WWW: Wonder

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Malcolm nodded. Of course, Barb wasn’t going to participate, and Caitlin was exempt; a decision had been taken to ask only adults to step forward. Malcolm wasn’t sure if his daughter qualified anyway although she surely tended that way.

  “All right,” said Malcolm. “I’m ready.”

  “Excellent. I know it is hard for you, but please try to look directly at the camera.”

  Malcolm nodded and clicked the record button with his mouse. Suddenly his mouth was dry—he hadn’t expected this to be a difficult thing to say. He had a cold cup of coffee on his desk; he took a sip—he could edit all this out before uploading, of course. The webcam was at the top of the monitor, and on the screen he had Microsoft Word open, displaying the speech he’d prepared.

  “I am not given to speaking much,” he read, “so forgive me for using prepared notes. I was born in Philadelphia, and now live in Waterloo, Canada. I am part of a minority that is deeply misunderstood. People have very confused ideas about us. Many are frightened of us. I’ve even heard it said that many people wouldn’t want their daughters or sons to marry one of us, and I know of people who have been denied jobs or promotions because they share this trait with me. But being what I am does not make me bad; being what I am does not make me dangerous; being what I am does not mean I don’t love, or hurt, or have a sense of humor.

  “My name is Malcolm Decter, and I’m here today to tell the whole world what I am.” He took a deep breath, let it out, and then said, loudly and clearly. “I am an atheist.”

  As the dance was winding down, Caitlin and Matt spoke again with Mr. Heidegger. He was excited to hear about her trip to New York, and he reiterated how much he missed having her in his class. “However,” he added, “young Mr. Reese here has been doing a good job of keeping me on my toes.” The conversation continued so long that they ended up being the last ones to leave the gym. Mr. H exited by the door that led directly outside.

  Caitlin’s mom had said they could call for a lift home—and Caitlin thought that might be a good idea. After all, who knew where Trevor had gone? And he did have a history of confronting Matt while walking home.

  But, as they’d seen earlier, it was a lovely evening—if cold, to Caitlin’s Texan blood—and Matt convinced her to walk. First they had to get their coats and her purse, though. Caitlin no longer had a locker here, so they’d put everything in Matt’s, up on the second floor.

  By the time they got upstairs, everyone else had left and the lights were off. There were no windows in the corridor, although each classroom door had a small one, and some light was coming through from the street outside. EXIT signs were glowing red—the first such Caitlin had seen in the dark—and LEDs flashed on what Matt said were smoke detectors.

  She’d been to Matt’s locker once before; it was very close to where her own had been—naturally enough, since they’d both had the same class for homeroom. The first time she’d gone to Matt’s locker—the first time they’d gone out together, for lunch at Tim Hortons—had been just seventeen days ago.

  How fast were things supposed to move, she wondered? Yes, the singularity was all about acceleration, about things happening more and more rapidly, about a headlong rush into the unknown, but—

  Matt seemed to be having more trouble navigating in the dark than she was. He’d walked this corridor at least as often as she had, but she’d done it for over a month while blind. She never consciously counted paces, but her body knew how far to go, whereas he kept looking at the doors they were passing, trying to read the dim room numbers marked on them.

  She took his hand and took the lead. “It’s down here,” she said. She was reminded again of the days before the school year had begun when she’d come here to practice walking the empty hallways. It was easy for her to stride briskly now since the corridor was wide, straight, and deserted.

  They reached Matt’s locker—again, he was looking at the number plates attached to their green doors, while she just knew that this was the right spot.

  Caitlin’s locker had had a padlock, and although she’d known the numerical combination, she’d learned to open it by touch—so many degrees to the left, so many to the right. While Matt fumbled in the dark with his lock, she continued on down the corridor another twenty feet, which brought her to the door of the room that had been their math class. She peered through the little window.

  The door was near the front of the classroom, so she was looking in at Mr. H’s desk, with its chair neatly tucked in, and obliquely at the green board along the front wall. It had writing on it, but she couldn’t read it from this angle and in this degree of darkness. She was curious about what the class was studying now, so she took the doorknob in her hand; it was cold and hard. She half expected the room to be locked, but it wasn’t. She pushed the door open and walked in to have a look at the board, but—

  Sigh. For everyone else, it was habit, she was sure, ingrained over a lifetime. But she still never thought to hit the light switch as she came into a room. She turned to head back toward the door and her heart skipped a beat. There was a strange shape silhouetted in the doorway, with bizarre lumps and—

  —and a voice that cracked. “Here you go,” Matt said, and Caitlin resolved the image: he had his coat draped over one arm, and her jacket and purse held in his other hand, extended toward her.

  He stepped into the room. She came toward him, intending to flick on the light, but—

  The thought came to her again. How fast were things supposed to move? How fast in this crazy new world?

  She also thought about what her mother had asked: Do you like Matt in particular, or do you just like having a boyfriend in general?

  And, of course, even before tonight, the answer had been the former: she really, really, really liked Matthew Peter Reese, and she knew with the same certainty she knew any mathematical truth that he really, really, really liked her.

  And after tonight—after seeing him be so brave and so strong—she knew she more than liked him.

  As she reached the door, she dimly saw the bank of four light switches set against a metal rectangle. She raised her hand, but then—yes, it was time—changed its trajectory and instead pushed the door shut.

  And there they were, the two of them, in the dark, with Matt holding their coats. It was dim enough that Caitlin couldn’t make out his expression—but she knew which one it had to be. She closed the small distance between them, put her arms around his neck, moved her face toward his, and kissed him long and hard.

  When they finally pulled back a bit, Caitlin could feel herself grinning widely.

  “Hey,” Matt said, softly.

  “Hey, yourself,” she replied.

  But here? she thought. Here? And then: Why not? There was no place in the world where she felt more safe than in a math classroom.

  She took her denim jacket and purse from him, and then took his hand, and she led him to the back of the room, behind the last row of desks. There were posters on the rear wall, and the graphics were big and bold enough that she could make them out: illustrations of geometric principles and conic sections.

  She opened her purse, pulled out one of the foil-wrapped condoms her mother had given her, and handed it to Matt, whose mouth dropped open.

  She smiled and put the purse on a chair. She spread out her denim jacket on the tile floor. She then took his jacket, which had a nylon exterior and was puffy—its chest and sleeves were filled with feathers or something else that was soft—and lay it on top of hers. And she took the condom back from him and conveniently set it on the outstretched sleeve of his jacket.

  And then she smiled at him again, and crossed her arms in front of her chest, and took hold of the bottom of her silky top—which was still blue in some abstract sense, she knew, but looked black in this light—and pulled it over her head, revealing her lacy bra.

  “Um,” said Matt softly, and “uh . . .”

  Caitlin grinned again. “Yes?”

  “What if we get caught?”


  She came toward him and started unbuttoning his shirt. “I’m no longer a student here—they can’t expel me! And you? They like you too much to kick you out.”

  Matt laughed. “True enough.” He helped undo his buttons, and when his shirt was off, he reached behind her and valiantly tried to unhook her bra. After thirty seconds of no success, Caitlin laughed and did it for him. His hands slid around to her front and cupped her breasts, and he said, very softly, “Wow.”

  “Thanks,” she replied, equally softly.

  He hesitated a moment. “Um, just, ah, just so you know, this is, ah—it’s . . . it’s my . . .”

  Caitlin looked up at him. “Your first time?”

  He turned his head slightly away. “Yeah.”

  She reached up and softly touched his cheek, gently turning his head back toward her. “I know,” she said. “It’s mine, too. And I want it to be with you.”

  He smiled, and it was wide enough that she could see it in the darkness, but it faded after a moment. “Um, what about—you know—I mean . . .”

  “What?”

  Matt dropped his voice to a whisper. “I, uh, I don’t think I can do it with Webmind watching.”

  The eyePod was in the left front pocket of her tight jeans. She undid the metal button and unzipped the fly—it was easier to get the device out that way—then pulled it out and held its one button down for five seconds. Her vision shut off; everything became a featureless gray. Before that had happened, she’d noted the position of the closest desk, and she set the eyePod carefully on its surface. She then shimmied out of her jeans, smiled at where she knew Matt was, found his hand, and led him down onto the bed of coats.

  “Fortunately,” she said, pulling him close, “I’m very good at doing things by touch . . .”

  thirty-eight

  I understood the significance of what had just happened, of course. And I was pleased with my restraint. When Caitlin had first pulled Matt to her, I’d thought about flashing into her vision the words, “Get a room!”—although maybe coming from me “Get a Roomba!” would have been more appropriate.

  But I knew it would be best if I said nothing at all. I had no body, and so the joys Caitlin and Matt had just experienced would forever be foreign to me; the closest I got to embodiment was the feeling I had when one part of me suppressed the action another part proposed. It wasn’t literally holding my tongue, but it felt somehow akin to that.

  Twenty-two minutes later, Caitlin turned her eyePod back on. They were still in the math classroom, but Matt was fully dressed again, including wearing his coat, and I assumed Caitlin was dressed, as well. He looked quite happy, I must say.

  Matt gingerly opened the classroom door and stuck his head into the hallway. Apparently the coast was clear because he motioned for Caitlin to follow. They quickly made their way down the corridor, then descended to the first floor.

  Just as they were about to exit the building, Matt excused himself to go into the boys’ restroom. As soon as Caitlin was alone, she said, “Sorry, Webmind.”

  No need to apologize, I sent to her eye. It is your right to turn off the eyePod whenever you wish.

  Caitlin shook her head; I could tell by the way the images moved. What? I asked.

  “And they call you Big Brother. Jerks.”

  Indeed . . . my little sister.

  “Not so little anymore,” she said softly.

  That was true.

  Caitlin was growing up.

  I was growing up.

  And just maybe the rest of the planet was, too.

  Burly bald-headed Marek led Peyton Hume down the pea green corridor and into the room he’d seen when he’d been eavesdropping. It was larger than Hume had thought, and the walls were yellow, not the beige they’d seemed on his monitor. There were windows along one side, which also hadn’t been visible in the view he’d had before, but they looked out over nothing more interesting than the adjacent parking lot, an industrial Dumpster, and the featureless black nighttime sky.

  Hume immediately spotted the security camera he’d tapped into earlier: a silver box on a rotating turret hanging from the ceiling near the front of the room. He could see several other webcams scattered about—some shaped like golf balls, others like short cylinders—and there were probably more that he wasn’t seeing.

  At the front of the room were two mismatched sixty-inch LCD monitors and a third monitor that looked to be perhaps fifty inches. One of the bigger ones was sitting on a desk; the other big one was atop a small cube-shaped refrigerator; and the fifty-incher was perched somewhat precariously on a half-height filing cabinet. The whole room had the look of a nerve center that had been thrown together in a hurry; Webmind clearly hadn’t been willing to wait for installers from Geek Squad to wall-mount the monitors.

  The monitor on the left showed what looked like an organization chart, with a single box at the top, and successively more boxes at each level down, but Hume couldn’t make out the labels from this far back. The boxes were mostly colored green, but a few were amber and four were red—no, no, make that three were red. One turned green while he watched. An African-American man called out as that happened, “Got it!”

  The monitor in the middle showed a view that kept cycling through what Hume soon realized must be the other control centers Webmind had referred to: each contained people in a variety of styles of dress intently working on various computers. One of the rooms seemed to be a gymnasium, with an indoor rock-climbing wall. Another might have been a factory floor. A third had large windows through which Hume could see a daytime cityscape although he didn’t recognize the city; all the people in that room were Asian.

  The smaller monitor on the right showed data displays and hex dumps, plus a large digital clock counting down second by second. As Hume watched, it went from a minute and zero seconds to fifty-nine seconds, then fifty-eight. He glanced at his own digital watch, which he fastidiously kept properly set; it appeared the countdown was to 11:00 P.M. Eastern time.

  He looked around the room, searching for any way he could stop what was about to happen—but there were clearly people involved all over the planet. Even if he could grab Marek’s gun—and there was no reason to think he’d be able to—what could he do? Shoot out the camera that was panning back and forth? That was pointless; it wouldn’t slow down Webmind. Or should he—desperate times required desperate actions—start popping off the hackers, putting bullets in the backs of their heads? But surely he couldn’t get more than four or five, tops, before someone blew him away.

  There was indeed nothing to do but watch.

  The digital timer continued to decrement. Thirty-one. Thirty. Twenty-nine.

  He looked again at the organizational chart; while his attention had been elsewhere, all but one of the squares had turned green.

  Webmind’s voice emanated from a speaker. “Mr. Hawkins—time is running out.”

  Devon Hawkins—Crowbar Alpha—was madly scooting a mouse along his desktop. “Sorry!” he shouted. “Damn system keeps reconfiguring itself. It’ll just—there!”

  Hume looked back at the board; every box was now emerald. He snapped his eyes to the timer: Eighteen. Seventeen. Sixteen.

  He half expected the roomful of hackers to start chanting the countdown out loud, just as he’d seen crowds do at the Cape before a shuttle launch, but they were all intent on their computers. With ten seconds left, Webmind himself started a spoken countdown: “Ten. Nine. Eight.”

  “All ports open!” shouted Chase.

  “Seven. Six. Five.”

  Hume could hear his own heartbeat, and he felt sweat beading on his forehead.

  “All set!” shouted another man.

  “Four. Three. Two.”

  “Interlocks in place!” shouted Drakkenfyre.

  Webmind’s tone didn’t change at all as he reached the end of the countdown; he simply finished it off with perfect mechanical precision. “One. Zero.”

  Hume half expected the lights to dim
—after all, he was in Washington, D.C., which had to be ground zero of any attempt to take over America’s computing infrastructure. But nothing happened in the room or, as far as he could tell, outside the window.

  But, still, Webmind’s next word took his breath away. “Success.”

  The president never arrived at meetings early; it would not do for him to be seen waiting on his underlings. At precisely 11:00 A.M., he nodded to one of the two uniformed guards, each brandishing a machine gun, who stood on either side of the auditorium’s heavy wooden door. The guard saluted and opened the door.

  The president was surprised to see so many senior Party members here. Indeed, it seemed the Minister of Communications had exceeded his authority summoning such a large group. He looked up at the podium, expecting perhaps to see Zhang Bo there, but—

  Ah, there he was, sitting in the front row. The president made his way down. His reserved seat was the central one in the first row, but he had to pass by the minister to get to it, and, as he did so, he said, “I trust your explanation will be satisfactory.”

  Zhang gave him an odd look, and the president took his seat. The moment he did so, a male voice emanated from the wall-mounted speakers, saying, in crisp Mandarin, “Thank you all for coming.”

  There was no one at the podium, which was positioned at stage left. But there was a giant LCD monitor mounted on the back wall, flanked on either side by a large Chinese flag hanging from the ceiling. The monitor lit up, showing the face of an old, wise-looking Chinese man. A second later, it changed to that of a smiling Chinese girl. Another second, and a middle-aged Zhuang woman appeared. A second more, and she was replaced by a kindly-looking male Han.

  The president shot a glance at the communications minister. He would have thought that everyone on his staff understood his dislike of PowerPoint by now.