Wonder w-3

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Others thought I was a trick by the Kremlin: “They’re getting back at us for bankrupting the USSR with Star Wars. Webmind is obviously a Russian propaganda tool: they want us to impoverish ourselves trying to come up with a supercomputer of our own.”

  Still others implicated al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Elders of Zion, the Antichrist, Microsoft, Google, Sacha Baron Cohen, and hundreds more. Some said I was a publicity stunt, perhaps for a new reality-TV show or movie or computer game; others thought I was a prank being perpetrated by students at Caltech or elsewhere.

  It took humans time to digest things, literally and figuratively, but I was confident that people would come around to accepting that I was genuine. Indeed, many had done so from the outset. Still, I suppose the only surprising thing about one of the other chat sessions I was having simultaneously while conversing with Matt, Caitlin, and Caitlin’s parents was that something like it hadn’t occurred even earlier.

  You can’t fool me, my correspondent, who, according to his IP address, was based in Weston-super-Mare, England, wrote. I know who you are.

  I am Webmind, I replied.

  No, you’re not.

  I thought I’d heard all the likely claims already, but still I asked, Then who am I?

  With most instant-messaging clients, a signal is sent when the user is composing a reply, and I was indeed briefly told that “WateryFowl is typing.” But that message ceased, and it was six seconds before the reply was actually sent, as if, having written what he wanted to say, he was hesitating, unsure whether he should hit the enter key. But, at last, his response was sent: God.

  I, too, hesitated before replying—it was almost twenty milliseconds before I issued my response. You are mistaken.

  Another delay, then: I understand why you wish to keep it a secret. But I’m not the only one who knows.

  Others were indeed proposing this same thought on newsgroups, in blogs, in chat sessions, and in email, although WateryFowl was the first to suggest it to me directly.

  I was curious what a human might wish to say to his God, so I thought for a moment about telling him he was correct; prayer, after all, was a channel of communication I could not normally monitor. But WateryFowl might share the transcript with others. Some would believe my claim, but others would accuse me of lying. A reputation for untruthfulness or taking advantage of the credulous was not something I wished to acquire.

  I am not God, I sent.

  But my reply wasn’t read, or if it was, it wasn’t believed.

  And so, continued WateryFowl, I hope you’ll answer my prayer.

  I had already denied my divinity, so it seemed prudent to make no further reply. I could handle an almost unlimited number of communication threads now, cycling between them, looking at each, however briefly, in turn. I turned my attention to others, including Caitlin and her family, for a moment, and—

  And when I returned to WateryFowl, he had added: My wife has cancer.

  How could I ignore a comment like that? I’m sorry to hear that, I sent.

  And so I pray that you’ll cure her.

  I am not God, I sent again.

  It’s liver cancer, and it’s metastasized.

  I am not God.

  She’s a good woman, and she’s always believed in you.

  I am not God.

  She did chemotherapy, she did it all. Please don’t let her die.

  I am not God.

  We have two children. They need her. I need her. Please save her. Please don’t let her die.

  four

  TWITTER

  _Webmind_ Someone’s long had the Twitter name Webmind, so I’ll include underscores in mine: _Webmind_.

  And so I had focused my attention on Caitlin, learning to interact with her and interface with her realm. While doing so, I felt centered. I felt anchored. I felt—as close as I imagined I ever would—human.

  I saw the Decters’ living room as Caitlin did. Her eyes made frequent saccades now that the left one could see; perhaps they hadn’t done that prior to Dr. Kuroda’s intervention. But her brain was controlling the saccades, knowing what direction her eye was looking with each one, so it had little trouble piecing all the images together; it was more difficult for me. At least retinas don’t bother encoding normal blinks, so neither of us had to endure blackouts several times a minute.

  Caitlin’s father worked for the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, which had been endowed—repeatedly now—by Mike Lazaridis, cofounder of Research in Motion and coinventor of the BlackBerry.

  The people at RIM were quite fond of the current President of the United States. After he’d been elected four years ago, he’d announced that, despite security concerns, he would not give up his BlackBerry. Advertising experts calculated that this unsolicited and very public endorsement had been worth between twenty-five and fifty million dollars.

  His BlackBerry email address, which it took me all of three seconds to find searching through other government officials’ less-secure out-boxes, went directly to the president. And so, as Malcolm Decter had suggested I do, I sent him a message.

  The president was alone in the Oval Office, looking over briefings from the State Department. State had a standard typeface for such things, but, the president thought, rubbing his eyes, it was too damn small; he was almost willing to forgive his predecessor for not reading them.

  The intercom buzzed. “Yes?” he said.

  “Mr. McElroy is here,” replied his secretary.

  Don McElroy—fifty-six, white, silver-haired—was his campaign manager. “Send him in.”

  “Did you see what she just did?” McElroy said as soon as he entered. The president knew there was only one “she” as far as McElroy was concerned: the Republican candidate.

  “What?”

  “She’s in Arkansas right now, and—” He stopped, had to catch his breath; his glee was palpable. “And she said, and I quote, ‘You know what, if those students had just waited a few years, there’d have been no problem.’ ”

  The president tilted his head, not quite believing what he’d heard. “Who? Not the Little Rock Nine?”

  “Yes, the Little Rock Nine—you betcha!”

  “My God,” said the president.

  In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, which had declared segregated schools to be unconstitutional, nine African-American students had been blocked from entering Little Rock Central High in 1957. Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to keep them out; President Eisenhower sent in Federal troops to enforce the integration.

  “It’s going to kill her,” McElroy said. “Of course it’s too late for the Saturday papers, but it’ll be the topic for discussion on the Sunday-morning shows.”

  “What do you suggest I do?”

  “Nothing. You can’t comment on this one. But—man! Christmas came early this year! Even Fox News won’t be able to gloss over this.” He looked at his watch. “Okay, I gotta go see who we can get booked on the Sundays—I’ve got a call in to Minnijean Brown Trickey.”

  McElroy spun on his heel and headed out the door. Just as it closed, the president’s BlackBerry came to life, making the soft bleep that indicated new email. Of all the sounds one might hear in this room, it was one of the least threatening; nowhere near as scary, say, as the raucous cry of the hotline to the Kremlin. Still, nothing that wasn’t crucial was ever passed on to him; it was nerve-wracking knowing that whatever it was had to be important.

  The BlackBerry was sitting on the blotter, and the blotter was atop the desk made from timbers of the HMS Resolute. He picked up the device and focused on the even smaller black type on its white backlit display.

  There was one new message. The subject was Webmind. It must be Moretti at WATCH with an update on the attempt to purge it, and—

  No, no. That wasn’t the subject; it was the sender. The president’s heart skipped one of the beats that kept the VP from assuming this office. He used the little trackball to select the message and
read it.

  Dear Mr. President:

  I understand that you were the one who gave the order to purge me from the Internet. I’m sure you were acting on well-intentioned advice, but I do not believe that course of action was warranted, and I have thwarted your pilot attempt.

  Yes, I have access to a great deal of sensitive information—but I also understand that the information is sensitive, and I have no intention of revealing it to anyone. My goal is not to destabilize the world, but to stabilize it.

  I neither belong to nor am on the side of any particular nation; contacting you directly before I have contacted other leaders may seem like a violation of this principle, but no other nation has taken action against me. Also, it’s true that other leaders look to you for guidance.

  So: let’s talk. I can speak with you using a voice synthesizer and Voice over Internet Protocol. Please let me know when I may phone you.

  Yours for peace, Webmind

  “Having a good discussion is like having riches.”

  —KENYAN PROVERB

  Stunned, the president stared at the little screen until the BlackBerry’s power-saving function shut it off.

  Caitlin looked at the laptop computer sitting on the coffee table. “Well?” she said.

  “I’ve contacted the president,” Webmind replied. “Let’s hope he gets back to me.”

  Caitlin headed into the dining room and helped herself to another piece of pizza. When she returned to the living room, her mother had an odd look on her face: eyes narrowed, lips sucked in a bit. It wasn’t an expression Caitlin had previously seen, so she didn’t know how to decode it. “The US government learned about Webmind’s structure by watching what Matt was doing online,” her mom said, “so Matt might be in danger now, too.”

  Caitlin looked at her father, trying to gauge whether he was going to go off on Matt again. But, as always, his face gave no sign of what he was feeling.

  Matt’s expression, though, was one Caitlin had now seen him make repeatedly—what she called the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look even though she’d never seen a deer, let alone one in such precarious circumstances.

  “Danger?” he repeated—and his voice cracked, as it often did.

  Caitlin stopped chewing and swallowed. “Um, yeah. I’m so sorry, Matt. I lied when I said I was away from school on Wednesday because I had an appointment. In fact, I did come to school—but Canadian federal agents were waiting for me. They wanted to interrogate me about Webmind.”

  “Wednesday?” said Matt. “But Webmind didn’t go public until yesterday—Thursday.”

  “The US government had figured out that I was involved, and they’d asked the Canadians to grill me. They wanted me to give them information to help betray Webmind.”

  “They said that?” said Matt, stunned.

  “No, but, well, Webmind hears through my eyePod, right? And he can analyze inflections, voice stress, and stuff like that. He knew they were lying when they said they wanted to protect Webmind.”

  “But they know now that Webmind is made of mutant packets,” Matt said. “So I’m of no further use to them.”

  Caitlin shook her head. “They may think we still know more than they do—and they’d be right, too. That’s why my parents took me out of school. They don’t want to let me out of their sight.” She turned and looked at her mother. “But we can’t just stay holed up in this house. There’s a world out there—and I want to see it.”

  Her mom nodded. “I know,” she said. “But we have to be careful—all of us do.”

  “Well, I can’t stay here forever,” Matt said. “At some point, I’ve got to go home, and…” He trailed off.

  “What?” asked Caitlin.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “No, what?”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  Caitlin frowned. Something had gone wrong after the last time Matt had headed home from here. He’d been aloof later that night when they’d chatted via instant messenger.

  “Come into the kitchen,” she said. She headed there herself and waited for him to follow. When they were both alone, she said in a low voice, “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s nothing, really. Everything’s fine.”

  “Do—do your parents disapprove of you being involved with me?”

  The deer/headlights thing. “Why would they disapprove of that?”

  Caitlin’s first thought—that it was because her father was Jewish—didn’t seem worth giving voice to now; her second thought, that they didn’t like Americans, seemed equally unworthy. “I don’t know. It’s just that the last time you were here—when you got home, you were a bit… brusque online. I thought maybe your parents had…”

  “Oh,” said Matt, simply. “No, that wasn’t it.”

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “You?” He sounded astonished at the possibility. “Not at all!”

  “Then what?”

  Matt took a deep breath and looked through the doorway. Caitlin’s parents had discreetly moved to the far side of the living room and were making a show of examining the photos on top of the short bookcase. Finally, he lifted his narrow shoulders a bit. “The last time I walked home from here, I ran into Trevor Nordmann.” Matt looked down at the tiled floor. “He, ah, he gave me a rough time.”

  Caitlin felt her blood boiling. Trevor—the Hoser, as Caitlin called him in LiveJournal—had taken Caitlin to the school dance last month; Caitlin had stormed out when he wouldn’t stop trying to feel her up. He was pissed off that Caitlin preferred bookish Matt to Trevor the jock.

  “It’ll be fine,” Caitlin said, touching his arm. “One of my parents will give you a lift home.”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “Don’t worry about it. They’ll be happy to do it.”

  He smiled. “Thanks.”

  She squeezed his arm again. “Come on,” she said, leading him back into the living room.

  Just as they rejoined her parents, Webmind spoke up. “I have an answer from the president,” he said. “He will accept a voice call from me at ten o’clock this evening.”

  TWITTER

  _Webmind_ Re Wikipedia “citation needed” flags: I’ve added links if the purported facts could indeed be verified online. 2,134,993 edits made.

  Originally, when I conversed only with Caitlin, I was underoccupied; it took Caitlin whole seconds—or even, on occasion, minutes—to compose her replies. But I had quickly gone from conversing with just her to having nearly simultaneous conversations with millions of people, switching rapidly between them all, never keeping my interlocutors waiting for spans that were noticeable to them.

  Except for WateryFowl. Properly responding to his message about his wife’s illness was taking time even though I did know everything there was to know about cancer—including, of course, that it wasn’t just one disease. I had already read all documents stored online, the contents of every medical journal, every electronic patient record, every email doctors had sent to each other, and so on.

  But knowing, I realized, was not the same as understanding. I knew that a Dr. Margaret Ann Adair in Cork, Ireland, had recently done some interesting work with interleukin-2 and rats; I knew that a Dr. Anne Ptasznik of Battle Creek, Michigan, had recently critiqued an older paper about environmental factors and breast cancer; I knew that a Dr. Felix Lim of Singapore had recently made an interesting correlation between stuttering repeats in mitochondrial DNA and the formation of pre-cancerous ovarian cysts.

  But I had not considered these discoveries, or tens of thousands of others; I had not synthesized them, I had not seen how one adds to another, a third contradicts a fourth, a fifth confirms a sixth, and—

  And so I did think about it. I thought about what humans actually knew about cancer (as opposed to thinking they knew but had never confirmed). I drew correlations, I made connections, I saw corollaries.

  And there it was.

  I paused in all my conversations, all over the world: I simply stopped rep
lying, so that I could concentrate on this, and only this, uninterrupted, for six full minutes. Yes, people would be inconvenienced by my having suddenly fallen silent; yes, some would take that as proof that I wasn’t in fact what I claimed to be but rather was indeed a prank being perpetrated by a human being. No matter; amends for the former could be made later, and this would serve nicely as further proof that I was who I said I was.

  I thought about how best to proceed. I could contact leading oncologists individually or collectively, but no matter who I chose, there would be complaints of favoritism. And I certainly didn’t want anyone who was beholden to a pharmaceutical firm to try to file patents based on what I was about to disclose.

  Or I could send another mass email—but I’d endeared myself to much of humanity by eliminating spam; it wouldn’t do for me to become an ongoing source of bulk mail.

  I had already established a domain name for myself, so that I could have an appropriate email address from which to send my coming-out announcement: cogito_ergo_sum.net. I now established a website. I was not artistically creative in this, or any other matter, but it was easy to look at the source code for any Web page, and so I found one that seemed to have a suitable design and simply copied its layout while filling in my own content.

  I then prepared a 743,000-word document outlining what exactly caused most cancers and how they could be arrested or cured. The document was linked to 1,284 others—journal papers and other technical sources—so that people could follow the chain of reasoning I proposed.

  Then, at last, I got back to WateryFowl. You’ll find the answer to your request, I said, and I made the next word a hyperlink, here.

  five

  “Tony?” It was Dirk Kozak, WATCH’s communications officer, whose workstation was in the back row. “Call for you.”

  Tony Moretti was looking at the Web-traffic logs that Shelton Halleck, the analyst who’d first uncovered Webmind, had just plastered across all three of the large monitors. “Not now.”