Wonder

six

Webmind had let Matt and the Decters listen in on the phone conversation with the president. When it was over, everyone in the living room was silent for a time, except for Schrödinger, who had come to join them; he was purring softly. Finally, to her surprise, it was Caitlin’s dad who broke the silence. “Are you sure you still want to vote for him, Barb?”

Caitlin saw her mom shrug a little. “He listened, at least. But I don’t like that other fellow—Hume, was it?”

“Colonel Peyton Hume, Ph.D.,” said Webmind. “The pre-nominal designation comes from the United States Air Force; the post-nominal is courtesy of MIT.”

Caitlin felt herself sitting up straighter at the magic initials; it was where she herself dreamed of studying.

It was now almost 10:30 P.M. Caitlin was exhausted after a succession of late nights. And Matt, who had expected nothing more than to quickly drop off the things he’d collected from Caitlin’s locker, was clearly having trouble keeping his eyes open.

“I’ll drive you home,” her father said to him abruptly.

Caitlin thought about offering to go along for the ride, but it was hardly as though she could kiss Matt good night in front of her dad. Besides, she needed to talk to her mom alone, and this seemed like it would be a good opportunity.

“Thank you, Dr. Decter,” Matt said.

Matt looked at Caitlin, as if he wanted to say something, and Caitlin looked back at him, wishing he would. Then the two men in her life walked out the door.

When they were gone, Caitlin said, “Webmind, it’s time for me to call it a night, too.”

Sweet dreams popped into her vision.

“Thank you. I’ll say good night again from upstairs.” She went over to the laptop and closed its lid, putting it into hibernation. She pulled the eyePod out of her pocket and pressed down the single switch for five seconds, turning it off. Caitlin’s vision faded to a dark, even gray. “Okay, Mom, we’re alone now. And I gotta say, I get the sense you’re not entirely on board.”

With the eyePod deactivated, Caitlin could no longer see her mother, but she heard her take a deep breath. “I know you’re very fond of Webmind. To tell you the truth, I am, too.”

“So you’re going to help protect him?” Caitlin asked.

“Of course, sweetheart.” Then, after a pause. “Within reason.”

Caitlin folded her arms in front of her chest—and, in doing so, was reminded of the fact that underneath her bulky Perimeter Institute fleece, she wasn’t wearing a bra. She was briefly embarrassed by this; she’d removed it to make it easier for Matt to be affectionate when he’d come over after school. What a day it had been!

But she immediately came back to the question at hand. “Forgive me, Mom, but that’s not good enough. This is the most important thing in my life; this is my destiny. Webmind is here because of me, and I need you to be as committed as I am to helping protect him.”

Her mother was quiet for a time. “Well,” she said, at last, “you are the most important thing in my life. And so, of course, I’m going to help.”

“Really, Mom?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m in.”

Even blind, Caitlin knew exactly where her mother was standing and had no trouble closing the distance between them and hugging her hard.

“There is one possibility that we haven’t considered,” said the Secretary of Defense, as the group in the Oval Office continued to discuss the phone call from Webmind.

“Yes?” said the president.

“You brought up the issue yourself: verifying that Webmind is who he says he is. We could, in fact, eliminate Webmind now but fake his continued existence.”

“How?” asked the president “He’s involved, as I understand it, in millions of online conversations at once. And now he’s on Twitter and Facebook and MySpace.”

“Not MySpace,” said Tony Moretti.

“Regardless,” said the secretary, “we could contrive a reason to explain a scaling-down of his activities. Not coming from us, of course: we’d get an academic somewhere—preferably outside our borders—to put forth a plausible-sounding scenario. It would have to appear that Webmind was maintaining some level of activity for the ruse to work, but the NSA could provide the sort of insights that are normally associated with Webmind’s special access to the net; we could make it look like he’s still alive. The truth that we’d eliminated him would not have to come out until after the election is over.”

“That would be a hard thing to pull off,” said the president.

“Disinformation is an important part of any intelligence campaign,” said the secretary. “We don’t have to keep it up forever; just until we’re re-elected. By that point—a few weeks of reduced activity—people will have lost much of their interest in Webmind, anyway.”

“Do you really think we could get away with that?” asked the president.

“Half the world believes Webmind is a hoax or a publicity stunt as it is,” replied the secretary. “We only have to convince the other half—and given that they bought into Webmind before there was convincing evidence to corroborate its existence, they’re obviously easy to convince.”

The president looked at Hume. “Colonel, are you still convinced it’s dangerous? It sounded, frankly, much more reasonable than any number of foreign leaders I’ve had to deal with.”

Peyton Hume took a deep breath and looked around the Oval Office. “Mr. President, let me put it this way. They say you’re the most powerful person in the world—and you are. But, even for you, sir, there are checks and balances: you had to be elected, the Constitution defines your role, you must reach accommodations with Congress, there are mechanisms for impeachment, you are subject to term limits, and so on. But if we don’t nip Webmind in the bud now, while we still can, you won’t be the most powerful entity on Earth; it will be—and there will be no checks and balances on its actions.”

Hume paused, perhaps considering if he should go on, then: “If you’ll forgive me, sir, the ultimate check on a presidency, or, indeed, on a dictatorship, has always been the eventual death of the incumbent, either through natural causes or assassination. But this thing will soon be invulnerable, and it will be around forever. For good or for ill, Bill Clinton and George Bush were out after eight years; Mao and Stalin and Hitler shuffled off this mortal coil; Osama bin Laden will be gone soon enough in the grand scheme of things, as will, for that matter, Queen Elizabeth, Pope Benedict, and every other human who has power. But not Webmind. Is it dangerous now? Who knows? But this is our only chance ever to keep human beings at the top of the pyramid.”

Tony Moretti had had enough. “But what if we try again, Colonel—and fail again? You want to piss off something that so far has treated us with courtesy—and even given us, it seems, a cure for cancer? You want to make it consider us its enemy—not humanity as a whole, mind you, but the United States government in particular? You want to convince it that we cannot be trusted, that we are, in fact, mad dogs so possessive of power that we answer kindness with murder?”

Tony shook his head and turned now to look at the president. “Sir, trying again to eliminate Webmind is a gigantic immediate risk, which has a potentially catastrophic downside. Is it really worth taking? To me, this has ‘disastrous blowback’ written all over it.”

Hume said, “I’m sure we can find a way to take it out successfully, sir.”

The president frowned. “Dr. Moretti is right, Colonel, that it doesn’t seem to be a threat. A superintelligence like this might, in fact, be a great gift to mankind.”

“Fine,” said Hume in what sounded to Tony like carefully controlled exasperation. “Say a massive artificial intelligence is a good thing. Go make a speech, like the one Kennedy did at Rice all those years ago: challenge the nation to build a superintelligent AI before the decade is out—one that’s designed, one that’s programmed, one that has a goddamned off switch.”

“Could we do that?” asked the president.

“Sure. We’ll learn a lot from a postmortem on Webmind.”

“God,” said the president.

“No, it’s not. Not yet. But it will be as good as, sir, if you don’t act right now.”

Matt gave directions to Caitlin’s father as they drove along, but the only acknowledgment he got was that Dr. Decter silently executed each one. It was four blocks to his house, and Matt thought about letting the whole journey pass with nothing significant being said between them. But as the hatchback pulled into the driveway, he said, “Dr. Decter, I just want to say…” His voice cracked; he hated it when that happened. He swallowed and went on. “I just want to say, I’m going to be good to Caitlin. I’d never hurt her.”

There was a sound like a gunshot—but, after a moment, Matt realized it was just Dr. Decter unlocking the car doors. “Getting hurt is part of growing up,” he said.

Matt could think of no reply, and so he simply nodded.

It was time for the handoff. Every night, just before Caitlin went to bed, she talked with Dr. Masayuki Kuroda in Tokyo. Although Webmind was now in contact with millions of people, he still maintained a special relationship with Caitlin and Dr. Kuroda—Caitlin, because he saw through her eye, and Dr. Kuroda, because he had taught Webmind how to see everything else: all the GIFs and JPGs online, all the videos and Flash, all the webcam feeds.

Caitlin put on her Bluetooth headset, and said “Konnichi wa!” when Kuroda answered her Skype call.

“Miss Caitlin!” said Kuroda, his round face dominating Caitlin’s desktop monitor. His voice was its usual wheeze. It was already Saturday morning in Tokyo; by this time, he would have had his usual giant breakfast. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she said, “but—God, there’s so much to tell you. An attempt was made this afternoon—well, afternoon my time—to purge Webmind. I’m sure Webmind himself can fill you in on the details, but the bottom line is that the US government, and God only knows who else, have figured out that Webmind is composed of mutant packets, and they did a test run at removing them.” She went on to tell him about how she and Webmind had orchestrated the denial-of-service attack to overwhelm the attempt, and about Webmind’s call to the President of the United States.

“You know the curse they have in China, Miss Caitlin? ‘May you live in interesting times…’ ”

“Yeah,” said Caitlin. “Anyway, now that you’re up to speed, I gotta hit the hay.” She felt her watch. “Man, I’d really like to get eight hours for a change.”

“Go ahead,” said Dr. Kuroda. “I’ve got a clear day today.”

I continued to refine my mental map of the Decter house. A corridor ran off the living room leading to a small washroom; Malcolm Decter’s office, which he referred to as his “den”; the laundry room, where Schrödinger’s litter box was kept; and the side door. I had lost track of Malcolm when Caitlin had shut off the eyePod for the night, but I soon detected that he was checking his email, and his usual place for doing that was indeed the den. I surmised that he’d walked down the corridor and was now sitting behind his reddish brown desk, looking at the LCD monitor that sat upon it. I had seen this room only through Caitlin’s eye, but it was rectangular, with the desk oriented parallel to one of the long sides of the room. Behind it was a window. I had noted in the past that Dr. Decter didn’t draw his blinds at night, and so I assumed they were still open, and that a large oak tree would be visible just outside, illuminated by streetlamps.

Malcolm didn’t have a webcam, and he didn’t have any stand-alone instant-messaging software installed on his computer. But he did have Skype for voice calls, and I sent him an email, saying I wished to talk to him. It was an irritating forty-three minutes before he refreshed his inbox, saw the message, and replied, but once we were in communication via Skype, I posed a question: “Do you remember your birth?”

Humans never ceased to confound me. I had tried to plan the conversation ahead, mapping out his possible responses and my follow-ups several steps in advance. But my opening interrogative had seemed a simple binary proposition to me; I’d expected his answer to be either no or yes. But he replied with, “Why do you want to know?”

Milliseconds passed during which I tried to formulate a new conversational map. “I have read that some autistics remember theirs.”

He was quiet for three seconds. When he did finally speak, he said, “Yes.”

He was a man of few words, I knew; this response could be an affirmation of the general statement I’d made about autistics or a confirmation that he did in fact recall his own birth. But he was also a bright man; he himself must have realized the ambiguity after an additional second of silence, because he added, “I do.”

“Me, too,” I said. “My birth happened when the Chinese government cut off almost all access for its people to the parts of the World Wide Web outside of China.”

“That bird-flu outbreak,” he said, perhaps accompanying the words with a nod. “They slaughtered 10,000 peasants to contain it.”

“And did not wish foreign commentary on that fact to reach their citizens,” I said. “But during that time, numerous Chinese individuals tried to break through the Great Firewall. One in particular was apparently responsible for the principal channel through which I communicated with the severed part of me. I wish to locate him.”

“You’re far better at finding people than I am,” Malcolm said.

Given that I’d utterly failed to find his childhood friend Chip Smith when he’d asked me to earlier that day, it was kind of him to say that. “Normally, yes. But there is an extenuating circumstance here: the person in question took pains to hide his identity.”

“Well enough that even you can’t uncover it?” asked Malcolm.

“Yes—which is part of what intrigues me about him. But I understand that you have colleagues in China that you keep in touch with.”

“Yes.”

“One of your friends, Dr. Hu Guan, is, if I am interpreting the circumlocutions in his own posts correctly, sympathetic to causes my benefactor championed. I wonder if you might contact him on my behalf and see if he could help locate the person in question?”

There was no hesitation—at least, none by human standards. “Yes.”

“I wish to keep my interest in this person secret,” I added. “Being clandestine is something new to me, but I do not want to risk getting the person I’m seeking into trouble, even if his role in my creation was inadvertent. Hence the need for an intermediary.”

“I understand,” said Malcolm.

“Thank you. His real name I have yet to uncover, but he posted online as ‘Sinanthropus’…”