Wonder w-3

by Robert J. Sawyer

  More text appeared in Caitlin’s eye. “Webmind says it says, ‘Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion.’ ”

  “Exactly! And, despite the Founding Fathers having seen nothing wrong with it, the UN went on to specifically ban slavery.”

  “ ‘No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.’ ”

  “Right!” She changed lanes. “That’s not mere economics, Caitlin; that’s moral progress, and despite occasional backsliding, there’s no doubt that our morality hasn’t just changed over time, it’s measurably improved. We treat more people with dignity and as equals than ever before in human history; the progress has been measurable even on time scales as small as decades.

  “Think about all that brouhaha in the news the last couple of days about the Little Rock Nine. Setting aside what that awful woman said, to most people segregation is inconceivable today—and yet, more than a hundred million Americans alive today were alive then, too.”

  They were passing Cambridge now. Her mother went on. “I’ve got some great books on this you can borrow, once your visual reading gets a little better. Robert Wright writes a lot about this; he’s well worth reading. He doesn’t talk about the World Wide Web, but the parallels are obvious: the more interconnections there are between people, the more moral we are in our treatment of people.”

  “There are—or at least, there were—a lot of con artists online,” Caitlin said.

  “Yes, true. But they’re anonymous—they don’t really have connections. And, well, that’s the good that’s coming out of Webmind’s presence. You might not know who someone is under an online name, I might not know who the anonymous reviewer on Amazon.com is—but Webmind knows. Even if you don’t interact with Webmind—even if you choose not to respond to his messages or emails—the mere knowledge that someone knows who you are, that someone is watching you, is bound to have a positive effect on the way most people act. It’s hard to be antisocial when you are part of a social network, even if that network is only yourself and the biggest brain on the planet.”

  “Okay,” said Caitlin, “but I—oh, hang on. Webmind has a question for you.”

  The song changed on the radio, Blondie giving way to Fleetwood Mac. “Yes?”

  “He says, ‘So are you saying that network complexity not only gives rise to intelligence, but to morality? That the same force—complexity—that produces consciousness also naturally generates morality, and that as interdependence increases, both intelligence and morality will increase?’ ”

  Caitlin watched her mom as she thought: her eyebrows drawing together, her eyes narrowing. When she at last spoke, it was accompanied by a nodding of her head. “Yes,” she said, “I am indeed saying that.”

  “Webmind says, ‘Interesting thought.’ ”

  They drove on through the darkness.

  Carla Hawkins, the mother of the hacker known as Crowbar Alpha, sat in her living room, her eyes sore from crying. She’d felt sad when her husband Gordon had taken off two years ago—but she’d never felt lonely. Devon had always been here, even if he did spend most of his time hunched over a keyboard in his bedroom.

  The fact that she would have been left alone, she knew, was one of the reasons the judge hadn’t sent Devon to prison after his virus had caused so much damage. But now he was gone, and—

  God, she hated to think about it. But he would not have run away. His computers were here, after all, and they were his life. She’d learned the jargon from him: overclocking, case mods, network-attached storage devices; taking his data away on a USB key wouldn’t have been enough for him.

  The police were still searching, but admitted they had no idea where to search; they’d already gone over all Devon’s usual haunts. When that redheaded government man had shown up earlier, she’d allowed herself for half a second to think they’d found him.

  She reached for a Kleenex, but the box was empty. She tossed the box on the floor and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  Yesterday at work, they’d all been talking in the break room about this Webmind thing. She hadn’t paid much attention, although the news about it had been impossible to avoid over the last several days, but…

  But Keelie—one of the other cashiers at Wal-Mart—had said something that was coming back to her, something about Webmind finding somebody’s long-lost childhood friend. And if he could find that person…

  She didn’t have a computer of her own; on the rare occasions she wanted to look something up online, she’d used one of Devon’s. She got off the couch and, as she did so, she happened to see the old wall clock. My goodness, had she really been sitting there crying and staring into space for over two hours?

  Devon’s room had posters from Halo, Mass Effect, and Assassin’s Creed on the pale yellow walls, and there were various gaming consoles scattered about—thank God for the Wal-Mart employee discount! And, on his rickety wooden desk, there was an Alienware PC with three monitors hooked up to it. It was still running; another sign that Devon had intended to return.

  She sat down on the chair—a simple wooden kitchen chair, which Devon liked but was hard on her back. No browser was currently open. The police had gone through his email and Facebook postings, looking for any sign that he’d arranged a rendezvous with someone or bought plane or bus tickets, but they’d found nothing. She opened Firefox and typed into Google, “How do I ask Webmind a question?” There was, of course, an “I’m feeling lucky” button beneath the search box, but she wasn’t—not at all.

  But the first hit held the answer: if you didn’t have a chat client of your own, simply go to his website and click on “chat” there. She did just that.

  She’d expected something fancier, but Webmind’s website had no flash animation, no frenetic graphics. It did, however, have an easy-on-the-eyes pale green background. The simple list of links on the front page was more impressive than any design wizardry could be. It was labeled “Most Requested Documents” and included “Proposed cancer cure,” “Suggested solution to Bali’s economic crisis,” “Notes toward efficient solar power,” and “Mystery solved: Jack the Ripper revealed.”

  And beneath that there was indeed a box that one could use to chat with Webmind. She pecked out with two fingers: My son is missing. Can you help me find him?

  The text reply was instantaneous. What is his name and last known address, please?

  She typed, Devon Axel Hawkins and their full street address.

  And there was a pause.

  Her stomach was roiling. If he could do all those things—cancer, solar energy, economic solutions—surely he could do this.

  After what seemed an awfully long time, Webmind replied, He has had no identifiable online presence since 4:42 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday. I have reviewed the police files and news coverage related to his disappearance, but found no leads to pursue.

  Her heart sank. She thought, But you know everything, although that seemed a pointless thing to type. But after several seconds of just staring at Webmind’s words, that’s exactly what she did put in the chat box.

  I know many things, yes, replied Webmind. And, after a few seconds, he added two more words. I’m sorry.

  She got up from the chair and headed back to the living room. By the time she reached the couch, her face was wet again.

  Peyton Hume woke with a start, soaked with sweat. He’d dreamed of an anthill, of thousands of mindless, sterile workers tending an obscene, white, pulsating queen.

  Next to him in the darkness his wife said, “Are you okay?”

  “Sorry,” he replied. “Bad dream.”

  Madeleine Hume was a lobbyist for the biofuels industry; they’d met four years ago at a mutual friend’s party. He felt her hand touch his chest. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “They just don’t get it,” Hume said. “The president. The world. They
just don’t get it.”

  “I know,” she said, gently.

  “If I push much harder, I’m going to get in trouble,” he said. “General Schwartz already sent me an email, reprimanding me for my ‘incendiary language’ on Meet the Press.”

  Madeleine stroked his short hair. “I know you're a chain-of-command kind of guy,” she said. “But you have to do what you think is best. I’ll support you all the way.”

  “Thanks, baby.”

  “It’s almost time to get up, anyway,” Madeleine said. “Are you going to go back to WATCH today, or heading into the Pentagon?”

  He hadn’t been to his office in the E-ring for three days now; it probably was time he made an appearance again. But—

  Damn it all, the test they’d conducted at WATCH had been proof of concept. If he could get someone to craft a virus that would eliminate Webmind’s mutant packets, the danger could be scoured from the Internet. Yes, yes, such a virus might screw other things up—maybe even crash the Internet for a time—but humanity could survive that. And survival was the name of the game right now.

  But Hume needed a hacker—a genuine Gibsonian cyberpunk—to pull that off. He’d tried last night to contact three more names on the black-hat list. He’d been unable to get hold of one—which could mean anything, he knew; another was indeed missing, according to her devastated boyfriend; and the third told Hume to cram it up his ass.

  “Yeah, I’ll go into the office,” he said. “And I’ll check with the FBI again, see if they’ve got any leads. The guy I talked to yesterday agreed it was a suspicious pattern—maybe even a serial killer; he called it the ‘hacker whacker.’ But the only blood at Chase’s place was his own, and there’s no sign of foul play in the other cases, they say.”

  She snuggled closer to him in the dark. “You’ll do the right thing,” she said. “As always.”

  The alarm went off. He let it ring, wishing the whole world could hear it.

  twenty-three

  It was now Thursday morning, October 18—one full week since Webmind had gone public. Caitlin wanted to do as much as she could to help him, and so today she started another pro-Webmind newsgroup, although thousands of those had already cropped up.

  She also posted comments on seventy-six news stories that had their facts wrong—and, yes, she knew the futility of that, and well remembered having had the famous xkcd webcomic read to her: a man is working at his computer, and his wife calls out, “Are you coming to bed?” He replies, “I can’t,” as he continues to type furiously. “Someone is wrong on the Internet!”

  And, anyway, she wasn’t really sure why she was bothering. After all, Webmind himself was now participating on tens of thousands of newsgroups, was posting comments on countless blogs, and was tweeting in dozens of languages. As CNN Online had put it, he was now the most overexposed celebrity on the planet, “like Paris Hilton, Jennifer Aniston, and Irwin Tan rolled into one.”

  Except that wasn’t really true, at least not to Caitlin’s way of thinking. In mathematics, celebrities were often used in discussing graph theory, since their interactions with their fans were a perfect example of a directed, asymmetric relationship between vertices: by definition, many more fans know a celebrity than are known to the celebrity. But Webmind did know everyone who was online. He wasn’t a celebrity; he was more like the whole planet’s Facebook friend.

  Still she continued to read news coverage and the follow-up comments—some favorable, some not—about Webmind’s speech at the UN, and all the other things he’d been doing, and—

  And what was that?

  There was an odd red-and-white logo next to the name of the person who had posted the comment she was now reading. She still had a hard time with small text, and JAWS couldn’t deal with text that was presented as graphics, but she squinted at it, and—

  Verified by Webmind.

  “Webmind?” she said into the air. “What’s up with that?”

  His synthesized voice came from her desktop speakers. “A number of people noted that I was in a position to verify the identity of people posting online, affirming that they were using their real names, rather than a handle or pseudonym. On sites like this one that allow avatar pictures, that picture can, at the individual’s request, be replaced with the Verified by Webmind graphic.”

  Caitlin thought about this. She often wrote online under the name Calculass, but there were indeed countless trolls who posted incendiary comments under fake names simply to spew hatred or mock others; on many sites, they derailed almost every discussion. Caitlin had found, for instance, that she simply couldn’t stomach reading the comments on the CBC News site, most of which were nasty, crude, racist, or sexist, or one of the eleven possible combinations of those four things.

  Webmind went on. “Some sites, such as Amazon.com, already allow an optional ‘Real Name’ badge to be attached to reviews, but, until now, there was no simple, across-the-Web solution for verifying that one was posting under his or her true identity. It was trivial for me to provide it, so I did.”

  “Interesting. But… but, I dunno, people gotta be able to say things anonymously online.”

  “In some cases, that’s true. There’s obviously a need for free political commentary in repressive regimes, and a way for whistle-blowers to draw attention to corporate and government malfeasance without fear of reprisals. But others have told me that a good part of the joy of the online world has been taken away by people who snipe from behind masks; as they’ve said, they wouldn’t engage in conversation with people who hid their identities in the real world, and they don’t feel they should be compelled to online.”

  “I guess.”

  “Already filters are starting to appear on sites to allow you to select to see only comments by those who are posting with Verified by Webmind credentials. In other places—where there is no legitimate need for anonymity—filters are being installed to allow only users I have verified to post at all. JagsterMail started offering VBW flags on ‘from’ addresses this morning, and Gmail is planning to follow suit. The initiative, which is grassroots based, has been referred to by many names, but the one that seems to be sticking is ‘Take Back the Net.’ That term—a play on the campaign against violence against women called Take Back the Night—has been used from time to time for other online initiatives, but never with any real traction. But it does seem appropriate here: there’s a feeling on the part of many that the online world, except on such social networking sites as Facebook, has been largely usurped by people who have grown irresponsible because of their anonymity.”

  Caitlin shifted in her chair. Webmind went on. “I do not believe you have yet seen the movie As Good as It Gets.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve never even heard of it.”

  “It stars Jack Nicholson as a novelist. When asked how he writes women so well, he replies, ‘I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.’ ”

  “That’s awful!” Caitlin said.

  “According to IMDb, it is one of the most memorable quotations from the film. But I agree that it is not an apt description of your gender, Caitlin. However, I do think it often applies to the effect of being anonymous online: with anonymity there is no accountability, and without accountability, there is no need for reason, or reasonableness.”

  Caitlin had had plenty of online arguments with people whose identities she did know, but, then again, she’d had lots of real-world arguments with such people, too. “It’s an interesting idea,” she said.

  “Would you like me to certify you?”

  “Well, you can’t when I’m posting as Calculass, right?”

  “Correct. But for your postings and email as Caitlin Decter, I can verify that you are who you claim to be.”

  She’d always been an early adopter. “Sure. Why not?”

  Colonel Hume drove toward his office at the Pentagon; at least he’d have access to facilities, and if any computers on the planet were secure from Webmind, it would be the one
s there. His phone rang just as he was turning a corner; he had his Bluetooth earpiece in. “Peyton Hume speaking,” he said.

  “Colonel Hume,” said a deep voice with a Hispanic accent. “This is Assistant Director Ortega at the Washington bureau.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Ortega.”

  “Just thought you’d want to know we were just copied on a missing-persons report. One of the names from the list you gave us: Brandon Slovak. Teh Awesome himself.”

  “God,” said Hume.

  “Takoma Park PD’s been to his apartment. No sign of forceable entry, but he definitely left unexpectedly. Half-eaten meal on the table, TV still running although the sound was muted.”

  “All right,” said Hume. “Let me know if you hear anything further, okay?”

  “Of course. And we’re starting a systematic check of everyone on your list within a hundred miles of the capital—see if anyone else is missing.”

  “Thanks. Keep me posted.”

  “Will do.” Ortega clicked off.

  Hume kept driving. Teh Awesome had been the one who’d said he liked Webmind, but—

  But he was also one of those who had been most capable of doing Webmind harm. In fact, maybe Slovak himself had known that. He might well have tried to be in touch with other hackers in the area and heard about their disappearances. Maybe all that posturing had been in case Webmind was listening in—in hopes of keeping himself safe.

  Fat lot of good it had done him.

  Hume turned onto F Street, and soon was passing the Watergate Complex. As an Air Force officer, he’d periodically been asked about Area 51, where the alien spaceships from Roswell were supposedly stored—or about whether the moon landings had been faked. And he’d always had the same answer: if the government was good at keeping secrets, the world would never have heard of Watergate or Monica Lewinsky.

  But he was keeping a secret—a huge secret. He knew how Webmind was instantiated; he knew what made it tick. And if Mohammed wouldn’t come to the mountain…