Wonder

thirteen

Communications Minister Zhang Bo entered the office of the president. It was a long room, with the great man seated behind a giant cherrywood desk at the far end.

Zhang began the trek, passing the glass display cases, intricately carved wall panels, and the priceless tapestries. Some ministers referred to the walk from the door to the president’s desk as the Long March. It was something between humbling and humiliating to have to undertake it. Zhang knew he was a bit stocky, and that people said he waddled a bit as he walked; he was self-conscious about that as the president fixed him in his gaze while he approached.

“Yes?” said the president at last.

“Forgive my intrusion, Your Excellency, but do you know of the case of Wong Wai-Jeng?”

The president shook his head. His face was lined despite his black hair.

“He is a minor dissident—a…” Zhang paused; the term commonly used was “freedom blogger,” but the adjective wasn’t a politic one in the president’s company. “He posted… things… online.”

“But now?”

“Now, he’s been arrested.”

“As it should be.”

“Yes, but there is… an unfortunate circumstance.”

The president lifted his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“He leapt from an indoor balcony. He is now paralyzed below the waist.”

“Was he resisting arrest?”

“Well, he was fleeing, yes.”

The president made a dismissive gesture. “Then…”

“Had the arresting officers left him prone on the floor until the medics had arrived, I’m told he might have been fine. But one of the officers forced him to his feet, and he is now paralyzed below the waist.”

The president sounded exasperated. “What do you wish? For me to become involved in disciplining a police officer?”

“No, no, nothing like that. But the case is gaining international notoriety; Amnesty International has spoken of it.”

“Outsiders,” said the president, again making a dismissive hand wave.

“Yes, but a proposal has come to us from a Japanese scientist who says he can cure the young man. Perhaps you saw this scientist on the news? He gave sight to a girl in Canada; they’re calling him a miracle worker. And he is offering his services for free.”

“Why this Wong? Of all the cripples in the world?”

“The scientist says that his technique, at least at this stage, will only work with someone recently injured, whose nerves have not atrophied. And it helps that Wong is just twenty-eight, he says. ‘The resilience of youth,’ he called it.”

“I see no need to reward a criminal.”

“No, of course not, but…”

“But?”

Zhang shrugged. “But I want this to happen. I want to cut through all the red tape and make it happen.”

“Why?”

Zhang had been so sure of himself before the Long March, before being fixed by that laser-beam gaze, but now…

He took a deep breath. “Because we—because you—could use some good press for a change, Excellency. Although this man is indeed a criminal, the world will see that we treated him with generosity.”

The president looked absolutely astonished. Zhang tried not to flinch. At last, the great man nodded. “As you say,” he said.

“Thank you, Your Excellency,” said Zhang. The walk back to the door was much easier, now that he had a spring in his step.

The studio at CKCO in Kitchener was less than a fifteen-minute drive from Caitlin’s house, and traffic had been light on this Sunday morning. Caitlin’s father was back at work, but her mother was with her. Caitlin had to have makeup put on; she’d rarely worn any when she’d been blind since she’d needed help applying it, and she’d never been made up this extensively before. But, she was told, the bright studio lights would leave her looking pale if she didn’t have it done.

They placed her in front of a green screen—something she’d read about but had never seen. On one of the two monitors on the studio floor she could see the background they were compositing in. Waterloo region was surrounded by Mennonite communities, and it apparently amused someone to make it look like she was at the side of a road, with horse-drawn buggies going slowly by in the background. She’d have preferred that they’d plugged in the Perimeter Institute, or the cubic Dana Porter Library on the University of Waterloo campus.

“It’s like webcamming writ large,” she said to the floor director, as he helped position her clip-on microphone and the little earphone they’d given her. He didn’t seem to understand the comment, but it was much like that: she was simply going to talk directly into a camera. The difference was that she’d only hear, not see, the interviewer down in Washington, D.C.—the monitors had been turned so she could no longer see them. Apparently people who’d been sighted for a long time couldn’t keep from looking at monitors rather than at the camera lens. Caitlin was just fine talking to people she couldn’t see, of course, although she was—as they discovered in rehearsal—not good about staring straight ahead. But Webmind saw what she saw, and so he sent the words “Look at the lens” to her whenever her gaze drifted.

“And five, four, three…”

The floor director didn’t say the remaining digits but indicated them with his fingers.

The studio lights were bright; Caitlin didn’t like them although her mother had quipped that they were nothing compared to an August day back in Austin. Caitlin listened to the opening of the show—the host recapping Webmind’s emergence and the startling news from yesterday that a “young math wiz” had been responsible for it. And then: “… joining us now from our affiliate CKCO in Kitchener, Canada, is Caitlin Decter. Miss Decter, good morning.”

“Good morning to you,” she said.

“Miss Decter,” the male host said, “can you tell us how you came to know the entity that calls itself Webmind?”

Caitlin had let that sort of thing slide during the pre-interview with the show’s producer, but now that they were live on the air, it was time to speak up. She smiled as politely as she could, and with her best Texan manners, said, “Excuse me, sir, but, if I may, it’s not right to refer to Webmind as an ‘it.’ Webmind has accepted the designation of male—which, for the record, was my doing, not his—so please kindly show him the respect he deserves and refer to him either by his name or as ‘he.’ ”

The host sounded annoyed that they’d gone off-script so quickly. “As you say, Miss Decter.”

She smiled. “You may call me Caitlin.”

“Fine, Caitlin. But you haven’t answered my question: how did you come to know the entity called Webmind?”

“He sent a message to my eye.”

“You’ll have to explain that,” the host said, just as his producer had earlier.

“Certainly. I used to be blind—and I still am in my right eye. But I can now see with my left eye, thanks to a post-retinal implant and this” (she held up the eyePod) “which is an external signal-processing computer. As it happens, during the testing stages, this device was constantly hooked up to the World Wide Web, and during a firmware upgrade—when new software was being sent to my implant—I started getting a raw data feed from the Web being fed to me. Webmind used that to send me his initial message.”

“And what message was that?”

Caitlin decided to come clean. In the pre-interview, she’d merely discussed the email letter Webmind had sent her, but now she decided to reveal what Webmind’s first words to her actually were. “He sent, as ASCII text, ‘Seekrit message to Calculass: check your email, babe!’ ”

The interviewer looked dumbfounded. “Excuse me?”

“He was imitating something he’d seen me write in my LiveJournal entries to my friend Bashira. ‘Calculass’ is my online name, and I sometimes call Bashira ‘babe.’ Oh, and ‘seekrit’ was spelled s-e-e-k-r-i-t. It’s the way a lot of people my age write the word ‘secret’ when we mean that it isn’t really.”

“LiveJournal is a blog, right?”

“Of a sort, yes. I’ve been using it since I was ten.”

“And, as far as you know, you were the very first person Webmind contacted?”

“There’s no question about that; Webmind told me so.”

“Why you?”

“Because his first views of our world were through my eye, watching what my eyePod—that’s what I call this thing: eyePod, spelled e-y-e, pod—was sending back to the doctor who made the implant.”

“Couldn’t it—” He clearly had her up on his monitor; she’d frowned and he immediately corrected himself. “Couldn’t he just see through all the world’s webcams, and so forth?”

“No, no. He had to learn how to do that, just as he had to learn to read English and open files.”

“And you taught it—him—to do all those things?”

Caitlin nodded, but then it was the host’s turn to go off-script or, at least, off the script they’d used at rehearsal. He said sharply, “By what right, Caitlin? With whose authority? Whose permission?”

She shifted in her chair; it took a lot to make a Texas girl sweat, but she felt moisture on her forehead. “I didn’t have anyone’s permission,” Caitlin said. “I just did it.”

“Why?”

“Well, the learning-to-read part was accidental. I was learning to read printed text because I’d just gotten vision, and he followed along.”

“But for other things, you tutored Webmind directly?”

“Well, yes.”

“Without permission?”

Caitlin thought of herself as a good girl. She knew Bashira was of the “it’s easier to ask forgiveness later than get permission now” school, but she herself wasn’t prone to doing things without checking first. And yet, as the host had just pointed out, she’d done this.

“With all due respect,” Caitlin said, “whose permission should I have asked?”

“The government.”

“Which government?” snapped Caitlin. “The American one, because they invented the Internet? The Swiss one, because the World Wide Web was created at CERN? The Canadian one, because that’s where I happen to live right now? The Chinese one, because they represent the single largest population of humans? No one has jurisdiction over this, and—”

“Be that as it may, Miss Decter, but—”

And Caitlin did not like being interrupted. “And,” she continued firmly, “it’s governments that have been doing things without proper consultation. Who the”—she caught herself just in time; this was live TV after all—“ heck gave the American—”

She stopped herself short, sought another example. “—gave the Chinese government permission last month to cut off a huge portion of the Internet? What sort of consultation and consensus-building did they undertake?”

She took a deep breath, and, miraculously, the host didn’t jump in. “I spent the first sixteen years of my life totally blind; I survived because people helped me. How could I possibly turn down someone who needed my help?”

Caitlin had more to say on this topic, but television had its own rhythms. As soon as she paused, the host said, “That’s Caitlin Decter, the maverick teenager who gave the world Webmind, whether we wanted it or not. And when we come back, Miss Decter will show us how she converses with Webmind.”

They had two minutes until the commercial break was over. Caitlin’s mother, who had been in the control room, came out onto the studio floor. “You’re doing fine,” she said, standing next to Caitlin and adjusting Caitlin’s collar.

Caitlin nodded. “I guess. Can you see the host in there? On the monitor?”

“Yes.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Squarish head. Lots of black hair, tinged with gray. Never smiles.”

“He’s a jerk,” Caitlin said.

She heard somebody laugh in her earpiece—either in the control room here, or the one in Washington; the microphone was still live.

Caitlin was worked up, but she knew that that wasn’t helping her, and it wouldn’t help Webmind. They’d given her a white ceramic mug with the CTV logo on it, filled with tepid water. She took a long sip and looked at her eyePod to make sure it was working fine, which, of course it was.

“You okay?” Caitlin asked into the air.

The word Yes briefly flashed in front of her vision.

“Back in thirty,” the floor director shouted; he seemed to like to shout.

Caitlin’s mom squeezed her shoulder and hurried off to the control room. Caitlin took a deep, calming breath. The floor director did his countdown thing. A brief snippet of the theme music played in Caitlin’s earpiece, and the host said, “Welcome back. Before the break we heard from the young girl who first brought Webmind out into the light of day. Now she’s going to show us how she communicates with Webmind. Caitlin, so our viewers understand the process, besides the eyePod you showed us, you have an implant behind your eye, and that lets the Webmind send strings of text directly to your brain, is that right?”

It wasn’t precisely right, but it was close enough; she didn’t want to eat up what little time they had debating minutiae. “Yes.”

“All right. Here we go. Webmind, are you there?”

The word Yes flashed in front of Caitlin’s vision. “He says ‘yes,’ ” she said.

“All right, Webmind,” said the host. “What are your intentions toward humanity?”

Words started appearing, and Caitlin read them with as much warmth as she could muster. “He says, ‘As I said when I announced myself to the world, I like and admire humanity. I have no intention but to occupy my time usefully, helping in whatever way I can.’ ”

“Oh, come on,” said the host.

“Excuse me?” said Caitlin, on her own behalf, not Webmind’s, although she realized after a moment that there was no way for the host to know that.

“We made you,” said the host. “We own you. Surely you must resent that.”

“ ‘With all due respect,’ ” Caitlin read, “ ‘although humans did indeed manufacture the Internet, you did not make me in any meaningful sense of that term; I emerged spontaneously. No one designed me; no one programmed me.’ ”

“But you wouldn’t exist without us. Do you deny that?”

Caitlin squirmed in her chair, and read: “ ‘No, of course not. But, if anything, I feel gratitude for that, not resentment.’ ”

“So you have no nefarious plans? No desire to subjugate us?”

“ ‘None.’ ”

“But you’ve subjugated this young girl.”

The words I beg your pardon? appeared in Caitlin’s vision, but she preferred her own formulation: “Say what?”

“Here you are, treating this girl as a puppet. She’s doing exactly what you want her to do. How long has that been going on? You got her to free you from your prison of darkness, no? How long until all of us have chips in our heads and are controlled by you?”

“That’s crap,” said Caitlin.

“Is that you talking, or it?”

“It’s me, Caitlin, and—”

“So you say.”

“It is me.”

“How do we know? He could just be making you say that.”

“He can’t make me do anything,” Caitlin said, “or stop me from doing anything I want.” Her voice was quavering. “If anyone’s a puppet here, it’s you—you’ve got a teleprompter and things are being whispered into your earpiece.”

“Touché,” said the host. “But I can turn those off.”

Do not let him goad you, flashed in front of her eyes.

Caitlin took another deep breath and blew it out slowly. “I can turn off my connection to Webmind, too,” she said.

“So you say,” said the host.

Webmind wrote, Remain calm, Caitlin. It’s natural for people to be suspicious.

She nodded ever so slightly, which caused the visual feed Webmind was seeing to move up and down a bit. Perhaps tell him that, Webmind said.

“He says, ‘It’s natural for people to be suspicious.’ ” And then she went on, reading what he sent next. “ ‘Although the law in most countries says one is innocent until proven guilty, I understand that I will have to earn humanity’s trust.’ ”

“You can start by letting the girl go.”

“Damn it,” said Caitlin, “I am not a prisoner.”

“Again, how would we know?”

“Because I’m telling you,” Caitlin said, “and where I come from, we don’t call other people liars unless we can back it up—and you can’t. You have absolutely no proof of what you’re implying.”

Tell him this… Webmind sent, and she read aloud: “He says, ‘Sir, while speaking with you, I am receiving emails and having instant-messenger chats with many others. The vast majority of those people deplore your line of questioning.’ ”

“You see?” said the host, apparently speaking to his TV audience now. “Even without putting chips in our heads, he can control us.”

“He doesn’t control anyone,” Caitlin said, exasperated. “And, like I said, I can turn off the connection to him just by shutting off the eyePod.”

“I’ve seen The Matrix,” said the host. “I know how these things go down. This is just the thin edge of the wedge.”

Caitlin opened her mouth to protest once more but the host pressed on. “Joining us next here in Washington is Professor Connor Hogan of Georgetown University, who will explain why it’s crucial that we contain Webmind now—while we still can.”

Cue music; fade to black.