Robert Sawyer - Wonder

Of course. There were no bookcases in the living room.

“What do your parents do?” Caitlin asked.

“Insurance stuff,” Sunshine said.

Well, that made sense: Kitchener-Waterloo’s biggest nontech area of business was, in fact, insurance. “Ah.”

Sunshine’s bedroom turned out to be downstairs. She led the way but went much too fast for Caitlin, who still needed to go very carefully on unfamiliar staircases. Still, soon enough she was down in Sunshine’s room.

“So—you and Matt!” Sunshine said, grinning, as she sat on the edge of her unmade bed.

“Yeah,” Caitlin said, smiling.

Sunshine shook her head slightly, and Caitlin was afraid she was going to say what Bashira kept saying: that Caitlin was out of Matt’s league, that she should be dating someone better-looking than him. But, to her relief, what Sunshine said was, “He’s too smart for me. But he seems nice.”

“He is,” Caitlin said firmly. She was still standing. There was an empty chair, but she rather liked that it was unremarked upon. When she’d been blind, the first thing people had done whenever she’d entered an unfamiliar room was make a fuss over getting her seated, as if she were infirm.

“Too bad he had to go. He’ll probably be tied up all day now, I guess.” Sunshine smiled then said, “Know what you should do?”

Caitlin shook her head.

Sunshine stood and, to Caitlin’s astonishment, she pulled her red T-shirt up over her head, exposing a pair of quite large breasts held up by a frilly beige bra; two seconds later, the bra was undone and had slipped down her flat belly.

Caitlin was surprised by what Sunshine had just done—and also half-surprised that Webmind hadn’t popped a comment into her eye, but, then again, if you’d looked at every picture on the World Wide Web, you’d probably be bored to death of breasts.

Sunshine then took something—her cell phone, that was it—out of her jeans pocket. She held the phone in one hand and—ah, that fake camera-shutter sound: she took a picture, presumably of her own chest. Then she tapped quickly away at the phone’s keyboard, and said, triumphantly, “There!”

“What?” said Caitlin.

“I just sent him a picture of my boobs.”

“Matt?” said Caitlin, incredulously.

Sunshine laughed. “No, my boyfriend, Tyler.” She lifted her breasts in her palms, then let them fall. “No offense, Caitlin, but I don’t think Matt’s ready for these babies.”

Caitlin grinned. She knew Sunshine was sixteen, and that Tyler was nineteen and worked as a security guard somewhere.

Sunshine went on. “Helps to let him know I’m thinking of him while he’s at work.”

Caitlin knew about the practice, of course: sexting, the sending of suggestive photos via cell phones. But she’d never seen it before, and it was hardly a topic that had come up often at the Texas School for the Blind.

Sunshine hooked her bra back up and pulled down her T-shirt. Then she gestured at Caitlin—or, more precisely, Caitlin realized belatedly, at her chest. “You should flash Matt. He’ll love it.”

The BlackBerry attached to the back of her eyePod was mounted in such a way that the camera was covered, and it was slaved to sending data to Dr. Kuroda’s servers in Tokyo, and, of course, to Webmind.

And so her parents had gotten her another BlackBerry—a different and somewhat larger model with a red casing. She carried the eyePod in her left hip pocket, and the other BlackBerry in her right one. She fished it out, turned it over so she could see—yes, that was it: the camera lens.

“I haven’t taken any pictures with it yet,” Caitlin said.

Sunshine held out her hand and sounded pleased that she could teach something to Caitlin. “Here, I’ll show you how.”

Caitlin considered. Webmind had seen her in various states of undress now, when she’d looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, so that certainly wasn’t an obstacle—and, besides, he’d assured her that her BlackBerry was now secure; no way those voyeurs at WATCH could be sneaking a peek.

And, well, she had been thinking just yesterday about the fact that American girls lose their virginity on average at 16.40 years of age—meaning she had just 142 days left if she wasn’t going to end up on the trailing edge. And Matt was someone she really cared about, and she could tell he really cared about her, too.

“Why the heck not?” she said, and she started unbuttoning her shirt.

Masayuki Kuroda looked at the webcam. “So,” Anna Bloom said, “the biggest threat to Webmind is probably BGP hijacking. Of course, there are safeguards, and anyone wanting to do it would have to figure out how to identify your special packets—and then figure out how to get routers to distinguish those mutants from the regular kind.”

“Colonel Hume managed that in his test run,” Kuroda said. “So it’s doable.”

“It’s doable by modifying router hardware,” Anna said. “We can hope it’s not something that could easily be done with BGP routing tables—but if it is…” She shook her head, then: “Look, it’s getting awfully late here. I’ve got to call it a night. Webmind, I wish you luck.”

“Thank you,” Webmind said.

She leaned forward, and then her camera went off.

“Well,” said Dr. Kuroda, “let’s hope your foes aren’t as clever as Anna.”

Of course, despite the gravity of the conversation, I had been cycling through communication with many others during it. And so I had learned that Malcolm Decter’s colleague in China had succeeded where I had failed, locating Sinanthropus in a hospital in Beijing. I’d accessed his medical records—and was distressed to learn of his condition. But a course of action immediately occurred to me, and, now that Professor Bloom was offline, I broached the topic with Dr. Kuroda.

“I have become aware of a young man,” I said, “who has recently suffered a spinal-cord injury, leaving him a paraplegic.”

“That’s awful,” Kuroda said, but I could tell by his vocal inflection that it was merely a reflex reply—an autoresponder, if you will.

I pressed on. “It is, yes. And I was hoping you might help him.”

“Um, Webmind, I’m not a medical doctor; I’m an information theorist.”

“Of course,” I said patiently. “But I have examined his medical records, including his digitized X-rays and MRI scans. I know precisely what’s wrong with him—and it is an information-processing issue. I can suggest straightforward modifications to the eyePod and the post-retinal implant you created for Caitlin that will almost certainly cure his condition.”

“Really? That‛s… wow.”

“Indeed. And yes: really.”

“Wow,” he said again. But then, after a moment, he added, “But why him? There are—I don’t know—there must be millions of people with spinal-cord injuries worldwide. Why help this person first?”

It was not instinctive for me to do so, but I was nonetheless learning to employ the technique of answering a question with a question—especially when I was not yet ready to be forthcoming, something else that was new to me. I’d been amused to learn that this approach had fooled many into thinking the first chatbots were actually conscious, for they replied to questions such as, “What should I do about my mother?” with questions of their own, such as, “Why do you worry about what other people think?”

I threw a version of Dr. Kuroda’s question back at him: “Why did you decide to give Caitlin sight first, before all the other blind people in the world?”

He lifted his rounded shoulders. “The etiology of her blindness. She had Tomasevic’s syndrome, and that’s a simple signal-encoding difficulty—clearly up my street.”