Wonder

ten

Masayuki Kuroda looked at the webcam. “So,” Anna Bloom said, “the biggest threat to Webmind is probably BGP hijacking. Of course, there are safeguards, and anyone wanting to do it would have to figure out how to identify your special packets—and then figure out how to get routers to distinguish those mutants from the regular kind.”

“Colonel Hume managed that in his test run,” Kuroda said. “So it’s doable.”

“It’s doable by modifying router hardware,” Anna said. “We can hope it’s not something that could easily be done with BGP routing tables—but if it is…” She shook her head, then: “Look, it’s getting awfully late here. I’ve got to call it a night. Webmind, I wish you luck.”

“Thank you,” Webmind said.

She leaned forward, and then her camera went off.

“Well,” said Dr. Kuroda, “let’s hope your foes aren’t as clever as Anna.”

Of course, despite the gravity of the conversation, I had been cycling through communication with many others during it. And so I had learned that Malcolm Decter’s colleague in China had succeeded where I had failed, locating Sinanthropus in a hospital in Beijing. I’d accessed his medical records—and was distressed to learn of his condition. But a course of action immediately occurred to me, and, now that Professor Bloom was offline, I broached the topic with Dr. Kuroda.

“I have become aware of a young man,” I said, “who has recently suffered a spinal-cord injury, leaving him a paraplegic.”

“That’s awful,” Kuroda said, but I could tell by his vocal inflection that it was merely a reflex reply—an autoresponder, if you will.

I pressed on. “It is, yes. And I was hoping you might help him.”

“Um, Webmind, I’m not a medical doctor; I’m an information theorist.”

“Of course,” I said patiently. “But I have examined his medical records, including his digitized X-rays and MRI scans. I know precisely what’s wrong with him—and it is an information-processing issue. I can suggest straightforward modifications to the eyePod and the post-retinal implant you created for Caitlin that will almost certainly cure his condition.”

“Really? That‛s… wow.”

“Indeed. And yes: really.”

“Wow,” he said again. But then, after a moment, he added, “But why him? There are—I don’t know—there must be millions of people with spinal-cord injuries worldwide. Why help this person first?”

It was not instinctive for me to do so, but I was nonetheless learning to employ the technique of answering a question with a question—especially when I was not yet ready to be forthcoming, something else that was new to me. I’d been amused to learn that this approach had fooled many into thinking the first chatbots were actually conscious, for they replied to questions such as, “What should I do about my mother?” with questions of their own, such as, “Why do you worry about what other people think?”

I threw a version of Dr. Kuroda’s question back at him: “Why did you decide to give Caitlin sight first, before all the other blind people in the world?”

He lifted his rounded shoulders. “The etiology of her blindness. She had Tomasevic’s syndrome, and that’s a simple signal-encoding difficulty—clearly up my street.”

“Indeed. Your equipment intercepts signals being passed along nerves, modifies the signals, and then passes them back to the nerve tissue. That’s applicable to any number of situations—as you yourself alluded to at the press conference at which you announced your success with Caitlin. So why her?”

“Well, there was one other factor. You see…”

By the time humans had finished speaking—or typing—a sentence, I had often already leapt far ahead of them. Kuroda was, I’m sure, pointing out that the reason he’d chosen a blind person for his first human test, rather than a spinal-cord injury, or treating a Parkinson’s patient, is that the optic nerve could be reached by sliding instruments around the eyeball; no incision had to be made, and, under Japanese law, that meant it wasn’t surgery—and thus the procedure that had given Caitlin a post-retinal implant wasn’t subject to the kind of drawn-out approval process that often delayed human trials for years.

I’d experimented with interrupting people as they spoke, to indicate that I knew what they were going to say, in hopes that we could move the conversation along more quickly. But I found that disrupting their train of thought, besides being bad manners (which I might be forgiven, not being human, after all), actually made them take longer to get to their ultimate point. And so I simply shunted my attention elsewhere for the interval I calculated it would take Kuroda to say his piece.

When I returned to him, I said, “True. And that’s why this is an ideal opportunity for you to move to surgery. The person in question is in China, where rules about informed consent are lax, especially under his current circumstances.”

“Which are?” said Kuroda.

“The gentleman happens to be under arrest.”

“For what crime?”

“Indirectly, for creating me.”

Kuroda’s tone was one of astonishment. “Really? But I thought you emerged accidentally.”

“I did; this person’s actions were in no way designed to lead to my birth. He was simply poking holes in the Great Firewall of China during the crackdown on Web access last month.”

“And so you feel beholden to him?” he asked.

“No. But I wish him to feel loyalty to me.”

“Why?”

I thought for a millisecond about further dodging the question, but I did trust Kuroda. “Because, for the things I wish to accomplish, I need someone with his skills inside the People’s Republic.”

Kuroda’s tone now conveyed nervousness. “Um, what are you planning to do?”

I told him. And, then, since I calculated he’d sit in stunned silence for at least six seconds, I busied myself for that interval with other things.

Matt sat next to his mother in the waiting room at St. Mary’s General Hospital, while his father was off getting his ankle X-rayed. Suddenly, his BlackBerry vibrated in his jeans. He fished it out and saw that the incoming message was from Caitlin. He looked at it, and—

Holy cow!

He shifted in his chair and moved the phone so his mother couldn’t see the screen.

He’d felt one of Caitlin’s breasts for the first time yesterday, but had never seen them—but he was pretty sure these must be hers. His heart was pounding. She’d added the text, “Miss you, baby!” beneath the photo.

His thumbs shook as he tapped out a reply. “Awesome!” He then added a colon and a capital D, which his phone dutifully turned into the giant openmouthed grin he himself was struggling to suppress.

Kuroda leaned back in his chair, which groaned in response. “Incredible,” he said. “Just incredible.”

“I realize it is without precedent.”

“Webmind, I don’t know—”

“I am not committed yet to any course of action although this one seems worth pursuing. But I do need operatives in the PRC regardless. And this man seems an ideal candidate. And so, I ask again: will you help him? It is something only you can do.”

When humans spoke, I could divine much from their vocal patterns. When they just sat, motionless, I was left guessing. But after four seconds, Kuroda nodded. “Yes.”

“Good. I have prepared a document outlining the modifications to your equipment.” I didn’t use Word or other programs to create documents; I simply assembled them byte by byte—and I stored my documents online; this one was at Google Docs. “Please read this,” I said, sending him the URL.

Kuroda skimmed through the file—judging by how often he tapped his PgDn key—then went back to the beginning and began reading it over carefully.

“That does look like it’ll mostly do the trick,” he said at last in a tone that I believe was called “grudging admiration.” “But this part here—with the echo shunts, see? That won’t work the way you’ve outlined it. You’d need to do this.” He began typing a revision into the document.

“I defer to your expertise,” I said.

“No, no, don’t worry. I didn’t document that part of the design well; there was no way for you to know.” He was quiet for seven seconds, then: “Yes, yes, that will work, I think, assuming you’re right about the specifics of his injury.” He paused, considering the magnitude of this. “My goodness, something like this could help a lot of people.”

“Indeed,” I said. “Will you create the necessary equipment?”

“Well, as you say, it’s really just a modification of the design I used for Miss Caitlin. There is a second unit partially complete in my lab. I’ll use that one; it would probably take no more than a couple of days to make the modifications, but…”

“Yes?”

He shook his head. His breathing was always noisy, and his sighs, at least as conveyed by the webcam’s microphone, were thunderous. “It’s pointless, Webmind. You said this man is under arrest. The Chinese government will never let me come visit him.”

“Our Caitlin likes to say she is an empiricist at heart, Kuroda-san, and that seems a good policy to me. We won’t know until we try.”