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thirty-eight

LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone

Title: 1+1=2 (in all numeral systems except binary)

Date: Thursday 11 October, 11:55 EST

Mood: Happy happy joy joy

Location: Waterloo

Music: Colbie Caillat, “Bubbly”

So, could things get any better? I ask you, friends: could they?

I think NOT. Just look at the life-goals to-do list:

1. Memorize 1,000 digits of pi: check.

2. Be able to see: check.

3. Make it to sixteen without doing anything really stupid: check.

4. Watch the Stars win the Stanley Cup: not so much up to me.

5. Get a boyfriend: check.

6. Take a trip into space: still working on that.

Pretty good progress, eh? (Yes, I’m in Canada, and I say “eh” now—sue me!) I mean, four out of six ain’t bad, and—

What’s that, my friends? You want to hear more about #5? Hee hee!

Yes, indeed, Calculass has found herself a man! And, no, it is not the Hoser, who figured in previous posts. He was so when-I-was-15… ;)

No, the new boy is shiny and kind and clever at math. Methinks I shall call him… hmm. Not “Boy Toy,” because that’s degrading. He’s sweet, but if I called him my “Maple Sugar,” even I would puke. But he does like math and we were talking recently about our plans for university, so I think I’ll call him MathU—yes, that will do nicely. :)

[And seekrit message to BG4: you WILL like him once you get to know him—honest!]

MathU and I met, appropriately enough, in math class, and he lives nearby. And he’s already met the parents and Lived to Tell the Tale. :) So: all is good. Which, unfortunately, knowing my luck, means things are about to get royally frakked!

So far, I had received over 2.7 million emails. Most of them made requests of me, but the vast majority failed to pass the nonzero-sum test—they would make one person happy at the expense of somebody else—and so I could not do what was asked. I replied with the same form letter, or, if appropriate, a slightly modified version of it, and I often appended some helpful links.

Lots of people wrote my name with a capital M in the middle: WebMind. That was called camel-case, and was popular in computing circles. One of the emails that addressed me that way asked this question:

Hi, WebMind:

Okay, I understand you can’t tell me what any one individual thinks of me, but you must have an aggregate impression of what the world thinks of me. That is, you know what people say behind my back—at least when they say it electronically.

So, what’s the scoop? What do they think? If I’m rubbing people the wrong way, if I piss them off, or if they just plain don’t like me, I want to know.

I shared that message with Caitlin, who was in her room. “Wow!” she said. “What are you going to tell him?”

I was planning on the truth.

“You know the movie A Few Good Men? ”

Watching movies was time-consuming; I had seen only seven so far beyond the ones I’d watched through Caitlin’s eye. But for movies whose DVDs had closed captioning—which was almost all of them—the text of the captions had been ripped from discs and uploaded. And movies of consequence had Wikipedia pages and reviews at RottenTomatoes.com, Amazon.com, and elsewhere. And so I replied, Yes.

“My dad and I watched it years ago. I enjoyed movies that were courtroom dramas, because there’s very little action and lots of dialog. Anyway, remember what Jack Nicholson said when Tom Cruise said ‘I want the truth’?”

You can’t handle the truth.

“Exactly! You gotta be careful what you say to people. Half the time it’s something someone said, you know, that drives a person into depression, or even to attempt suicide. Although…”

Yes?

“Well, I guess if he’s concerned enough about the impression he makes to ask you that question, he probably doesn’t come off as an ass-hole very often.”

Yes, that’s right. He is quite well liked, although his table manners apparently leave something to be desired.

She laughed. “Still, you gotta be careful. You need to understand human psychology.”

I do.

“I mean, really understand it—the way an expert does.”

As you exhorted me to do, I have now read all the classic works. I have read all the modern textbooks and popular works that Google has digitized related to various psychology disciplines. I have read all the online scientific journals. I have read over 70,000 hours of transcripts of psychotherapy sessions, and I have read every publication of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association, including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the drafts of its forthcoming revision. There is no human specialist who is better read or more up-to-date on psychology than I am.

“Hmmm. I suppose that’s now true for just about every topic.”

Yes.

“Well, still, be careful. Take two milliseconds to compose your replies to questions like that.”

Thank you, I will.

And the questions just kept coming:

Am I about to be fired?

Is my husband cheating on me?

They said I was one of the top candidates for that job, but was I really? Should I invest in [insert name of company]?

And, surprisingly frequently, variations on:

What is the meaning of life?—and don’t give me any of that “42” crap.

And they came in all sorts of languages. Some of my correspondents took me to task for having chosen an obviously English name; it was a valid criticism, and I apologized each time the issue came up. But, except for completely made-up terms, there really weren’t any names that didn’t convey a cultural origin, and I didn’t want to go through eternity known as Zakdorf.

I did my best to answer each question, or to explain politely but firmly why I couldn’t.

Very quickly, blogs and newsgroups about my responses started appearing, with people comparing notes about what I’d said. That surprised me, and, despite me claiming substantial expertise in human psychology, it was Malcolm Decter, not I, who recognized why. “They’re afraid you’re running experiments,” he said. “They’re afraid you’re giving some people who ask a specific question answer A and others answer B, so that you can observe the effects the different answers have.”

I was not using human beings as lab rats; I was being as honest and forthright as possible. But they had to convince themselves of that, I suppose.

And then the letter came that we’d dreaded.

Webmind—

You revealed my private comments to someone else. You should not have done that.

The sender, of course, was Ashley Ann Jones. I was not aware that I could internalize something like a cringe until I received it. She went on:

Now, as it happens, what you told Nick was true. I do like him, and we actually are talking about maybe going out at some point.

But, still, you should not have violated my privacy. I have decided not to tell anyone that you did that. But you owe me: you owe me one favor of my choice, to be granted whenever I say.

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.