Robert Sawyer - Wonder

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.”