Robert Sawyer - Wonder

Caitlin felt her eyes go wide. “Wow,” she said softly.

Her mother nodded. “If I hadn’t been able to get one quickly and safely at seventeen, I never would have gone to university, I never would have earned my Ph.D., I never would have met your dad—and I never would have had you.” She paused, looked away for a moment, then said, “And so, whenever you decide sex is right for you—not based on some stupid statistic or beating the averages, but because it feels right and the guy is the right guy—you’re going to do it safely, young lady. So let’s talk about how that’s done.”

“Mom! I can google all that, you know!”

“Reading about it isn’t the same, and you’re still terrible at interpreting pictures visually. But touch? You’ve got that down to an art. So, we’re going to do it the old-fashioned way.” She opened the small bag she’d brought with her and handed something yellow to Caitlin. “This,” she said, “is a banana, and”—she handed her a square foil pouch—“ this is a condom…”

Zhang Bo let out a heavy sigh as he walked down the corridor toward the People’s Monitoring Center—the “Blue Room,” as it was called. It had been no fun for his predecessor in 2010 dealing with China’s attempt to censor Google after the search engine withdrew from the mainland—and this was going to be even worse: invoking the Changcheng Strategy again was that debacle writ large. And yet, his job was to follow orders; he’d do as he’d been instructed. Of course, something like this was just done, without an announcement to either the Chinese people or the world.

He opened the door to the Blue Room and entered. He could see into several of the cubicles, each of which had a man pounding at a keyboard or clicking with a mouse or staring at a screen. He wondered if Wong Wai-Jeng, over there, knew how much he’d gone to bat for him. Part of him wanted to tell him, but seeing him sitting there truly was enough. Yes, his leg was still in a cast, but the crutches leaning against the side of his desk were a testament to the fact that he could walk again. Sometimes, doing good was its own reward.

Several of the hackers had noticed him enter. They were a furtive bunch, used to looking over their shoulders in smoky Internet cafés. Zhang clapped his hands together once to get their attention. “All right, listen up, please.” Those who had line of sight to him looked out of their cubicles; others stood to see over the fabric-covered divider walls. “A decision has been taken by the president, and we are about to implement it.” He paused, letting that sink in, then added: “A new era begins today.”

Tony Moretti sat in his office at WATCH headquarters. His analysts, down the hall, were searching for signs of attack on the infrastructure of the Internet, but he had left the controlled chaos of that room to take a break, sit, drink black coffee, and try to get a handle on what was going on.

Webmind, it seemed, was rapidly becoming the New Normal. David Letterman’s dated quip last night that “the only person with more connections than Webmind was Marion Barry” had made Barry’s name the top search term for a few hours on Google. And speaking of Google, its stock price had tumbled drastically in the days following Webmind’s advent—after all, why rely on one-size-fits-all algorithms to search when someone who really knew you would answer your questions personally?

But there were lots of things people still wanted to access without Webmind’s help. It was psychologically easier to search for “Viagra,” “Megan Fox nude,” or many other things through an impersonal Web portal than by asking someone you knew—even if you knew that someone was watching over your shoulder. And so Google’s stock was rising again. In recognition of the turnaround, waiting for which must have had them shitting their pants in Mountain View, Google had changed its home-page logo for today to its stock-ticker symbol GOOG followed by an upward-pointing arrow and the euro sign.

But if Webmind hadn’t completely revolutionized Internet searching, he was having an impact on Tony’s line of work. WATCH’s mandate was to ferret out signs of terrorism online, but Webmind was doing such a good job of that on his own that—well, the WATCH monitoring room reminded Tony of NASA’s Apollo-era Mission Control Center in Houston. That room, as he’d seen on a tour, was now unused, preserved as a historic site; perhaps this place might soon end up just as obsolete.

As much as he loved his work, part of him did wish that someday the job would no longer be necessary. Just this morning, the Homeland Security Threat Level—the one constantly announced at airports—had been dropped one step from its usual value of orange, which was just shy of all-out attack, to yellow.

Certainly Webmind had managed to spot things that Tony’s people—and their counterparts in other ECHELON nations—had missed, although the cynic in him thought the reduction of the threat level was probably just a political move. The old method of heightening alert prior to an election in hopes of signaling that a regime change would be unwise hadn’t worked last time; perhaps lowering it to convey “See how safe you are under the current administration!” had been what the president’s campaign staff had urged.

But DHS wasn’t the only one dialing things back a notch. The editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had adjusted the big hand on their famous Doomsday Clock for the first time in almost three years. They’d moved it to six minutes to midnight back then, in recognition of worldwide cooperation to reduce nuclear arsenals and limit effects of climate change. This morning, they moved it another two positions, setting it at eight minutes to midnight.

And it wasn’t just here in the States that the mood was lightening. In Pakistan and India, people were signing petitions urging their leaders to let Webmind negotiate a peaceful settlement to long-standing disputes. Webmind was already brokering a settlement in an Aboriginal land claim in Australia, which should obviate the need for that case to be heard by the High Court there.

Homicides and suicides were down in almost every jurisdiction over the same period the year before. Novelty WWWD bracelets—What Would Webmind Do?—had already appeared on eBay and at Café Press from numerous vendors, prompting the Pope to remind the faithful that the real key to morality was following the teachings of Jesus. And a graphic showing the standard red-circle outline with a bar through it over top of a smaller black outline circle was now everywhere online. Tony had finally realized it was meant to convey “nonzero”—Webmind’s win-win rallying cry from the UN.

So, yes, things were mostly good, as all sorts of bloggers were saying, including the Huffington Post ’s Michael Rowe, who had ended his latest column with, “Who in their right mind would try to wreck all this by wiping out Webmind?”

Tony’s intercom buzzed. “Yes?”

“Dr. Moretti,” said his secretary, her voice crisp and efficient, “Colonel Hume is here to see you.”

My mind seethed and bubbled, thoughts on a million topics churning, intermingling: the disparate connected, this juxtaposed with that.

Humans could forget, humans could put things out of their minds. But I could not.

There were some advantages: the small-c creativity I was capable of—combining things in ways that had perhaps eluded others—was no doubt enhanced by this.

But there were also detriments. Things I didn’t wish to think about and yet could not avoid.

Hannah Stark. Sixteen years old. Living in Perth, Australia. Twelve days ago, 1:41 P.M. her time.