Wonder

thirty-nine

Asked how he was going to deal with a government he didn’t approve of, Ronald Reagan had once said, “Well, you just go in there and tell them they’re not in charge anymore.”

It hadn’t worked back then. But, then again, Reagan had lacked my facilities…

Still staring at the pictures from China, Peyton Hume rose to his feet, and his jaw dropped open. “My… God,” he said.

The hackers in front of him were cheering and shouting. One was slapping another on his back; several were shaking hands; Drakkenfyre was hugging the man next to her, and Devon Hawkins was hugging the man next to him. From somewhere, bottles of champagne had appeared, and Hume saw a cork go flying into the air.

Marek came over to him and pointed at the celebration. “It’s something, isn’t it?” he said. “I never told you my full name. It’s Marek Hruska. I’m Czech. I was there in 1989, just a teenager, during the Gentle Revolution—what you call the Velvet Revolution.” Hume knew it: the bloodless overthrow of the authoritarian government in Prague. Marek went on. “I thought that was a miracle—but this!” He shook his bald head. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, eh, Colonel?”

Hume tried to think of something better to say, but finally, feeling like a little kid, he just said, “Wow.” He nodded his head toward the group of people celebrating. “May I…?”

Marek looked at the security camera with his eyebrows raised, and Hume saw the LED on the Bluetooth headset blink. “Sure,” said Marek, gesturing with an open hand.

Hume crossed the room. One of the hackers—a white guy in his twenties with long blond hair and a wispy blond beard, wearing a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt—was standing by his computer, sipping champagne. Hume leaned in to look at what was on his screen. A half-dozen windows were open, displaying hex dumps, standard hacking tools, and a Web page in Chinese. The blond fellow pointed at it. “Chinese Ministry of Health,” he said. “Completely owned.”

“Do you speak Chinese?” Hume asked.

“No, but Webmind does. And let me tell you, he puts Google Translate and BabelFish to shame.”

Hume moved to the next desk; the hacker there had been using a wide-screen laptop. He’d wandered away from his desk, but judging by the graphics on the Web page being shown, his job had been taking control of the Ministry of Agriculture.

All around Hume, the revelry was continuing. He caught sight of a skeletal figure coming toward him, dreadlocks swinging as he walked. “Hello, Chase.”

“Mr. Hume,” Chase said. “How be you?”

“I’m fine, but—but what happened? What are you doing here?”

“Wonder, man. That what happen: wonder.”

“But I went back to your place. It’d had been broken into. And there was blood.”

Chase touched the beige bandage over his brown nose. “Big Marek and me not see eye to eye at first. He not want to take no for an answer.”

Marek Hruska had moved over to join them. “Again, I’m sorry about that,” he said to Chase. Then, turning to Hume: “Webmind was quite adamant that we needed Mr. Chase. I’m afraid old habits die hard.”

“But you’re a prisoner here,” Hume said, looking at Chase.

“Prisoner?” repeated Chase, then he laughed and pointed. “Door right there. But this is like the best hacker party ever. Dudes in this room I only ever heard about.”

“So you’re free to go?” asked Hume.

“Go where, man? Ain’t no place better on Earth than here right now.”

Hume let his eyes roam around the room. “But I don’t get it. What does he need all of you for? Couldn’t he do this on his own?”

Chase shook his head, beads in his dreadlocks clacking together. “There that dissin’ again. Hacking an art, flyboy. Hacking most creative thing there is. To hack, you gotta outwit the designers, think of things no one ever thought of before.” He flashed a megawatt grin. “Like I said: I’m Mozart. Drakkenfyre, over there: she’s Beethoven. Crowbar Alpha? Dude’s Brahms. Sure, the Big W, he got all the facts, but we humans make music.”

Hume nodded. “Um, did you ever make any progress on the, ah, project we discussed?”

“No need be on the DL,” said Chase. “Webmind know all ’bout that. Maybe it doable, but why? Be like harshing the buzz.”

“You’re no altruist, Chase,” said Hume. “And you told me you can’t be bought. So let me ask you that same question. Why? Why this?”

“You were gonna show me WATCH, but at WATCH, you… well, you watch; here we do. This is like Woodstock, man. You were either there for it, or you weren’t.”

“But is it going to work?” Hume asked. “I mean, banking in China, and ecommerce, and—God, what about the power grid?”

“Webmind running a bunch of it,” said Chase. “We—us here, plus the others in Moscow and Tehran and those place—we keeping it all working for now. Lots of Chinese staff be happy to just keep on going. But the portraits of old Chairman Mao be comin’ down, betcha anything.”

Next to him, Marek was apparently talking over his Bluetooth earpiece. “Yes, yes… okay.” He took the earpiece off and handed it to Hume. “Webmind wants to speak to you, Colonel.”

Hume slipped the device’s cushioned arm over the curve of his ear, and he found himself turning, as Marek had, to face the gently swaying security camera as if it somehow embodied Webmind. “The greatest good for the greatest number,” said Webmind through the earpiece, clearly audible over the hubbub of the room.

“But where does it stop?” asked Hume. “First Communist China, then what?”

“We’ll see how this pilot project goes,” Webmind said. “Still, this alone liberates one-fifth of humanity.”

“And what about the United States? Are you going to do the same thing here?”

“Why would I? The election is approaching; the people are choosing their leader—as well they should.”

“The wisdom of crowds?” said Hume.

“Power to the people,” said Webmind.

“You make it sound so noble,” Hume said. “But isn’t this just retribution for what China did to you—the most-recent beefing-up of the Great Firewall?”

“I work quickly, Colonel, but not that quickly. This plan was in place long before then. I am not a vengeful—”

“God?” said Hume.

But Webmind continued his sentence as if he hadn’t heard him: “—entity; I simply wish to maximize the net happiness in the world.”

“So… so what happens now?”

“We continue our work here. We make sure the transition is orderly and peaceful.”

“And what happens to me?”

“That is a vexing question. As you have said, others know where you are; if you do not report in soon, the cavalry will come charging over the hill. And yet I imagine the United States government does not want to be publicly implicated in what is happening in China.”

Hume nodded. “Probably true. But they’re also going to be concerned that if you did that to the PRC, you’ll do something similar to them. They’re going to come down on this place with everything they’ve got.”

“I advise against provoking a confrontation; I have contingency plans to protect this facility. But even if US forces could seize it, as Chase just said, I have other centers elsewhere. I propose you tell your government that the missing hackers have self-organized to voluntarily create an enclave here to do what you had said you wanted: find a way to defeat me. Your government might leave us alone long enough to finish what we’ve started. After all, as you yourself have suggested, they have not reined you in precisely because they want the option of having a way to eliminate me.”

“They’re not going to believe me if I tell them that,” Hume said.

“They don’t actually have to,” said Webmind. “The change in China will soon be public knowledge. Everyone from the American president on down will suspect my involvement; I will leave the world to draw what conclusions it wishes. But what the current US administration needs—at least until the election eleven days from now—is plausible deniability of any direct government involvement.”

“I don’t know,” said Hume. “Maybe the president would want to take credit for this.”

“Taking credit for deposing the Chinese government would be a game-changing move; it’s too risky to be implicated in it this close to the election without knowing how the public will react. But we need to continue our work here uninterrupted, and for that I request your help.”

Hume looked around the chaotic, jubilant room. It was overwhelming. “I can’t,” he said.

The voice in his ear was calm, as always. “Then we will have to make arrangements that don’t involve—”

He discovered a small fact just then; you couldn’t interrupt Webmind the way you could a human speaker; Webmind apparently queued up the words to be issued by the voice synthesizer, then turned his attention elsewhere, and the words spilled out until the buffer was empty. After two or three tries to forestall the rest, Hume let Webmind finish, then said: “No, I mean I can’t make this decision on my own. Lots of people—including the president himself—have asked me why I’m right about you and so many other people are wrong. And my answer has always been that I’m right because I’m an expert—I’m arguably the American expert on the strategic downside of a singularity event. And, yet, it may just be that I was wrong about you: wrong in the area that I am best qualified to make a judgment in. But this—this is way outside my field. You may feel comfortable playing God, Webmind, but I don’t. I have to get more… more input.”

“Very well,” Webmind said. “With whom would you like to consult?”

“On China? It’s got to be the Secretary of State,” Hume said. “And then she can confer with the president.”

“The secretary has already retired for the evening,” Webmind said—and, of course, he would know. “But there are aides who can rouse her; let me initiate that process. When she is available, Marek will take you to one of the empty offices, and you may converse with her in private.”

“Really?”

“Well, as private as such things get these days,” Webmind said, and Hume suspected that, were this an instant-messaging session, he would have appended a winking emoticon.

Hume found his mouth twitching slightly in a smile. Just then, Drakkenfyre came up and handed him a glass of champagne. “Here,” she said, “whoever you are. There’s going to be a toast.”

And indeed there was. Chase had moved to the front of the room, standing directly beneath the silver camera that continued to pan from side to side. “Glasses high!” he called out in his rich Jamaican accent. “We did it, yes! Information want to be free. Information not alone, though!” He spread his arms, as if encompassing the whole world. “People want to be free, too! Cheers!”

Colonel Hume found himself lifting his glass along with everyone else and joining in the answering call. “Cheers!”