Wonder

thirty-four

On the evening of the school dance, Matt came to Caitlin’s house to get her. In Ontario, as Caitlin had learned, a sixteen-year-old could get a G1 driver’s license—but had to have another licensed driver in the car for the first year of driving. Matt could drive, but he’d have to bring an adult along, so he and Caitlin walked to the dance. There was no breeze to speak of, and it felt like about forty-five degrees to Caitlin, and—

No, she was in Canada now, and they (sensibly!) used the metric system here. She did the conversion instantly in her head: 45 minus 32 times 5 divided by 9; it was about seven degrees Celsius out. Much colder than it would be back in Texas, but people had assured her it wasn’t bad for late October in Waterloo. Anyway, even though she had on a denim jacket, it gave her an excuse to squeeze closer to Matt.

Caitlin had only walked to the school once before: when Trevor Nordmann—the Hoser himself—had escorted her to the last school dance. Back then, she’d been blind: her first hints of vision hadn’t occurred until later that evening, coming home alone through the pouring rain during a thunderstorm. All the other times she’d gone to the school, one of her parents had given her a lift.

It was turning out to be a pleasant walk: she was getting good at walking on unfamiliar terrain at a reasonable speed. At first, she’d felt uncomfortable trying to do so without her white cane, but she liked strolling along holding Matt’s hand.

Howard Miller Secondary School had an impressive white portico in front of its entrance. Caitlin and Matt passed through it and headed down the series of corridors that led to the main gymnasium.

Music blared from the speakers as they entered; Caitlin didn’t recognize the song, but there were lots of Canadian groups she didn’t know. The lighting was dim, and there were a couple of dozen people dancing—jumping about really; it was a fast song. At least as many people were standing around the edges of the room, some talking in small groups, others texting away. Sounds echoed off the hard walls and floor, and it was quite warm.

“Hey, Cait,” said a voice she recognized.

She turned and smiled. “Hi, Sunshine!”

“Hi. Hey, Matt.”

“Hi, Sunshine,” he said, and Caitlin was pleased that he spoke up as he did so.

“Have you seen Mr. Heidegger?” Caitlin asked.

“He’s around somewhere. He danced earlier with Mrs. Zehetoffer,” Sunshine said, as if that were the funniest thing imaginable. “And—oh, there he is.”

Sunshine pointed. Caitlin was good at drawing imaginary lines between fingertips and objects if she could see them both simultaneously, but she had to swing her head 180 degrees to see who Sunshine was pointing at, and she couldn’t find the correct face in the crowd.

“I see him,” said Matt. “Come on, Caitlin.” And he led her over.

“Well, if it isn’t my star pupil!” said Mr. H, grinning. He was skinnier than Matt and even taller than Caitlin’s father.

Caitlin smiled. “Hi, Mr. H.”

“Are you enjoying being a celebrity?” he asked.

“I figure my fifteen minutes are almost up,” she replied, smiling.

“No doubt, no doubt. Still, everyone is very happy for you.”

“Thanks,” Caitlin said.

“And I gotta tell you, all the teachers here are talking about how your friend Webmind is going to affect education.”

Caitlin tried to suppress a grin as the Braille for I expect an A for effort scrolled across her vision. “I guess he will, at that,” she said.

Mr. H shook his head a bit. “People still don’t get it,” he said. “When I was your age, the first cheap pocket calculators appeared, and my teachers were all arguing about whether we should be allowed to use them in class. People kept saying, ‘Yes, but what if they don’t have one?’ They kept trotting out silly desert-island or post-nuclear-holocaust scenarios. They just didn’t see that the world had been irretrievably altered—that there’d never again be a time when memorizing multiplication tables would be important. The game had changed. Webmind is like that: a permanent, irreversible modification of the human condition—and I think it’s for the good.”

Caitlin smiled, remembering all over again why she liked Mr. H so much. They chatted a few minutes more in the warm room, and then she and Matt drifted away. A slow dance soon started, and they headed into the center of the gym. She liked draping her arms around his neck and resting her head on his shoulder as they swayed with the music, even if, as always, the speakers were turned up so high that the sound was distorted.

When the song was done, Caitlin gave him a peck on the cheek, and said, “I’ve got to go to the girls’ room.”

Matt nodded. “Okay.” He looked around the dim gymnasium, then pointed to the far wall, where there was an open door leading outside. “I’m going to get some fresh air; I’ll meet you outside.”

It was dark by the time Colonel Hume pulled up out front of Zwerling Optics, a four-story-tall office building with telecommunication dishes on the roof. According to tweets from ex-employees, as soon as the company had been bought, all sixty-seven workers had received generous severance payments and been escorted off the premises.

Of course, it was wrong to think of this building as Webmind’s headquarters. He wasn’t located here—and that was part of the problem. When Hume had co-authored the Pandora protocol for DARPA in 2001, they’d been mostly worried about artificial intelligences that would be programmed in laboratories. Something like that would have a physical location: a specific set of servers, a cluster of computers, likely in a single building that could be cordoned off or, if necessary, blown up.

But Webmind was nowhere and everywhere—which meant, if Webmind was going to keep an eye on his sequestered hackers, there had to be video feeds out of this building. Fiber-optic trunks were hard to tap because the only way to do so was by physically cutting into the cable and diverting some of the photons, which resulted in a measurable drop in signal quality. But this building had coaxial cable leading out of it. And coax leaked—you could read what was being sent along it without interfering at all with the datastream, and therefore without tipping anyone off about what you were doing. The ease of wiretapping coax was one of the reasons the US government kept quietly deflecting attempts to redo Internet infrastructure nationwide.

Hume was dressed in casual clothes: blue jeans and a sky blue cotton shirt with its sleeves rolled up revealing his freckled arms. He’d moved over to the front passenger seat so he’d have more room to work.

His laptop was open and perched on the dashboard above the glove compartment, and he was wearing silver headphones. The video feed he was intercepting was grainy, and it blacked out periodically; the sound was attenuated, as if it were coming from very far away.

The view he’d managed to tap seemed to be from a security webcam that endlessly panned left and right, taking about ten seconds to complete a sweep in each direction. The first person he spotted was a woman—white, straight brown hair that tumbled over her shoulders. Her face was bent down, intent on—yes, yes, on a keyboard—so he couldn’t be positive, but he felt sure this was Simonne Coogan, the famed Drakkenfyre herself.

The camera continued to pan, and—God, there must be thirty-odd people in there! All were working at computers—some desktops, some laptops. A sound he’d first taken to be static was actually the combination of all their keystrokes.

The camera continued to move and—

No question: the gaunt face, the dreadlocks, the glint off the gold ring through the right eyebrow: it was Chase. Something odd about his nose, though… ah, it was bandaged, and in one of society’s countless acts of thoughtless humiliation, with a wide “flesh”-colored Caucasianbeige Band-Aid.

The camera panned on. More faces deep in concentration—but what the hell were they all doing?

There was Devon Hawkins—Crowbar Alpha himself—wearing a Halo 4 T-shirt. Hume wanted to call Hawkins’s mother, to put her mind at ease, but that would have to wait. Next to Hawkins was… hmmm. Might be Gordon Trent.

The camera’s view was from the front of the room, so he couldn’t see what was on any of the monitors. At the back of the room there was a long table covered with typical hacker sources of fuel: cans of beer and Red Bull, bottles of Coke, an industrial coffee urn, and several Dunkin’ Donuts cartons.

It didn’t look like the hackers were prisoners, and yet it seemed likely that none of them had left this building for days. Records Tony Moretti had passed him showed twenty-three food deliveries—mostly pizza, Chinese, and sushi—at all hours of the day and night.

The camera started to swing back in the other direction. Hume saw one of the people—a black man of maybe forty—get up and move over to stand behind a white guy in his late twenties; the former seemed to be giving the latter a hand with something.

And then Hume heard a deep male voice over the headphones—preternaturally calm but tripping ever so slightly over the gap between each word: “Attention, please, everyone.” He recognized the voice, of course: it was the new, official Webmind voice—the one he’d introduced to the world with his speech at the UN. It went on: “Status reports, please. Transportation?”

“Ready,” replied a man off camera.

“Information technology?” asked Webmind.

“Not yet—another half hour, tops.”

“Housing?”

“Good to go,” said a woman.

“Health?”

“Owned!” crowed a youthful male voice.

“Environmental Protection?”

The camera happened to catch this speaker, a long-haired white man: “I’m in—finally!”

“Justice?”

“Just a sec—yes, yes, I’ve got full control now.”

“Commerce?”

This speaker, too, was on camera: an Asian fellow who looked like he might be as young as fifteen: “I’m in! I’m in!”

“Ag—” But then, maddeningly, the sound dropped out.

Hume used the laptop’s trackpad to adjust settings, but the panning video remained silent. He slapped the palm rest with his hand, there was a crackle of static over the headphones, then the audio resumed, with a man speaking: “—to go.”

Webmind’s voice again, saying two ominous words: “National Defense?”

“I’m good,” replied one man, and “Me, too,” added another.

Hume’s heart was pounding so hard he thought for a second he was having a coronary. Jesus H. Christ! He had given the hacking community what he’d thought was the ultimate challenge, for what could be more impressive than taking down a world-spanning AI? Why, nothing short of taking over the whole goddamned United States government—and nowhere better to do it from than right here in the capital region. No wonder Webmind had remained silent during the lead-up to the US election—it didn’t make any fucking difference to him who won on November 6; he was going to be in charge.

Rat-tat-tat!

Hume’s heart actually stopped for a moment. He’d been so intent on watching the screen and straining to listen that he’d missed the man approaching his car out of the darkness from the right; that man had rapped his knuckles against the passenger-side window.

Hume felt his stomach clenching as he looked up at him. The man was white, six-two, two hundred muscular pounds, perhaps thirty-five—and his head was shaved bald. He motioned for Hume to roll down the window; Hume pressed the button that did that, opening it only an inch so they could speak.

“Colonel Hume,” the man said, lifting a Glock 9mm semiautomatic pistol and pressing it against the sheet of glass between them, “won’t you come inside?”