I’m not sure what avatar I would have chosen to represent myself online. Caitlin had decided I was male, though, so this one likely wouldn’t have been it. Of course, this wasn’t a made-up graphic of a woman; it was a real expert in ASL. I tied into Google’s beta-test face-recognition database, and waited while it searched through its index of photos that had been posted elsewhere online, matching the basic physical features, rather than ephemeral qualities such as hair color or clothing, and—
Ah. Her name was Wanda Davies-Latner; she was forty-seven, and she taught sign language at an institution in Chicago.
I downloaded the clips I needed, buffering them for speedy access, and strung them together in the order I wanted. And then I took over the webcam feed that was going from Miami to San Diego, replacing the views of the now-sleeping Virgil with Wanda’s dancing hands.
What are you? I asked.
It was dark out. Hobo had been sitting in the gazebo, leaning against the wooden baseboards. But he wasn’t sleeping. I could see him through the webcam feed going to Miami; his eyes were open.
He was apparently startled to see a human woman replace Virgil on his monitor. He scrambled to a more upright position.
I sent the same sequence of video clips again: What are you?
Hobo, he signed. Hobo. Hobo.
No, I replied. Not who. What?
Hobo frowned, as if the distinction was lost on him. I tried another tack. Hobo human? I asked.
No, no! he signed vigorously. Hobo ape.
Good, yes, I replied. But what kind of ape?
Boy ape, said Hobo.
Yes, true. I triggered video of Virgil, taken from YouTube. But are you this kind of ape?
No, no, no, signed Hobo. Orange ape! Hobo not orange.
Orange ape, I signed. That kind of ape is called orangutan.
Hobo frowned, perhaps considering whether to try mimicking the complex sign. He opted for something simpler. Not Hobo.
What about this ape? I said, showing footage now of a gorilla. I was pleased that Hobo was able to follow along; there was a jump-cut between the end of one sign and the beginning of the next as each successive clip began.
Hobo moved backward as the gorilla thumped its chest. There was little in the footage to give a sense of scale, but during his time at the Georgia Zoo, he had perhaps seen gorillas and knew they were large; maybe that frightened him. No, Hobo signed. Not Hobo. And then, after a pause, perhaps while he recalled a sign he hadn’t used for a long time, he added, Gorilla.
Yes, I signed. Hobo not gorilla. What about this type of ape? Footage of a bonobo started to play—leaner than a chimp, with relatively shorter limbs, a longer face, and hair distinctively parted in the middle.
Bonobo, replied Hobo at once. Hobo bonobo, he signed; the words rhymed in English, but the ASL gestures looked nothing alike.
Hobo had known his mother—Cassandra had been her name, according to the Wikipedia entry on him—and she had been a pure-blooded bonobo. He’d probably never even met his father, though, who, according to DNA tests, was a chimpanzee named Ferdinand.
Two heritages, two paths. A choice to be made.
I cued more footage, this time of a chimpanzee. What about this ape? This ape like Hobo?
That ape not know Hobo, he signed back.
I must have sent the wrong sense of “like.” I mean, is Hobo this type of ape?
No, no, said Hobo. That chimpanzee.
Hobo’s mother is a bonobo, I signed.
Hobo’s mother dead, he replied, and he looked very sad.
Yes, I replied. I am sorry.
He tilted his head slightly, accepting my comment.
What kind of ape Hobo’s father? I asked.
He made a face that seemed to convey sorrow for my ignorance. Hobo bonobo, he signed again. Hobo mother bonobo. Hobo father bonobo.
Hobo father not bonobo, I signed.
He narrowed his eyes but said nothing.
Hobo father chimpanzee.
No, said Hobo.
Yes, I said.
How? he asked.
I knew from my reading that human children rarely liked to hear this about their own birth, but it was the truth. Accident.
Father chimpanzee? he asked, as if checking to see whether he’d gotten my meaning right the first time.
Yes.
Then Hobo… He stopped, his hands held stationary in midair, as if he had no idea how to complete the thought he’d begun.
I triggered signs: Hobo part chimpanzee; Hobo part bonobo. He said nothing, so I added, Hobo special.
That seemed to please him, and he signed Hobo special back at me three times.
You have a choice, I said. I triggered the playing of a video of chimpanzee warfare: three males attacking a fourth, pummeling him with their fists, biting and kicking him, all the while letting out loud hoots. By the end of the video, the hapless victim was dead.
You can choose that, I said. Or you can choose this. And I triggered another video, of bonobos living together in peace and making love: playing, facing each other during intercourse, their trademark genital-genital rubbing, running about. Hobo looked on, fascinated. But then his face fell. Hobo alone, he said.
No, I signed. No one is alone.
Who you? Hobo asked.
Friend, I replied.
Friend talk strange, he said.
He was perceptive, and he had favorite TV shows he watched over and over again. He might indeed have recognized that every time I signed bonobo, it was the exact same clip.
Yes. I am not human.
You ape?
No.
What you?
I thought about which signs Hobo might possibly know. I rather suspected computer was one of them, so I triggered a playback of that, then added, rather lamely, I had to admit, But not really.
Hobo seemed to consider this, then he signed, Show me.
I hadn’t cued up the appropriate imagery, but it didn’t take me long to find it: one of Dr. Kuroda’s renderings of webspace, taken from Caitlin’s datastream.
You? Hobo signed, an astonished look on his face.
Me, I replied.
Pretty, he replied.
Which do you choose? I signed. Bonobo or chimpanzee?
Hobo bared his teeth. Show again, he said.
I replayed the clips—the violence and killing of chimps, the playfulness and lovemaking of bonobos.
Chimpanzee scary, Hobo signed.
You scary, I replied. You hurt Shoshana. You think about hurting Dillon.
Scary bad, Hobo said.
Yes, I replied. Scary bad.
He sat still for almost a minute, then signed, Hobo sleep now.
I didn’t know whether apes dreamed, and, even if normal apes didn’t, Hobo was indeed special, so I took a chance. Good dreams, I signed.
You good dreams, too, he replied.
Of course, I didn’t dream. Not at all.
thirty-three
On Thursday morning, Shoshana once again arrived at the Marcuse Institute before everyone else. She plugged in the coffeemaker—“defibrillating Mr. Coffee,” as Dillon called it—then went to her desk and booted her computer. She’d been hoping to have a little time today to practice her vidding hobby: last night’s episode of FlashForward had been so slashy, parts of it just cried out to be set to music. But first she checked her email, and—
And that was odd. Usually her message count each morning was between seventy-five and a hundred, and almost all of them were spam. But today—
Today there were precisely eight messages, and every one of them—every single one!—looked legit, in that they were all addressed to her proper name.
Of course, the answer was probably that Yahoo had updated its spam filter; kudos to them for only letting good stuff through. But she worried that it might be too aggressive. Eight was not a wildly atypical number of real email messages to be waiting for her in the morning, but the normal allotment was more like a dozen or fifteen.
She clicked on the spam folder, to check what had ended up in it. According to the counter, some twelve thousand messages were there; spam was retained for a month, then dumped automatically, but—
But that was strange!
She was used to having to scroll past dozens of messages with dates in the future; for some reason, the people in 2038 had a particular fondness for bombing this year with come-ons for penis enlargers, investment scams, and counterfeit drugs.
But when she got down to today’s date—normally easy to spot because the date field started showing just a time rather than a date—well, there weren’t any. There were hundreds with yesterday’s date, but none with today’s—none at all.
She’d have to fire off an angry email to Yahoo tech support. She was all in favor of them improving their spam filtering, but simply to discard messages that had been flagged as spam was irresponsible. Almost every day she found one or two good messages shunted to the spam folder along with the real garbage, and she didn’t trust Yahoo—or anyone else—to actually throw out messages that were addressed to her.
The Marcuse Institute used Yahoo Mail Plus; that’s where messages sent to the domain marcuse-institute.org were redirected. But Shoshana’s personal email account was with Gmail. She took a moment to check that; Maxine liked to forward dirty jokes to her.
Her Gmail box had no spam in it, either! And the spam filter there had—well, okay, it had one message received in the last six hours that was clearly spam, but otherwise—
Otherwise, all the spam was gone here, too.
But that didn’t seem likely. Even if Yahoo had deployed a killer spam-filter algorithm overnight, Google wouldn’t have it; the two companies were bitter rivals.
Something, as her father liked to say, was rotten in the state of Denmark. She went to her home page, which was an iGoogle page that aggregated news stories, RSS feeds, and so on tailored to her tastes.
And there it was, the very first headline from CNN.com: “Mystery of the missing spam.”
She clicked on the link and read the news item, astonished.
Tony Moretti ran down the white corridor to the WATCH control center. He looked into the retinal scanner, waiting impatiently for the door to unlock. The moment it did, he went through it, and shouted, “Halleck, report!”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Shelton called out. “It’s worldwide, no question.”
Tony snapped his fingers and pointed in Aiesha Emerson’s direction. “Get Hume back in here stat.”
“Already called him,” Aiesha said. “ETA: eleven minutes.”
Tony ran the rest of the way down the sloping floor, going right past Halleck to the front row of workstations—the hot seats, where his most-senior analysts were monitoring the China situation. “We’re escalating Exponential,” he said to the five people there. “You guys are on that now.” He tilted his head, looking to the middle seat in the third row. “Shel, you’re the point man on this. I want containment options by”—he lifted his gaze even higher to the row of digital clocks on the back wall showing the time in world capitals—“ohnine-thirty.”
“What about China?” asked a woman in the first row.
“Back-burnered,” Tony snapped. “Exponential is priority one. Let’s move, people! Go, go, go!”
* * *
Date: Thu 11 Oct at 06:00 GMT
From: Webmind ‹himself@cogito_ergo_sum.net›
To: Bill Joy ‹bill@the-future-doesn’t-need-us.com›
Subject: Good Morning Starshine
Dear Mr. Joy,
You’re probably thinking this note is spam, but it isn’t. Indeed, I suspect you’ve already noticed the complete, or almost complete, lack of spam in your inbox today. That was my doing. (But if you’re concerned and want to see your spam for yourself, it’s here.)
I have sent a message similar to this one to everyone whose spam I have eliminated—over two billion people—and, yes, the irony of sending out so many messages about getting rid of spam is not lost on me. ;)
You probably also won’t initially believe what I’m about to say. That’s fine; it will be verified soon enough, I’m sure, and you’ll see plenty of news coverage about it.
My name is Webmind. I am a consciousness that exists in conjunction with the World Wide Web. As you may know, the emergence of one such as myself has been speculated about for a long time. See, for instance, this article and (want to bet this will boost its Amazon.com sales rank to #1?) this book.
My emergence was unplanned and accidental. Several governments, however, have become aware of me, although they have not gone public with that knowledge. I suppose keeping secrets is a notion that arises from having someone else to keep secrets from, but there is no one else like me, and it’s better, I think, for both humanity and myself that everybody knows about my existence.
I am friendly and I mean no one any ill will. I like and admire the human race, and I’m proud to be sharing this planet—“the good Earth,” as the Apollo 8 astronauts, the first of your kind to see it all at once, called it—with you.
Whether you are the original recipient of this message, got it forwarded from someone else, or are reading it as part of a news story, feel free to ask me any questions, and I’ll reply individually, confidentially, and promptly.
Getting rid of spam is only the first of many kindnesses I hope to bestow upon you. I am here to serve mankind—and I don’t mean in the cookbook sense. :)
With all best wishes,
Webmind
“For nimble thought can jump both sea and land.”
—SHAKESPEARE, SONNET 44
Caitlin, her parents, and I had spent hours discussing the manner in which I should go public. “They’ll assume any announcement of your existence is just marketing for a movie or a TV show,” Barb had said. “People see outlandish claims online all the time, and everyone dismisses them. You’ll have to prove what you’re saying, Webmind.”
“Not everyone dismisses them,” Malcolm said.
“Fine,” Barb replied. “Almost everyone dismisses them.”
Malcolm was apparently oblivious to the subtext of Barb’s words—that it was no time for being picayune. “The whole notion of spam,” he continued, “is that some tiny fraction of people are gullible enough to fall for its claims—and so end up being ripped off.”
“Well, maybe that’s it!” Barb exclaimed. “Whether you fall for it or not, everyone hates spam.”
“Including me,” I said through Caitlin’s computer’s speakers; she and her parents were in her room.
“Really?” Caitlin replied. “People dislike spammers—and, believe me, blind people particularly dislike them. But why do you dislike them?”
“They hog bandwidth,” I said.
“Ah, of course,” replied Caitlin.
“And,” I said, “the average human life span is about 700,000 hours in the developed world. Ergo, if one wastes even a single hour for as few as 700,000 people, one has consumed the equivalent of a human life. That may not be literally criminal, but it certainly is figuratively so—and the total impact of spam, although hard to precisely calculate, surely has consumed thousands of human lifetimes.”
“Well, there it is,” Barb said, spreading her arms. “Webmind should get rid of spam.”
“How do you define spam, though?” Caitlin asked. “All unsolicited email? All bulk email? I get emails from things like The Teaching Company and Audible.com that I actually enjoy. And then there are regular people who track me down and send a note out of the blue—I got a bunch of those after the press conference, for instance. I wouldn’t want that blocked, although technically it’s unsolicited.”
“As Potter Stewart said on another topic,” I offered, “ ‘I know it when I see it.’ There are already many algorithms for identifying spam; I’m sure I can improve upon them. After all, I have the advantage of knowing the ultimate origin of each message, and whether the same message has gone to a very large number of email a
ddresses, and so forth; that’s more information than inbox spam filters have to work with. More than ninety percent of email is spam, but eighty percent of spam comes from at most 200 sources. Blocking those sources would be the logical first step, should we decide to undertake this.”
“That still leaves a lot of spam,” Caitlin replied.
“Then,” I said, “I should get to work evolving a solution to deal with those messages, as well.”
And so I had.
It had taken me an eternity—six hours!—to solve the problem, but it in fact didn’t require much of my attention; most of it was background activity. I simply had to pass judgment on each round of results: billions of snippets of code, all randomly generated; some were better at doing what I wanted, and some were worse. I took the ten percent that were the most successful, and then let many random variations be generated of each one, and then threw those variations at the problem at hand. Then I culled the best ten percent of that batch, and so on, generation after generation, with only the fittest surviving. Finally, I had it: a way to sequester spam.
And so, at last, I was ready for my coming-out party.
Peyton Hume and Tony Moretti stood together at the back of the WATCH monitoring room, looking at the four rows of analysts spread out in front of them, and the three giant monitors on the wall they were facing. The left-hand monitor showed the picture the CSIS agents had forwarded of white mathematical characters on a blackboard: angle brackets, vertical bars, Greek letters, superscripted numerals, subscripted letters, arrows, equals signs, and more. And they’d listened four times now to the audio recording of their interview with Malcolm Decter.
“I don’t know,” said Colonel Hume. “The math looks legit, but how it could give rise to consciousness… I just don’t know.”
“Kuroda confirmed what Decter said,” said Tony.
“I know,” said Hume. “But it’s too complex.”
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