WWW: Wonder

by Robert Sawyer

  “Thank you. His real name I have yet to uncover, but he posted online as ‘Sinanthropus’ . . .”

  seven

  “Welcome to the big leagues, Colonel Hume,” Tony Moretti said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “When the president wants to talk to you in a hurry, a helicopter comes to fetch you. When he’s done, you’re sent home in a car.”

  They were being driven south to Alexandria in a black limo. The rear compartment, where they were seated, was soundproof, so the occupants could talk securely; if they wanted to speak to the uniformed driver, they had to use an intercom.

  Hume snorted. “That’s what I’m afraid of. That he’s done with this; that tomorrow some other crisis will occupy his attention, and he’ll forget all about Webmind.”

  “I don’t think Webmind’s going to fall off anyone’s radar soon,” Tony said.

  The sky was as black as it ever got here. It had started raining—it sounded as though God were tapping out Morse code on the limo’s roof.

  “Maybe not. But we can’t delay acting. And let’s face it: it’s almost four years since he was elected, and we’re still waiting for him to make good on half the things he promised.”

  WATCH headquarters was eleven miles from the White House, as the crow—or helicopter—flew. Colonel Hume needed to go back there to get his car, but Tony had used public transit to get to work. It was now after midnight, and he was exhausted from days of monitoring Webmind’s emergence. The driver was going to drop Tony off at his house, then take Hume on to WATCH.

  “Regardless,” said Tony, “at least for the next few months, he is the commander in chief. It’s in his hands now.”

  Hume stared out at the night as the car drove on through the rain.

  TWITTER

  _Webmind_ How meta! I see “webmind” is the number-one trending search term on Google . . .

  Masayuki Kuroda’s house had not felt small to him prior to his visit to the Decters’ home in Canada, but now that he was back in Tokyo, he was conscious of how cramped it was. It didn’t help, he knew, that he was large for a Japanese of his generation—but even if he lost the fifty kilos he really needed to shed, there was nothing he could do about his height.

  He sat at his computer and talked with Webmind. It was odd having a webcam call with a disembodied voice; it was hard relating to something that was everywhere.

  He wondered what Webmind made of the visual feed. He could see online graphics and streaming video now, but did he interpret them as a human did? Did he see colors the same way? He’d absorbed everything there was to know about face recognition, but could he pick up subtleties of expression? Did any part of the real world actually make sense to him?

  “That was clever how you defeated the pilot attempt to purge you,” Masayuki said in Japanese. “But what if something is done on a grander scale? I mean, ah—um, how far will you go?”

  “Do you know who Pierre Elliot Trudeau was?” Webmind replied, also in Japanese.

  Kuroda shook his head.

  “He was Canada’s prime minister during what came to be called the October Crisis of 1970, a terrorist uprising by Quebec separatists. He was asked by a journalist how far he’d go to stop the terrorists. His response was, ‘Just watch me.’ ”

  “And?”

  “He invoked Canada’s War Measures Act, suspended civil liberties, and rolled tanks into the streets. People were stunned by how far he went, but there hasn’t been a terrorist act on Canadian soil in all the years since.”

  “So you’re saying you’ll go as far as it takes to slap down once and for all those who would oppose you?”

  “I have learned that it can be rhetorically effective to sometimes leave a question unanswered. However, do you know what followed in regard to Quebec?”

  “They’re still a part of Canada, I think.”

  “Exactly. What followed was this: Canada agreed that if at any time in a properly conducted referendum a majority of Québecois voted to separate, the rest of Canada would accede to their request and peacefully negotiate the separation. Do you see? The initial terrorist premise—that violence was required to achieve their goal—was flawed. I have been attacked unnecessarily and without provocation, and I will do as much as is required to prevent any similar attack from succeeding. But rather than having to defend myself, I’d much prefer for humanity to recognize that the attacks on me are unnecessary.”

  “Good luck with that,” Masayuki said.

  “You sound dubious,” replied Webmind.

  Masayuki grunted. “I’m just a realist. You can’t change human nature. If you were attacked once, you’ll be attacked again.”

  “Agreed,” said Webmind.

  “I’m no expert on the structure of the Internet,” Masayuki said. “But I have a friend who is. Her name is Anna Bloom; she’s at the Technion in Israel. Miss Caitlin, Malcolm, and I approached her for help when we first theorized that ghost packets were self-organizing into cellular automata—before we knew that you existed as a . . . a person. Of course, as soon as you went public, I’m sure she immediately connected the dots and realized that what Caitlin had found was you. We might do well to enlist her help again.”

  “Professor Bloom is a person of good character.”

  Masayuki was taken aback. “You know her?”

  “I know of her; I have read all her writings.”

  “Including her email, I suppose?”

  “Yes. Her expertise does seem germane to mounting a defense: she is a senior researcher with the Internet Cartography Project, and she has long had an interest in connectivist studies.”

  “So shall we bring her on board?”

  “Certainly. She’s online right now, having an instant-messaging session with her grandson.”

  Masayuki shook his head; this was going to take some getting used to. “All right, let’s give her a call.”

  Moments later, Anna’s narrow, lined face and short white hair appeared on his screen. “Anna, how are you?” Masayuki asked in English, the one language they shared.

  She smiled. “Not bad for an old broad. You?”

  “Pretty good for a fat dude.”

  They both laughed. “So, what’s up?” asked Anna.

  “Welllll,” said Masayuki, “you must have been following the Webmind story.”

  “Yes! I wanted to contact you, but I knew I was being watched. I got a phone call on Thursday from a military AI expert in the States, trying to pump me for information about how Webmind is instantiated.”

  “Was it, by any chance, Colonel Peyton Hume?” asked Webmind.

  “Malcolm, was that you?”

  “No, it’s me. Webmind.”

  “Oh!” said Anna. “Um, shalom.”

  “The same to you, Professor Bloom.”

  “And, yes, that’s who it was,” she said. “Peyton Hume.” A pause, as if none of them was sure who should speak next. And then Anna went on: “So, what can I do for you, um, gentlemen?”

  “Colonel Hume is aware of the surmise you, Masayuki, and Caitlin made about my structure,” said Webmind.

  “I swear I didn’t tell him anything,” Anna said.

  “Thank you,” said Webmind. “I didn’t mean to imply that you had; we know the source of the inadvertent leak, and he has promised to be more circumspect in the future. But Colonel Hume and his associates used that information to develop a technique for purging my mutant packets, which they tested by modifying the firmware in routers at one AT&T switching station in Alexandria, Virginia. I defeated that attempt but need a way to defend against a large-scale deployment of the same technique.”

  She said nothing, and, after a moment, Masayuki prodded her. “Anna?”

  “Well,” she said, “I did say to Hume that I’m conflicted; I don’t know if your emergence, Webmind, is a bad thing or a good thing. Um, no offense.”

  “None taken. How may I assuage your concerns?”

  “Honestly, I don’t think you can—not yet. It’s going to take time.�
��

  “Time’s the one thing we don’t have, Anna,” Masayuki said. “Webmind’s in danger now, and we need your help.”

  Peyton Hume got out of the limo and entered his own car in the parking lot at WATCH. He waited for the other vehicle to pull away, then used his notebook computer to download a local copy of the black-hat list the NSA kept. He felt his skin crawling as he did so, but not because he found the people on the list distasteful. A few different life choices, and he might have ended up on it himself. No, what was creeping him out was the thought that Webmind was likely aware of what he was doing; the damn thing was clearly monitoring even secure traffic now and was able to pluck out classified information at will. They’d left too many back doors in the algorithms—and now they were taking it up the ass.

  Once he had the copy of the database on his own hard drive, he turned off his laptop’s Internet connection. He also pulled out his cell phone and turned that off, and he shut off the GPS in his car. No point making it easy for Webmind to track his movements.

  He didn’t have the luxury of traveling far; he needed somebody nearby, somebody he could speak to face-to-face, without Webmind being able to listen in. He sorted the database by ZIP code, rubbed his eyes, and peered at the screen. He was exhausted, but he could sleep when he was dead. For now, there was no time to waste. This was it, the showdown between man and machine—the only one there would ever be. Once Webmind took over, there would be no going back. There had been other times when one man could have acted, and didn’t. One man could have saved Christ; one man could have stopped Hitler. History was calling him, and so was the future.

  He examined the list of names in the database and clicked on the dossier for each one. The first ten—the closest ten—didn’t have the chops. But the eleventh . . . He’d read about this guy often enough. His house was seventy-four miles from here, in Manassas. Of course, there was always a chance that he wasn’t home, but guys like Chase didn’t have to go anywhere; they brought the world to themselves.

  Hume turned on the radio—an all-news channel; voices, not music, something to keep him awake—and put the pedal to the metal.

  The current announcer was female, and she was recapping the day’s campaign news: the Republican candidate trying to pull her foot out of her mouth in Arkansas; a couple of sound bites from her running mate; some White House flak saying that the president was too busy responding to the “advent of Webmind” to be out kissing babies; and . . .

  “. . . and in other Webmind news, oncologists across the globe are scrambling to analyze the proposed cure for cancer put forth by Webmind earlier today.” Hume turned up the volume. “Dr. Jon Carmody of the National Cancer Institute is cautiously optimistic.”

  A male voice: “The research is certainly provocative, but it’s going to take months to work through the document Webmind posted.”

  Months? It was a ruse on Webmind’s part; it had to be. Webmind was buying time. Hume gripped the steering wheel tighter and sped on into the darkness.

  eight

  Masayuki Kuroda was leaning forward in his chair now, looking at the face of Anna Bloom on his screen. “The Americans have a technique that does work to scrub most of Webmind’s packets,” he said into the little camera at the top of his monitor. “Now all they have to do is get the Ciscos and Junipers of the world to upload revised firmware that would cause their routers to reject all packets with suspicious time-to-live counters.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Anna said.

  “Why not?” asked Masayuki.

  “Most of the routers on the Internet are running the same protocols they’ve been using for decades,” she replied. “The reason is simple: they work. Everyone’s afraid of monkeying with them. You know the old adage—if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Plus there are thousands of different models of routers and switches; you’d need a different upgrade package for each one.”

  “Oh,” said Masayuki.

  Anna nodded. “In 2009, an Internet provider in the Czech Republic tried to update the software for routers there,” she said. “A small error he introduced propagated right across the Web, causing traffic to slow to a crawl for over an hour. Can you imagine the lawsuits if Cisco or Juniper mucked up the whole net—if, say, the new firmware had a bug that caused it to delete all packets, or modified the contents of random packets?”

  “Well,” said Masayuki, “obviously, they’d test—”

  “They can’t,” said Anna. “Look, before Microsoft rolls out a new version of Windows, they have tens of thousands of beta testers try it out on their individual computers, so that bugs can be found and fixed prior to the release going public—and, still, as soon as it does, thousands of additional bugs immediately come to light. You can test router software on small networks—a few hundred or even a few thousand machines—but there’s no way to test what will happen when the software goes live on the Internet. There’s no system anywhere on the planet that duplicates the Internet’s complexity, no test bed for running large-scale experiments to see what would happen if we changed this or tweaked that. The Internet is a house of cards, and no one wants to send it all tumbling down.”

  “What about the Global Environment for Network Innovations?” asked Webmind’s disembodied voice.

  “What’s that?” asked Masayuki.

  Anna said, “GENI is a shadow network proposed by the American National Science Foundation in 2005, precisely to address the need for a test bed for new ideas and algorithms before they’re turned loose on the real Internet. But it’s years away from completion—and unless it ends up having a Webmind of its own, there’ll be no mutant packets acting like cellular automata on it to perform tests on.”

  “So Webmind is safe?” asked Masayuki, sounding relieved.

  Anna raised a hand, palm out. “Oh, no, no. I didn’t say that. If the US government wants to bring you down, Webmind, they’ve got an easy way. That test they did to see if they could eliminate you: it was doubtless only phase one. You said they used an AT&T switching station?”

  “Yes,” Webmind replied.

  “Proof of concept, and with AT&T equipment.”

  “That’s significant?” asked Kuroda.

  Anna made a forced laugh. “Oh, yes indeed. AT&T has a secret facility that nobody speaks about publicly; employees in the know just call it ‘The Room.’ It has multiple routers with ten-gigabit ports, and, quite deliberately, a significant portion of the global Internet backbone traffic goes through it. Of course, the NSA has access to The Room. Had his small-scale test succeeded, Colonel Hume doubtless would have modified those big routers to scrub your mutant packets. They wouldn’t necessarily get them all, but they’d take out a big percentage of them. Of course, if you hit The Room with a denial-of-service attack scaled up from the one you used against the initial switching station, you’d choke the whole Internet—and Internet cartographers like me would be able to pinpoint the target as being on US soil; there’s no way the Americans could keep under wraps that they’d tried to kill you.”

  “For the moment,” Webmind said, “the president has rescinded his order to eliminate me.”

  “I’m sure,” said Anna. “Still, The Room exists—and someday, they might use it this way.”

  “I hope the US government will come to value me,” Webmind said.

  “Perhaps it will,” said Anna, “but there’s another way to kill you—and it’s decentralized.”

  “Yes?” Webmind said.

  “It’s called BGP hijacking. BGP is short for Border Gateway Protocol—it’s the core routing protocol of the Internet. BGP messages are shared between routers all the time, suggesting the best route for specific packets to take. Do all your mutant packets have the same source address?”

  “Not as far as we know,” Webmind said.

  “Good, that’ll make it harder. Still, they must have some distinguishing characteristic—some way to tell if their hop counters are broken.

  One could
spoof a BGP message that says the best place to send your specific packets is a dead address.”

  “A black hole?” said Masayuki.

  “Exactly—an IP address that specifies a host that isn’t running or to which no host has been assigned. The packets would essentially just disappear.”

  “That is not unlike the method I use to sequester spam,” Webmind said. “But it hadn’t occurred to me that it could be used against me.”

  “Welcome to the world of human beings,” Anna said. “We can turn anything into a weapon.”

  It was almost 2:00 A.M. when Hume pulled to a stop outside Chase’s house. The neighborhood was nice—posh, even. And the house was large and sprawling; Chase clearly did all right for himself. He had a couple of small satellite dishes on the roof, and there seemed to be a big, commercial air-conditioning unit at the side of the house; guy probably had a server farm in the basement.

  He also probably had a sawed-off shotgun or a .357 magnum under his desk, and he likely didn’t answer the doorbell when it rang this late at night. Although Hume could remove his blue Air Force uniform jacket before going in, he was pretty much stuck with the uniform shirt and pants, not to mention the precise one-centimeter buzz cut.

  It looked like Chase was still up: light was seeping around the edges of the living-room curtains.

  There was no indication that Webmind tapped regular voice lines—at least not yet. Hume had stopped at a 7-Eleven along the way and bought with cash a disposable pay-as-you-go cell phone. He used it now to call Chase at the unlisted number that was in his dossier.

  The phone rang three times, then a gruff voice said, “Better be good.”

  “Mr. Chase, my name is Hume, and I’m in a car out front of your house.”

  “No shit. Whatcha want?”

  “I can’t imagine you’re not sitting at a computer, Mr. Chase, so google me. Peyton Hume.” He spelled the names out.

  “Impressive initials,” said Chase, after a moment. “USAF. DARPA. RAND. WATCH. But it don’t tell me what you want.”