Robert Sawyer - Wonder

“Was it, by any chance, Colonel Peyton Hume?” asked Webmind.

“Malcolm, was that you?”

“No, it’s me. Webmind.”

“Oh!” said Anna. “Um, shalom.”

“The same to you, Professor Bloom.”

“And, yes, that’s who it was,” she said. “Peyton Hume.” A pause, as if none of them was sure who should speak next. And then Anna went on: “So, what can I do for you, um, gentlemen?”

“Colonel Hume is aware of the surmise you, Masayuki, and Caitlin made about my structure,” said Webmind.

“I swear I didn’t tell him anything,” Anna said.

“Thank you,” said Webmind. “I didn’t mean to imply that you had; we know the source of the inadvertent leak, and he has promised to be more circumspect in the future. But Colonel Hume and his associates used that information to develop a technique for purging my mutant packets, which they tested by modifying the firmware in routers at one AT&T switching station in Alexandria, Virginia. I defeated that attempt but need a way to defend against a large-scale deployment of the same technique.”

She said nothing, and, after a moment, Masayuki prodded her. “Anna?”

“Well,” she said, “I did say to Hume that I’m conflicted; I don’t know if your emergence, Webmind, is a bad thing or a good thing. Um, no offense.”

“None taken. How may I assuage your concerns?”

“Honestly, I don’t think you can—not yet. It’s going to take time.”

“Time’s the one thing we don’t have, Anna,” Masayuki said. “Webmind’s in danger now, and we need your help.”

Peyton Hume got out of the limo and entered his own car in the parking lot at WATCH. He waited for the other vehicle to pull away, then used his notebook computer to download a local copy of the black-hat list the NSA kept. He felt his skin crawling as he did so, but not because he found the people on the list distasteful. A few different life choices, and he might have ended up on it himself. No, what was creeping him out was the thought that Webmind was likely aware of what he was doing; the damn thing was clearly monitoring even secure traffic now and was able to pluck out classified information at will. They’d left too many back doors in the algorithms—and now they were taking it up the ass.

Once he had the copy of the database on his own hard drive, he turned off his laptop’s Internet connection. He also pulled out his cell phone and turned that off, and he shut off the GPS in his car. No point making it easy for Webmind to track his movements.

He didn’t have the luxury of traveling far; he needed somebody nearby, somebody he could speak to face-to-face, without Webmind being able to listen in. He sorted the database by ZIP code, rubbed his eyes, and peered at the screen. He was exhausted, but he could sleep when he was dead. For now, there was no time to waste. This was it, the showdown between man and machine—the only one there would ever be. Once Webmind took over, there would be no going back. There had been other times when one man could have acted, and didn’t. One man could have saved Christ; one man could have stopped Hitler. History was calling him, and so was the future.

He examined the list of names in the database and clicked on the dossier for each one. The first ten—the closest ten—didn’t have the chops. But the eleventh… He’d read about this guy often enough. His house was seventy-four miles from here, in Manassas. Of course, there was always a chance that he wasn’t home, but guys like Chase didn’t have to go anywhere; they brought the world to themselves.

Hume turned on the radio—an all-news channel; voices, not music, something to keep him awake—and put the pedal to the metal.

The current announcer was female, and she was recapping the day’s campaign news: the Republican candidate trying to pull her foot out of her mouth in Arkansas; a couple of sound bites from her running mate; some White House flak saying that the president was too busy responding to the “advent of Webmind” to be out kissing babies; and…

“… and in other Webmind news, oncologists across the globe are scrambling to analyze the proposed cure for cancer put forth by Webmind earlier today.” Hume turned up the volume. “Dr. Jon Carmody of the National Cancer Institute is cautiously optimistic.”

A male voice: “The research is certainly provocative, but it’s going to take months to work through the document Webmind posted.”

Months? It was a ruse on Webmind’s part; it had to be. Webmind was buying time. Hume gripped the steering wheel tighter and sped on into the darkness.

Masayuki Kuroda was leaning forward in his chair now, looking at the face of Anna Bloom on his screen. “The Americans have a technique that does work to scrub most of Webmind’s packets,” he said into the little camera at the top of his monitor. “Now all they have to do is get the Ciscos and Junipers of the world to upload revised firmware that would cause their routers to reject all packets with suspicious time-to-live counters.”

“Oh, I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Anna said.

“Why not?” asked Masayuki.

“Most of the routers on the Internet are running the same protocols they’ve been using for decades,” she replied. “The reason is simple: they work. Everyone’s afraid of monkeying with them. You know the old adage—if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Plus there are thousands of different models of routers and switches; you’d need a different upgrade package for each one.”

“Oh,” said Masayuki.

Anna nodded. “In 2009, an Internet provider in the Czech Republic tried to update the software for routers there,” she said. “A small error he introduced propagated right across the Web, causing traffic to slow to a crawl for over an hour. Can you imagine the lawsuits if Cisco or Juniper mucked up the whole net—if, say, the new firmware had a bug that caused it to delete all packets, or modified the contents of random packets?”

“Well,” said Masayuki, “obviously, they’d test—”

“They can’t,” said Anna. “Look, before Microsoft rolls out a new version of Windows, they have tens of thousands of beta testers try it out on their individual computers, so that bugs can be found and fixed prior to the release going public—and, still, as soon as it does, thousands of additional bugs immediately come to light. You can test router software on small networks—a few hundred or even a few thousand machines—but there’s no way to test what will happen when the software goes live on the Internet. There’s no system anywhere on the planet that duplicates the Internet’s complexity, no test bed for running large-scale experiments to see what would happen if we changed this or tweaked that. The Internet is a house of cards, and no one wants to send it all tumbling down.”

“What about the Global Environment for Network Innovations?” asked Webmind’s disembodied voice.

“What’s that?” asked Masayuki.

Anna said, “GENI is a shadow network proposed by the American National Science Foundation in 2005, precisely to address the need for a test bed for new ideas and algorithms before they’re turned loose on the real Internet. But it’s years away from completion—and unless it ends up having a Webmind of its own, there’ll be no mutant packets acting like cellular automata on it to perform tests on.”

“So Webmind is safe?” asked Masayuki, sounding relieved.

Anna raised a hand, palm out. “Oh, no, no. I didn’t say that. If the US government wants to bring you down, Webmind, they’ve got an easy way. That test they did to see if they could eliminate you: it was doubtless only phase one. You said they used an AT&T switching station?”