Robert Sawyer - Wonder

Matt laughed. “True enough.” He helped undo his buttons, and when his shirt was off, he reached behind her and valiantly tried to unhook her bra. After thirty seconds of no success, Caitlin laughed and did it for him. His hands slid around to her front and cupped her breasts, and he said, very softly, “Wow.”

“Thanks,” she replied, equally softly.

He hesitated a moment. “Um, just, ah, just so you know, this is, ah—it’s… it’s my…”

Caitlin looked up at him. “Your first time?”

He turned his head slightly away. “Yeah.”

She reached up and softly touched his cheek, gently turning his head back toward her. “I know,” she said. “It’s mine, too. And I want it to be with you.”

He smiled, and it was wide enough that she could see it in the darkness, but it faded after a moment. “Um, what about—you know—I mean…”

“What?”

Matt dropped his voice to a whisper. “I, uh, I don’t think I can do it with Webmind watching.”

The eyePod was in the left front pocket of her tight jeans. She undid the metal button and unzipped the fly—it was easier to get the device out that way—then pulled it out and held its one button down for five seconds. Her vision shut off; everything became a featureless gray. Before that had happened, she’d noted the position of the closest desk, and she set the eyePod carefully on its surface. She then shimmied out of her jeans, smiled at where she knew Matt was, found his hand, and led him down onto the bed of coats.

“Fortunately,” she said, pulling him close, “I’m very good at doing things by touch…”

I understood the significance of what had just happened, of course. And I was pleased with my restraint. When Caitlin had first pulled Matt to her, I’d thought about flashing into her vision the words, “Get a room!”—although maybe coming from me “Get a Roomba!” would have been more appropriate.

But I knew it would be best if I said nothing at all. I had no body, and so the joys Caitlin and Matt had just experienced would forever be foreign to me; the closest I got to embodiment was the feeling I had when one part of me suppressed the action another part proposed. It wasn’t literally holding my tongue, but it felt somehow akin to that.

Twenty-two minutes later, Caitlin turned her eyePod back on. They were still in the math classroom, but Matt was fully dressed again, including wearing his coat, and I assumed Caitlin was dressed, as well. He looked quite happy, I must say.

Matt gingerly opened the classroom door and stuck his head into the hallway. Apparently the coast was clear because he motioned for Caitlin to follow. They quickly made their way down the corridor, then descended to the first floor.

Just as they were about to exit the building, Matt excused himself to go into the boys’ restroom. As soon as Caitlin was alone, she said, “Sorry, Webmind.”

No need to apologize, I sent to her eye. It is your right to turn off the eyePod whenever you wish.

Caitlin shook her head; I could tell by the way the images moved. What? I asked.

“And they call you Big Brother. Jerks.”

Indeed… my little sister.

“Not so little anymore,” she said softly.

That was true.

Caitlin was growing up.

I was growing up.

And just maybe the rest of the planet was, too.

Burly bald-headed Marek led Peyton Hume down the pea green corridor and into the room he’d seen when he’d been eavesdropping. It was larger than Hume had thought, and the walls were yellow, not the beige they’d seemed on his monitor. There were windows along one side, which also hadn’t been visible in the view he’d had before, but they looked out over nothing more interesting than the adjacent parking lot, an industrial Dumpster, and the featureless black nighttime sky.

Hume immediately spotted the security camera he’d tapped into earlier: a silver box on a rotating turret hanging from the ceiling near the front of the room. He could see several other webcams scattered about—some shaped like golf balls, others like short cylinders—and there were probably more that he wasn’t seeing.

At the front of the room were two mismatched sixty-inch LCD monitors and a third monitor that looked to be perhaps fifty inches. One of the bigger ones was sitting on a desk; the other big one was atop a small cube-shaped refrigerator; and the fifty-incher was perched somewhat precariously on a half-height filing cabinet. The whole room had the look of a nerve center that had been thrown together in a hurry; Webmind clearly hadn’t been willing to wait for installers from Geek Squad to wall-mount the monitors.

The monitor on the left showed what looked like an organization chart, with a single box at the top, and successively more boxes at each level down, but Hume couldn’t make out the labels from this far back. The boxes were mostly colored green, but a few were amber and four were red—no, no, make that three were red. One turned green while he watched. An African-American man called out as that happened, “Got it!”

The monitor in the middle showed a view that kept cycling through what Hume soon realized must be the other control centers Webmind had referred to: each contained people in a variety of styles of dress intently working on various computers. One of the rooms seemed to be a gymnasium, with an indoor rock-climbing wall. Another might have been a factory floor. A third had large windows through which Hume could see a daytime cityscape although he didn’t recognize the city; all the people in that room were Asian.

The smaller monitor on the right showed data displays and hex dumps, plus a large digital clock counting down second by second. As Hume watched, it went from a minute and zero seconds to fifty-nine seconds, then fifty-eight. He glanced at his own digital watch, which he fastidiously kept properly set; it appeared the countdown was to 11:00 P.M. Eastern time.

He looked around the room, searching for any way he could stop what was about to happen—but there were clearly people involved all over the planet. Even if he could grab Marek’s gun—and there was no reason to think he’d be able to—what could he do? Shoot out the camera that was panning back and forth? That was pointless; it wouldn’t slow down Webmind. Or should he—desperate times required desperate actions—start popping off the hackers, putting bullets in the backs of their heads? But surely he couldn’t get more than four or five, tops, before someone blew him away.

There was indeed nothing to do but watch.

The digital timer continued to decrement. Thirty-one. Thirty. Twenty-nine.

He looked again at the organizational chart; while his attention had been elsewhere, all but one of the squares had turned green.

Webmind’s voice emanated from a speaker. “Mr. Hawkins—time is running out.”

Devon Hawkins—Crowbar Alpha—was madly scooting a mouse along his desktop. “Sorry!” he shouted. “Damn system keeps reconfiguring itself. It’ll just—there!”

Hume looked back at the board; every box was now emerald. He snapped his eyes to the timer: Eighteen. Seventeen. Sixteen.

He half expected the roomful of hackers to start chanting the countdown out loud, just as he’d seen crowds do at the Cape before a shuttle launch, but they were all intent on their computers. With ten seconds left, Webmind himself started a spoken countdown: “Ten. Nine. Eight.”

“All ports open!” shouted Chase.

“Seven. Six. Five.”

Hume could hear his own heartbeat, and he felt sweat beading on his forehead.

“All set!” shouted another man.

“Four. Three. Two.”