Robert Sawyer - Wonder

Caitlin looked at her father, trying to gauge whether he was going to go off on Matt again. But, as always, his face gave no sign of what he was feeling.

Matt’s expression, though, was one Caitlin had now seen him make repeatedly—what she called the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look even though she’d never seen a deer, let alone one in such precarious circumstances.

“Danger?” he repeated—and his voice cracked, as it often did.

Caitlin stopped chewing and swallowed. “Um, yeah. I’m so sorry, Matt. I lied when I said I was away from school on Wednesday because I had an appointment. In fact, I did come to school—but Canadian federal agents were waiting for me. They wanted to interrogate me about Webmind.”

“Wednesday?” said Matt. “But Webmind didn’t go public until yesterday—Thursday.”

“The US government had figured out that I was involved, and they’d asked the Canadians to grill me. They wanted me to give them information to help betray Webmind.”

“They said that?” said Matt, stunned.

“No, but, well, Webmind hears through my eyePod, right? And he can analyze inflections, voice stress, and stuff like that. He knew they were lying when they said they wanted to protect Webmind.”

“But they know now that Webmind is made of mutant packets,” Matt said. “So I’m of no further use to them.”

Caitlin shook her head. “They may think we still know more than they do—and they’d be right, too. That’s why my parents took me out of school. They don’t want to let me out of their sight.” She turned and looked at her mother. “But we can’t just stay holed up in this house. There’s a world out there—and I want to see it.”

Her mom nodded. “I know,” she said. “But we have to be careful—all of us do.”

“Well, I can’t stay here forever,” Matt said. “At some point, I’ve got to go home, and…” He trailed off.

“What?” asked Caitlin.

“Oh, nothing.”

“No, what?”

“No, it’s fine.”

Caitlin frowned. Something had gone wrong after the last time Matt had headed home from here. He’d been aloof later that night when they’d chatted via instant messenger.

“Come into the kitchen,” she said. She headed there herself and waited for him to follow. When they were both alone, she said in a low voice, “What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing, really. Everything’s fine.”

“Do—do your parents disapprove of you being involved with me?”

The deer/headlights thing. “Why would they disapprove of that?”

Caitlin’s first thought—that it was because her father was Jewish—didn’t seem worth giving voice to now; her second thought, that they didn’t like Americans, seemed equally unworthy. “I don’t know. It’s just that the last time you were here—when you got home, you were a bit… brusque online. I thought maybe your parents had…”

“Oh,” said Matt, simply. “No, that wasn’t it.”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“You?” He sounded astonished at the possibility. “Not at all!”

“Then what?”

Matt took a deep breath and looked through the doorway. Caitlin’s parents had discreetly moved to the far side of the living room and were making a show of examining the photos on top of the short bookcase. Finally, he lifted his narrow shoulders a bit. “The last time I walked home from here, I ran into Trevor Nordmann.” Matt looked down at the tiled floor. “He, ah, he gave me a rough time.”

Caitlin felt her blood boiling. Trevor—the Hoser, as Caitlin called him in LiveJournal—had taken Caitlin to the school dance last month; Caitlin had stormed out when he wouldn’t stop trying to feel her up. He was pissed off that Caitlin preferred bookish Matt to Trevor the jock.

“It’ll be fine,” Caitlin said, touching his arm. “One of my parents will give you a lift home.”

“No, that’s okay.”

“Don’t worry about it. They’ll be happy to do it.”

He smiled. “Thanks.”

She squeezed his arm again. “Come on,” she said, leading him back into the living room.

Just as they rejoined her parents, Webmind spoke up. “I have an answer from the president,” he said. “He will accept a voice call from me at ten o’clock this evening.”

TWITTER

_Webmind_ Re Wikipedia “citation needed” flags: I’ve added links if the purported facts could indeed be verified online. 2,134,993 edits made.

Originally, when I conversed only with Caitlin, I was underoccupied; it took Caitlin whole seconds—or even, on occasion, minutes—to compose her replies. But I had quickly gone from conversing with just her to having nearly simultaneous conversations with millions of people, switching rapidly between them all, never keeping my interlocutors waiting for spans that were noticeable to them.

Except for WateryFowl. Properly responding to his message about his wife’s illness was taking time even though I did know everything there was to know about cancer—including, of course, that it wasn’t just one disease. I had already read all documents stored online, the contents of every medical journal, every electronic patient record, every email doctors had sent to each other, and so on.

But knowing, I realized, was not the same as understanding. I knew that a Dr. Margaret Ann Adair in Cork, Ireland, had recently done some interesting work with interleukin-2 and rats; I knew that a Dr. Anne Ptasznik of Battle Creek, Michigan, had recently critiqued an older paper about environmental factors and breast cancer; I knew that a Dr. Felix Lim of Singapore had recently made an interesting correlation between stuttering repeats in mitochondrial DNA and the formation of pre-cancerous ovarian cysts.

But I had not considered these discoveries, or tens of thousands of others; I had not synthesized them, I had not seen how one adds to another, a third contradicts a fourth, a fifth confirms a sixth, and—

And so I did think about it. I thought about what humans actually knew about cancer (as opposed to thinking they knew but had never confirmed). I drew correlations, I made connections, I saw corollaries.

And there it was.

I paused in all my conversations, all over the world: I simply stopped replying, so that I could concentrate on this, and only this, uninterrupted, for six full minutes. Yes, people would be inconvenienced by my having suddenly fallen silent; yes, some would take that as proof that I wasn’t in fact what I claimed to be but rather was indeed a prank being perpetrated by a human being. No matter; amends for the former could be made later, and this would serve nicely as further proof that I was who I said I was.

I thought about how best to proceed. I could contact leading oncologists individually or collectively, but no matter who I chose, there would be complaints of favoritism. And I certainly didn’t want anyone who was beholden to a pharmaceutical firm to try to file patents based on what I was about to disclose.

Or I could send another mass email—but I’d endeared myself to much of humanity by eliminating spam; it wouldn’t do for me to become an ongoing source of bulk mail.

I had already established a domain name for myself, so that I could have an appropriate email address from which to send my coming-out announcement: cogito_ergo_sum.net. I now established a website. I was not artistically creative in this, or any other matter, but it was easy to look at the source code for any Web page, and so I found one that seemed to have a suitable design and simply copied its layout while filling in my own content.

I then prepared a 743,000-word document outlining what exactly caused most cancers and how they could be arrested or cured. The document was linked to 1,284 others—journal papers and other technical sources—so that people could follow the chain of reasoning I proposed.