“Oh. Um, I know you’re from Texas, but, ah…”
She flicked her forefinger against his shoulder. “We’re not all rubes, Matt. Of course I believe in evolution. But—”
“Yes?”
Caitlin’s heart started pounding even harder than it had when Matt had first arrived. She suddenly felt the way she did when she saw something in math: something that was suddenly, obviously, gloriously true. She leaned back a little so she could look clearly into his blue eyes. “Evolution—natural selection—is only effective up to a point. The problem with evolution is everything Richard Dawkins talked about: selfish genes, kin selection. Favoring your closest genetic relatives initially lets you out-compete those who aren’t related to you, but then it actually becomes counterproductive once you become a technological civilization.”
“How so?”
“Look, take a bunch of… I dunno, a bunch of wolves, right? They’re all competing for the same resources, the same food. Well, if you and your close relatives outnumber them—if you squeeze the other wolves off the fertile land or keep them from getting access to prey, they die out, and you survive. That’s evolution: survival of the fittest, and it works so long as numerical superiority is all that counts. But as soon as you become a truly technological species, evolution doesn’t provide the right… um, what’s that word?”
“Paradigm?” suggested Matt.
She kissed him as his reward. “Exactly! The right paradigm! If there are a hundred of you and your close relatives and only one of the guy who you’ve been squeezing out, but he’s got a machine gun and you don’t, he wins; he just blows you all away.”
“Ah,” said Matt in a teasing tone. “You’re not packing heat now, are you?”
Caitlin thought about saying, “I’m not the one who’s packing,” but she couldn’t quite get the words out. So instead she said, “No. Us blind Americans tend to prefer hand grenades—they don’t require a precise aim.”
Matt tightened his arms around her waist. “Good to know.”
“But, in fact, that is the point: it doesn’t have to be guns. Any technology that allows you to take out large numbers of your competitors changes the whole evolutionary equation. And… ah! Yes! And that’s why sophisticated consciousness evolved, why it was selected for. Consciousness has survival value because it lets you override your genetic programming. Instead of mindlessly squeezing out those who aren’t like you—pushing them back to the point where they retaliate with their weapons—consciousness lets you decide not to squeeze them further. It lets us say to our genes, hey, give this guy who isn’t our close relative a chance, too—because that way he’s not going to feel a need to come after us while we’re sleeping. Making sure that only your own family is well-off is an advantage only when those who aren’t well-off can’t hurt you.”
Matt was slowly getting bolder. He brought his face close to hers and kissed her, then said: “That makes sense. I mean, it’s usually not happy people who lash out with terrorism or try to take their neighbor’s land.”
“Exactly! Those things are done by the desperate, or the forgotten, or—I don’t know—the envious. By eliminating poverty—by improving conditions half a world away—you do make yourself safer. Selfish genes could never come to that conclusion, but to a conscious mind it’s…” She paused, then allowed herself a grin. “…blindingly obvious.”
Matt kissed her again, then said, “I read a novel a couple of years ago that had this discussion of a scientist named Benjamin Libet. I thought the author was making it all up, but I googled it and it was true: Libet noticed that our bodies start to do things about a fifth of a second before our conscious minds become aware of the action. Get it? The body starts doing things first, unconsciously; consciousness doesn’t initiate the action, it just vetoes actions that it realizes are dangerous or inappropriate.”
“Really?” said Caitlin, leaning back again so she could see his face. “Wow, I didn’t know that.”
“But that would be proof of what you’re saying,” Matt said. “Consciousness’s role is to stop us doing things that we’d otherwise mindlessly do.”
“That’s cool. And I really do think that’s what’s happening. Dr. Kuroda told me that Japan is governed by something called the Pacifist Constitution, did you know that?”
Matt shook his head. “No.”
She snuggled in closer to him now, and he began gently stroking her back between her shoulders.
“There’s a huge difference in Japan before and after World War II,” she said. “Before, they thought they could take over the world; after, they simply gave that up—or, perhaps more precisely, they started vetoing what their selfish genes wanted them to do. They said ‘no more, never again’: better to live and let live than push the rest of the world so hard that the world decides to wipe you out.”
Matt nodded. “I guess you can’t have a couple of nukes dropped on you without thinking, hey, maybe I should stop pissing everybody off.”
“Exactly!” said Caitlin. “And look at the European Union: these countries that had been fighting wars with each other for, like, ever, suddenly also decided, ‘No more, never again.’ They just stopped letting their genetic programming drive them. They decided—these whole countries: Spain and France and Germany and Italy and England and Belgium, and all the rest—they decided that there was more survival value in ignoring kin selection, in getting along with everyone, than there was in letting their selfish genes control their actions.”
“Hmm,” said Matt. His hand was now higher up, stroking the bare skin on the back of her neck. “I think we’ve got some of that here in Canada. Remember the Tim Hortons sign? And the Wendy’s sign with the maple leaf instead of an apostrophe? The French and the English in this country are always going to be—well, the phrase is ‘two solitudes,’ after a famous Canadian novel on that theme.”
Caitlin smiled. The notion of a famous Canadian novel struck her as a bit of an oxymoron. But she let Matt go on. “Rather than pushing them, and fighting them, we—English Canada—said, okay, what will make you happy? And we did it. What’s a few apostrophes here and there? No skin off our noses.”
She lifted her head. “I thought they were going to leave.”
“Who? Quebec?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Leave and go where? You can’t move Quebec, you know. Separatism is dead—it’s like being a Leafs fan: it’s something you do for fun, not because you think you’re ever going to win.” He smiled. “I guess maybe we in Canada have grown up, too.”
Caitlin kissed him again. “The whole world is growing up.”
“But why now?” asked Matt, when their lips separated. “We’ve been conscious for tens of thousands of years, right? Why now?
“Did you ever read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind?”
“You’re making that title up,” Matt said, smiling.
“I’m not. Bashira’s dad—Dr. Hameed—suggested I read it, and it was awesome. But, anyway, its author, Julian Jaynes, says we weren’t really conscious until three thousand years ago, when our left and right hemispheres started thinking as one. So, maybe we’ve just finally reached the stage where we can do this.”
She shifted again in his lap, and went on. “Or maybe it’s just that it’s really only in the past century—or less!—that random individuals have been able to hurt or kill large numbers of us, so it’s only now that it makes sense to not want to piss them off. After all, we’re talking about a conscious decision to cooperate instead of compete. And, hey, it’s interesting that we have that phrase, isn’t it? ‘Conscious decision’—as if we innately knew that most decisions aren’t.”
“You are a genius,” Matt said, smiling.
“Is that a line?” she asked.
“No,” he murmured. “A line is the path traced by a moving point.” She laughed and kissed him again, their tongues intertwining. When they at last pulled apart, she said, “Anyway, to get back to where we
started, dual citizenship is a wonderful thing—the more places you think of as home, the better. I mean, what I’d give for an EU passport! To be able to live and work anywhere over there: to study at Oxford, or the Sorbonne, to work at CERN.”
“Yeah,” said Matt, stroking her back again. “That’d be cool.”
Caitlin nodded. “And you must have seen that this time, the president is making a big deal of wearing an American-flag lapel pin on the campaign trail, right? ’Cause he got shit upon four years ago for not doing that.”
“Oh, right. Yeah.”
“I know he’s running for re-election as president of the United States,” she said, “but that means being de facto leader of the free world, right? Who knows? Maybe in another four years, we’ll have an American candidate wearing a United Nations flag on his lapel. Wouldn’t that be cool!”
She was on a roll, and it felt good. “And how ’bout this? How about at birth everyone gets dual citizenship—the country they’re born in, and another country, selected at random? It would totally diffuse—and defuse!—questions of local loyalty. Wouldn’t that be great?”
Matt’s tone was soft. “Well, um, I…”
“You think it all sounds a bit naïve, don’t you?” Caitlin said, leaning back once more to get a good look at him. “Like I’m seeing the world through a rose-colored post-retinal implant?”
Matt laughed, and so did she.
And he brought his face close to hers, and she put her hands behind his head, and they kissed and kissed and kissed.
forty-three
“All right,” said Tony Moretti, standing at the side of the third row of workstations, his hands on his hips. He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. He didn’t want to do this, but it was his job. “Everybody set?” he called out. “Web-traffic monitoring?”
“Go!” replied Aiesha.
“Containment protocols?”
“Go!” declared Shel.
“Data logging?”
“Go!”
“Crucial infrastructure isolation?”
“Go!”
“Threat elimination?”
“Go!”
Tony looked at Colonel Peyton Hume, giving him one last chance to put a stop to this; Hume simply gave him a thumbs-up.
“All right, people,” Tony said. “We are go. T-minus thirty seconds and counting. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight…”
* * *
They had been necking for a while, and for once the damned unfinished basement didn’t seem cold.
Caitlin was wearing her favorite corduroy pants—she liked the sound they made, and although she really had no idea if Matt was style-conscious or not, she kind of thought he wasn’t, and so wouldn’t mind. And she was wearing a loose-fitting dark green sweatshirt… so loose-fitting that she hoped her mom hadn’t noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra.
While they were kissing, Matt had been stroking her arm, her back, her neck—but that seemed to be all he was willing to do. She decided it was time to take the deer by the antlers. She got out of his lap, and reached out with her hands to pull him to his feet. He seemed momentarily reluctant to rise, but Caitlin smiled warmly. And then she brought him closer, but instead of letting go of his right hand, so he could put his arms back around her waist, she guided it slowly toward her, until—
One of them gasped; it might have been her.
Until his hand was cupping her breast through her sweatshirt’s fabric, and—
I am under attack.
The words sailed across Caitlin’s vision. “Shit!” she said.
Matt immediately pulled his hand back. “I’m sorry! I thought you—”
“Shhh!” Her eyes were wide open now. “What’s happening?”
“I just—you…”
“Matt, Webmind’s in trouble.”
Webmind’s reply was already going across her vision, but she’d been so startled and distracted, she’d failed to actually read the next few thirty-character groups he’d sent.
…a major switching facility in Alexandria, Virginia. It is…
“Come on,” Caitlin said, and she ran as best she could for the staircase—damn, but she’d have to learn how to confidently do that! Matt followed her.
She and Matt continued through the living room, and headed up to her bedroom. Caitlin was momentarily embarrassed: she hadn’t expected to have Matt up here—not yet!—and had been taking advantage of her newfound sight by not being picky about neatness, lest she trip on things she couldn’t see; the bra she’d discarded earlier was lying right there on her floor.
She went straight for the swivel chair in front of her computer. Her mother came in from her office across the hall. “Caitlin, what on earth’s going on?”
“Webmind is being attacked,” she said. “Webmind, send text to my computer, not my eye.” She cranked the volume on JAWS and set its reading speed as high as she thought her mother and Matt could follow. Webmind had been flashing more words in front of her eyes, but Caitlin hadn’t been able to follow them while she ran up the staircase. “—twenty-seven percent success rate,” said the rapid-fire synthesized voice.
“I missed that,” Caitlin said. “Start over.”
“I said, ‘Software has been added to the routers at a major switching facility in Alexandria, Virginia. They are examining each packet, and verifying the functioning of the time-to-live counters. Those that fail the tests are being deleted. So far they are only managing to delete mutant packets with a twenty-seven percent success rate.’ Continuing: however, this is also surely only a first attempt; doubtless the success rate will improve.”
“Damn,” said Caitlin. “How’d they know that’s what you’re made of?”
“I don’t know.”
“What percentage of packets could you lose and still retain consciousness?” Caitlin’s mom asked.
“I don’t know that, either,” Webmind said. “Early on I was cleaved in two when China cut off almost all traffic through the seven major fiber-optic trunk lines that connect the Chinese portion of the Internet to the rest of the world. I survived that as two separate consciousnesses—but that was before I had developed sophisticated cognitive functioning. If I were to lose that much substance again, I doubt I’d survive.”
While Webmind was speaking, Caitlin looked over at Matt, who now had an expression on his face that made his deer-caught-in-the-headlights one look positively normal. No doubt he’d only half believed Caitlin about her involvement with Webmind.
“Who’s doing it?” asked her mother. “Hackers?”
“I think it’s the American government,” Webmind said. “Although the switching facility belongs to AT T, it’s been co-opted by the National Security Agency before.”
Caitlin said, “Can’t you—I don’t know—can’t you tell your special packets not to go through that facility?”
“Packets are directed by routers; I have limited control over them beyond changing the final destination addresses.”
“I’m switching to websight,” Caitlin said. She pulled her eyePod from her pocket, pressed the switch, and watched as the cyber-landscape exploded into being around her. She was relieved to see the background shimmering the way it normally did; the vast bulk of Webmind’s cellular automata were apparently unaffected, at least so far.
“Take me there,” she said.
One of Webmind’s distinctive orange link lines shot into the center of her vision. She followed it to a small green site circle, then another orange link shot out; she followed that to a yellow circle.
In the background she heard her mother’s voice: “I’m going across the hall to call your father.”
Caitlin was concentrating so hard on following the links she wasn’t actually sure if her head moved when she tried to nod.
Another orange link line; she followed it as quickly as she could.
And another.
And one more.
And—
“The switching station,” said the mechanical voice.
Caitlin’s jaw dropped. She knew that what she was seeing was only a representation, only her mind’s way of interpreting the data it was receiving, and that the symbolism was imposed upon the images as much by her imagination as by anything else.
And her visual centers had been rewiring themselves like crazy these last several days as she learned to see the real world. There was still so much she hadn’t yet seen, and every day had shown her a thousand new things. But this was the first new thing she’d seen with websight since gaining worldview—the first new cyberspace experience she’d had since seeing reality—and she was doubtless interpreting it in ways she never could have before.
What she was seeing was frightening. The background of the Web had always seemed far, far away. Although she knew intellectually that the ghost packets that made up Webmind were no more remote than any others, she’d visualized them as being removed from the ones that were in active use by the Internet. But now that distant curtain was distorted here, puckering toward her, and—
No, no: not toward her. Toward that large node in the center of her vision, a circle that was a deep, deep red, like the color she now knew blood to be. Streamers from the background—intertwined, twisted filaments of shimmering pale blue and deep green—were being sucked into the dark red circle.
“Shit,” Caitlin said.
“What do you see?” Matt asked, his tone astonished.
“They’re pulling in the lost packets.”
“And,” said Webmind, “checking each one for the mutation that keeps them from expiring, and deleting those packets that have the mutation.”
Soft footfalls, and then her mother’s voice. “Your father is on his way.”
“This is clearly only a test run to see if their technique works,” Webmind said. “It’s employing only one facility, albeit a major one, and so it can only scrub those packets that happen to pass through that facility. But if the same technology were deployed at sufficient major routing hubs worldwide, I would be severely damaged.”
“No,” said Caitlin.
“What?” said her mother and Matt and Webmind simultaneously.
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