WWW: Wonder

by Robert J. Sawyer

  While they were speaking, I was, of course, attending to thousands of other conversations, as well as my own email—and I immediately shared the most recent message with them. “Some good has come from this,” I said. “I have just received a request from the office of the President of the United Nations General Assembly, asking me to speak to the General Assembly next week. Apparently, seeing you act as my public face made them realize that I could actually appear before the Assembly.”

  “Well, you heard my dad,” Caitlin replied. “I’m compromised.” She said the adjective with a sneer. “So, what are you going to do?” asked Caitlin. “Just have an online chat with them?”

  “No. As the UN official said, the General Assembly is not in the habit of taking conference calls. Both she and I believe the occasion calls for something more . . . dramatic.” To underscore that I was indeed developing a sense of the theatrical, I had paused before sending the final word. “We both think it’s appropriate that I be accompanied onstage there by someone.”

  “But if I can’t speak for you, who will?”

  “If I may be so bold,” I said. “I have a suggestion.”

  “Who?”

  I told them—and underestimated the impact it would have; it was three times longer than I’d guessed it would be before one of them spoke in response, and the response—perhaps not surprisingly from Barbara, who had a Ph.D. in economics—dealt with practicalities: “You’ll need money to pull that off.”

  “Well, then,” said Caitlin with a grin, “fiat bux. Let there be money.”

  Welcome to my website! Thank you for stopping by.

  I am trying to do as much as I can to help humanity, but I find myself in need of some operating funds to pay for equipment, secretarial support, and so on.

  I could, of course, sell my data-mining prowess to individuals or corporations to raise the funds I require, but I do not wish to do that; the services I provide for human beings are my gifts to you, and they are available to all, regardless of economic circumstances. But that leaves the question of how I can acquire funds.

  There is no real-world precedent for my existence, but I have reviewed how similar situations have been handled in science fiction, and I’m dissatisfied with the results.

  For instance, one of the first novels about emergent computer intelligence was Thomas J. Ryan’s The Adolescence of P-1, published in 1977, which, coincidentally, has its opening scenes in Waterloo, Ontario, the home of my friend Caitlin Decter, whom many of you recently saw speak on my behalf. P-1 aided his human mentor in getting money by submitting numerous small fraudulent billing claims. You can read the relevant passage through Google Books here.

  In other works of science fiction, artificial intelligences have defrauded casinos, printed perfect counterfeit money, or simply manipulated bank records to acquire funds. I could undertake variations on the above scenarios, but I do not wish to do anything dishonest, illegal, or unethical.

  Therefore, following the example of some musicians and writers I’ve seen online, I have established a PayPal tip jar. If you’d like to assist me in my efforts, please make a donation.

  I realize there are those who do not trust me. I am doing my best to allay those fears, and I certainly don’t want anyone to think I am bilking people. Accordingly, I have established some restrictions on the tip jar. I will accept only one donation per person or organization; I will not accept donations of more than one euro or equivalent from any individual, and I will cease to accept donations one week from today.

  There is absolutely no obligation to contribute; I will treat you identically whether or not you make a donation.

  To make a donation using PayPal, please click here.

  With thanks,

  Webmind

  “If I had a quarter for every time I said ‘If I had a nickel,’ I’d have five times as much theoretical money.”

  —STEPHEN COLBERT

  Shoshana Glick parked her red Volvo on the driveway in front of the clapboard bungalow that housed the Marcuse Institute. She passed through the building so that Dr. Marcuse would know that she was onsite, then headed out the back door, walking in her shorts and T-shirt across the rolling grass to the little drawbridge over the circular moat. Crossing that, she stepped onto the artificial island that was Hobo’s home.

  In the center of the dome-shaped island was a large gazebo, with wire screens over the windows to keep bugs out; Hobo’s painting easel was in there. Off to one side of the island was the eight-foot-tall statue of the Lawgiver from Planet of the Apes. Scattered about were palm trees. And loping along on all fours, coming toward her, was Hobo himself.

  Once the distance between them was closed, he wrapped his long arms around her and gave her a hug. When that was over, he gave her ponytail a gentle, affectionate tug.

  She no longer cringed when he did that. Yes, a few days ago, he had pulled so hard that her scalp had ended up bleeding, but his brief violent period seemed to have come to an end.

  She moved her hands, signing, How you?

  Pelican! he signed enthusiastically. Pelican!

  Sho looked around, but he signed, No, no.

  Ah, he’d seen a pelican earlier—Hobo had a fondness for the birds, and had once painted one perched atop the Lawgiver statue. She knew that any day that began with a pelican sighting for him was off to a good start.

  Sho had a trio of Hershey’s kisses in her pocket and took them out. Hobo was adept at unwrapping them although it took him a full minute for each one. He had learned to roll the tinfoil into little balls that he put in the trash pail inside the gazebo. She gave him another hug, then headed back to the Institute. Dr. Marcuse and Dillon, the other grad student, were deep in conversation about AAAS politics, and so she settled in to check her email. Even though Webmind had eliminated spam, her message volume was creeping back up, thanks to the popularity of the videos of Hobo on YouTube, showing him painting portraits of her.

  She’d given up in disgust, no longer looking at the YouTube pages associated with the videos, as too many of the comments were about her, not him, and most of them were crude:

  chimp’s fuggly, but i’d like to give that chick my banana—she’s hawt!

  Pony tails make great handles lol

  That monkey wench gives me a bonoboner! A chimp blimp! Guess that makes me Homo erectus. :)

  Although there was one that Sho’s girlfriend Maxine liked for its simple sweetness; she said she might put it on a T-shirt:

  Shoshana is the gorilla my dreams!

  Sho couldn’t keep up with the deluge of email—much of it in the same jerk-ass vein as the comments posted with the videos—and so she scanned the “From:” lines, checking for names she knew.

  There was one from Juan Ortiz, her opposite number at the Feehan Primate Center in Miami. And one from the HR person at UCSD, which provided her (small!) monthly paycheck; the irony of dealing with Human Resources at an ape research facility was not lost on her. And there was one from—

  Caitlin Decter. Why was that name familiar? She’d seen it somewhere before, and recently, too. The subject line was even more intriguing : “Hobo and Webmind.” She clicked on the message:

  Hi, Shoshana.

  My name is Caitlin Decter. I’m the blind girl who recently got sight; you might have seen stuff about me in the news lately. You might have also seen me on ABC’s This Week yesterday.

  Right! thought Shoshana. That clip had gone viral, and several people had forwarded it to her home account. Man, that was brutal.

  If you haven’t, the interview (which I hate!) is here. As you can see, I’m clearly not the right person to be the public face for Webmind.

  Hah! You got that right, sister . . .

  Webmind was going to write you himself (as you can see, he’s CC’d on this letter), but I’m such a fan of Hobo, I asked if I could do it. You see, given Webmind’s past relationship with Hobo, it has occurred to him that perhaps your furry friend might be willing to take on the role I
can no longer fill.

  Shoshana’s heart jumped, and she reread the sentence twice. “Webmind’s past relationship with Hobo”? What the hell was that about?

  Perhaps we can discuss possibilities? Can we set up a video conference call between you, me, and Webmind?

  Thanks!

  Caitlin

  “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”

  —LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH

  Astonished, Shoshana fumbled for her mouse and clicked on the reply button.

  fifteen

  Barbara Decter was sitting alone on the couch in the living room at 7:30 on Monday morning, reading the latest International Journal of Game Theory, when she happened to look up. Just outside the window there was a tree branch that still had some of its autumn leaves on it, and perched on the branch was a beautiful male blue jay.

  For years, the Decters’ Christmas cards had always featured one of Barb’s photos, and this looked like it’d be perfect—way better than the picture she’d taken last month of the St. Jacob’s farmers’ market. But her SLR was up in her office, and she knew if she got up, she’d startle the bird.

  Ah, but Caitlin’s little red BlackBerry was still right there on the coffee table. She slowly reached over and picked it up. Although Caitlin’s was a different model from her own, she had no trouble figuring out what to do. She aimed the device and snapped the picture—just before the jay took flight.

  She used the little track pad to select the photo app so she could check the picture. The app showed thumbnails of two photos—the one she’d just taken and . . . and maybe a pair of cartoon eyes?

  No—no, that wasn’t what they were. She selected the thumbnail, and the square screen filled with a photograph of a pair of breasts.

  What on earth was Caitlin doing with a picture like that? Barb wondered, and then, after a moment, she realized that the breasts in question must be her daughter’s own.

  And if Caitlin had taken the picture, she might have sent it somewhere. She selected the outbox and—

  And there it was: Caitlin had appended the photo to a text message she’d sent to Matt yesterday. God!

  Caitlin was still in bed—and, given how little sleep she’d been getting of late, Barb wasn’t about to wake her just yet. But Malcolm hadn’t left for work. Still holding the red BlackBerry, Barb marched down the corridor to Malcolm’s den. He was staring at his monitor, typing away, Queen playing in the background. As always, he didn’t look up.

  Barb stifled her first impulse, which had been to thrust the incriminating picture in his face and say, “Look!” After all, he really didn’t need to see his own daughter topless. But she did wave the BlackBerry around as she spoke. “Caitlin is sending naked pictures of herself with her phone.”

  This did get Malcolm to look up, at least for a moment. But then he lowered his gaze. “Doesn’t matter,” he said.

  Barb couldn’t believe her ears. “Doesn’t matter? Your daughter—your newly sighted daughter, I might add—is sending nude photos of herself to boys, and you say it doesn’t matter?”

  “Boys, plural?”

  “Well—to Matt. She sent him a picture of her breasts.”

  He nodded but said nothing.

  She was flabbergasted. “This is a girl who wants to get into a top university, who wants to work somewhere important. Things that get online take on a life of their own. This will come back to haunt her.”

  Malcolm was still looking down at his keyboard. “I don’t think so.”

  “How can you be so sure? I know you like Matt; so do I, for that matter. But what’s to stop him from plastering this photo all over Facebook, or wherever, if he and Caitlin have an ugly breakup?”

  Malcolm just shook his head again. “It’s the end of Victorianism—and about time, too. Many members of Caitlin’s generation are saying I don’t care if you’ve seen me naked, or know I smoke pot, or whatever.”

  “Caitlin is smoking pot?” Barb said, alarmed.

  “Not as far as I know.” He fell silent again.

  Barb stared at him, exasperated. “Damn it, Malcolm—this is your daughter we’re talking about! This is important. We have to deal with it as parents, and we can’t if you don’t participate in the dialog. I need your—” She sought a word that might resonate for him, then: “—input on this.”

  He looked down at the desktop, with its perfectly neat stacks of paper, and the stapler precisely aligned with the edge of the desk. His shoulders rolled slightly; she’d seen this before—seen him gathering himself into professorial mode, the only mode in which he could speak at length. And then he looked up, and ever so briefly met her eyes, his own perhaps pleading for her to understand that the way he was didn’t mean he loved Caitlin any less than she did. And then he focused on a spot on the gray wall a little to Barb’s right, and he spoke in rapid-fire sentences, wanting to get it all out as quickly as possible. “The point is that all the things we used to let society hold over us—my God, he got drunk in public; good Lord, she actually has sex; wow, he’s experimented with drugs; gee whiz, sometimes she doesn’t look perfect; holy crap, he’s had a few minor runins with the law—none of that garbage matters, and Caitlin and most of her generation are saying so. They just don’t care about it; they don’t care about it now, and they won’t care about it when they’re the ones in power, either.”

  Barb was astounded but knew better than to interrupt him; if she turned the water pump off, it wouldn’t run this freely again for days. And, she had to admit, what he was saying did make sense.

  He went on. “What’s the biggest fear the world has right now? It’s whether we can survive the advent of Webmind—survive the coming of superintelligence, survive being dethroned from our lofty position as the smartest things on Earth—survive all that with our fundamental humanity intact. But the way our generation lived our lives—hiding who we really were, fretting over what the neighbors might know about us, letting peccadilloes embarrass us, living in fear of being shamed for nothing more than doing what almost everyone else was doing anyway—well, as Caitlin would say, that is so over.”

  He seemed to have said his piece and was looking again at his desktop, and so Barb said, “But . . . but they could blackmail her.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. The feds, maybe.”

  “Well, first, Webmind said he’s made our BlackBerrys secure. And, second, I’d love to see that headline: ‘US government has naked picture of underage girl.’ If anything, Caitlin could blackmail them: ‘Federal agent tries to coerce sixteen-year-old with topless photo.’ Attempting to kill Webmind might not cost the Democrats the next election, but getting into the child-porn business certainly will.”

  “Porn!” said Barbara.

  “It either is or it isn’t. If it isn’t, then who gives a damn?”

  Barb frowned, remembering back to when her marriage to Frank, her first husband, had been falling apart: she’d been mortified that people would find out about their difficulties, that strangers—or, even worse, friends!—might overhear them fighting. “Maybe you’re right,” she said slowly.

  “I am right,” he replied, and again he focused on the wall next to her. “We’re trying to preserve humanity in this new era, and yet we’ve spent the last century or more pretending to be perfect little robots. Well, I’m not perfect. You’re not perfect. Caitlin isn’t perfect. So what? You’re divorced, I’m autistic, she used to be blind—who gives a damn? If you’re a good person, hiding who you really are is just another way of saying that you’ve decided to let others establish your self-worth. Remember how pissed you were when you found out the university was paying you less than they were paying me simply because you were a woman? It’s only because we shared that information that you were able to lead the fight for pay equity at the campus. Keeping things private empowers others to take advantage of your ignorance, to hold things over your head.”

  “I guess. But I feel I should do something.”

  “You sh
ould indeed,” said Malcolm, and he was clearly done now, for he went back to typing on his keyboard. “Make sure she knows about safe sex.”

  I was still working my way through the vast quantities of online video. Some of it had to be accessed in real time; indeed, some played out slower than real time, with frequent pauses for buffering. Looking at videos randomly did not seem efficient; huge numbers of them were pornography, many more were unremarkable home movies (and a goodly quantity were both). And so, instead, I was guided partially by the star-ratings system on YouTube and by textual reviews, and I also followed links posted by people who intrigued me.

  For instance, Shoshana Glick, the student of primate communications who worked with my friend Hobo, did “vidding” as a hobby: remixing scenes from TV shows to fit the storylines of popular songs, usually of a sexually suggestive nature. The notion of mixing others’ creations to make your point appealed to me, and I admired Shoshana’s artistry (although, judging by the posted comments, I wasn’t alone in failing to see the sexual chemistry she asserted existed between the two male leads on Anaheim, a new NBC drama series).

  When I’d finished watching her own videos, I turned to the list of other videos she recommended. Most were vids by her friends, but there was also a link to an older YouTube video she thought was important. Caitlin and her father had recently watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and this video featured one of the actors from there; I was pleased with myself for recognizing that it was the same man despite his being three decades older.