Wonder

eleven

Sunshine did ultimately walk Caitlin back to her house, but she declined an invitation to come in; her boyfriend Tyler was getting off work, and she wanted to follow up on the promise made by the picture she’d sent.

Caitlin came in the front door, and her mom came swooping into the room. “Where the hell is Matt?”

“Don’t worry, Mom. Sunshine walked me home. Matt had to go to the hospital; his dad twisted his ankle.”

“Sit down.”

“Mom! I didn’t do anything wrong! I told you—Sunshine walked me home.”

“Just—sit down.”

Caitlin was trying to decode her mother’s face, but it was contorted in ways she’d never seen before. Caitlin moved over to the white couch, flopped herself down, and crossed her arms in front of her chest.

Her mother took a deep breath, then: “I hope you enjoyed your trip to the donut shop, Caitlin, because it’s the last normal afternoon you’re ever going to have.”

Caitlin was anxious. Did her mom know about the picture she’d sent Matt? No, that wasn’t possible; surely Webmind wouldn’t have ratted her out. “Mom, you can’t ground me!”

Her mother stopped pacing and—Caitlin’s eyes went wide—she dropped to her knees in front of Caitlin, and took Caitlin’s hands in hers; her mother’s were shaking. She looked right into Caitlin’s eyes.

“They know.”

“What?”

“About you and Webmind.”

“Who knows?”

“Soon—everyone: everyone on the whole damn planet. I got a call just before you came in—from ABC News. They know you’re the one who brought Webmind forward.”

Caitlin felt her mouth dropping open.

“How… how did they find out?”

Her mother got to her feet again, and when she was standing, she spread her arms. “God, we were stupid to think it would stay a secret. We knew that the US government was onto you—and that they’d told CSIS and the Japanese government, too. It was only a matter of time before someone leaked it, and—”

The phone rang. Caitlin’s mother looked briefly at her, then picked it up. “Hello?” Then: “May I ask who’s calling?” Then: “Look, I’m her mother. She’s only sixteen, for God’s sake. What? No, no, we don’t want to fly to Washington tonight. Jesus. Yes, yes, I know she has to talk to somebody… Look, ABC already called, and—no, no we haven’t committed to them. All right, all right. Yes, yes. No, I’ve got it—it’s right here on the call display. Yes, all right, if you must. Yes, good-bye. I—no, no; good-bye.” She put down the phone.

“NBC,” she said, looking at Caitlin. “Meet the Press.”

The phone rang again. Caitlin’s mom went over to it, and did something that made the ringer stop—here, at least; it was still jangling away on the other phones in the house. “Let the machine get it,” she said. And, indeed, it did: Caitlin could hear the muffled sounds of a message from another journalist being left; the answering machine was in the kitchen.

“I should call your father,” her mom said. “My cell’s upstairs; can I use yours?”

“Sure.” Caitlin fished out her red BlackBerry, dialed her dad for her, and handed it to her mother.

They waited for him to answer, then, after several seconds, voice desperate, her mom said: “Malcolm—the cat’s out of the bag.”

Zhang Bo, China’s Minister of Communications, didn’t often think about the irony of his job—but that irony had haunted him for the last few weeks.

The Communist Party said they did not want outside influences, but he looked at what he was wearing: a blue Western-style business suit, and, today, a gray tie. He was forty-five but remembered the days of Mao suits—the plain, high-collared, shirtlike jackets customarily worn during the reign of Mao Zedong. Actually, given his own stocky frame, a Mao jacket might have been better for him, but at least under the current rules he was allowed a small mustache. That, too, was a Western influence; his favorite American actor sported a similar one.

The mandate of the Ministry of Communications was to keep out information from the rest of the world—which meant, of course, that Zhang had to monitor much of it himself: the New York Times, CNN, NHK, the BBC, Al Jazeera, Pravda—he had tabs for all of them always open in the Maxthon browser he favored.

And he had Google and Baidu alerts set for specific combinations of keywords: the president’s name, “Tibet,” “Falun Gong,” and, of late, “Shanxi” and “bird flu.” Most of the recent news had been unkind. Although a handful of Western commentators acknowledged that Beijing probably had no choice but to eliminate the peasants who had been exposed to the human-transmissible version of the H5N1 virus, most of the coverage excoriated China for what they variously termed a “heartless,” “unnecessary,” and—apparently the suggestion of a dragon had occurred spontaneously to numerous writers, although, as Zhang knew, the term actually referred to an Athenian politician—“draconian” action.

And now, as if all that weren’t bad enough, the police were once again being accused of brutality—over what should have been a minor arrest at the paleontology museum. Blogs domestic and foreign were aflame with the tale.

Zhang sighed as he read yet another damning story; this one was in the Huffington Post.

He decided to turn to his email instead. One of the messages was from Quan Li, the epidemiologist who had recommended the eliminations. He read it, answered the question with a curt no: Li could not accept any foreign interview requests.

He continued to work his way through the list of messages, saying no, no, and no again. And then—

A message from the University of Tokyo, here, on his secure account? How could…? He clicked on it, read it, and felt the knot that had grown in his stomach loosening ever so slightly. When he was done, he picked up his phone’s handset and pushed the speed dial for the president’s office.

Malcolm Decter had hurried home from the Perimeter Institute—and Dr. Hawking. Caitlin was pleased he was willing to do that, but her mother was right: it was a crisis.

Still, part of her was happy that the secret was out, that everyone would know that she’d been the one who’d figured out that Webmind was there. In the world that mattered to her—the world of computing and math—those who did things first got ahead, even if they weren’t the best or the brightest. And if you were the best and the brightest, well, there’d be no stopping you! Google, Microsoft, RIM, Apple, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Jagster group—they’d all be offering her…

It was a heady thought for a sixteen-year-old who had never worked beyond occasionally tutoring math; she hadn’t been able to babysit, after all, or cut grass, or deliver newspapers, or do any of the other things kids did to make money. But, yes, multibillion-dollar corporations might well beat a path to her door, offering her jobs. And what Ivy League school would turn down an application that combined her marks with this?

Besides, keeping the secret was killing her. Bashira would be amazed, and Stacy back in Austin would freak.

“So, what do we do?” her mom said to her dad. She was seated on the couch now, an oblivious Schrödinger rubbing against her legs. “All the American networks want Caitlin to appear tomorrow, and so do the Canadian ones. The BBC just called, and the NHK. Of course, we don’t have to do anything.” She looked at Caitlin. “Just because people want to talk to you doesn’t mean you have to talk to them.”

“Works for me,” said her dad, who was now pacing where his wife had previously.

“No,” said Caitlin. “I’ve got to tell people what I know. You’ve seen the news, the blogs—and you heard what the president and his advisors said: there are those who are frightened by Webmind, who don’t trust him.”

“Okay, but then which of the Sunday-morning news shows? You can’t do them all.”

Caitlin shook her head. “I don’t want to leave Waterloo.”

“CBS said you could do it from the CBC in Toronto,” her mother said. “And both the ABC guy and the NBC one said you could do it from the CTV station in Kitchener. They’ve all got reciprocal arrangements with Canadian broadcasters, apparently.”

Caitlin was about to speak when, to her astonishment, her father looked directly at her, as if he wanted to fix in his memory the way she’d been before. Finally, after averting his eyes, he said, “Caitlin?” That was all: just her name. But it was enough. He was saying, as always, that it was up to her.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

“Which show?” asked her mom.

“I’m a numbers kind of girl,” Caitlin said. “Let’s do the one with the highest ratings.”

Chase sat at the far-left computer, pounding out code. Guns ’N Roses blared from the stereo. He shook his head, took a swig of Red Bull, slid his chair down two workstations, and looked at the results of his previous attempt: the compiler reported four errors. He went into debugging mode, found the problems, fixed them.

More Red Bull.

Sliding to another computer.

The stereo switching to another song.

The maestro at work.