Robert Sawyer - Wonder

“Yes?” said the president at last.

“Forgive my intrusion, Your Excellency, but do you know of the case of Wong Wai-Jeng?”

The president shook his head. His face was lined despite his black hair.

“He is a minor dissident—a…” Zhang paused; the term commonly used was “freedom blogger,” but the adjective wasn’t a politic one in the president’s company. “He posted… things… online.”

“But now?”

“Now, he’s been arrested.”

“As it should be.”

“Yes, but there is… an unfortunate circumstance.”

The president lifted his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“He leapt from an indoor balcony. He is now paralyzed below the waist.”

“Was he resisting arrest?”

“Well, he was fleeing, yes.”

The president made a dismissive gesture. “Then…”

“Had the arresting officers left him prone on the floor until the medics had arrived, I’m told he might have been fine. But one of the officers forced him to his feet, and he is now paralyzed below the waist.”

The president sounded exasperated. “What do you wish? For me to become involved in disciplining a police officer?”

“No, no, nothing like that. But the case is gaining international notoriety; Amnesty International has spoken of it.”

“Outsiders,” said the president, again making a dismissive hand wave.

“Yes, but a proposal has come to us from a Japanese scientist who says he can cure the young man. Perhaps you saw this scientist on the news? He gave sight to a girl in Canada; they’re calling him a miracle worker. And he is offering his services for free.”

“Why this Wong? Of all the cripples in the world?”

“The scientist says that his technique, at least at this stage, will only work with someone recently injured, whose nerves have not atrophied. And it helps that Wong is just twenty-eight, he says. ‘The resilience of youth,’ he called it.”

“I see no need to reward a criminal.”

“No, of course not, but…”

“But?”

Zhang shrugged. “But I want this to happen. I want to cut through all the red tape and make it happen.”

“Why?”

Zhang had been so sure of himself before the Long March, before being fixed by that laser-beam gaze, but now…

He took a deep breath. “Because we—because you —could use some good press for a change, Excellency. Although this man is indeed a criminal, the world will see that we treated him with generosity.”

The president looked absolutely astonished. Zhang tried not to flinch. At last, the great man nodded. “As you say,” he said.

“Thank you, Your Excellency,” said Zhang. The walk back to the door was much easier, now that he had a spring in his step.

The studio at CKCO in Kitchener was less than a fifteen-minute drive from Caitlin’s house, and traffic had been light on this Sunday morning. Caitlin’s father was back at work, but her mother was with her. Caitlin had to have makeup put on; she’d rarely worn any when she’d been blind since she’d needed help applying it, and she’d never been made up this extensively before. But, she was told, the bright studio lights would leave her looking pale if she didn’t have it done.

They placed her in front of a green screen—something she’d read about but had never seen. On one of the two monitors on the studio floor she could see the background they were compositing in. Waterloo region was surrounded by Mennonite communities, and it apparently amused someone to make it look like she was at the side of a road, with horse-drawn buggies going slowly by in the background. She’d have preferred that they’d plugged in the Perimeter Institute, or the cubic Dana Porter Library on the University of Waterloo campus.

“It’s like webcamming writ large,” she said to the floor director, as he helped position her clip-on microphone and the little earphone they’d given her. He didn’t seem to understand the comment, but it was much like that: she was simply going to talk directly into a camera. The difference was that she’d only hear, not see, the interviewer down in Washington, D.C.—the monitors had been turned so she could no longer see them. Apparently people who’d been sighted for a long time couldn’t keep from looking at monitors rather than at the camera lens. Caitlin was just fine talking to people she couldn’t see, of course, although she was—as they discovered in rehearsal—not good about staring straight ahead. But Webmind saw what she saw, and so he sent the words “Look at the lens” to her whenever her gaze drifted.

“And five, four, three…”

The floor director didn’t say the remaining digits but indicated them with his fingers.

The studio lights were bright; Caitlin didn’t like them although her mother had quipped that they were nothing compared to an August day back in Austin. Caitlin listened to the opening of the show—the host recapping Webmind’s emergence and the startling news from yesterday that a “young math wiz” had been responsible for it. And then: “… joining us now from our affiliate CKCO in Kitchener, Canada, is Caitlin Decter. Miss Decter, good morning.”

“Good morning to you,” she said.

“Miss Decter,” the male host said, “can you tell us how you came to know the entity that calls itself Webmind?”

Caitlin had let that sort of thing slide during the pre-interview with the show’s producer, but now that they were live on the air, it was time to speak up. She smiled as politely as she could, and with her best Texan manners, said, “Excuse me, sir, but, if I may, it’s not right to refer to Webmind as an ‘it.’ Webmind has accepted the designation of male—which, for the record, was my doing, not his—so please kindly show him the respect he deserves and refer to him either by his name or as ‘he.’ ”

The host sounded annoyed that they’d gone off-script so quickly. “As you say, Miss Decter.”

She smiled. “You may call me Caitlin.”

“Fine, Caitlin. But you haven’t answered my question: how did you come to know the entity called Webmind?”

“He sent a message to my eye.”

“You’ll have to explain that,” the host said, just as his producer had earlier.

“Certainly. I used to be blind—and I still am in my right eye. But I can now see with my left eye, thanks to a post-retinal implant and this” (she held up the eyePod) “which is an external signal-processing computer. As it happens, during the testing stages, this device was constantly hooked up to the World Wide Web, and during a firmware upgrade—when new software was being sent to my implant—I started getting a raw data feed from the Web being fed to me. Webmind used that to send me his initial message.”

“And what message was that?”

Caitlin decided to come clean. In the pre-interview, she’d merely discussed the email letter Webmind had sent her, but now she decided to reveal what Webmind’s first words to her actually were. “He sent, as ASCII text, ‘Seekrit message to Calculass: check your email, babe!’ ”

The interviewer looked dumbfounded. “Excuse me?”

“He was imitating something he’d seen me write in my LiveJournal entries to my friend Bashira. ‘Calculass’ is my online name, and I sometimes call Bashira ‘babe.’ Oh, and ‘seekrit’ was spelled s-e-e-k-r-i-t. It’s the way a lot of people my age write the word ‘secret’ when we mean that it isn’t really.”

“LiveJournal is a blog, right?”

“Of a sort, yes. I’ve been using it since I was ten.”

“And, as far as you know, you were the very first person Webmind contacted?”

“There’s no question about that; Webmind told me so.”