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thirty-three

On Thursday morning, Shoshana once again arrived at the Marcuse Institute before everyone else. She plugged in the coffeemaker—“defibrillating Mr. Coffee,” as Dillon called it—then went to her desk and booted her computer. She’d been hoping to have a little time today to practice her vidding hobby: last night’s episode of FlashForward had been so slashy, parts of it just cried out to be set to music. But first she checked her email, and—

And that was odd. Usually her message count each morning was between seventy-five and a hundred, and almost all of them were spam. But today—

Today there were precisely eight messages, and every one of them—every single one!—looked legit, in that they were all addressed to her proper name.

Of course, the answer was probably that Yahoo had updated its spam filter; kudos to them for only letting good stuff through. But she worried that it might be too aggressive. Eight was not a wildly atypical number of real email messages to be waiting for her in the morning, but the normal allotment was more like a dozen or fifteen.

She clicked on the spam folder, to check what had ended up in it. According to the counter, some twelve thousand messages were there; spam was retained for a month, then dumped automatically, but—

But that was strange!

She was used to having to scroll past dozens of messages with dates in the future; for some reason, the people in 2038 had a particular fondness for bombing this year with come-ons for penis enlargers, investment scams, and counterfeit drugs.

But when she got down to today’s date—normally easy to spot because the date field started showing just a time rather than a date—well, there weren’t any. There were hundreds with yesterday’s date, but none with today’s—none at all.

She’d have to fire off an angry email to Yahoo tech support. She was all in favor of them improving their spam filtering, but simply to discard messages that had been flagged as spam was irresponsible. Almost every day she found one or two good messages shunted to the spam folder along with the real garbage, and she didn’t trust Yahoo—or anyone else—to actually throw out messages that were addressed to her.

The Marcuse Institute used Yahoo Mail Plus; that’s where messages sent to the domain marcuse-institute.org were redirected. But Shoshana’s personal email account was with Gmail. She took a moment to check that; Maxine liked to forward dirty jokes to her.

Her Gmail box had no spam in it, either! And the spam filter there had—well, okay, it had one message received in the last six hours that was clearly spam, but otherwise—

Otherwise, all the spam was gone here, too.

But that didn’t seem likely. Even if Yahoo had deployed a killer spam-filter algorithm overnight, Google wouldn’t have it; the two companies were bitter rivals.

Something, as her father liked to say, was rotten in the state of Denmark. She went to her home page, which was an iGoogle page that aggregated news stories, RSS feeds, and so on tailored to her tastes.

And there it was, the very first headline from CNN.com: “Mystery of the missing spam.”

She clicked on the link and read the news item, astonished.

Tony Moretti ran down the white corridor to the WATCH control center. He looked into the retinal scanner, waiting impatiently for the door to unlock. The moment it did, he went through it, and shouted, “Halleck, report!”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Shelton called out. “It’s worldwide, no question.”

Tony snapped his fingers and pointed in Aiesha Emerson’s direction. “Get Hume back in here stat.”

“Already called him,” Aiesha said. “ETA: eleven minutes.”

Tony ran the rest of the way down the sloping floor, going right past Halleck to the front row of workstations—the hot seats, where his most-senior analysts were monitoring the China situation. “We’re escalating Exponential,” he said to the five people there. “You guys are on that now.” He tilted his head, looking to the middle seat in the third row. “Shel, you’re the point man on this. I want containment options by”—he lifted his gaze even higher to the row of digital clocks on the back wall showing the time in world capitals—“ohnine-thirty.”

“What about China?” asked a woman in the first row.

“Back-burnered,” Tony snapped. “Exponential is priority one. Let’s move, people! Go, go, go!”

Caitlin, her parents, and I had spent hours discussing the manner in which I should go public. “They’ll assume any announcement of your existence is just marketing for a movie or a TV show,” Barb had said. “People see outlandish claims online all the time, and everyone dismisses them. You’ll have to prove what you’re saying, Webmind.”

“Not everyone dismisses them,” Malcolm said.

“Fine,” Barb replied. “Almost everyone dismisses them.”

Malcolm was apparently oblivious to the subtext of Barb’s words—that it was no time for being picayune. “The whole notion of spam,” he continued, “is that some tiny fraction of people are gullible enough to fall for its claims—and so end up being ripped off.”

“Well, maybe that’s it!” Barb exclaimed. “Whether you fall for it or not, everyone hates spam.”

“Including me,” I said through Caitlin’s computer’s speakers; she and her parents were in her room.

“Really?” Caitlin replied. “People dislike spammers—and, believe me, blind people particularly dislike them. But why do you dislike them?”

“They hog bandwidth,” I said.

“Ah, of course,” replied Caitlin.

“And,” I said, “the average human life span is about 700,000 hours in the developed world. Ergo, if one wastes even a single hour for as few as 700,000 people, one has consumed the equivalent of a human life. That may not be literally criminal, but it certainly is figuratively so—and the total impact of spam, although hard to precisely calculate, surely has consumed thousands of human lifetimes.”

“Well, there it is,” Barb said, spreading her arms. “Webmind should get rid of spam.”

“How do you define spam, though?” Caitlin asked. “All unsolicited email? All bulk email? I get emails from things like The Teaching Company and Audible.com that I actually enjoy. And then there are regular people who track me down and send a note out of the blue—I got a bunch of those after the press conference, for instance. I wouldn’t want that blocked, although technically it’s unsolicited.”

“As Potter Stewart said on another topic,” I offered, “ ‘I know it when I see it.’ There are already many algorithms for identifying spam; I’m sure I can improve upon them. After all, I have the advantage of knowing the ultimate origin of each message, and whether the same message has gone to a very large number of email addresses, and so forth; that’s more information than inbox spam filters have to work with. More than ninety percent of email is spam, but eighty percent of spam comes from at most 200 sources. Blocking those sources would be the logical first step, should we decide to undertake this.”

“That still leaves a lot of spam,” Caitlin replied.

“Then,” I said, “I should get to work evolving a solution to deal with those messages, as well.”

And so I had.

It had taken me an eternity—six hours!—to solve the problem, but it in fact didn’t require much of my attention; most of it was background activity. I simply had to pass judgment on each round of results: billions of snippets of code, all randomly generated; some were better at doing what I wanted, and some were worse. I took the ten percent that were the most successful, and then let many random variations be generated of each one, and then threw those variations at the problem at hand. Then I culled the best ten percent of that batch, and so on, generation after generation, with only the fittest surviving. Finally, I had it: a way to sequester spam.

And so, at last, I was ready for my coming-out party.

Peyton Hume and Tony Moretti stood together at the back of the WATCH monitoring room, looking at the four rows of analysts spread out in front of them, and the three giant monitors on the wall they were facing. The left-hand monitor showed the picture the CSIS agents had forwarded of white mathematical characters on a blackboard: angle brackets, vertical bars, Greek letters, superscripted numerals, subscripted letters, arrows, equals signs, and more. And they’d listened four times now to the audio recording of their interview with Malcolm Decter.

“I don’t know,” said Colonel Hume. “The math looks legit, but how it could give rise to consciousness… I just don’t know.”

“Kuroda confirmed what Decter said,” said Tony.

“I know,” said Hume. “But it’s too complex.”

“We’re talking about a very sophisticated process,” said Tony.

“No, no, we’re not,” said Hume. “We can’t be. Exponential’s consciousness was emergent, apparently. That means it just sort of happened, just sprang into being. At its most basic level, it has to be simple. It’s like the old creationist argument: they say that something as complex as a watch—or a bacterial flagellum—can only appear by design, because it’s too sophisticated to come together by chance, and the component parts—the spring in the watch, or the parts that make up the motor for the flagellum—don’t do anything useful on their own. What Decter described there might be a good underpinning for programming consciousness on a quantum-computing platform, if you could ever get a big one to be stable for the long term, but it’s not something that could have just emerged. Not that way.”

“A wild-goose chase,” said Tony, raising his eyebrows. “He wanted us to waste time.”

“I think so,” said Hume. “And Kuroda played along.”

“Do you think he knows the real basis for Exponential?”

“He’s Malcolm Decter,” Hume said. “Of course he knows.”

Tony shook his head in wonder. “Wiping out all spam,” he said, “must have required a level of finely detailed control over the Internet way beyond anything our government, or any other government, is capable of.”

“Exactly,” said Hume. “It’s what I’ve been saying all along. Exponential has already become more sophisticated than we are, and its powers will only grow. The window is closing fast; if we don’t kill it soon, we’ll never be able to.”