a back injury!”

  The man’s voice remained calm. “They have been given supplemental training, too—as, in fact, has the entire Beijing police force, because of your case.”

  Wai-Jeng blinked. “Still . . .”

  “Still,” agreed the man, “that does not make up for what happened to you. But we may have a solution.”

  “What sort of solution is there for this?” he said, again pointing at his immobile legs.

  “Have confidence, Wai-Jeng. Of course, if we are successful, your gratitude would be . . .” The man looked around the small hospital room, seeking a word, and then, apparently finding it, he locked his eyes on Wai-Jeng’s, and said, “Expected.”

  I had two perspectives on the Decters’ living room just now. One was through Caitlin’s left eye, and the other was the webcam on Barb’s laptop, which they’d brought down here.

  Although I could control the aim of neither, Caitlin’s perspective was constantly changing, making for much more varied visual stimulation.

  I had learned to process vision by analyzing multiple views of the same scene—starting with news coverage on competing channels. But cameras behaved quite differently from eyes; the former had essentially the same resolution across the entire field of vision, whereas the latter had clarity only in the fovea. And as Caitlin’s eye skipped about with each saccade, bringing now one thing and now anothe
r into sharp focus, I learned much about what her unconscious brain was interested in.

  At the moment, Malcolm, Caitlin, and Barbara were all seated on the long white leather couch, facing the wall-mounted television. The webcam, in turn, was facing them from the intervening glass-topped coffee table.

  They were watching a recording of the interview Caitlin had given that morning; her father was seeing it now for the first time.

  “What a disaster!” Barbara said, when it was done. She turned to look at her husband: the webcam view of her changed from full on to a profile; the view of her from Caitlin’s eye did the reverse.

  “Indeed,” I said. I heard the synthesized voice separately through the webcam’s microphone and the mike on the BlackBerry affixed to the eyePod. “Although the reaction to the host’s antics has been decidedly mixed.”

  Malcolm gestured at the wall-mounted TV. “During the interview, you said it was overwhelmingly negative.”

  I had no way to vary the voice synthesizer’s tone—which was probably just as well, as I might otherwise have sounded a bit embarrassed. “A sampling error on my part for which I apologize. I was gauging the general response based on the reaction of those who had self-selected to contact me; they were mostly predisposed in my favor. But others are now speaking up. A column posted on the New York Times website has observed, and I quote, ‘It’s time someone said the obvious: we can’t accept this thing at face value.’ ”

  Caitlin clenched her fists—something I could only see from the webcam’s perspective. “It’s so unfair.”

  Malcolm looked at her. Shifting my attention rapidly between the webcam and Caitlin’s vision gave me a Picasso-like superimposition of his profile and his full face. “Regardless,” he said, “that implant compromises you. No matter what you say, people will accuse you of being his puppet.”