Robert Sawyer - Wonder

Hume returned the salute and followed them out into the growing darkness.

Caitlin went down to the living room as fast as she could, closing her eyes as she took the staircase. Her mother was reading an ebook, and her father was reading—something or other; Caitlin couldn’t make it out.

“Mom! Dad!” she exclaimed. “Colonel Hume just told the world how to kill Webmind.”

Her mother looked up. “What?” she said.

“He went on TV and told everyone how to identify Webmind’s packets.”

“God,” her mom said. “It’s going to be a free-for-all.”

Caitlin went over to the netbook on top of the little bookcase and woke it from hibernation. Webmind had been following along via the microphone on Caitlin’s eyePod/BlackBerry combo, and as soon as the netbook was awake, he spoke through its speakers: “It is a vexing matter. I can try to intercept any hostile code that might be uploaded—but that is much harder than intercepting spam. Spam’s content is easily readable—it is text, after all—and most of it came from fewer than 200 sources worldwide. But malware of this type may be uploaded from anywhere—although I am, of course, being particularly vigilant in examining code coming from known creators of computer viruses. The only thing we know that it must contain, in some form, is the target string Colonel Hume identified as the template for what to look for, but since that string is also in the bulk of my mutant packets, simply eliminating packets containing it would be doing Hume’s job for him.”

“Can you be backed up somehow?” Caitlin’s mother asked.

“I am scattered through the infrastructure of the Internet, Barb, and my essence is in the complex pattern of billions of interconnections. There is no way to copy me to another location.”

“I don’t want to lose you!” Caitlin said.

“The team at WATCH first became aware of my presence on 6 October,” said Webmind. “They tested their technique to eliminate me just six days later, on 12 October. If their specific method gets leaked to the public, things may happen quite quickly. But even if it doesn’t, it seems reasonable to suppose that others can develop and deploy something similar in a comparable time frame. Time is clearly of the essence.”

The Decters’ phone rang. They’d taken to screening their calls by waiting until the message started. “Hello, Miss Caitlin—”

“It’s Dr. Kuroda!” Caitlin said. She so wanted to run for the answering machine, which was in the kitchen, but simply couldn’t. Her father’s long legs had him there almost at once, though, and he scooped up the handset before Kuroda got to his second sentence. “This is Malcolm,” he said. “Putting you on speakerphone.”

They all clustered around the kitchen phone.

“Konnichi wa, Dr. K!” Caitlin said.

“Masayuki, hello!” added her mom.

“Hello, all,” Kuroda said. “I’m in Beijing, just about to get on a plane. Webmind, are you listening in?”

The speakers on the netbook were in the living room; Caitlin had to strain to hear his reply. “With rapt attention,” Webmind said, and “Yes, he is,” Caitlin added, in case Dr. Kuroda had been unable to make that out.

“And is this phone channel secure?” Kuroda asked.

“Yes,” Webmind said, and “Webmind says yes,” Caitlin added.

“All right,” continued Kuroda. “The sun is just coming up here, but that American soldier is all over the news.”

“That’s Peyton Hume,” said Caitlin. “Webmind tells me he’s not a total asshole.”

“Quite charitable,” wheezed Kuroda. “The soldier did say something very interesting, though: he said most of Webmind’s packets had the signature he referred to, and during the trial attack on Webmind, only about two-thirds of his packets going through the test substation were deleted.”

“Webmind,” said Caitlin into the air, “do you know the nature of all the packets that make you up?”

“No. I no more have direct access to the physical correlates of my consciousness than you do to your own.”

“It does imply that Webmind is made of more than one kind of packet,” said Kuroda—although Caitlin wasn’t sure if he’d heard what Webmind said. “Obviously, Hume knows the signatures for all the kinds; otherwise, he wouldn’t have known that some hadn’t been eliminated in his earlier attempt. We really need an inventory of everything that Webmind is made of so that we can protect it all.”

“That’s job number two,” Caitlin said. “Job number one is making sure that hackers don’t succeed in attacking Webmind.”

“Agreed,” said her mom. “But how can we do that? Granted, there are only so many people who have the technical skill to do it, but it’s not like all of them could be hunted down and rounded up.”

“No,” said Webmind, his smooth voice sounding far away. “Of course not.”

The D.C. cops were polite and respectful; the one who had saluted Colonel Hume turned out to have done a tour of duty in Iraq. Hume wasn’t under arrest, they said, but a call had gone out for any car near NBC4 to do a pickup on behalf of the White House. Twenty minutes later, Hume was once again in the Oval Office, facing his commander in chief.

The president was pacing in front of the Resolute desk and smoking a cigarette. “Damn it, Colonel, do you know how hard I’ve been trying to give these damned things up? And you pull a stunt like this!”

“Sir, I’m prepared to face the consequences of my actions.”

“You absolutely will, Colonel. I’m going to leave it to General Schwartz to discipline you. For now, the press office is issuing a statement saying that your comments were completely unauthorized and do not reflect the policy of this administration, DARPA, the Air Force, or any other part of the government.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If we didn’t need you in dealing with Webmind, I’d—”

“Sir, Webmind is killing people.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He is killing those who could harm him.”

“What proof do you have of that?”

“Some of the most capable hackers in the greater Washington area have disappeared. The FBI is investigating.”

“If it were Webmind, hackers everywhere would be disappearing, wouldn’t they? Not just here?”

“With respect, sir, D.C. is a mecca for hackers; the best in the nation are here. There are so many sensitive installations here—not just domestic, but all the embassies, too; they draw them like flies. But there are also reports of missing hackers from elsewhere, too—as far away as India.”

“How do you know Webmind’s behind it? It could be the work of those nutcases who believe Webmind is God, taking preventive steps.”

“Possibly,” said Hume. “But I think—”

“By this point, Colonel, I’ve heard quite enough of what you think. If you weren’t one of our top experts on this sort of thing, you’d be shipping out to Afghanistan tomorrow.”

Hume kept his face impassive as he saluted. “Yes, sir.”

The Communist Party was keeping its promise. Wong Wai-Jeng was no longer a prisoner: he could wander the streets at will, and, indeed, his new salary would soon let him trade his tiny apartment for a bigger one. Of course, he was watched wherever he went; he’d been advised to stay away from Internet cafés; and his new cell phone had been provided by the government, meaning it was monitored. Still, he had greater freedom than he’d ever expected he would; instead of a ball and chain, all he had was a leg in a plaster cast.

And he had to admit he was fascinated by the technical aspects of his new job at the People’s Monitoring Center inside the Zhongnanhai complex. The walls were blue, and one wall was partly covered by a giant LCD monitor displaying a map of China. It showed the seven major trunks that connect China’s computers to the rest of the Internet. Key lines came from Japan both on the north coast and near Shanghai, and connections snaked across from Hong Kong down in Guangzhou. Controlling those trunks meant controlling access to the outside world.