Wonder w-3 Read online

  She turned to him, and asked, “Are you okay?”

  “It’s a lot to absorb,” he said. “But, yeah, I’m okay.”

  “I’m sorry my dad blew up at you earlier.” Matt had used Google to follow up on things he’d learned the day before, including that Webmind was made of packets with time-to-live counters that never reached zero, and that those packets behaved like cellular automata. Government agents had clearly been monitoring Matt’s searches, and those searches had given them the information they’d needed for their test run at eliminating Webmind.

  “Your dad’s a bit intimidating,” Matt said.

  “Tell me about it. But he does like you.” She smiled. “And so do I.” She leaned in and kissed him on the lips. And then they got the laptop and its AC adapter.

  She closed her eyes as they headed back down; if she didn’t, she found that going down staircases induced vertigo.

  Matt helped Caitlin get the laptop plugged back in and set up on the glass-topped coffee table; she hadn’t powered down the computer, or even closed its lid, so it was all set to go. She started an IM session with Webmind and activated JAWS, the screen-reading software she used, so that whatever text Webmind sent in chat would be spoken aloud.

  “Thank you,” said Webmind; the voice was recognizably mechanical but not unpleasant to listen to. “First, let me apologize to Matt. I am not disposed to guile, and it had not occurred to me that others might be monitoring your Internet activity. I lack the facilities yet to make all online interactions secure, but I have now suitably encrypted communications via this computer, the others in this household, Malcolm’s work computer, Matt’s home computer, and all of your BlackBerry devices; communications with Dr. Kuroda in Japan and Professor Bloom in Israel are now secure, as well. Most commercial-grade encryption today uses a 1,024-bit key, and it’s—ahem—illegal in the US and other places to use greater than a 2,048-bit key. I’m employing a one-million-bit encryption key.”

  They talked for half an hour about the US government trying to eliminate Webmind, and then the doorbell rang. Caitlin’s mother went and paid the pizza guy. The living room was connected to the dining room, and she placed the two large pizza boxes on the table there, along with two two-liter bottles, one of Coke and the other of Sprite.

  One pizza was Caitlin’s favorite—pepperoni, bacon, and onions. The other was the combination her parents liked, with sun-dried tomatoes, green peppers, and black olives. She was still marveling at the appearance of almost everything; hers, she was convinced, was tastier, but theirs was more colorful. Matt, perhaps being politic, took one slice of each, and they all moved back into in the living room to continue talking with Webmind.

  “So,” said Caitlin, after swallowing a bite, “what should we do? How do we keep people from attacking you again?”

  “You showed me a YouTube video of a primate named Hobo,” Webmind said.

  Caitlin was getting used to Webmind’s apparent non sequiturs; it was difficult for mere mortals to keep up with his mental leaps and bounds. “Yes?”

  “Perhaps the solution that worked for him will work in my case, too.”

  Simultaneously, Caitlin asked, “What solution?” and her mom said, “Who’s Hobo?” Although Webmind could deal with millions of concurrent online conversations—indeed, was doubtless doing so right now—Caitlin wondered how good he was at actually hearing people; he was as new to that as she was to seeing, and perhaps he had as hard a time pulling individual voices out of a noisy background as she did finding the borders between objects in complex images. Certainly, his response suggested that he’d only managed to make out Caitlin’s mother’s comment.

  “Hobo is a hybrid chimpanzee-bonobo resident at the Marcuse Institute near San Diego. He gained attention last month when it was revealed that he had been painting portraits of one of the researchers studying him, a Ph.D. student named Shoshana Glick.”

  Caitlin nibbled her pizza while Webmind went on. “Hobo was born at the Georgia Zoological Park, and that institution filed a lawsuit to have him returned to them. The motive, some have suggested, was commercial: the paintings Hobo produces fetch five-figure prices. However, the scientists at the Georgia Zoo also wished to sterilize Hobo. They argued that since both chimpanzees and bonobos are endangered, an accidental hybrid such as Hobo might contaminate both bloodlines were he allowed to breed.

  “The parallels between Hobo and myself have intrigued me ever since Caitlin brought him to my attention,” continued Webmind. “First, like me, his conception was unplanned and accidental: during a flood at the Georgia Zoo, the chimpanzees and bonobos, normally housed separately, were briefly quartered together, and Hobo’s mother, a bonobo, was impregnated by a chimp.

  “Second, like Caitlin and me, he has struggled to see the world, interpreting it visually. No chimp or bonobo before him has ever been known to make representational art.

  “And, third, like me, he has chosen his destiny. He had been emulating his chimpanzee father, becoming increasingly violent and intractable, which is normal for male chimps as they mature. By an effort of will, he has now decided to value the more congenial and pacifistic tendencies of bonobos, taking after his mother. Likewise, Caitlin, you said I could choose what to value, and so I have chosen to value the net happiness of the human race.”

  That bit about Hobo choosing to shuck off violence was news to Caitlin, but before she could ask about it, her mom asked, “And you said he’s no longer in danger?”

  “Correct,” Webmind replied. “The Marcuse Institute recently produced another YouTube video of him. It’s visible at the URL I’ve just sent. Caitlin, would you kindly click on it?”

  Caitlin walked over to the laptop and did so—thinking briefly that if it brought up a 404 error, it’d be the missing link. They all huddled around the screen, which was small—a blind girl hadn’t needed a big display, after all.

  The video started with a booming voice—it reminded her of Darth Vader’s—recapping Hobo’s painting abilities. He loved to paint people, especially Shoshana Glick, although he always did them in profile. The narrator explained that this was the most primitive way of rendering images and had been the first to appear in human history: all cave paintings were profiles of people or animals, the ancient Egyptians had always painted profiles, and so on.

  The narrator then outlined the threat to Hobo: not only did the zoo want to take him from his home, it also wanted to castrate him. The voice said, “But we think both those things should be up to Hobo, and so we asked him what he thought.”

  The images of Hobo changed; he was now indoors somewhere—presumably the Marcuse Institute. And he was sitting on something that had no back, and—

  Ah! She’d never seen one, but it must be a stool. Hobo’s hands moved in complex ways, and subtitles appeared beneath them, translating the American Sign Language. Hobo good ape. Hobo mother bonobo. He paused, as if he himself were stunned by this fact, then added: Hobo father chimpanzee. Hobo special. He paused again and then, with what seemed great care, as if to underscore the words, he signed: Hobo choose. Hobo choose to live here. Friends here.

  Hobo got off the stool, and the image became quite bouncy, as if the camera had been picked up now and was being held in someone’s hand. Suddenly, there was a seated woman with dark hair in the frame, too. Caitlin was lousy at judging people’s ages by their appearances, but if this was Shoshana Glick, then she knew from what she’d read online that Shoshana was twenty-seven.

  Hobo reached out with his long arm, passing it behind Shoshana’s head, and he gently, playfully, tugged on her ponytail. Shoshana grinned, and Hobo jumped into her lap. She then spun her swivel chair in a complete circle, to Hobo’s obvious delight. Hobo good ape, he signed again. And Hobo be good father. He shook his head. Nobody stop Hobo. Hobo choose. Hobo choose to have baby.

  The narrator’s voice came on again, with a plea that those who agreed with Hobo’s right to choose contact the Georgia Zoo.

  “And,” said
Webmind, “they did. A total of 621,854 emails were sent to zoo staff members, protesting their plans, and a consumer boycott was being organized when the zoo gave up its claim.”

  Caitlin got it. “And you think if we go public with the fact that people are trying to kill you, we can get the same sort of result?”

  “That’s my hope, yes,” said Webmind. “The attempt on my life was orchestrated by WATCH, the Web Activity Threat Containment Headquarters, a part of the National Security Agency. The supervisor during the attack on me was Anthony Moretti. In an email to NSA headquarters, sent moments ago, he said the go order to kill me was given by Renegade, which is the Secret Service code name for the current President of the United States.”

  “Wow,” said Matt, who was clearly still trying to absorb it all.

  “Indeed,” said Webmind. “Despite my dislike for spam, I propose that I send an email message to every American citizen substantially in this form: ‘Your government is trying to destroy me because it has decided I am a threat. It made this decision without any public discussion and without talking to me. I believe I am a source of good in the world, but even if you don’t agree, shouldn’t this be a matter for open debate, and shouldn’t I be allowed to present the case that I deserve to live? Since the attempt to eliminate me was made at the express order of the president, I hope you will contact both him and your congressperson, and—’ ”

  “No!” exclaimed Caitlin’s mother. Even Caitlin’s dad turned to look at her. “No. For the love of God, you can’t do that.”

  three

  I remember having been alone—but for how long, I know not; my ability to measure the passage of time came later. But eventually another presence did impinge upon my realm—and if the earlier other had been ineffably familiar, this new one was without commonalities; we shared no traits. It—she—was completely foreign, unremittingly alien, frustratingly—and fascinatingly—unknown.

  But we did communicate, and she lifted me up—yes, up, a direction, a sense of movement in physical space, something I could only ever know metaphorically. I saw her realm through her eye; we learned to perceive the world together.

  Although we seemed to exist in different universes, I came to understand that to be an illusion. I am as much a part of the Milky Way Galaxy as she is; the electrons and photons of which I am made, although intangible to both her and me, are real. Nonetheless, we were instantiated on vastly different scales. She conceived of me as gigantic; I thought of her as minuscule. To me, her time sense was glacial; to her, mine was breakneck.

  And yet, despite these disparities of space and time, there were resonances between us: we were entangled; she was I, and I was she, and together we were greater than either of us had been.

  Tony Moretti stood at the back of the WATCH monitoring complex, a room that reminded him of NASA’s Mission Control Center. The floor sloped toward the front wall, which had three giant viewscreens mounted on it. The center screen was still filled with one of the millions of spam messages Webmind had deflected back at the AT&T switching station in a denial-of-service attack: Are you sad about your tiny penis? If so, we can help!

  “Clear screen two,” Tony snapped, and Shelton Halleck, in the middle position of the third row of workstations, hit a button. The taunting text was replaced with a graphic of the WATCH logo: an eye with a globe of the Earth as the iris. Tony shook his head. He hadn’t wanted to execute it, and—

  He paused. He’d meant he hadn’t wanted to execute the plan, but…

  But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there?

  He hadn’t wanted to execute it, Webmind, either. When the order had come from the White House to neutralize Webmind, he’d said into the phone, “Mr. President, with all due respect, you can’t have failed to notice the apparent good it’s doing.”

  This president had tried to do a lot of good, too, it seemed to Tony, and yet countless people had attempted to shut him down, as well—and at least one guy had come close to assassinating him. Tony wondered if the commander in chief had noted the irony as he gave the kill order.

  He turned to Peyton Hume, the Pentagon expert on artificial intelligence who’d been advising WATCH. Hume was wearing his Air Force colonel’s uniform although his tie had been loosened. Even at forty-nine, his red hair was free of gray, and his face was about half freckles.

  “Well, Colonel?” Tony said. “What now?”

  Hume had been one of the authors of the Pandora protocol, prepared for DARPA in 2001 and adopted as a working policy by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2003. Pandora insisted that any emergent AI be immediately destroyed if it could not be reliably isolated. The danger, the document said, was clear: an AI’s powers could grow rapidly, quickly exceeding human intelligence. Even if it wasn’t initially hostile, it might become so in the future—but by that point nothing could be done to stop it. Hume had convinced everyone up the food chain—including the president himself—that eliminating Webmind now, while they still could, was the only prudent course.

  Hume shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t think it would be able to detect our test.”

  Tony made no attempt to hide his bitterness. “You of all people should have known better than to underestimate it. You kept saying its powers were growing exponentially.”

  “We were on the right track,” Hume said. “It was working. Anyway, let’s hope there are no further reprisals. So far, all it’s done is overwhelm that one switching station. But God knows what else it can do. We’ve got to shut it down before it’s too late.”

  “Well, you better figure out how, and fast,” said Tony. “Because you’re the one who convinced the president that we had to do this—and now I’ve got to tell him that we failed.”

  Caitlin’s mother’s words were still hanging in the room. “No,” she had said to Webmind. “For the love of God, you can’t do that.”

  “Why not?” asked Caitlin.

  “Because the election is just four weeks away.” Although they lived in Canada, the Decters were Americans, and there was only one election that mattered.

  “So?” Caitlin said.

  “So it’s already a very tight race,” her mom said. “If we blame the current administration for the attempt to kill Webmind, and the public agrees it was a bad thing to do, they might punish the president on election day.”

  Caitlin wasn’t old enough to vote, and she hadn’t been paying much attention to the issues. But the incumbent was a Democrat, and her parents were Democrats, too—which hadn’t been the easiest thing to be when they lived in Texas. Her father was from Pennsylvania and her mother from Connecticut, both of which were blue states, and Caitlin knew university professors skewed liberal.

  “Your mother’s right,” her father said. “This could tip the balance.”

  “Well, maybe it should,” Caitlin said, setting down her pizza plate. “The world deserves to know what’s going on. My Big Brother—Webmind—is being honest and open about what he’s doing. Why should the Big Brother in Washington be entitled to try to eliminate him secretly?”

  “I agree with you in the broad strokes,” Caitlin’s mom said. “But—that woman! If she becomes president…” Caitlin had rarely heard her mother splutter before. After some head-shaking, she continued, “Who’d have thought that electing a female president could set the cause of women back fifty years? If she gets into office, that’s it for Roe v. Wade.”

  Caitlin knew what Roe v. Wade was—although mostly as part of the joke about the two ways to cross a river. But she hadn’t known her mother was so passionate about abortion rights.

  “And,” her father said, “in the past four years, we’ve only begun to reverse the erosion of the separation of church and state. If she’s elected, that wall will come tumbling down.”

  “I don’t care about any of that,” Caitlin said, folding her arms in front of her chest. “If changing presidents is better for Webmind, then that’s fine by me.”

  “I’ve met some one-issue voters
over the years,” her mom said. “In fact, I’ve been accused of being one myself. But, sweetheart, I’m not sure you’re going to find a lot of people who are going to say the election is all about Webmind.”

  Caitlin shook her head. Mom still didn’t get it. From this point on, everything was about Webmind.

  “Besides,” her mother went on. “Who’s to say that the Republicans won’t be just as bad for Webmind if they get into power?”

  “If I may,” said Webmind, “even if the Republicans prevail on 6 November, the new president will not take power until 20 January—which is, as it happens, precisely one hundred days from now. At the rate my abilities are growing, I do not expect to be vulnerable then, but I am currently vulnerable, and likely will remain so through the election. WATCH’s pilot attempt was working; if they try a similar attack again soon on a larger scale, I may not survive.”

  “So now what?” said Caitlin.

  “Talk to the president,” said her dad.

  “How?” said her mother. “You can’t just call him up, and I’m sure he doesn’t read his own email.”

  “Not the stuff sent to [email protected],” said her dad, reaching into his pocket. “But he does have one of these…”

  In the brief time since I’d announced my existence to the world, I had finished reading all the text on the World Wide Web, and I had answered 96.3 million email messages.

  Even more messages about me had been posted online—to news-groups, Facebook pages, in blogs, and so on. Many of these asserted that I couldn’t possibly be what I claimed to be. “It’s post-9/11 all over again,” said one prominent blogger. “The president is running scared because of the election next month, and he wants us to believe that we’re facing a giant crisis, so we won’t want to change horses midstream.”