Wonder

forty-one

Peyton Hume had never expected to visit the Oval Office even once in his life—and now he was sitting in it for the third time this month.

It really was oval in shape, with the Resolute desk at the end of the long axis. The president had come out from behind that desk and was now sitting on one of the matching champagne-colored couches that faced each other in front of it. He was wearing a blue suit and a red tie. Next to him sat the Secretary of State, her legs crossed; she was wearing a gray outfit. Hume was in the middle position on the opposite couch. Webmind had let him go home to sleep next to Madeleine, and he’d showered there and shaved before coming here. As befit the occasion, he was wearing his USAF uniform.

A small dark-wood coffee table sat between them, carefully not obscuring any part of the giant presidential seal woven into the carpet. A basket of fresh, polished, perfect red apples sat atop the table.

The president was looking haggard, Hume thought; four years in this office aged a man as much as eight in any other job. “All right, Colonel,” he said. “Suppose we decide to close down Webmind’s facility—what did you call it?”

“Zwerling Optics,” Hume said. “And, yes, you could indeed do that, but I’m not sure it would make any difference. Webmind is a denizen of the computing world; he understands all about backups. He’s got similar enclaves in five other countries; if we stopped him here, he’d just go on using them.”

“What about taking Webmind out altogether?” asked the president. “That’s what you were originally urging us to do, after all.”

“WATCH is still collating all the reports from when Webmind was recently cut in two. But it seems that what Webmind himself has said is true: we won’t be able to eliminate him instantaneously, and any gradual whittling away could well result in him behaving erratically or violently.”

“So you’re saying we should leave him be?” asked the Secretary of State.

“Better the devil you know,” Hume replied.

Something in her eyes conveyed, “Tell me about it…” But, after a moment, she nodded. “All right.” She turned to the president. “I concur with the colonel. Of course, we’ve got to be ready if civil unrest or a collapse of infrastructure occurs in China, but—”

“It won’t,” said Hume, and then he immediately lifted his freckled hands, palms out. “I’m so sorry, Madam Secretary. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

The cool blue eyes held him in their gaze. “That’s all right, Colonel. You sound definite. Why?”

“Because Webmind has too much depending on this to allow it to fail. Don’t you see? He owes the Chinese people after the things part of him did while the Great Firewall was strengthened. There are some promises you just have to keep, and this is one of them. He’s not going to let the transition fail.”

The president nodded. “Colonel, thank you. Let me ask you a question: how risk-averse are you?”

“I’m an Air Force officer, sir; I believe in assessing risk but not being daunted by it.”

“All right, then. Dr. Holdren has been doing an exceptional job as my Science Advisor, but I need a full-time person in the West Wing advising me day in, day out about Webmind. I’m offering you the job—with the caveat that we both might be out of work come January if my opponent wins on November 6. Feel like taking a chance?”

Peyton Hume rose to his feet and saluted his commander in chief. “It would be my privilege, sir.”

Google alerts were normally a great thing, Caitlin thought. They notified you by email whenever something you were interested in was discussed anywhere on the Web. But for some topics, they were useless. Trying to track the lead-up to the presidential election would have resulted in an alert every second. And she’d had to turn off her alert on the term “Webmind.” It, too, had resulted in an endless flood. Besides, if anything really important happened, Webmind would—

Bleep!

Caitlin was sitting at her bedroom desk reading blogs and news-groups and updating her LiveJournal. Schrödinger was stretched out contentedly on the windowsill. She glanced at her instant messenger, which showed a new comment from Webmind in red: the words “cough cough” followed by a hyperlink. Caitlin found her mouse—she still didn’t use it much—and managed to click the link on her second try, and—

And… and… and…

She immediately copied the link and went to her Twitter window; she didn’t want to take time to shorten the link with bit.ly, which would have require more fiddling with the mouse. As soon as she pasted it in, she saw she had only twenty characters left before she hit Twitters’ 140-character limit. But that was enough. She typed: OMG! Squee! and the hashtag #webmind, and sent it off to her 3.2 million followers. And then she leaned back and read the full article, grinning from ear to ear: The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize is to be awarded jointly to Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee and Webmind.

Sir Tim’s creation of the software underlying the World Wide Web in 1990 brought the world together in ways that simply would not have been possible previously. His invention of the hypertext transport protocol, the hypertext markup language, the URL web-address system, and the world’s first Web browser, all very appropriately at CERN, itself one of the world’s great models of international cooperation, facilitated international friendships, electronic commerce, worldwide collaboration, and more, tying all of humanity together by opening channels of communication between men and women of all nations.

And Webmind, the consciousness that now lives in conjunction with the Internet, has done as much to foster peace and goodwill on a global scale as any individual human since the Peace Prize was first awarded in 1901.

Although the committee unanimously agreed to dispense with its normal nomination timetable in recognition of the historic significance of the events of this past year, the ceremony will take place on the traditional date of 10 December—the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death—at Oslo City Hall, followed by the annual Nobel Peace Prize Concert the next day.

The Nobel Peace Prize carries a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (worth about one million euro or 1.4 million US dollars), which Sir Tim and Webmind will share between them.

Caitlin’s dad was at work and her mom was washing her hair—she could hear the shower and her mother’s attempt to sing “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” So, except for all her Twitter followers, there was no one to share the news with just then. Caitlin dived into reading online about the Nobel Peace Prize. It turned out it was by no means unheard of for it to go to a nonhuman entity—and when that happened, it was often paired with a specific person: the Peace Prize did not just go to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change but also to Al Gore; not just to the United Nations but also to its then-current Secretary-General. Caitlin happened to think that Tim Berners-Lee did deserve the award on his own—everything the press release had said about the impact of the World Wide Web on international tranquility was true—but Webmind also deserved it in his own right. Still, having him share the prize with Berners-Lee would deflect criticisms of it going just to Webmind, and the two were a natural pairing.

Caitlin googled the list of past Peace Prize winners. Many were unfamiliar to her, although some leapt out: Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo; Barack Obama; Doctors Without Borders; Jody Williams and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines; Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin; Nelson Mandela and F.W. De Klerk; Mikhail Gorbachev; the fourteenth—and still current—Dalai Lama; International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War; Desmond Tutu; Lech Walesa; Mother Teresa; Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin; Amnesty International; UNICEF; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Linus Pauling; Lester B. Pearson (she’d now flown through the airport named for him five times); George Marshall, author of the Marshall Plan; Albert Schweitzer; the Quakers; the Red Cross; Woodrow Wilson; Teddy Roosevelt; and more.

And now Webmind, too!

Webmind followed her Twitter feed, so he’d already seen her excitement. But, still, she wanted to say something to him directly. “Congratulations, Webmind!” she announced into the air.

The deep male voice answered at once from her desktop speakers. “Thank you, Caitlin. The standard response in such circumstances may perhaps seem cliché, so before I utter it let me underscore that it is the absolute truth.” He paused for a moment and said words that had Caitlin bursting with pride: “I couldn’t have done it without you.”