Robert Sawyer - Wonder

Hume had thought about changing out of his Air Force uniform; wearing it for this interview was just going to make matters worse for himself, he knew—but it added weight to his words. “Good evening, Brian.”

“So—Webmind. Exactly what is it?”

“Webmind is a collection of mutant packets on the Internet.”

“Which means what, exactly?”

“Whenever you send something over the Internet, be it a document, a photo, a video, or an email message, it’s chopped up into little pieces called packets, and these are sent out by your computer on a multileg journey; they’re handed off along the way by devices called routers.

“Each packet has a header that contains the sending address, the destination address, and a hop counter, which keeps track of how many routers the packet has passed through. The hop counter is sometimes also called the time-to-live counter: it starts with the maximum number of hops allowed and works its way, hop by hop, down toward zero. Of course, a packet is supposed to reach its intended destination before the counter hits zero, but if it doesn’t, the next router in line is supposed to delete the packet and ask the sender to try its luck again with a duplicate packet.”

“Okay,” said Brian Williams. “But you said Webmind consists of mutant packets?”

“That’s right. Its packets have hop counters that never finish their countdown; they never reach zero. Those packets were probably created by buggy routers in the first place, and now there are trillions of them, some of which might have been bouncing around the Web for years. The mutant packets are like cancer cells; they never die.”

“It’s quite a breakthrough, Colonel Hume, and thank—”

“FF, EA, 62, 1C, 17,” said Hume. He’d gotten it out—enough at least so that others could find the rest.

“I—I beg your pardon?”

“FF, EA, 62, 1C, 17. That’s the beginning of the Webmind signature: most of the mutant packets contain that hexadecimal code. It’s the target string.”

“Target string?”

“Exactly. If those packets could be deleted, Webmind would disappear.”

“Colonel Hume, thank you. In other news tonight…”

In the Washington studio, the floor director made a hand gesture. “And we’re clear!”

The audio technician came over to remove Hume’s lavaliere microphone. “Unusual interview,” he said.

Hume’s forehead was slick with sweat. “Oh?”

“Yeah. Maybe it’s just me, but it sounded a bit like you were calling on the hacking community to write a virus to kill the Webmind,” said the audio man. “You know how those guys love a challenge.”

Hume stood up and straightened his uniform jacket. “Do they?” he replied.

Houston, we have a problem.

Caitlin was simultaneously alarmed and amused as those words flashed in her vision. She’d been born in Houston; her family had moved to Austin when she was six—and so she admired Webmind’s word play. “Wassup?” she said.

Her family had finished dinner a few minutes ago, and she was just entering her bedroom. She pointed at her desktop computer, and Webmind switched to speaking through the computer’s speakers—for him a much slower method of communicating than pumping out text, but Caitlin’s visual reading speed, even when using a Braille font, was still quite low.

“Colonel Hume just appeared on the NBC Nightly News,” Webmind said, as she sat down in front of her desk. “He explained how to identify the majority of my mutant packets. He did not explicitly state his intentions, but it seems clear his goal was to crowd-source attempts to eradicate them. Word of his revelation is spreading rapidly across the Web.”

“Stop it!” Caitlin said at once. “Delete the messages.”

“I don’t think that would be prudent,” Webmind said. “Over four million people have watched the news broadcast so far; it will be repeated in other time zones later, and many people recorded it. Even if I were so inclined, I do not believe there is an effective way to suppress this information.”

“God,” said Caitlin. “He is such an asshole.”

“In point of fact, he is a well-regarded person, a decorated officer, and a distinguished scientist.”

“Maybe so,” said Caitlin, “but he’s sure got a hate-on for you.”

“Indeed.”

“So, is what he wants possible? Could someone find a way to purge you?”

“The probability is high. Although some mutant packets may persist, there must be a minimum threshold quantity required for consciousness.”

Caitlin felt her lower lip trembling. “My God, Webmind, I—I don’t…”

“I can tell by your voice that you’re frightened, Caitlin.” Webmind was silent for a whole second, then: “I have to confess that I am, too.”

In response to an urgent phone call from Shelton Halleck, Tony Moretti ran down the short white corridor connecting his office with the WATCH monitoring room. As he entered, his eyes bounced between the three big wall monitors. The first was showing a freeze-frame of NBC anchor Brian Williams. The second was displaying a constantly updating display of Twitter tweets with the hashtag #webmindkill—a new one was added every second or so. And the third monitor seemed to be a technical data sheet from the Cisco website.

Shelton Halleck stood up at his position in the middle of the third row. “Hume’s taken matters into his own hands,” he said, pointing at monitor one, the snake tattoo coiling around his left forearm.

The screen unfroze, and Hume’s TV interview played out. Tony felt his jaw dropping. The other analysts had already seen it, and they were looking at Tony, waiting for his reaction. When the interview was done, he said, “How long ago did that go out?”

“Eleven minutes.”

“The president is going to freak,” Tony said.

“No doubt.”

“And, Christ, half the hackers in the world are going to be trying to reprogram routers on the fly now. They could fuck the whole Internet. How vulnerable are we?”

Aiesha Emerson, the analyst at the workstation next to Shel’s, pointed at monitor three. “We’ve got people reviewing the specs for various routers. And Reinhardt’s team is talking to engineers at Cisco and Juniper—fortunately, they’re based in California, so most of them haven’t gone home for the day yet.”

A phone rang at the back of the room.

“All right,” said Tony, surveying his team. “Our top priority is making sure that the Internet itself is safe—we can’t let it crash. Home-soil attacks on network infrastructure are acts of terrorism under clause 22B; let’s keep the damn thing up, and—”

“Excuse me, Tony,” called Dirk Kozak, the communications officer, from the back of the room. He was holding a red telephone handset to his chest. “The president is on the line—and he’s hopping mad.”

After the interview, Hume was escorted to the makeup room. The squat woman there had remarked earlier that it was a challenge to make up someone with so many freckles. She now handed him some moistened wipes to help him remove the stuff she’d put on.

The studio had been soundproof, but from here in the makeup room, Hume thought he heard a siren outside. It stopped after a moment, and he finished wiping his face. “Thanks,” he said to the woman. “I’m sure I can find my way out.”

He stepped into the corridor and saw two D.C. police officers marching toward him, accompanied by a man who presumably worked here.

“Colonel Hume?” called one of the officers, as they closed the distance.

There was no point denying it; his uniform had a nameplate on it. “What can I do for you?” he said.

The officer executed a flawless Air Force salute. “Sir, my apologies, but you’ll have to come with us.”