Robert Sawyer - Wonder

Hobo briefly turned his head to look at Sho, made a pant-hoot, then looked out at the vast sea of faces, representing the member nations. He made a general sweep of his arms, encompassing all those people, and then began moving his hands again.

Shoshana looked even more startled than she had a moment ago, and at first she didn’t speak.

“Go ahead,” said Webmind, through the twin speakers on Dr. Theopolis, but without also pumping it out over the chamber’s sound system. “Tell them what he’s saying.”

Shoshana swallowed, leaned into the microphone on the podium, and said, “He says, ‘Wrong, wrong, wrong.’ ”

Hobo indicated the delegates again and his hands continued to move.

She went on. “He says, ‘All thump chest, all thump chest.’ ” She hesitated for a second, then apparently decided she had to explain. She looked out at the eighteen hundred people. “Hobo spent his early years at the Georgia Zoo. The bonobo compound faced the gorilla compound. He called the alpha male gorilla ‘thump chest.’ ”

She let it sink in, and Caitlin, still in the wings, suddenly realized what Hobo meant. With his simple clarity of vision, he was saying it was nuts to have a room filled almost exclusively with alpha males. He could see it in their postures, sense it in their attitudes, smell it in their pheromones. The world’s leaders were those who pushed, those who sought power, those who tried constantly to dominate others.

Hobo lifted the disk around his neck as if showing it to the audience. Then, letting the disk dangle again, he moved his hands, and Shoshana translated. “ ‘Friend not thump chest. Friend good friend.’ ”

Hobo indicated himself, and made more signs. Shoshana said, “ ‘Hobo not thump chest. Hobo good ape.’ ” She looked startled when he pointed at her. “Um, ‘Shoshana not thump chest. Shoshana good human.’” Hobo then spread his arms, and Caitlin guessed that it wasn’t an ASL sign, but simply was meant to encompass the whole General Assembly. And then his hands fluttered again. “ ‘Need more good human here,’ ” Shoshana said on his behalf.

The president spoke from his position behind them on the jade dais. “Um, thank you, Webmind. And thank you Mister, um, Hobo.”

Webmind’s smooth audiobook-narrator’s voice said: “It is Hobo and I who thank you, Mr. President.” And, perhaps at a sign from Webmind, Hobo turned and walked off the stage, Dr. Theopolis swinging from his neck.

Colonel Hume returned to his car, drove a short distance from Devon Hawkins’s house, and pulled into a strip mall. He parked and massaged his temples.

First Chase, now Crowbar Alpha. One could have been an anomaly, but two was a definite pattern.

Hume felt his stomach knotting. He undid his shoulder belt, then rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. There was only one possible answer: Webmind knew he was attempting to find a skilled hacker to do what the US government lacked the balls to do—and so it was tracking down such hackers and eliminating them.

But how? How could it do that?

Of course. That stupid PayPal come-on it had sent to the world; enough people fell for the Nigerian inheritance scam to make it still worth trying right up till—well, till Webmind pulled the plug on spam. But if people had fallen for that, surely countless more had fallen for this, sending donations to Webmind. Which meant it had a wad of money. Which meant it could hire thugs, hit men, whatever it wanted.

But how did it know which hackers to go after? How did it know who Hume was going to approach?

There was only one answer. Webmind must have noted the black-hat database Hume had downloaded to his laptop on Friday, and was guessing which individuals Hume might have gone after, probably using the same criteria Hume himself had used: level of hacking skill and proximity.

Could he risk approaching a third hacker? Would that be tantamount to issuing a death sentence for that person? Or—

Webmind had eliminated Hawkins before Hume had even thought about contacting him—days before, in fact. It had probably already guessed who Hume’s third choice would have been—and his fourth, and his fifth.

Hume was almost afraid to turn his computer back on to check the database again, but he had taken precautions; the laptop was offline. He was using a local copy of the black-hat database, and there was no way Webmind could know who he was looking up in it.

He pulled his laptop out from under the passenger seat, woke it from hibernation, and looked at the list. There were 142 names on it.

He wondered just how thorough Webmind had been.

The announcer’s portentous voice: “From Comedy Central’s World News Headquarters in New York, this is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

Caitlin could barely contain herself as she and her mom watched from the green room. Yes, she’d already been on TV once—but this was different! She loved, loved, loved The Daily Show, and had the biggest crush ever on Jon Stewart. She hadn’t yet had a chance to see the show since gaining sight, and was fascinated to see what Stewart looked like; she’d never have guessed he had gray hair.

Caitlin knew about Stewart’s various visual schticks, because her friend Stacy had described them for her: today it was the mad scribbling on the pages in front of him while the music played, followed by the flipping of the pen into the air and the seemingly effortless catching of it as it fell back down—and to see it, on the flat-panel wall monitor, made her smile from ear to ear. And—oh my God!—she’d gotten to meet John Oliver earlier; she loved his British accent and his sense of the absurd.

Stewart did two segments before Caitlin was called out for her interview. Her mom stayed in the green room as Caitlin was escorted to the set.

“Caitlin, thank you for coming,” Stewart said. They were both seated in wheeled chairs, with a glossy black U-shaped desk between them.

She tried not to bounce up and down on her chair. “My pleasure, Jon.”

“You’re originally from Austin?”

“Don’t mess with Texas,” Caitlin said, grinning.

“No, no. I’ll leave that to the Texans. But now you live in Canada, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And—let me get this straight—when you lived here, you were blind, but when you went to Canada, you gained sight? So, is that the kind of thing you get with Canadian-style health care?”

Caitlin laughed. “I guess so—although, actually, I went to Japan for the procedure.”

“Right, yes. And they put an implant in your head—was it a Sony?”

Caitlin laughed again—in fact, she was afraid she was about to get the giggles. “No, no, no. It was custom-built.”

“And it’s through this implant that Webmind first saw our world—seeing what you see, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“So, he’s looking at me right now?”

“Yes, he is.”

Stewart leaned back in his chair, and made a show of smoothing his hair. “And…?”

Webmind sent text to her eye. “He says you have ‘a fascinating countenance.’ But I think you’re adorable!”

Stewart tried to suppress a grin. “And you are—um, how old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“You are… utterly and completely devoid of interest to a man my age.” And he made a comic face and loosened his tie in what Caitlin guessed was an “Is it hot in here?” way. She laughed out loud.

“Earlier today,” Stewart said, “Webmind spoke at the United Nations, and you were there?”

“Oh, yes—it was awesome!”

“And—let me get this straight—he used an ape to speak for him? Was the ape named Caesar, by any chance? ’Cause that could spell trouble.”