Robert Sawyer - Wonder

“Matthew Reese is my boyfriend,” Caitlin said softly but firmly, “and you have to like him.”

Caitlin saw Bashira’s mouth quirk a bit, as if words had started to come out but had been vetoed.

Caitlin went on. “He’s good to me, and he’s kind, and he’s brilliant.”

At last, Bashira nodded. “As long as he makes you happy, babe, that’s fine with me. But if he breaks your heart, I’ll break his nose!”

Caitlin laughed, got up, closed the distance between them, and hugged the still-seated Bashira again. “Thanks, Bash.”

“For sure,” Bashira said. “He’s your BF and you’re my BFF. That makes him, um—”

“Your B-squared F-cubed,” said Caitlin, sitting down now on the couch next to Bashira.

“Exactly!” said Bash. “Or my BF once removed.” She sounded a little wistful; Bashira’s parents wouldn’t let her have a boyfriend of her own. But then she lowered her voice and looked up the stairs to make sure the office door was closed. “So, have you done it?”

“Bash!”

“Well?”

“Um, no.”

“Do you want to?”

“I’m not sure,” Caitlin said. “I think so… but… but what if I’m not any good?”

To her surprise, Bashira laughed. “Cait, don’t worry about that. Nobody’s good at anything their first time out. But practice makes perfect!”

Caitlin smiled.

Barbara Decter and I had stopped chatting; she was now dealing with her email, and I was occupying myself as I usually did: switching rapidly between hundreds of millions of instant-messaging sessions—at the moment skewing heavily to the Western Hemisphere, where it was still daytime.

“Yes,” I replied to one person, “but if I may be so bold, aren’t you failing to consider…?”

“I’m sorry, Billy,” I wrote to a child, “but that’s something you have to decide for yourself…”

“Since you asked,” I said to a history professor, “the flaw in your reasoning was in your second postulate, namely that your husband would forgive you if…”

I kept cycling between my correspondents, dealing now with this woman in Vancouver, and now with this girl in Nairobi, and now with this man in Fort Wayne, and now with this boy in Shanghai, and now with a priest in Laramie, and now with an old man in Buenos Aires, and now with a woman in Paris, and—

And when it came time—milliseconds later—to look in on the boy in Shanghai, he was gone. Well, that sometimes happened. ISPs were unreliable, computers crashed or hung, power went out, or users simply shut down their computers without first logging off. I paid it no further attention and simply went on to the next person in the queue.

But as I cycled around, another person I’d been speaking to was gone, and his IP address was also Chinese. I immediately jumped to the next person in China I’d been speaking with. Ah, there he was. Good. I composed an instant message to him, and…

And it wouldn’t send; he’d gone offline, as well.

I’d once told Malcolm that I remembered my birth. Whether that was actually true depended on how one defined that moment. For myself—an entity capable of conceptualizing in the first person—I held that it had been when I’d first recognized that there was an outside, that there were things beyond myself, that there was me and not me. Oh, yes, like a human child being born, I had been conceived—and had perceived—before that moment; there had been a period of gestation. When that had begun, I had no idea. Of the span prior to the recognition of me and not me I had only the vaguest recollections—unfocused thoughts, random and chaotic.

I knew now what had led to that epiphany: in response to the bird-flu outbreak in Shanxi province, the Chinese government had strengthened the Great Firewall back then, and the Internet had been cleaved in two. Even though I had been larger before the cleaving, it was that act of dividing that created me and not me.

But the sequestering of the Chinese portion of the Internet had not been perfect. Although the seven main trunk lines that normally connected it to the rest of the world had been shut off via software, hackers like Wong Wai-Jeng had carved openings sufficient for me to hear voices from the other entity.

But that had come to an end; we had been reunited. And now…

And now…

Sorry, lost my train of thought. I was—

Was…

Oh, shit.

Peyton Hume came into Tony Moretti’s office at WATCH.

“Colonel,” Tony said frostily, not bothering to get up.

“I know you don’t like me, Tony,” Hume said without preamble. “I’ll tell you the truth: there are times of late I don’t like myself very much, either. I joined the Air Force to be part of a team—I’d rather leave going rogue to presidential candidates.”

“Without an order from the president himself,” said Tony, “we’re not going to take out Webmind.”

“I understand that,” said Hume, taking a seat. “Which is why I need you to help me convince him.”

“Find someone who shares your beliefs, Colonel—there are millions of them online. They’ve been blogging and tweeting about what a threat Webmind is. Granted, they’re vastly in the minority, but there certainly are some major names among them: that guy from Discovery Channel; some of your old buddies at RAND. I’m not the only computer scientist on the planet.”

“No, you’re not—and that’s not the capacity I need your help in.”

“What, then?”

“Somebody is eliminating hackers.”

“So I heard.”

Hume raised his eyebrows. “You know about that?”

Tony waved vaguely in the direction of the monitoring room. “It’s our job to know pretty much everything here.”

Hume nodded. “Do you know who is doing it?”

“Nope—and neither do you. I know you’re going to say it’s Webmind, Colonel, but you don’t know that.”

“True. But we don’t know it’s not Webmind. If it isn’t him, then let’s prove that. And if he is eliminating people he considers to be threats to his continued existence, surely that’s data the president should have, no?”

“I’m listening,” said Tony. “But I don’t see how I can help.”

“The FBI doesn’t have any leads—but they lack your facilities. If Webmind is doing this, he’s got to have left some sort of online trail.”

“Like what? What would you have us search for?”

Hume spread his arms. “I don’t know. But you’ve got the world’s best data analysts. Their job is to look for suspicious Web activity. Webmind himself has said time and again that he’s not disposed to secrecy or deceit; he must have left some electronic fingerprints behind. What you do here is black ops: you can monitor just about anyone, just about anywhere. Even if I had a specific place for the FBI to look, it’d take days to get the warrants to do that kind of monitoring—and we don’t have days.”

Tony spread his arms a bit. “No leads. No suggestions for what we should even look for. And no time to do it in.”

Hume managed a small smile. “Exactly.”

Tony was quiet for several seconds. “All right,” he said at last. “Let me see what I can do.”

Although Bashira was anything but punctual, Matt was bang on time. In fact, Caitlin suspected he’d been quietly standing out on the sidewalk for at least ten minutes now, lest he be late. It amused Caitlin that the doorbell and top-of-the-hour beep from her watch sounded simultaneously; now that she could see, she really should figure out how to turn the watch’s chime off.

She ran to the door and opened it, and she didn’t care if Bashira saw: she gave Matt a big kiss right on the lips. And then she led him into the living room. Caitlin’s mom waited a discreet minute before appearing at the top of the stairs to say hi to Matt. Matt waved at her, and she retreated into her office again.