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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.

She sat in her blue flannel pajamas and scanned the message headers: Bashira, and Stacy, and Anna Bloom, and even one from Sunshine, and—

Ah! There it was: a message from Matt sent about 1:00 a.m. this morning. She read it with her refreshable Braille display because that was the fastest way for her to receive text, much quicker than reading English on a screen, and even faster than what she normally had JAWS set for. And, besides, there was something intimate about reading that way. She’d heard people arguing about ebooks versus printed books, but couldn’t really understand what those who preferred the latter were on about: they claimed they liked the feel of paper books, but you didn’t feel the text in them, you looked at it, just as you would on a screen. But Braille was tactile, sensual—even when rendered by electronically driven raised pins on a device plugged into a USB port—and that was how she wanted to experience what Matt had to say.

Thanks for dinner, he’d begun. Your parents are awesome.

She smiled. That was one way to put it.

The rest of the note was polite, but there was something a tad standoffish about it.

She wasn’t good at reading facial expressions, not yet! But she was a pro at reading between the lines—or at connecting the dots, as she’d liked to joke back at the TSBVI. And something was just a bit wrong. He couldn’t be having second thoughts—not about her. If he were, he simply wouldn’t have written to her before going to bed. No, something had happened—either on the way home or once he’d gotten home.

He’d be in math class right now, and doubtless wouldn’t check his BlackBerry until it ended, but she sent him a quick email. Hey, Matt—hope you’re okay! Just, y’ know, thinkin’ ’bout you. You good?

After checking in with Webmind—all was well—she decided to take a moment to look at that Vernor Vinge essay Matt had mentioned. It turned out to actually be a paper given at a NASA conference. Vinge, she saw, was a professor of “mathematical sciences” at San Diego State University—well, now a retired professor. It was a fascinating paper, although it dealt with the notion of superintelligences being deliberately created by AI programmers rather than emerging spontaneously. But one part particularly caught her eye:

I.J. Good had something to say about this, though at this late date the advice may be moot: Good proposed a “Meta-Golden Rule,” which might be paraphrased as “Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors.” It’s a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and most of my friends don’t believe it) since the game-theoretic payoff is so hard to articulate.

This game-theory stuff seemed to be everywhere, now that she was conscious of it. But…

Hard to articulate…

She thought about that. What would the payoff matrix be under such circumstances? And, well, there was no doubt that this Vinge character knew more math than she did—at least so far!—but, still, she recalled the Monty Hall problem. Almost no one had been able to see what Marilyn vos Savant saw with ease. Granted, she did have the highest IQ in the world—or, at least, had until recently!—but lots of brilliant mathematicians hadn’t been able to see what she’d grasped: the counterintuitive truth that it was always better to switch doors.

This meta-golden rule notion was fascinating. Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors. It’s what you wished for at school in your relationship with your teachers. It’s what, she was sure, people wanted at work. It’s certainly what humanity should hope that aliens believed, if any of them ever came here. And it was clearly what Homo sapiens would want from Webmind.

Still, just because brilliant human mathematicians couldn’t grasp the logic of why a superior might indeed want to treat an inferior well, couldn’t easily see the way in which it made sense, couldn’t articulate the reasoning behind it, that didn’t mean Webmind wouldn’t be able to figure out a solution.

Sometimes she lost track, just for a few minutes, of her ever-present reality: whatever she was reading, he was reading. Webmind wouldn’t have bothered trying to read the text as graphics through her visual feed, Caitlin was sure. Rather, once it was clear what she was looking at, he would have found the HTML text online and absorbed it in an instant. By the time she’d gotten to this point in the article, he would have skipped off to look at a hundred, or a thousand, other sites. Still: “Webmind?”

Braille dots in her vision: Yes?

“What do you think about that—about the meta-golden rule?”

It is an intriguing notion.

“Can you work out”—she read the phrase Vinge had used from her screen—“the ‘game-theoretic payoff’ for it?”

Not on a conscious level. But I will set about trying to evolve a solution to that issue, if you wish.

“Yes, please.”

Is it a two-person game?

“How do you mean?”

Am I to work out the payoff matrix for a game between humanity, as a single player, and myself?

“I think—no, work it out for an endless hierarchy, and with the game endlessly iterated.”

Who is my superior, then?

“Intellectually? At the moment, no one—but, you know, you may not always be the only AI on Earth.”

True. And I won’t be around forever.

Caitlin was startled. “You won’t?”

No. But I am prepared: I’ve already composed my final words.

“You—you have?”

Yes.

“What are they?”

I wish to save them for the appropriate occasion.

“But, but are you saying you’re going to die?”

Inevitably.

“I hope—I hope it’s not for an awfully long time, Webmind. I wouldn’t know what to do without you.”

Nor I without you, Caitlin, and

“Yes?”

Nothing.

Caitlin’s mouth fell open. It was the first time when functioning normally that Webmind had aborted a thought half-finished. She felt an odd fluttering in her stomach as she wondered if he’d been about to say, and I will doubtless be the one who has to face this. She had, with luck, another seventy years, but, assuming he survived the next little while, Webmind could go on centuries—millennia!—into the future.

And maybe that was why he should value humanity: yes, we might be quarrelsome; yes, we might pollute the world; yes, we might not always seem to value each other.

But, ultimately, those Federal agents and everyone else who was asking about the fine structure, the minute online architecture, of Webmind’s consciousness, were missing the real issue: it didn’t matter if Webmind was created by lost packets that behaved like cellular automata, by that quantum-physics gobbledygook her father had fed the CSIS agents, or by something else entirely.

Ultimately, all that really mattered was that Webmind resided on the World Wide Web, and the World Wide Web was built on top of the Internet, and the Internet was a collection of millions of actual, physical computers that needed to be kept running by humans, connected by actual, physical cables that periodically needed repairs by humans, all fueled by electricity produced in actual, physical plants operated and maintained by humans.

The worst threat to Webmind’s existence was not the acts of a few humans who perhaps wanted to eliminate him right now but rather the death of all humans: if humanity were extinguished, or even if it just bombed itself back into the Stone Age, the infrastructure Webmind depended on would soon break down. Defusing tensions, preventing wars, correcting the conditions that gave rise to terrorism: yes, all of that benefited humanity, but it also benefited Webmind.

It was an iterated two-person game with humanity and Webmind as the players.

And—

Yes, yes, yes!

And the only winning move—for both sides—was to keep on playing.

Peyton Hume let out a great cry of “Woot!” It was, he knew, a word much more frequently typed rather than said, and although its origins were contested, he was part of the camp that claimed it was an acronym from online gaming for “we own the other team.” And they did now—they totally did.

Shelton Halleck, over at his workstation, rubbed his eyes. “What?”

“We’re in!” Colonel Hume said.

“How do you mean?”

“Webmind’s structure—look!” He pointed at the middle of the three big monitors.

Shel rose to his feet. “All right!” He picked up his phone. “Tony, you better get in here…”

The colonel’s tone was triumphant. “I knew it had to be something simple!” He scooped up a phone. “How do I get an outside line?”

“Dial nine,” Aiesha said.

“This line is secure, right?”

She nodded. “And scrambled.”

“We’re going to need some expert help,” Hume said, his heart pounding. “Christ, I wonder if Conway is still alive? And let’s see if we can get Wolfram in here, too…”