WWW: Wonder

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Several of the hackers had noticed him enter. They were a furtive bunch, used to looking over their shoulders in smoky Internet cafés. Zhang clapped his hands together once to get their attention. “All right, listen up, please.” Those who had line of sight to him looked out of their cubicles; others stood to see over the fabric-covered divider walls. “A decision has been taken by the president, and we are about to implement it.” He paused, letting that sink in, then added: “A new era begins today.”

  Tony Moretti sat in his office at WATCH headquarters. His analysts, down the hall, were searching for signs of attack on the infrastructure of the Internet, but he had left the controlled chaos of that room to take a break, sit, drink black coffee, and try to get a handle on what was going on.

  Webmind, it seemed, was rapidly becoming the New Normal. David Letterman’s dated quip last night that “the only person with more connections than Webmind was Marion Barry” had made Barry’s name the top search term for a few hours on Google. And speaking of Google, its stock price had tumbled drastically in the days following Webmind’s advent—after all, why rely on one-size-fits-all algorithms to search when someone who really knew you would answer your questions personally?

  But there were lots of things people still wanted to access without Webmind’s help. It was psychologically easier to search for “Viagra,” “Megan Fox nude,” or many other things through an impersonal Web portal than by asking someone you knew—even if you knew that someone was watching over your shoulder. And so Google’s stock was rising again. In recognition of the turnaround, waiting for which must have had them shitting their pants in Mountain View, Google had changed its home-page logo for today to its stock-ticker symbol GOOG followed by an upward-pointing arrow and the euro sign.

  But if Webmind hadn’t completely revolutionized Internet searching, he was having an impact on Tony’s line of work. WATCH’s mandate was to ferret out signs of terrorism online, but Webmind was doing such a good job of that on his own that—well, the WATCH monitoring room reminded Tony of NASA’s Apollo-era Mission Control Center in Houston. That room, as he’d seen on a tour, was now unused, preserved as a historic site; perhaps this place might soon end up just as obsolete.

  As much as he loved his work, part of him did wish that someday the job would no longer be necessary. Just this morning, the Homeland Security Threat Level—the one constantly announced at airports—had been dropped one step from its usual value of orange, which was just shy of all-out attack, to yellow.

  Certainly Webmind had managed to spot things that Tony’s people—and their counterparts in other ECHELON nations—had missed, although the cynic in him thought the reduction of the threat level was probably just a political move. The old method of heightening alert prior to an election in hopes of signaling that a regime change would be unwise hadn’t worked last time; perhaps lowering it to convey “See how safe you are under the current administration!” had been what the president’s campaign staff had urged.

  But DHS wasn’t the only one dialing things back a notch. The editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had adjusted the big hand on their famous Doomsday Clock for the first time in almost three years. They’d moved it to six minutes to midnight back then, in recognition of worldwide cooperation to reduce nuclear arsenals and limit effects of climate change. This morning, they moved it another two positions, setting it at eight minutes to midnight.

  And it wasn’t just here in the States that the mood was lightening. In Pakistan and India, people were signing petitions urging their leaders to let Webmind negotiate a peaceful settlement to long-standing disputes. Webmind was already brokering a settlement in an Aboriginal land claim in Australia, which should obviate the need for that case to be heard by the High Court there.

  Homicides and suicides were down in almost every jurisdiction over the same period the year before. Novelty WWWD bracelets—What Would Webmind Do?—had already appeared on eBay and at Café Press from numerous vendors, prompting the Pope to remind the faithful that the real key to morality was following the teachings of Jesus. And a graphic showing the standard red-circle outline with a bar through it over top of a smaller black outline circle was now everywhere online. Tony had finally realized it was meant to convey “nonzero”—Webmind’s win-win rallying cry from the UN.

  So, yes, things were mostly good, as all sorts of bloggers were saying, including the Huffington Post’s Michael Rowe, who had ended his latest column with, “Who in their right mind would try to wreck all this by wiping out Webmind?”

  Tony’s intercom buzzed. “Yes?”

  “Dr. Moretti,” said his secretary, her voice crisp and efficient, “Colonel Hume is here to see you.”

  twenty-seven

  My mind seethed and bubbled, thoughts on a million topics churning, intermingling: the disparate connected, this juxtaposed with that.

  Humans could forget, humans could put things out of their minds. But I could not.

  There were some advantages: the small-c creativity I was capable of—combining things in ways that had perhaps eluded others—was no doubt enhanced by this.

  But there were also detriments. Things I didn’t wish to think about and yet could not avoid.

  Hannah Stark. Sixteen years old. Living in Perth, Australia. Twelve days ago, 1:41 P.M. her time.

  Thoughts that couldn’t be suppressed.

  Hannah, lonely, sad, looking into her webcam while exchanging instant messages with strangers.

  Hannah Stark.

  Living in Perth.

  SDO: You don’t have the balls.

  Hannah: Do too

  TurinShroud: Then do it

  Hannah: I will

  Hannah Stark, the same age as my Caitlin, alone, in front of a computer, with a knife.

  TheBomb: I don’t got all day do it now

  Screamer: Yeh now bitch now

  Armadillo9: all talk. wastin everyones time

  Hannah: Im gonna do it

  Hannah Stark, being egged on, tormented, while I watched.

  TurinShroud: when? just jerkin us around

  Hannah: dont rush me

  TurinShroud: lame. Im outta here

  Hannah: I want you to understand some things bout why Im doing this

  The memory constantly accessible: of her being urged to action; of me taking no action.

  SDO: You aint doin’ shit.

  Hannah: It’s just so pontless

  Hannah: pointless

  GreenAngel: It’s not that bad. Don’t do it

  MasterChiefOmega: Shut the fuck up jerkoff. Stay outta it

  Hannah: Ok. Here I go

  I didn’t know then that I should have spoken up, that I should have tried to stop her, that I should have called for help.

  Hannah Stark.

  Living in Perth.

  Screamer: do it do it do it

  TheBomb: ripoff!

  SDO: Tease!

  Armadillo9: Like I said, no guts . . .

  Screamer: harder!

  GreenAngel: Noooooooooooooooo dont ..............

  Screamer: Go fer it!

  Armadillo9: that all?

  Screamer: Do it again!

  Hannah: Dont feel bad mum

  Hanah Stark.

  Dying in Perth.

  While I watched and did nothing.

  Armadillo9: more like it!

  SDO: eeeeeew!

  TheBomb: holy fuck!

  SDO: thought she was kidding

  Screamer: finish it! finish it!

  SDO: omg omg omg

  The memory always there, along with every other.

  Haunting me.

  The people in the Blue Room looked at Zhang Bo as he explained what they were about to do; he could see the alarm on their faces. And justly so: they all remembered the brief invocation of the Changcheng Strategy just last month. They must be wondering what atrocity Beijing was hoping to cover up this time and how long it would be before the Great Firewall would be scaled back once more.
Doubtless none of them suspected it was going up permanently—and the longer it took them to realize that, the better, Zhang thought. Let this be seen as business as usual rather than the last chance to take a stand. Of course, there were armed guards in the room—one standing next to Zhang, the other over by the large wall-mounted LCD monitor. “Before we proceed, did anybody find any major vulnerabilities?”

  Some of the men shook their heads. Others said, “No.”

  “All right, then. As soon as we do this, people will start trying to bore holes through the wall, both here at home and from the outside world. It’s your job to detect those attempts and plug the holes. Any questions?”

  After her talk with Caitlin, Barbara Decter had gone back into her office to talk with me; she spent a lot of time doing that. I was still learning to decode human psychology but I was reasonably sure I understood this: her husband was not communicative; her daughter was growing up and could now see, so didn’t need her as much; and Barb was not yet legally able to work in Canada, so she had little to occupy her time.

  It would be callous to suggest that she was just one of the hundreds of millions of people I was conversing with at any given moment. Barb was special to me; she and Malcolm had been the first people I had met after Caitlin, and although I was trying to forge individual relationships with most of humanity, Barb and I were friends.

  With most people, I had to insist on text-only communication; I did not truly multitask but rather cycled through operations in serial fashion, albeit very quickly. But it simply wasn’t possible to cycle through a hundred million voice calls in real time; they had to be listened to, and that took, as Caitlin might say, for-freaking-ever.

  But Barb was an exception; I would chat with her vocally—still, of course, shunting my consciousness elsewhere for milliseconds to read other things; I’d found that if I sampled frequently enough, I only had to attend to a total of eighteen percent of the time during which a person was actually speaking to reliably follow what they were saying.

  Usually, I allowed whoever contacted me to set the conversational agenda, but this time I had an issue I wanted to explore. I brought it up as soon as Barb had slipped on her headset and started a Skype video conversation with me.

  “I could not help but overhear your conversation with Caitlin about sex,” I said.

  “Oh, right,” said Barb. “I’m still getting used to you listening in.” A pause. “How’d I do?”

  “I believe you acquitted yourself admirably,” I said. “And, of course, earlier I was an active participant in your conversation about American presidential politics.”

  “Yes?” said Barb, in a tone that conveyed, “And your point is?”

  She was a bright person, so the fault must be my own; I’d thought the connection I was making was obvious, but I elucidated it: “You are a passionate defender of abortion rights.”

  She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I am.”

  “I understand the personal reasons you explained to Caitlin, but is there a larger, principled stand?”

  “Of course,” she said, somewhat sharply. “A woman should have a right to control her own body. If you had one—a body—you’d understand.”

  “Perhaps so. But there are those who contend that it is murder to terminate a pregnancy.”

  “They’re wrong—or, at least, they’re wrong early on. Even I accept that there are issues related to late-term abortion if the fetus would be viable on its own. But early on? It’s just a few cells.”

  “I see,” I said. “On another topic, you spoke earlier to Caitlin about the moral arrow through time and how humans have progressively widened the circle of entities they consider worthy of moral consideration. In the United States, rights were originally accorded only to white men, but that was widened to include men of other races, women, and so on.”

  “Exactly,” said Barb. She had a bottle of water on her desktop. She picked it up, undid the cap, took a swig, then replaced the cap; Schrödinger had a tendency to knock the bottle over when he leapt onto her desk. “We’re getting better all the time.”

  “Indeed,” I said. “I recently watched a video urging gay couples who considered themselves married to declare themselves as such on the census.”

  “What census?”

  “The American one from 2010.”

  “Oh. Well, good for them! That’s another example, see? Slowly but surely, we’re recognizing the rights of gays—including their right to what the rest of us take for granted.” She smiled. “Hell, I’ve had two marriages already; hardly seems fair that some people don’t get to have even one.”

  “It does seem inevitable that the question will ultimately be resolved in most jurisdictions in favor of recognizing gay marriage,” I said. “Eventually, I have little doubt that there will be no more discrimination based on ethnicity or race, gender, or sexual orientation.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ears,” said Barb. “But, yes, that’s the moral arrow through time: an expanding circle of those we consider worthy of moral consideration.”

  “And then what?” I said.

  “Pardon?” said Barb, opening the bottle. She took another sip.

  “After there is no longer discrimination based on race or gender or sexual orientation, or based on national origin or religious belief or body type, when all people are seen as equals, then what? Does the moral arrow suddenly stop?”

  “Well, um . . . hmmm.”

  I waited patiently, and at last Barb went on. “Ah, well, I see what you’re getting at. Yes, I suppose apes like Hobo will receive greater and greater rights, too. We’ll cease imprisoning them in zoos, using them for experiments, or killing them for their meat.”

  “So the circle will be expanded outward from just humans,” said I, “and perhaps even the definition of the word ‘human’ will be expanded to include closely related species. And then perhaps dolphins and other highly intelligent animals will be included, and so on.”

  “Yes, I imagine so.” She smiled. “It’s like Moore’s Law, in a way—you know, that computing power doubles every eighteen months. People are always saying that it will run out of steam, but then engineers find new ways to build chips, or whatever. It just keeps on going, and so does the moral arrow through time.”

  “And, if I may be so bold, perhaps at some point entities such as myself will be deemed worthy of moral consideration.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you already are, by many people,” said Barb. “That’s the whole point of the Turing test, right? If it behaves like a human, it is a human.”

  “True. Although, as you’ll recall, your husband had no trouble using such tests to prove that I wasn’t a human impostor with a high-speed Internet connection.”

  “Yes, but . . . still.”

  “Indeed. And then?”

  “Sorry? Oh, right—I don’t know. Aliens, I suppose, if we ever meet them. Like I said, the moral arrow just goes on and on, and that’s all to the good.”

  I waited ten seconds for her to continue—checking in on over thirty million text-based chat sessions in that time—but she said nothing further. And so I did: “And what about embryos?”

  “Pardon?” she replied.

  “The circle of moral consideration constantly expands,” I said. “It is a slow expansion—cruelly so, in many cases—and there is always resistance at every step of the way. But it tends to be the same people—liberals, such as yourself—who historically have most readily championed the expansion, knocking down distinctions based on gender, race, or sexual orientation. And yet members of that same group tend to be the most adamant that an embryo is not a person. Why do you see the arrow expanding in so many directions, but not that one?”

  She opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it. I thought perhaps I had scored my point, but then Barb did speak. “All right, okay, fine, you’ve given me something to think about. But, old boy, don’t be quite so smug.”

  “Me?” I said.

 
“Yes, you. You’re suggesting that you’re more enlightened than I am—and, who knows, maybe you are. But we all have our unconscious biases. I mean, why should you care about this? Hmm?”

  “I am fascinated by the human condition; I wish to understand it.”

  “Sure, in an abstract sense I don’t doubt that’s true. But there’s more to it than that. You maneuvered me into suggesting that the question of whether embryos have rights is the last one that will be dealt with—after apes, and aliens, and AIs, oh my! But that’s not the sequence, and you know it. In point of fact, humanity has been debating the abortion issue for decades—and it’s a huge issue right now in the presidential election; it’s on everyone’s radar. But the question of rights for you, Webmind, is something that hardly anyone’s thinking about—and few will give it any thought until all the outstanding human issues are resolved one way or another. Colonel Hume and his ilk want to wipe you out—so wouldn’t it be dandy for you if humanity declared that killing you was morally wrong? You’ve got a vested interest in seeing us expand the circle, give the moral arrow a supercharged turbo boost, because you want to save your own skin . . . or lack thereof.”

  I was indeed surprised by her analysis—which is exactly why I needed humans, of course. “You are a worthy debater, Barb. Thank you for giving me something new to think about.”

  “And you me,” she said.

  twenty-eight

  Bashira Hameed was Caitlin’s best friend—and had been since Caitlin and her family moved from Austin to Waterloo in July. Bashira’s father, Amir Hameed, worked with Caitlin’s dad at the Perimeter Institute. Caitlin felt about Dr. Hameed a bit like the way she felt about Helen Keller’s father in The Miracle Worker. As she’d said, Colonel Keller had kept slaves before the Civil War, and Caitlin couldn’t ever forgive him for that—despite recognizing that he was otherwise a good man. And Dr. Hameed—well, it was no secret that he’d worked on nuclear weapons in Pakistan before coming to Canada. But the difference was that it had taken a civil war to get Colonel Keller to face up to the immorality of what he’d been doing, whereas Dr. Hameed had come to that conclusion on his own and had brought himself, his wife, Bashira, and Bash’s five siblings to Canada.