Wonder

twenty-one

All right, Peyton Hume thought. Webmind is probably onto me. And, more than that, Webmind probably knows that I’m onto it. Which meant there was no need any longer for all the cloak-and-dagger stuff. He pulled out his new cell phone and simply called the next hacker on his list, a man in Takoma Park who went by the name Teh Awesome—a guy almost as good (or bad!) as Crowbar Alpha or Chase.

“Hello?” said a male voice after the phone stopped ringing.

“Hello. May I please speak to Brandon Slovak?”

“Speaking.”

“Mr. Slovak, I’m—I’m with the Washington Post. I was just wondering, what’s your opinion of this Webmind thing?”

“God, it’s incredible,” Slovak said. “I was just talking to him when you called. I thought I was Teh Awesome, but he’s the shit, you know?”

“Yes,” said Hume. “I do.” And he snapped the phone shut.

Malcolm Decter was hard at work in his living room, dealing with what had become an ongoing irritation: the inability for me to be present unless one of the Decters brought a laptop into the room. After some trial and error, he had managed to hook up his netbook computer to one of the inputs for the big-screen wall-mounted TV. He’d then placed the netbook on top of the low-rise bookcase, between (as I saw through the netbook’s webcam as he carried the unit across the room) a framed photo of him and Barbara on their wedding day, and a picture of Caitlin as an infant in Barbara’s lap; when she’d been that young, Caitlin’s hair had been blonde instead of the dark brown it was now.

“How’s that?” he asked.

“Please turn the netbook eighteen degrees to the left,” I said; my voice was now coming through the external home-theater speaker system.

He had a good eye. But, of course, he was Caitlin’s father, and had her same gift for math—eighteen degrees was five percent of a circle.

“Thank you,” I said. “And if you could close the screen a further ten degrees.” He did so, which had the effect of tipping the webcam so that it would easily be able to view people sitting on the white leather couch.

“Perfect,” I said.

He didn’t reply, but that was normal for him. He turned and was clearly about to head back down the corridor to his den. “Malcolm?” I said.

He stopped without looking back. “Yes?”

“Have a seat, please.”

He did so. The couch was a little low to the ground for him, and his knees made acute angles.

“I was intrigued,” I said, “by your response to Caitlin sharing what some might consider a compromising photo with Matt.”

“How do you know what I said?”

“Barb was holding Caitlin’s BlackBerry when the two of you discussed this, and the device was turned on.” His face was impassive, and so I went on. “You spoke quite passionately about how we shouldn’t be afraid of people knowing who we really are.”

Again, no response. Although I knew Barb loved him, I also knew she sometimes found it frustrating dealing with him, and I was beginning to understand why. Earlier today, I’d spoken about how different the realm I’d been born in was—but humans and the Internet both wanted their signals acknowledged. Malcolm just sat there. I couldn’t see what he was looking at, but extrapolating his eyeline, and knowing the layout of the room from seeing it through Caitlin’s eye, it was a wall calendar they’d presumably brought with them from Texas, as it showed a picture of the Austin skyline at night.

“And on the issue of who one really is,” I continued, “it’s difficult to gauge the number of people like you worldwide. Official estimates have ranged from 2.5% to 3.8% of the planet’s population. But studying what people actually say in email or in other documents they have created and looking at the traffic on websites devoted to this topic leads me to conclude that the true incidence has been vastly underreported—most likely out of fear of discrimination, social stigma, or persecution.”

Good scientist that he was, Malcolm said, “Show me your data.”

I sent a summary to the big-screen TV and watched as his eyes scanned it.

Peyton Hume was determined to try at least once more. Consulting the black-hat list, he decided Drakkenfyre looked like the next-best choice. Her real name was Simonne Coogan—one of the few women on his list. The conventional wisdom was that there were fewer female than male hackers, but really the very best hackers of all had never been caught or identified, and so who knew what the real gender split was? Maybe female hackers were better at eluding detection.

Drakkenfyre had never been arrested or charged with a crime. She was a programmer for a computer-gaming company called Octahedral Software, based in Bethesda; their game based on Allen Steele’s Coyote novels was a cult favorite. WATCH had detected her hacking into systems at both EA in Redwood City and Ubisoft in Montreal, but thwarting industrial espionage was not their mandate. Still, the dossier on her noted her incredible sophistication and subtlety, and—say, look at that! It had been prepared in part by Tony Moretti, who’d added, “Might be worth recruiting.” But apparently no one had taken him up on that suggestion—at least not yet.

No time like the present.

The fact that WATCH kept an active eye on her was useful. Rather than calling Drakkenfyre directly, Hume used his cell phone to call WATCH and asked for Shelton Halleck, the analyst there who had first noticed that Caitlin Decter’s visual signals were being mirrored over the Internet to servers in Tokyo.

“Halleck,” said the familiar Southern drawl. “What can I do you for?”

“Shel, it’s Peyton Hume.”

“Afternoon, Colonel. What’s up?”

“There’s a hacker in Bethesda. Her online name is Drakkenfyre—D-R-A-double-K-E-N-F-Y-R-E; real name Simonne Coogan.” He spelled the name. “Can you tell me what she’s up to right now?”

He could hear Shelton typing—and it brought back a mental picture of the younger man’s forearm with the green snake tattoo encircling it.

“Got it,” said Shelton. “Quite a talented lady, it seems.”

“She certainly is,” said Hume. “I’ve got her dossier here on my laptop. She still with Octahedral?”

“Yup, and she seems to be at work right now, and… yes, yes, no question: she’s up to her old tricks. Been dyin’ to play Assassin’s Creed IV myself, but I was plannin’ to wait until it was officially launched next month.”

“You got an address for Octahedral there?”

“Sure.” Shel read it to him.

It was only about half an hour away at this time of day. “Thanks,” said Hume.

Masayuki Kuroda’s flight back to Japan wasn’t until early tomorrow morning, so he spent some time walking the streets of Beijing. The Chinese had no compunction about staring—and the sight of a Japanese who weighed 150 kilos and towered above everyone else clearly intrigued them.

The streets weren’t as crowded as those of Tokyo, nor were most of them as upscale. Still, here, in a big urban center, people seemed mostly happy—and why not? Their lives were measurably better with each passing year: their prosperity grew, their projected longevity increased, their standard of living improved.

And yet—

And yet they weren’t free to speak their minds or practice their beliefs or choose their leaders. Human-rights violations were rampant, and even setting aside the recent slaughter in Shanxi, executions were common. Yes, his own Japan was one of only three democracies left in the world that practiced capital punishment; the others were the United States and South Korea, although the latter had had a moratorium on it for years. But at least Japan’s executions were public knowledge, reported by the media, and subject to due process. Here in China, people like that young man who could now walk thanks to him lived in fear.

He was passing a street vendor’s cart. A foreigner—a white man—was trying to find out how much a bottled beverage cost. The wizened dealer replied with movements of a single hand. Kuroda knew the Chinese had a way of showing numbers up to ten using just one hand instead of two—admirable data compression—but he didn’t know the system, and so was unable to help bridge the communications gap. He did think about warning the tourist to check the expiration date; he’d yet to see a bottle of diet cola for sale here that wasn’t well past its sell-by date.

Masayuki always wheezed a bit as he breathed (not to mention snoring up a storm at night, according to his wife), but here his breathing was even more labored. At least his eyes had stopped stinging after the first day.

And whereas Tokyo was so ordered, so clean, and—yes—so capitalist, Beijing was chaotic, messy, and oppressive, with armed state guards everywhere. People crossed the streets wherever they wanted, vehicles—even buses—routinely ignored red lights, and bicycles weaved recklessly through the traffic; the Chinese had to revel in what little freedom they did have.

Tokyo always had an eye on the future—although to Masayuki, that meant it often seemed stuck in some 1980s sci-fi movie full of neon and chrome. But the echoes of Beijing’s long history were everywhere here, from odd little side streets that looked like they hadn’t changed in centuries to the opulent red buildings of the Forbidden City.

But the noise! There was a rumble behind everything, almost as if the 1.3 billion heartbeats of this giant land had blended into a continuous pounding.

Walking along, taking in all the sights, all the sounds, all the smells, Masayuki found himself feeling wistful; endings were always sad. Still, he tried to etch everything in his mind—so that someday he’d be able to tell his grandchildren what China had been like.