Wonder

twenty-five

Houston, we have a problem.

Caitlin was simultaneously alarmed and amused as those words flashed in her vision. She’d been born in Houston; her family had moved to Austin when she was six—and so she admired Webmind’s word play. “Wassup?” she said.

Her family had finished dinner a few minutes ago, and she was just entering her bedroom. She pointed at her desktop computer, and Webmind switched to speaking through the computer’s speakers—for him a much slower method of communicating than pumping out text, but Caitlin’s visual reading speed, even when using a Braille font, was still quite low.

“Colonel Hume just appeared on the NBC Nightly News,” Webmind said, as she sat down in front of her desk. “He explained how to identify the majority of my mutant packets. He did not explicitly state his intentions, but it seems clear his goal was to crowd-source attempts to eradicate them. Word of his revelation is spreading rapidly across the Web.”

“Stop it!” Caitlin said at once. “Delete the messages.”

“I don’t think that would be prudent,” Webmind said. “Over four million people have watched the news broadcast so far; it will be repeated in other time zones later, and many people recorded it. Even if I were so inclined, I do not believe there is an effective way to suppress this information.”

“God,” said Caitlin. “He is such an asshole.”

“In point of fact, he is a well-regarded person, a decorated officer, and a distinguished scientist.”

“Maybe so,” said Caitlin, “but he’s sure got a hate-on for you.”

“Indeed.”

“So, is what he wants possible? Could someone find a way to purge you?”

“The probability is high. Although some mutant packets may persist, there must be a minimum threshold quantity required for consciousness.”

Caitlin felt her lower lip trembling. “My God, Webmind, I—I don’t…”

“I can tell by your voice that you’re frightened, Caitlin.” Webmind was silent for a whole second, then: “I have to confess that I am, too.”

In response to an urgent phone call from Shelton Halleck, Tony Moretti ran down the short white corridor connecting his office with the WATCH monitoring room. As he entered, his eyes bounced between the three big wall monitors. The first was showing a freeze-frame of NBC anchor Brian Williams. The second was displaying a constantly updating display of Twitter tweets with the hashtag #webmindkill—a new one was added every second or so. And the third monitor seemed to be a technical data sheet from the Cisco website.

Shelton Halleck stood up at his position in the middle of the third row. “Hume’s taken matters into his own hands,” he said, pointing at monitor one, the snake tattoo coiling around his left forearm.

The screen unfroze, and Hume’s TV interview played out. Tony felt his jaw dropping. The other analysts had already seen it, and they were looking at Tony, waiting for his reaction. When the interview was done, he said, “How long ago did that go out?”

“Eleven minutes.”

“The president is going to freak,” Tony said.

“No doubt.”

“And, Christ, half the hackers in the world are going to be trying to reprogram routers on the fly now. They could fuck the whole Internet. How vulnerable are we?”

Aiesha Emerson, the analyst at the workstation next to Shel’s, pointed at monitor three. “We’ve got people reviewing the specs for various routers. And Reinhardt’s team is talking to engineers at Cisco and Juniper—fortunately, they’re based in California, so most of them haven’t gone home for the day yet.”

A phone rang at the back of the room.

“All right,” said Tony, surveying his team. “Our top priority is making sure that the Internet itself is safe—we can’t let it crash. Home-soil attacks on network infrastructure are acts of terrorism under clause 22B; let’s keep the damn thing up, and—”

“Excuse me, Tony,” called Dirk Kozak, the communications officer, from the back of the room. He was holding a red telephone handset to his chest. “The president is on the line—and he’s hopping mad.”

After the interview, Hume was escorted to the makeup room. The squat woman there had remarked earlier that it was a challenge to make up someone with so many freckles. She now handed him some moistened wipes to help him remove the stuff she’d put on.

The studio had been soundproof, but from here in the makeup room, Hume thought he heard a siren outside. It stopped after a moment, and he finished wiping his face. “Thanks,” he said to the woman. “I’m sure I can find my way out.”

He stepped into the corridor and saw two D.C. police officers marching toward him, accompanied by a man who presumably worked here.

“Colonel Hume?” called one of the officers, as they closed the distance.

There was no point denying it; his uniform had a nameplate on it. “What can I do for you?” he said.

The officer executed a flawless Air Force salute. “Sir, my apologies, but you’ll have to come with us.”

Hume returned the salute and followed them out into the growing darkness.

Caitlin went down to the living room as fast as she could, closing her eyes as she took the staircase. Her mother was reading an ebook, and her father was reading—something or other; Caitlin couldn’t make it out.

“Mom! Dad!” she exclaimed. “Colonel Hume just told the world how to kill Webmind.”

Her mother looked up. “What?” she said.

“He went on TV and told everyone how to identify Webmind’s packets.”

“God,” her mom said. “It’s going to be a free-for-all.”

Caitlin went over to the netbook on top of the little bookcase and woke it from hibernation. Webmind had been following along via the microphone on Caitlin’s eyePod/BlackBerry combo, and as soon as the netbook was awake, he spoke through its speakers: “It is a vexing matter. I can try to intercept any hostile code that might be uploaded—but that is much harder than intercepting spam. Spam’s content is easily readable—it is text, after all—and most of it came from fewer than 200 sources worldwide. But malware of this type may be uploaded from anywhere—although I am, of course, being particularly vigilant in examining code coming from known creators of computer viruses. The only thing we know that it must contain, in some form, is the target string Colonel Hume identified as the template for what to look for, but since that string is also in the bulk of my mutant packets, simply eliminating packets containing it would be doing Hume’s job for him.”

“Can you be backed up somehow?” Caitlin’s mother asked.

“I am scattered through the infrastructure of the Internet, Barb, and my essence is in the complex pattern of billions of interconnections. There is no way to copy me to another location.”

“I don’t want to lose you!” Caitlin said.

“The team at WATCH first became aware of my presence on 6 October,” said Webmind. “They tested their technique to eliminate me just six days later, on 12 October. If their specific method gets leaked to the public, things may happen quite quickly. But even if it doesn’t, it seems reasonable to suppose that others can develop and deploy something similar in a comparable time frame. Time is clearly of the essence.”

The Decters’ phone rang. They’d taken to screening their calls by waiting until the message started. “Hello, Miss Caitlin—”

“It’s Dr. Kuroda!” Caitlin said. She so wanted to run for the answering machine, which was in the kitchen, but simply couldn’t. Her father’s long legs had him there almost at once, though, and he scooped up the handset before Kuroda got to his second sentence. “This is Malcolm,” he said. “Putting you on speakerphone.”

They all clustered around the kitchen phone.

“Konnichi wa, Dr. K!” Caitlin said.

“Masayuki, hello!” added her mom.

“Hello, all,” Kuroda said. “I’m in Beijing, just about to get on a plane. Webmind, are you listening in?”

The speakers on the netbook were in the living room; Caitlin had to strain to hear his reply. “With rapt attention,” Webmind said, and “Yes, he is,” Caitlin added, in case Dr. Kuroda had been unable to make that out.

“And is this phone channel secure?” Kuroda asked.

“Yes,” Webmind said, and “Webmind says yes,” Caitlin added.

“All right,” continued Kuroda. “The sun is just coming up here, but that American soldier is all over the news.”

“That’s Peyton Hume,” said Caitlin. “Webmind tells me he’s not a total asshole.”

“Quite charitable,” wheezed Kuroda. “The soldier did say something very interesting, though: he said most of Webmind’s packets had the signature he referred to, and during the trial attack on Webmind, only about two-thirds of his packets going through the test substation were deleted.”

“Webmind,” said Caitlin into the air, “do you know the nature of all the packets that make you up?”

“No. I no more have direct access to the physical correlates of my consciousness than you do to your own.”

“It does imply that Webmind is made of more than one kind of packet,” said Kuroda—although Caitlin wasn’t sure if he’d heard what Webmind said. “Obviously, Hume knows the signatures for all the kinds; otherwise, he wouldn’t have known that some hadn’t been eliminated in his earlier attempt. We really need an inventory of everything that Webmind is made of so that we can protect it all.”

“That’s job number two,” Caitlin said. “Job number one is making sure that hackers don’t succeed in attacking Webmind.”

“Agreed,” said her mom. “But how can we do that? Granted, there are only so many people who have the technical skill to do it, but it’s not like all of them could be hunted down and rounded up.”

“No,” said Webmind, his smooth voice sounding far away. “Of course not.”

The D.C. cops were polite and respectful; the one who had saluted Colonel Hume turned out to have done a tour of duty in Iraq. Hume wasn’t under arrest, they said, but a call had gone out for any car near NBC4 to do a pickup on behalf of the White House. Twenty minutes later, Hume was once again in the Oval Office, facing his commander in chief.

The president was pacing in front of the Resolute desk and smoking a cigarette. “Damn it, Colonel, do you know how hard I’ve been trying to give these damned things up? And you pull a stunt like this!”

“Sir, I’m prepared to face the consequences of my actions.”

“You absolutely will, Colonel. I’m going to leave it to General Schwartz to discipline you. For now, the press office is issuing a statement saying that your comments were completely unauthorized and do not reflect the policy of this administration, DARPA, the Air Force, or any other part of the government.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If we didn’t need you in dealing with Webmind, I’d—”

“Sir, Webmind is killing people.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He is killing those who could harm him.”

“What proof do you have of that?”

“Some of the most capable hackers in the greater Washington area have disappeared. The FBI is investigating.”

“If it were Webmind, hackers everywhere would be disappearing, wouldn’t they? Not just here?”

“With respect, sir, D.C. is a mecca for hackers; the best in the nation are here. There are so many sensitive installations here—not just domestic, but all the embassies, too; they draw them like flies. But there are also reports of missing hackers from elsewhere, too—as far away as India.”

“How do you know Webmind’s behind it? It could be the work of those nutcases who believe Webmind is God, taking preventive steps.”

“Possibly,” said Hume. “But I think—”

“By this point, Colonel, I’ve heard quite enough of what you think. If you weren’t one of our top experts on this sort of thing, you’d be shipping out to Afghanistan tomorrow.”

Hume kept his face impassive as he saluted. “Yes, sir.”