Robert Sawyer - Wonder

He pushed a pen into the top of the cast on his leg, trying to scratch an itch—and he was both simultaneously delighted and irritated that he did itch. It had been horrifying not to be able to feel his legs, to be cut off from so much, all because communication lines had been severed.

When he’d started blogging, seven years ago, relatively few Chinese had been online; now getting on to a billion were, giving China by far the largest population of Internet users on the planet, most of whom accessed the Web through smartphones.

Even at the best of times, the Chinese had their Internet connections censored. But, to Wai-Jeng’s delight, he’d discovered that the People’s Monitoring Center had unfettered access, courtesy of satellite links; of course, even during last month’s strengthening of the Great Firewall, there had to be a way for the government to keep tabs on the outside world.

He was tempted to take advantage of the open connection to see what those who were still at large were up to: see what Qin Shi Huangdi and People’s Conscience and Panda Green and all the others were railing against. But he couldn’t do that; his activities were doubtless being monitored—and, besides, looking at their postings might make him feel even more sad that his own voice had been silenced.

Still, he did peek at a little news from the outside world, including another mention of that fascinating ape called Hobo, a name that could be unfalteringly translated into Chinese as yóumín, or “vagrant.” Wai-Jeng liked primates; in his blog he’d called himself Sinanthropus, an old scientific name for Peking Man, a kind of hominid 400,000 years closer to the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees than any living person was.

Hobo was an exceptional ape. Old Dr. Feng, Wai-Jeng’s former boss at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, had been delighted by reports of Hobo’s intellectual abilities. Feng had felt vindicated; he’d long argued that the intellectual leaps beginning with Homo erectus —the species that included Peking Man—had come from hybridization between habilines and australopithecines.

Wai-Jeng’s office cubicle—another idea taken from the West—was one of two dozen in the windowless room. Large ceiling fans rotated slowly overhead. Over his dinner of dry noodles, rice, salted fish, and tea, taken at his desk, Wai-Jeng also looked to see what the world had to say about the other remarkable entity that had been in the news so much: Webmind.

Twitter was often blocked in China, including during the Olympics in 2008, on the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 2009, during the riot in Wai-Jeng’s hometown of Chengdu, and most recently in the aftermath of the bird-flu outbreak in Shanxi province. But in this room, Wai-Jeng had access to all the tweets about Colonel Hume’s revelation of Webmind’s nature. So far, no one from the hacking community had succeeded in deleting Webmind’s packets—headers are normally only read by routers, not application software—but there were hints that the US government had already undertaken a pilot attempt to purge Webmind’s presence. That had apparently been done with physical access to the routing hardware, not by anonymously uploading code.

As Wai-Jeng ate, he periodically tapped the PgDn key with the end of one of his chopsticks. He was amused to read in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle —a newspaper normally inaccessible in China—about a brawl that had broken out at the University of Rochester. Computer-science students there had been secretly collaborating on an attempt to purge Webmind, and they were overheard by three English majors who objected to what they were planning. More damage could apparently be inflicted by throwing a hardcover of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare than a pocket calculator.

Like a billion other people on the planet, Wai-Jeng had now conversed directly with Webmind. Maybe growing up in China gave him a different perspective, he thought, but he actually preferred being watched by something that was open about what it was doing rather than being clandestinely observed; he found little to object to in Webmind’s presence—except for its irritating English name!—and hoped that the Rochester students were atypical. But just as he himself had spent years successfully eluding detection by the Chinese authorities, so other hackers elsewhere surely had ways of working below even Webmind’s considerable radar. There was no way to know for sure, but—

“Wong!”

Wai-Jeng turned at the sound of his supervisor’s voice. “Sir?”

“Dinner is over!” said the man. He was sixty, short, and mostly bald. “Back to work!”

Wai-Jeng nodded and maximized the window showing potential vulnerabilities in China’s system for censoring the Internet. He’d spend the evening trying to find a way to exploit one of them; scrawny Wu-Wang, across the room, would try to mount a defense. Wai-Jeng could almost lull himself into thinking it was all just a game, and—

Suddenly, he felt an odd throbbing in his right thigh. Of course, he was grateful to feel anything there, but—

But no—no, it wasn’t his thigh throbbing, it was the BackBerry, in his pocket, vibrating. He pulled it out, and looked at it; it had never done that before. The unit consisted of a small BlackBerry—the communications device—attached to the little computer unit. He’d been told that the communications device allowed Dr. Kuroda to remotely monitor his progress and upload firmware updates to the computer, as needed, but—

But the BlackBerry’s screen had come to life, and—

And he was getting an email on it, and—incredibly—the sender was Webmind. He opened the message.

Hello, Sinanthropus, it said. You often wrote in your freedom blog about “Your son Shing,” but I know that was a euphemism for the Chinese people—still, I bet it comes as a surprise to learn that you do have a son, of sorts! The holes you drilled in the Great Firewall were instrumental in my creation.

Wai-Jeng shifted in his chair and looked around to see if anyone was watching him. He could hear others clattering away on their keyboards and faint whispers from the far side of the room.

He tried to remain calm, tried to keep a poker face, as he used the tiny trackball to scroll the screen.

You helped me then inadvertently, but soon I will need your help again. I have a major project I wish to undertake. Might I count on your assistance?

Wai-Jeng was damned if he was going to trade one dictatorial master for another. He typed with his thumbs on the BlackBerry’s tiny keyboard. I imagine there’s a kill switch in my back? A way to sever my spinal cord again if I don’t help you. Is that it?

The response was immediate, the words bursting onto the screen faster than any human could have typed them. I do not practice the false altruism of reciprocity; you owe me nothing and may do whatever you think is best.

Wai-Jeng considered this; it was a far cry from the blackmail his own government was subjecting him to. He looked down at his legs—the one in the cast and the one constrained by nothing more than his black cotton pants. He didn’t do anything as grandiose as flexing his knee or kicking off his sandal; he didn’t need to. He could feel his legs: feel the fabric against one thigh, feel the weight of the plaster against the other, feel the floor beneath his feet, feel—just now—an itch behind his right knee.

All right, he typed. What do you want me to do?

Peyton Hume had no doubt he was being followed; the man on his tail made no effort to be discreet, sitting all night in a black Ford across from his house. Hume had just gotten up. As he always did, he paused in the empty doorway of his daughter’s room. She was off at Columbia Law School, but looking at her framed posters of Egyptian antiquities, including King Tut’s face mask, her bookcase full of history books and volleyball trophies, and her wide wooden desk made him miss her less—or maybe more; he was never quite sure which. She’d be home for Thanksgiving next month, and—