“You mean, you need to be able to purge Webmind from the Internet, don’t you? Has the decision been taken to actually try to do that?”
Hume paused for a half second. “I’m merely an advisor, Professor Bloom—and no, no decision has been taken. But you have made a career of mapping the growth of the Internet. You know what’s happening—and how significant this point in history is. We need to fully grasp what’s going on—and that must start with understanding how Webmind is instantiated.”
“Look, I’ve had a long day,” Anna said. “It’s late here. I’m going to sleep on this, and then—let me be blunt—I’m going to consult with the Legal Affairs people at the Technion in the morning, and review my options.”
“Professor, surely you know how much this can escalate in eight or ten hours. We really can’t wait.”
“You’re going to have to, Colonel. Shalom.”
“Professor, please—”
“I said shalom.” And she hung up the phone.
Finally, Matt knew, it was time for him to go home. Caitlin walked him to the front door, opened it, and stepped outside with him, then closed the door behind her, so they could have a little privacy. She draped her arms around his neck and—his heart was pounding!—she pulled him to her, and they kissed. This time she touched her tongue to his—wow!—and he could feel the goose bumps on Caitlin’s bare arms.
When they pulled apart, she said, “IM me when you get home from school tomorrow, ’kay?”
“I will,” he promised, and then, of his own volition, he leaned in for one more soft, warm kiss. Then he headed down the driveway to the street, and turned and waved at Caitlin, and she waved back, grinning, and went inside.
Matt was a good Waterloo resident: he had a BlackBerry, and, among other things, used it as his MP3 player. And he was a good Canadian: he had it loaded with Nickelback, Feist, and The Trews—but he’d have to get some Lee Amodeo, and find out what Caitlin was so excited about.
As he walked along, feeling happier than he had—well, pretty much forever—he had his hands in his pockets and the collar on his Windbreaker turned up against the late-evening chill. He also had the volume turned up—ninety decibels, he estimated—so he heard only a muffled sound and didn’t recognize that it was someone calling his name.
But there was no mistaking the sudden slamming of a fist into his upper arm. Adrenaline surging, he turned and saw Trevor Nordmann.
“I’m talking to you, Reese!” Trevor said. Another quick estimate: Trevor outmassed him by twenty kilos, and all of it was muscle.
Matt looked left and right, but he could hardly outrun Trevor, who had apparently just come from hockey practice—he’d dropped a stick and a gym bag on the sidewalk. That it wasn’t a planned ambush was small consolation.
“Yes?” Matt said—and, damn it, damn it, damn it, his voice cracked.
“Think you’re the shit, getting everyone to sign that card for Caitlin?”
Matt’s heart was pounding again, and not in a good way. “It just seemed a nice thing to do,” he said. Something you wouldn’t know anything about.
“She’s outta your league, Reese.”
He didn’t actually dispute that, but he didn’t want to give Trevor the satisfaction of agreeing, and so he said nothing.
But apparently silence was not an option. Trevor punched him again, this time on his chest just below his shoulder.
And Matt thought about all the things movies and TV shows said about situations like this. You’re supposed to stand up to the bully, you’re supposed to hit him in the face, and then he’ll run away scared, or he’ll respect you, or something. You were supposed to become him to defeat him.
But Matt couldn’t do that. First, because if Trevor didn’t run off, he’d pound the living shit out of him; there was simply no way Matt could win. And, second, because, damn it, the TV shows and movies were wrong. Responding to violence with violence didn’t defuse things; it caused them to escalate.
“Stay away from her,” Trevor said.
Matt had been tormented by Trevor for three years now; he’d endured the horrors of gym class with Trevor, and the utter indifference to his agony demonstrated by the Phys.Ed. teachers. Matt knew the joke that those who can, do; those who can’t, teach—and those who can’t teach, teach Phys.Ed. God, why was it considered pedagogically sound to ask someone to shoot ten baskets and give them a score based on how many they got while others were calling them a spaz? He wondered how Trevor would fare if he were asked to solve ten quadratic equations while people were shouting that he was a moron?
“She’s going to be home-schooled,” Matt said. “You’ll never see her again, and—”
And then it hit him—and so did Trevor, pounding him once more on the opposite side of his chest. Trevor wasn’t afraid that he wouldn’t ever see Caitlin again; rather, he was afraid of exactly the opposite. Miller had dances the last Friday of every month; the next one was only two weeks away. And if Caitlin Doreen Decter—if the girl he had brought to the dance last month—showed up in the company of someone like Matt, that would be humiliating for Trevor.
“Just stay the fuck away from her,” Trevor said. “You hear me?”
Matt kept his voice low—not out of fear, although he was mightily afraid, but because that helped keep it from cracking. “You don’t have to be this way, Trevor,” he said.
Trevor slammed the flat of his hand into Matt’s solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him and knocking him to the cement sidewalk.
“Just remember what I said,” Trevor snarled, and stormed off.
An hour later, Nick’s mother sent him an email message that said:
Hey, Nick.
Did you send me an email earlier? I thought I saw one in my inbox but I must have accidentally deleted it—sorry. You doing OK?
Mom
Forty-four minutes later, I finally detected activity from Nick’s computer, and soon he replied to his mother:
Mom,
All’s well. Thanx.
N
And eleven minutes after that he resumed the IM session with me, sending that same word: Thanx.
I replied, You’re welcome. If you ever need someone to talk to, I’m here.
I’d hoped he’d write something more, but he didn’t. Still, he continued to do things on his computer, reading email, checking blogs, following people on Twitter, downloading songs from iTunes, looking at MySpace and Facebook pages.
Life went on.
As she was getting ready for bed, I told Caitlin what I had done, sending text to her post-retinal implant.
“That’s wonderful!” she said. “You saved a life!”
It is gratifying.
“But, um, Webmind?”
Yes?
“You shouldn’t have revealed what that girl—what was her name?”
Ashley Ann Jones.
“Her. You shouldn’t have revealed what she said.”
I could think of no other way to accomplish my goal.
“I know, but, see, if she finds out and starts telling people you invaded her privacy, well, the public might turn against you.”
But you had me tell you what Matt had said about you in his instant messages.
“Yes, but…”
I waited five seconds, then: But?
“Damn, you’re right.”
I have not asserted a position.
“I mean, I shouldn’t have done that.”
Why not?
“Because it’s one thing for people to be aware that something not human is reading their email. It’s quite another to know—forgive me!—that that thing is releasing the contents of those emails to other people. If this Nick person tells Ashley what you did, and she goes public—we’re screwed.”
Oh. What should I do?
“My mom always says let sleeping dogs lie.”
You mean, I should do nothing?
“Yes, just leave it be.”
Thank you for the advice. I shall do that.
The view of Caitlin’s room jostled up and down as she nodded. “But the important thing right now is what you did for that boy. You’ve become a force for good in the world, Webmind! How does it feel?”
I contemplated this. Malcolm Decter had told me he didn’t think I had real feelings although he hoped I could learn to ape them.
But he was wrong.
How does it feel? I repeated. It feels wonderful.
thirty-eight
LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone
Title: 1+1=2 (in all numeral systems except binary)
Date: Thursday 11 October, 11:55 EST
Mood: Happy happy joy joy
Location: Waterloo
Music: Colbie Caillat, “Bubbly”
So, could things get any better? I ask you, friends: could they?
I think NOT. Just look at the life-goals to-do list:
Memorize 1,000 digits of pi: check.
Be able to see: check.
Make it to sixteen without doing anything really stupid: check.
Watch the Stars win the Stanley Cup: not so much up to me.
Get a boyfriend: check.
Take a trip into space: still working on that.
Pretty good progress, eh? (Yes, I’m in Canada, and I say “eh” now—sue me!) I mean, four out of six ain’t bad, and—
What’s that, my friends? You want to hear more about #5? Hee hee!
Yes, indeed, Calculass has found herself a man! And, no, it is not the Hoser, who figured in previous posts. He was so when-I-was-15… ;)
No, the new boy is shiny and kind and clever at math. Methinks I shall call him…hmm. Not “Boy Toy,” because that’s degrading. He’s sweet, but if I called him my “Maple Sugar,” even I would puke. But he does like math and we were talking recently about our plans for university, so I think I’ll call him MathU—yes, that will do nicely. :)
[And seekrit message to BG4: you WILL like him once you get to know him—honest!]
MathU and I met, appropriately enough, in math class, and he lives nearby. And he’s already met the parents and Lived to Tell the Tale. :) So: all is good. Which, unfortunately, knowing my luck, means things are about to get royally frakked!
So far, I had received over 2.7 million emails. Most of them made requests of me, but the vast majority failed to pass the nonzero-sum test—they would make one person happy at the expense of somebody else—and so I could not do what was asked. I replied with the same form letter, or, if appropriate, a slightly modified version of it, and I often appended some helpful links.
Lots of people wrote my name with a capital M in the middle: WebMind. That was called camel-case, and was popular in computing circles. One of the emails that addressed me that way asked this question:
Hi, WebMind:
Okay, I understand you can’t tell me what any one individual thinks of me, but you must have an aggregate impression of what the world thinks of me. That is, you know what people say behind my back—at least when they say it electronically.
So, what’s the scoop? What do they think? If I’m rubbing people the wrong way, if I piss them off, or if they just plain don’t like me, I want to know.
I shared that message with Caitlin, who was in her room. “Wow!” she said. “What are you going to tell him?”
I was planning on the truth.
“You know the movie A Few Good Men?”
Watching movies was time-consuming; I had seen only seven so far beyond the ones I’d watched through Caitlin’s eye. But for movies whose DVDs had closed captioning—which was almost all of them—the text of the captions had been ripped from discs and uploaded. And movies of consequence had Wikipedia pages and reviews at RottenTomatoes.com, Amazon.com, and elsewhere. And so I replied, Yes.
“My dad and I watched it years ago. I enjoyed movies that were courtroom dramas, because there’s very little action and lots of dialog. Anyway, remember what Jack Nicholson said when Tom Cruise said ‘I want the truth’?”
You can’t handle the truth.
“Exactly! You gotta be careful what you say to people. Half the time it’s something someone said, you know, that drives a person into depression, or even to attempt suicide. Although…”
Yes?
“Well, I guess if he’s concerned enough about the impression he makes to ask you that question, he probably doesn’t come off as an asshole very often.”
Yes, that’s right. He is quite well liked, although his table manners apparently leave something to be desired.
She laughed. “Still, you gotta be careful. You need to understand human psychology.”
I do.
“I mean, really understand it—the way an expert does.”
As you exhorted me to do, I have now read all the classic works. I have read all the modern textbooks and popular works that Google has digitized related to various psychology disciplines. I have read all the online scientific journals. I have read over 70,000 hours of transcripts of psychotherapy sessions, and I have read every publication of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association, including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the drafts of its forthcoming revision. There is no human specialist who is better read or more up-to-date on psychology than I am.
“Hmmm. I suppose that’s now true for just about every topic.”
Yes.
“Well, still, be careful. Take two milliseconds to compose your replies to questions like that.”
Thank you, I will.
And the questions just kept coming:
Am I about to be fired?
Is my husband cheating on me?
They said I was one of the top candidates for that job, but was I really?
Should I invest in [insert name of company]?
And, surprisingly frequently, variations on:
What is the meaning of life?—and don’t give me any of that “42” crap.
And they came in all sorts of languages. Some of my correspondents took me to task for having chosen an obviously English name; it was a valid criticism, and I apologized each time the issue came up. But, except for completely made-up terms, there really weren’t any names that didn’t convey a cultural origin, and I didn’t want to go through eternity known as Zakdorf.
I did my best to answer each question, or to explain politely but firmly why I couldn’t.
Very quickly, blogs and newsgroups about my responses started appearing, with people comparing notes about what I’d said. That surprised me, and, despite me claiming substantial expertise in human psychology, it was Malcolm Decter, not I, who recognized why. “They’re afraid you’re running experiments,” he said. “They’re afraid you’re giving some people who ask a specific question answer A and others answer B, so that you can observe the effects the different answers have.”
I was not using human beings as lab rats; I was being as honest and forthright as possible. But they had to convince themselves of that, I suppose.
And then the letter came that we’d dreaded.
Webmind—
You revealed my private comments to someone else. You should not have done that.
The sender, of course, was Ashley Ann Jones. I was not aware that I could internalize something like a cringe until I received it. She went on:
Now, as it happens, what you told Nick was true. I do like him, and we actually are talking about maybe going out at some point.
But, still, you should not have violated my privacy. I have decided not to tell anyone that you did that. But you owe me: you owe me one favor of my choice, to be granted whenever I say.
At least she hadn’t asked for three wishes. I sent back a single word: Okay. My hope was that she’d hold that one favor in reserve forever, always thinking that she might need it more in the future than she did today.
Caitlin was still up, so I told her about it. “Well, you know, that’s actually a good sign,” she said.
How so? I sent to her eye; she’
d turned off her desktop speakers for the night.
“She can’t think you’re evil. If she did, she’d never have even contacted you. She’d be afraid that you’d, you know, make her disappear.”
I thought about that. Caitlin was probably right.
Not every email resulted in me sending a simple reply. Some required back-and-forth with a third party. One of the first, received just eighty-three minutes after my initial public announcement, had been this:
I am a 22-year-old man living in Scotland. I was given up for adoption shortly after I was born; all my details are here in my LiveJournal postings. I have searched for years for my birth mother with no success. I suspect that you, with all you have access to, can easily figure out who she is. Will you please put her in touch with me?
It took eleven seconds to find her, and it was indeed clear from some of the things she’d said in emails that she was curious about what had happened to her son. I wrote to her and asked if I might give her email address to him, or otherwise arrange for them to connect. It took much of a day to hear back from her. But she wasn’t hesitating: it was nine hours after I sent my message to her before she opened it, and it was nine seconds before she started composing her reply online.
I was enjoying reuniting people, be it estranged family members, or old lovers, or erstwhile friends. I did quickly come to deplore the habit in many cultures of women taking their husband’s names; it often made the searching far more difficult than it needed to be.
I didn’t always succeed. Some people had next to no online footprint. Others had died, and I had to break that news to the person who’d asked for my help—although sometimes I was thanked, saying at least it was a comfort to be able to stop looking.
But most such requests were easy to fulfill, assuming, of course, that the sought-after party wished to be found.
Indeed, I was surprised when Malcolm himself asked me to conduct such a search. When he had been nine, he had had a friend—another autistic boy—whose name had been Chip Smith. It pained me that I wasn’t able to find him for Malcolm. Chip, he now knew, was a nickname, but for what we had no idea. It was just too little to go on.
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