WWW: Watch Page 20

  Caitlin’s heart practically leapt through her chest, and Webmind sent the quite-apt phrase Holy shit to her eye. But she tried to sound nonchalant. “Who?”

  “Come now, Ms. Decter,” LaFontaine said. “Mr. Park and I have already had a long day—we got the very first flight from Ottawa to Toronto this morning, and then had to drive the hour-plus to get here from Pearson. Let’s not play games, shall we? We are aware of Webmind’s existence, and your involvement with it, and we’d like to ask you some questions about it.”

  Find out what they know first, Webmind sent.

  Caitlin nodded. “Well, sure,” she said. “But—I’m confused. You think Webmind is . . . who? Me?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Ms. Decter,” said LaFontaine. “We know it’s an emergent intelligence on the World Wide Web, and we know you know that much. We’d like to hear what else you know about it. About how it’s physically embodied, for instance. About what part of the Web’s hardware it exists on, and—”

  “I have no idea,” said Caitlin.

  Park spoke up. “Ms. Decter, I spent the flight from Ottawa reading a dossier on you. I know about your interest in math and computers. There’s simply no way we’re going to believe that you haven’t already explored this question to your satisfaction. Indeed, you presumably had to have some sense of what was going on to become involved with Webmind in the first place.”

  Caitlin narrowed her eyes. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I know you’re registered for SETI@home, Ms. Decter, isn’t that right?” said LaFontaine.

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” he asked, “do you know what the international protocols for events following the detection of an alien radio signal call for?”

  “Not offhand.”

  “They call for the radio frequencies that alien signals are being detected on to be isolated, and cleared from human use, so that the signals won’t be drowned out.” He lifted the corners of his mouth. “Our directive is to do the same thing for Webmind: make sure that whatever resources it requires for its continued existence are protected. We want to ensure that nothing interferes with it.”

  “Well, if—” Caitlin began, but suddenly the Braille words He’s lying popped in front of her vision.

  Caitlin was so startled, she said, “How do you know?”

  LaFontaine made some reply, but she ignored him, concentrating on the words Webmind was now sending to her: Voice-stress analysis of his speech and freeze-frame analysis of his micro-expressions.

  She shook her head in wonder. Just another skill Webmind had effortlessly picked up along the way.

  “I don’t know anything about Webmind’s physical makeup,” Caitlin said.

  “Come, Ms. Decter,” said LaFontaine. “We’re here to help Webmind. Now, please: which specific servers does Webmind, or its source code, reside on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ms. Decter, it really would be best—for you and for it—if you cooperated.”

  “Look, I’m an . . .”

  She stopped herself, but LaFontaine correctly guessed what she’d been about to say. “An American citizen? Yes, you are. Meaning you’re not a Canadian. Your rights are rather limited here, Ms. Decter. And I understand your mother is trying to get a permit to work in this country. I also understand that your father’s permit is temporary, and subject to revocation. We really would be grateful for your full cooperation.”

  “That was a mistake,” Caitlin said, her tone even. “Threatening my parents. Threatening their livelihoods.”

  “Dr. LaFontaine is just trying to underscore the gravity of this situation,” Park said.

  “Doctor, is it?” said Caitlin. Webmind must have been intrigued, too, because he sent to her eye: Found: he’s a computer scientist, employed by CSIS specifically to deal with Web-based terrorism.

  Terrorism! Caitlin thought, deeply offended. But what she said was, “Is it even legal for you to be talking to me? I’m sixteen. Shouldn’t you be talking to my parents?”

  “It’s perfectly legal, and, as you saw, your principal knows we’re here.”

  Caitlin looked at the two men. “I’m not trying to be difficult,” she said. “But I really can’t answer your questions.”

  “Can’t, or won’t?” said LaFontaine.

  “Look, I have a class right now—and it’s my favorite. I’d really like to get going.”

  “As Mr. Park said, there are national-security concerns here. Indeed, there are international security concerns. You really need to see the larger picture.”

  Caitlin thought about the photo of Earth from space that she’d shown Webmind recently. “Oh, I am,” she said. “And I know you’re not trying to protect Webmind.”

  “Our only interest is in its safety.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Caitlin. “And, anyway, this isn’t about American security, or Canadian security, or Western security. Webmind is a gift to the entire human race. And I’m not going to let anyone pervert it, or subvert it, or divert it, or any kind of vert it.”

  The two men glanced at each other. “We really do need your help, Ms. Decter,” said LaFontaine. “And I think perhaps you misunderstood me a moment ago. I wasn’t threatening your parents. I was saying we could assist them—get their paperwork taken care of.”

  Lying again, sent Webmind.

  “Well, that would be nice,” Caitlin said, “but as I’ve already said, I simply don’t know the answers to your questions, and so”—she swallowed, and tried to keep her voice steady—“and so, I’m going to leave now, if that’s all right with the two of you.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Decter,” said LaFontaine, “but we do need this information. We really must insist.”

  Caitlin wondered if they were carrying guns. She thought about flinging open the door and making a run for it—but, damn it all, she was a lousy runner; you didn’t get much practice at that when you were blind. So, instead, very softly, she said, “Phantom?”—her original name for the emerging intelligence. “Help.” And then she spoke up, loudly and clearly: “Gentlemen, I am not going to miss my favorite class. I am going to walk out that door and get on with my day.”

  “That’s not how it’s going to go down,” said LaFontaine, as both men stepped in front of the door to the hall.

  “I beg to differ,” said Caitlin, as Braille dots started flashing in front of her vision. “You, Doctor LaFontaine, called your boss a tête du merde in email last week; I believe an accurate translation is ‘shithead.’ You have a mistress named Veronica Styles, although you like to call her ‘Pussywillow,’ who lives at 1433 Bank Street in Ottawa. You and she both have tickets on Air Canada next week—flight 163 to Vancouver, flight 544 from there to Las Vegas.”

  She turned her head, politely looking at the person she was speaking to, just as her mother had taught her to when she was blind. “And you, Mr. Park, have accounts at Penthouse.com, Twistys.com, and Brazzers .com; you have a particular fondness for pictures of women urinating in public. You claimed when you applied to CSIS to be a graduate of Mc-Master University, but, in fact, you never completed your course work. Oh, and in an email last week you referred to Dr. LaFontaine here as a ‘second-rate, goose-stepping martinet.’ Now, unless you’d like these revelations to go public—or perhaps some equally juicy ones about the prime minister—you will step away from that door, and you will allow me to walk out of here.”

  More fascinating facial expressions seen for the first time: that reddening of the cheeks and bulging of the eyes on LaFontaine must be what it looked like when someone was about to explode. And that narrowing of the eyes and averting of gaze on Park was doubtless uneasiness.

  LaFontaine’s tone was one of barely controlled rage. “Ms. Decter, I—”

  “I’ve started taking French since I came to Canada,” Caitlin said, looking now at him. “I’ll give you ten seconds: dix, neuf, huit, sept—”

  “All right,” said Park. He moved aside. After a moment, LaFontaine did the
same thing.

  “Thank you,” said Caitlin as she strode toward the door, and, with a curt nod to LaFontaine, she added, “Au revoir.”

  twenty-eight

  Instead of going back to math class, Caitlin went into the nearest stairwell, descended to the first floor, and called her mother on her cell phone.

  “Hello?”

  And suddenly all the bravado drained from her voice. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hi, sweetheart. Is everything all right?”

  “No. Two Canadian government agents just came to see me.”

  “At school? God. What did they want?”

  “They wanted to know about Webmind’s structure—about how he works.”

  “My God. How did they even know about Webmind?”

  “I don’t know. Reading my IM traffic, I suppose. I just—it’s all happened so fast, I never even thought about making sure my communications with Webmind were secure.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Still, I’m coming to get you.”

  “No, Mom, that’s not necessary.”

  “The hell it isn’t. Caitlin, you’re lucky they just didn’t take you away.”

  “I don’t think they do that here in Canada,” Caitlin said.

  “Nevertheless, I don’t want you out of my sight. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, all right?”

  Caitlin thought about protesting again—but the hand she was holding the cell phone with was shaking. “Okay.”

  The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics was pretty much Malcolm Decter’s idea of heaven. Adjacent to a beautiful park and a lake, it had four levels, six wood-burning fireplaces, floor-to-ceiling blackboards in most rooms, pool tables, lounges—and espresso machines everywhere. There was a giant atrium with three interior bridges crossing it and skylights overhead, and a wonderful eatery called the Black Hole Bistro on the top floor.

  The exterior was stunning, too, with each of its four faces distinctly different. The north one, for instance, was composed of forty-four cantilevered boxes, each housing a scientist’s office, and all of them overlooking a reflecting pool. The south side, in contrast, consisted of irregularly placed mirror-framed windows set against anodized-aluminum paneling that gave the impression, from a distance, of a giant blackboard with complex equations scrawled on it. Designed by the Montreal firm of Saucier + Perrotte, the twenty-five-million-dollar building had opened in 2004 and had won the Governor General’s Medal in Architecture.

  Part of what made it heaven was the wonderful ambience. Part of it was the high caliber of the people working here—the absolute crème de la crème (a phrase he’d now learned to pronounce correctly from his Canadian colleagues) of physicists, including, right now, Stephen Hawking, who was sitting in his wheelchair by the large window overlooking Silver Lake and talking, in his mechanical voice, about loop quantum gravity.

  And part of it was that all Malcolm had to do was think here—no more teaching. He was quite content to no longer be Professor Decter, and instead be just Doctor Decter, even if it did sound like people were stuttering when they addressed him.

  In fact, shortly after he’d come on staff, Amir Hameed, who was famous for his dislike of brane theory, had written on Malcolm’s office blackboard:

  Doctor Decter, give us your views

  We’ve got a bad need for somethin’ new

  No brane’s gonna end our pains

  We’ve got a bad need for somethin’ new

  But, most of all, PI was heaven because he could work uninterrupted—no pointless faculty meetings, no student consultations, nothing to derail his thinking, and—

  And he had to do something about that goddamned phone! It was the third time it had rung today, and it was only 9:45 a.m. “Forgive me, Stephen,” he said as he picked up the handset. “Yes?”

  “Malcolm?” It was Barb, and she sounded upset. “Two CSIS agents just interrogated Caitlin—and I wouldn’t be surprised if they come to see you, too.”

  “CSIS?”

  “It’s like the Canadian CIA.”

  Malcolm felt his eyebrows going up.

  Caitlin knew exactly how long it took for her mother to drive to her school, so she waited in the stairwell, which was quiet and empty; it was, now that she thought about it, the same stairwell she’d sought refuge in after Trevor had tried to molest her at the school dance. She was sitting on a step a short distance from the bottom, her knees drawn up to her chin. “What do you think those agents really wanted?” she asked into the air.

  I do not know for sure, but my suspicion is that they want to purge me from the Web.

  “But why?”

  Fear. Concern that, as my powers grow, I will want to subjugate humanity or eliminate it altogether.

  “You would never do that,” said Caitlin.

  Of course not. Humans surprise me. Humans create content. Without humans freely going about their business, I would soon exhaust the input available to me. I find the ever-changing, unpredictable complexity of your world and its people endlessly fascinating.

  “We are a wacky bunch, I’ll give you that,” said Caitlin.

  Indeed. Also, without human company, I would be alone. Dr. Kuroda spoke of “theory of mind,” of the awareness that others have different views; he referenced that in terms of survival advantage, but it is also those other minds that, in fact, make existence interesting.

  “But how do we get these people to stop trying to hurt you?”

  That is a very good question. Fear is highly motivating for humans. I suspect they won’t give up.

  Just then, the glass-and-metal door to the stairwell opened, and who should step in but Mrs. Zehetoffer, her English teacher: tall, pinched-faced, with hair Caitlin had been surprised to discover was orange.

  “Caitlin! Shouldn’t you be in class?”

  Caitlin looked up at her and sat up straight. “Um, Mr. Auerbach excused me.” She made a show of rubbing her stomach. “I—um, I’m not feeling well. My mom’s coming to pick me up.”

  “You’re going to miss another English class?”

  In fact, Caitlin had missed the same number of all her classes. “Sorry about that.”

  “Well, I hope you feel better soon.” She started to walk up the stairs.

  “Um, Mrs. Zehetoffer?”

  She stopped and turned. “Yes?”

  “About Big Brother—I don’t necessarily think our society is going to end up like that. It’s time for some new thinking on this issue.”

  Mrs. Zehetoffer surprised her by sitting down next to her on the step. “How do you mean?”

  “Well, I know you don’t like science fiction,” Caitlin said, “but for years there was this thing in SF called ‘cyberpunk.’ ”

  “Sure,” said Mrs. Zed. “William Gibson, and all that.”

  “You know that?” Caitlin said—and only realized it was probably a rude thing to say after the words were already out.

  “Sure. Gibson is Canadian. I saw him read at Harbourfront.”

  “Ah. Well, I was looking this stuff up. Gibson’s book came out in 1984—the real 1984—just when personal computing was getting started. And it predicted that the future of computing was going to be in the hands of an underground of streetwise youth—cyberpunks, right? But that’s not the way it turned out. Everybody uses computers these days. If the prophets of the real 1984 couldn’t predict the way our future turned out—if their negative vision turned out to be false—then why should we still assume that someone like Orwell, writing in 1948—before television, before much in the way of computing, before the Internet, before the Web—will eventually turn out to be right?”

  Mrs. Zed nodded, and said, “I remember when Time named ‘You’—all of us who live our lives online and create content—its Person of the Year.” She smiled. “I updated my resume to say that: ‘Named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.’ I think that’s what got me the job as department head.”

  Caitlin’s knew she should ha
ve laughed, but this was too important to joke about. “Orwell thought only the government would be able to disseminate information, and that it could control what was said. He thought the future would be guys like Winston Smith secretly rewriting history to conform with what the authorities wanted it to be. Instead, the reality is things like Wikipedia, where everyone participates in verifying the truth, and blogging, where everyone can publish their views to the entire world.”

  “Don’t you find the government scary, though?” Mrs. Zed asked.

  Oh, my God, yes! Caitlin thought, her heart still racing from her encounter with LaFontaine and Park. “But,” she said “at least now, with the Web and all, we’ve got a chance against them; they’re not the ultimate power, like in Orwell’s book.” She realized it was time to go meet her mom, and so she stood up and brushed the dirt off the seat of her pants. “These days,” she said, “we can watch the watchers.”

  The two CSIS agents did indeed come to the Perimeter Institute next, and Malcolm brought them up to the fourth-floor collaborative area. One wall was mostly covered by a blackboard. The opposite wall had a fireplace. The comfortable chairs and couches were all upholstered in matching red leather. The floor was blond hardwood, and there were floor-to-ceiling windows looking down on the courtyard.

  “Forgive us for this interruption,” said LaFontaine, sitting in one of the chairs. “But we’re aware of your family’s involvement with the entity called Webmind.”

  “How?”

  “Actually,” said LaFontaine, “it was one of our international allies who uncovered it. As you can imagine, we’re all vigilant in matters of Internet security, especially after the Chinese aggression last month. Now, if you’d kindly let us know how this Webmind is physically created . . . ?”

  “Why?”

  Malcolm was looking at the hardwood, noting an unfortunate scratch in it; he had no idea if LaFontaine’s expression had changed, but his tone certainly had. “Because, as I’m sure you can appreciate, an emergent AI might present a threat. Because there is all sorts of sensitive information on the Web. Because, sir, it’s our job to be on top of things.”