WWW: Watch Read online

  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.

  Word spread quickly that I was reuniting people; various daytime TV shows were announcing that they’d be featuring those who had been brought back together by me in the days to come. That led to an even greater demand for this service, and I was happy to provide it. I was particularly pleased when reciprocal requests arrived at about the same time: a man named Ahmed, for instance, looking for his lost love Ramona approached me within ten minutes of Ramona beseeching my help in finding Ahmed.

  I was careful: when someone was seeking a lost blood relative, I checked the seeker’s background to see if he or she was in need of a bone-marrow or kidney transplant, or something similar—not that I flat-out denied such requests; not at all. But in contacting the other party, I did let them know that they were perhaps being sought by a relative who wanted a very big favor; I included similar caveats when approaching rich people who were being searched for by acquaintances who had fallen on hard times. To their credit, sixty-three percent of those who were probably being sought for medical reasons and forty-four percent of those being sought for financial ones allowed me to facilitate contact.

  All in all, it was gratifying work, and, although there was no way to quantify it, little by little, I was indeed increasing the net happiness in the world.

  Tony Moretti was exhausted. He had a small refrigerator in his office at WATCH and kept cans of Red Bull in it. He thought, given the hours he had to work, that he should be allowed to expense them, but the GAO was all over wastage in the intelligence community; it’d be interesting to see if next month’s election changed things.

  The black phone on his desk made the rising-tone priority ring. The caller ID said: WHITE HOUSE.

  He picked up the handset. “Anthony Moretti.”

  “We have Renegade for you,” said a female voice.

  Tony took a deep breath. “Thank you.”

  There was a pause—almost a full minute—and then the deep, famous male voice came on. “Dr. Moretti, good morning.”

  “Good morning to you, sir.”

  “I’ve just come from a meeting with the Joint Chiefs. We’ve made our decision.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Webmind is to be neutralized.”

  Tony felt his heart sink. “Mr. President, with all due respect, you can’t have failed to notice the apparent good it’s doing.”

  “Dr. Moretti, believe me, this decision was not taken lightly. But the fact is that Webmind has compromised our most secure installations. It’s clearly accessing Social Security records, among many other things, and God only knows what other databases it’s broken into. I’m advised that there’s simply too great a risk that it will reveal sensitive information to a hostile power.”

  Tony looked out his window at the nighttime cityscape. “We still haven’t found a way to stop it, sir.”

  “I have the utmost confidence in your team’s ability, Dr. Moretti, and, as you yourself have advised my staff, time is of the essence.”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Tony said. “Thank you.”

  “I’m handing you over to Mr. Reston, who will be your direct liaison with my office.”

  Another male voice came on the line. “Mr. Moretti, you have your instructions. Work with Colonel Hume and get this done.”

  “Yes,” said Tony. “Thank you.”

  He put down the phone, and, just as he did so, the door buzzer sounded. “Who is it?” he said into the intercom.

  “Shel.”

  He let him in.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Shel said.

  “Yes?”

  “Caitlin Decter has just announced to the world that she has a boyfriend.”

  Tony was still thinking about what the president had ordered him to do. “So?” he said distractedly.

  “So if she knows how Webmind works, she might have told him.”

  “Ah, right. Good. Who is it?”

  “One of the boys from her math class; there are seventeen candidates, and we’re monitoring them all.”

  Tony took a swig of his energy drink; it tasted bitter.

  He’d gotten into this line of work to change the world.

  And that, it seemed, was precisely what he was going to do.

  thirty-nine

  “Konnichi wa!” Caitlin said into the webcam. She was in her bedroom, seated at her desk.

  Dr. Kuroda was sitting in the small, cramped dining area of his home. He had a computer with a Skype phone and a webcam hookup there; the Japanese, Caitlin guessed, had computers everywhere.

  The round face smiled at her from the larger of her monitors. “Hello, Miss Caitlin. What are you doing still up? It must be late your time.”

  “It is, but I’m too wired to sleep. You shouldn’t have left all that Pepsi in the fridge.”

  He laughed.

  “So, how are things in Japan?” she asked.

  “Besides general excitement—and some concern—about Webmind? We’re disturbed by the rising tensions between China and the United States. We’re so close to China that if they sneeze, we catch pneumonia.”

  “Oh, right, of course. That’s awful.” She paused. “It won’t come to war, will it?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Good. But, if it did, would your army have to join in?”

  His voice had an odd tone as if he were surprised by what she’d said. “Japan doesn’t have an army, Miss Caitlin.”

  She blinked. “No?”

  “Have you studied Wo
rld War II yet in history class?”

  She shook her head.

  He took a deep breath, then let it out in a way that made even more noise than usual for him. “My country . . .” He seemed to be seeking a phrase, then: “My country went nuts, Miss Caitlin. We had thought we could take over the world. Us, a tiny group of islands! You’ve been here, but you never saw it. We’re just 380,000 square kilometers; the US, by contrast, is almost ten million square kilometers.”

  The math was so trivial she didn’t even think of it as math: Japan was 3.8% the size of the US. “Yes?” she said.

  “And my tiny country, we did some terrible things.”

  Caitlin’s voice was soft. “Not you. You weren’t even born . . .”

  “No. No, but my father . . . his brothers . . .” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Do you know the document that ended the war? The Potsdam Declaration?”

  “No.”

  “It was issued by Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek, and it called for the Japanese military forces to be completely disarmed. We all know this here; we study it in school: ‘The alternative for Japan,’ they said, ‘is prompt and utter destruction.’ ”

  “Wow,” said Caitlin.

  “Wow, indeed. And we did the only sensible thing. We stood down; we disarmed. You—your people, the Americans—had already dropped two atomic bombs on us . . . and even still, some of my people wanted to fight on.” He shook his head, as if stunned that anyone could have wanted to continue after that. Then he loomed closer into the camera, and Caitlin could hear him typing. After a moment he said, “I’ve sent you a link to the Potsdam Declaration. Have a look at Article Three.”

  Caitlin switched to her IM window, clicked on the link, and tried to read it in the Latin alphabet. “The result . . . of . . . the . . . the—”

  “Sorry,” said Kuroda, leaning forward in his dining-room chair. He did something with his own mouse, took a deep breath, almost as if steeling himself, then read aloud: “It says, ‘The result of the futile and senseless German resistance to the might of the aroused free peoples of the world stands forth in awful clarity as an example to the people of Japan. The might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which, when applied to the resisting Nazis, necessarily laid waste to the lands, the industry and the method of life of the whole German people.’ ”

  He paused, swallowed, then went on. “ ‘The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, will mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.’ ”

  She followed the words on screen as he read them aloud. He stopped at the end of Article Three, but something in Article Four caught her eye—it must have been the word “calculations”—she was learning to recognize whole words! She read it slowly, and quietly, to herself:

  The time has come for Japan to decide whether she will continue to be controlled by those self-willed militaristic advisers whose unintelligent calculations have brought the Empire of Japan to the threshold of annihilation, or whether she will follow the path of reason.

  She thought about what she’d been learning about game theory. Everything in it was predicated on the assumption that the opponents were indeed reasonable, that they could calculate likely outcomes. But what if they weren’t? What if, as Dr. Kuroda had said, they were nuts?

  “And so,” said Kuroda, “we have no army—and no navy, and no marines. In 1947, we adopted a new constitution, and we call it Heiwa-Kenpo, ‘the Pacifist Constitution.’ And it says . . .”

  Again, keystrokes; a link—and new text on Caitlin’s screen.

  “Article Nine,” said Kuroda, “the most famous of all: ‘The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. Land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”

  “So, what do you do if somebody—you know, um, the North Koreans, or somebody like that—attacks Japan?”

  “Well, actually according to our agreement with your country, the Americans are supposed to come to our aid. But we are allowed to maintain self-defense forces, and we do: the Rikujo Jieitai—the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force—and corresponding Maritime and Air Self-Defense Forces.”

  “Oh, well, then, you do have an army!” said Caitlin. “It’s just semantics.”

  “No,” said Kuroda, adamantly. “No. These are defensive forces. They have no offensive weapons, no nuclear weapons, and they are civilian agencies, and the employees are civilians. That means no courts-martial and no military law; if one of them does something wrong, it’s tried in public court, like any other criminal action. And, as far as the Japanese people are concerned, the chief job of the defense forces is disaster relief: aid in firefighting, rescues, dealing with earthquakes, searching for missing persons, and the reinforcement of embankments and levees in the event of flooding. I know you were pretty young when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, but, believe me, had it hit Japan, the response would have been much more effective.”

  “Hmmm,” said Caitlin. “I mean, it all sounds wonderful—‘forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.’ But you didn’t exactly come to that position on your own.”

  “No, you’re right; it was pretty much foisted on us by General Mac-Arthur. But when George W. Bush was in power, he—or, at least, his officials—pressured us to revise Article Nine: they wanted us to have a military again, so we could join them in wars. And you know what? During Bush’s second term, eighty-two percent of Japanese specifically supported keeping Article Nine unchanged. Seven decades ago, we might not have chosen peace voluntarily—but today we do.”

  The emails to me continued to pour in. Of course, many were insincere or jokes, and a few were simply incomprehensible.

  A lot of the obvious questions were asked within the first few hours. On the other hand, new sorts of questions kept occurring to people as they became aware of the range of things I could do. And a new sport of trying to “stump Webmind” had quickly emerged, with people asking deliberately difficult questions, but, like the recursion issue—“I know that you know that I know”—the questions soon became so obtuse and convoluted that no human could tell if the answer I was providing was correct.

  There were also those who kept trying to crash me. On the first day, 714 people asked me to calculate to the last digit the value of pi, and thirty-seven people wrote variations on: “Everything I say to you is a lie; I am lying.”

  Most of the emails, though, were from people who sincerely wanted things:

  Can you tell me what my boss says about me? (No, because it would violate his privacy.)

  Can’t you help me? I’m a florist, and my Web page is ranked number 1,034 on Google, and even lower on Jagster. Can’t you fix things so that it’ll at least be in the top ten? (No, but here are some links to resources on improving your search-engine ranking.)

  I’ve been trying to find a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side for two years now. Couldn’t you let me see new listings just a little bit before they go public? My ex will kill me if I don’t get a place of my own. (No, because your gain would be somebody else’s loss; others are in similar situations. However, I will gladly alert you the moment a new listing is made public.)

  I don’t have long to live, and I don’t want my legacy to be the nasty things I have said about other people online. Surely you can track all that down and purge it for me. (Done.)

  Others were doing their own purging. I saw one person who had posted frequently to a white-supremacist newsgroup delete all his own comments—but there was nothing he could do about the hundreds of posts by others that began with quotations from him, such as: On December 2, Aryanator said . . .

  There were also exhortations for things I should do: Now that you’ve gotten rid of spam, how �
��bout clearing out all that porn? (Legal porn? Sorry. Child pornography? Stay tuned.)

  If you’ve really read everything that’s online, you’ve got to know that these alternative-medicine sites are shams. Do the world a favor and shut them down. (No, but I will contact those who visit such sites and suggest additional reading they might find edifying.)

  Can’t you provide a secure channel for freedom bloggers in China and elsewhere to speak up? (I am investigating this.)

  Brittany Connors! Brittany Connors! Brittany Connors! Surely there’s enough about her online already. Can you stop people from posting more? (Hey, you don’t have to look at it.)

  You and I both know that George W. Bush got a bum rap from the liberal media elite. Can’t you correct what’s been posted about him? We deserve an accurate history! (I’m not going to change existing text on this or any other topic; I won’t become the Ministry of Truth. But feel free to post your own views as widely as you wish.)

  Okay, I accept that you’re a benign AI—but surely something malevolent could emerge, no? Are you keeping watch? I’ d especially keep an eye on Silicon Valley start-ups and the people at MIT . . . (Oh, yes, indeed . . . )

  Look, I don’t want much—just for you to insert “Spoiler Warning!” in front of messages about TV programs that give away upcoming plot twists. (I will not modify text—but, yes, I do agree posting such things without warnings is rude!)

  forty

  Friday morning, Caitlin found herself leaping out of bed the moment she woke up—even if that wasn’t until 9:18 a.m.; it had been a late night, after all, webcamming with Dr. Kuroda, plus talking with Webmind and trying to follow the major news coverage and blog commentary about his emergence.

  Normally, she’d have sleepily weighed the joys of staying snuggled under her blanket versus getting up to check on Webmind, but today the equation was clear: after all, now that she’d turned on her eyePod, Webmind could send text to her eye, but she hadn’t told Matt how to do that yet—and so she went to her computer, hoping he’d sent something overnight.