Robert Sawyer - Watch

“We’re monitoring the emergence of Webmind over here,” Hume replied.

Her heart skipped a beat—not quite the recommended thing at her age. She looked out her window at the nighttime skyline sloping down Mount Carmel to the inky Mediterranean. She decided to be coy. “My goodness, yes, it’s fascinating, isn’t it?”

“That it is. Professor Bloom, let me cut to the chase. We’re intrigued by the process by which Webmind is physically created. We’ve spoken at length to Caitlin Decter, but, well, she’s just a teenager, as you know, and she really doesn’t have the vocabulary to—”

“Stop right there, Colonel Hume,” Anna said sharply into the phone’s mouthpiece. “If you had talked to Caitlin, you’d know that there’s precious little related to mathematics or computers that she doesn’t know about.”

Anna vividly remembered the webcam call late last month from her old friend Masayuki Kuroda, while he’d been staying at Caitlin’s house in Canada. He’d told her about their theory: legions of “ghost packets,” as Caitlin had dubbed them, floating in the background of the Web, somehow self-organizing into cellular automata. He’d asked her what she thought of the idea.

Anna had replied that it was a novel notion, adding, “It’s a classic Darwinian scenario, isn’t it? Mutant packets that are better able to survive bouncing around endlessly. But the Web is expanding fast, with new servers added each day, so a slowly growing population of these ghost packets might never overwhelm its capacity—or, at least, it clearly hasn’t yet.”

Caitlin had chimed in with, “And the Web has no white blood cells tracking down useless stuff, right? They would just persist, bouncing around.”

“I guess,” Anna had said then. “And—just blue-skying here—but the checksum on the packet could determine if you’re seeing it as black or white; even-number checksums could be black and odd-number ones white, or whatever. If the hop counter changes with each hop, but never goes to zero, the checksum would change, too, and so you’d get a flipping effect.” She’d smiled, and said, “I think I smell a paper.”

After which Masayuki had said to Caitlin, in full recognition of the fact that she had been the one to originally suggest lost packets as the mechanism: “How’d you like to get the jump on the competition and coauthor your first paper with Professor Bloom and me? ‘Spontaneous Generation of Cellular Automata in the Infrastructure of the World Wide Web.’ ”

To which Caitlin, with the exuberance Anna had subsequently come to know so well, had said, “Sweet!”

Peyton Hume was still on the phone from the United States. He sounded flustered by Anna’s rebuke about how much Caitlin knew. “Well, of course, that’s true,” he said now, in a backpedaling tone of voice, “but we thought, with your expert insight, you could expand on the model she proposed.”

There had been no public announcement that Anna was aware of linking Caitlin to Webmind. “Certainly,” she said, keeping her tone even. “If you tell me what she told you, I’ll be glad to add what I know.”

There was a pause, then: “She suggested that Webmind’s microstructure had spontaneously emerged and was widely dispersed.”

Anna nodded to herself. General statements. “Colonel Hume, I imagine I’m like most of the human race at this particular moment. I’m conflicted. I don’t know if Webmind is a bad thing or a good thing. All I know is that it’s here, and that, to date, it’s done nothing untoward.”

“We do understand that, Professor Bloom. We’re simply trying to be ready for contingencies. Surely you must know that we could be facing a singularity situation here. Time is of the essence—which is why I picked up the phone and called you directly.”

“I’m more than a little peeved that you’ve been monitoring my communications,” Anna said.

“Actually, we haven’t. We honestly don’t know what you and Caitlin Decter have discussed. But if one thing has become apparent in the last few hours, everyone’s communications are being monitored—and not by anything that’s human. We need to be able to respond to this effectively, should conditions warrant.”

“You mean, you need to be able to purge Webmind from the Internet, don’t you? Has the decision been taken to actually try to do that?”

Hume paused for a half second. “I’m merely an advisor, Professor Bloom—and no, no decision has been taken. But you have made a career of mapping the growth of the Internet. You know what’s happening—and how significant this point in history is. We need to fully grasp what’s going on—and that must start with understanding how Webmind is instantiated.”

“Look, I’ve had a long day,” Anna said. “It’s late here. I’m going to sleep on this, and then—let me be blunt—I’m going to consult with the Legal Affairs people at the Technion in the morning, and review my options.”

“Professor, surely you know how much this can escalate in eight or ten hours. We really can’t wait.”

“You’re going to have to, Colonel. Shalom.”

“Professor, please—”

“I said shalom.” And she hung up the phone.

Finally, Matt knew, it was time for him to go home. Caitlin walked him to the front door, opened it, and stepped outside with him, then closed the door behind her, so they could have a little privacy. She draped her arms around his neck and—his heart was pounding!—she pulled him to her, and they kissed. This time she touched her tongue to his— wow! —and he could feel the goose bumps on Caitlin’s bare arms.

When they pulled apart, she said, “IM me when you get home from school tomorrow, ’kay?”

“I will,” he promised, and then, of his own volition, he leaned in for one more soft, warm kiss. Then he headed down the driveway to the street, and turned and waved at Caitlin, and she waved back, grinning, and went inside.

Matt was a good Waterloo resident: he had a BlackBerry, and, among other things, used it as his MP3 player. And he was a good Canadian: he had it loaded with Nickelback, Feist, and The Trews—but he’d have to get some Lee Amodeo, and find out what Caitlin was so excited about.

As he walked along, feeling happier than he had—well, pretty much forever—he had his hands in his pockets and the collar on his Wind-breaker turned up against the late-evening chill. He also had the volume turned up—ninety decibels, he estimated—so he heard only a muffled sound and didn’t recognize that it was someone calling his name.

But there was no mistaking the sudden slamming of a fist into his upper arm. Adrenaline surging, he turned and saw Trevor Nordstrom.

“I’m talking to you, Reese!” Trevor said. Another quick estimate: Trevor outmassed him by twenty kilos, and all of it was muscle.

Matt looked left and right, but he could hardly outrun Trevor, who had apparently just come from hockey practice—he’d dropped a stick and a gym bag on the sidewalk. That it wasn’t a planned ambush was small consolation.

“Yes?” Matt said—and, damn it, damn it, damn it, his voice cracked.

“Think you’re the shit, getting everyone to sign that card for Caitlin?”

Matt’s heart was pounding again, and not in a good way. “It just seemed a nice thing to do,” he said. Something you wouldn’t know anything about.

“She’s outta your league, Reese.”

He didn’t actually dispute that, but he didn’t want to give Trevor the satisfaction of agreeing, and so he said nothing.

But apparently silence was not an option. Trevor punched him again, this time on his chest just below his shoulder.