Robert Sawyer - Watch

“And so,” said Kuroda, “we have no army—and no navy, and no marines. In 1947, we adopted a new constitution, and we call it Heiwa-Kenpo, ‘the Pacifist Constitution.’ And it says…”

Again, keystrokes; a link—and new text on Caitlin’s screen.

“Article Nine,” said Kuroda, “the most famous of all: ‘The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. Land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”

“So, what do you do if somebody—you know, um, the North Koreans, or somebody like that—attacks Japan?”

“Well, actually according to our agreement with your country, the Americans are supposed to come to our aid. But we are allowed to maintain self-defense forces, and we do: the Rikujo Jieitai —the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force—and corresponding Maritime and Air Self-Defense Forces.”

“Oh, well, then, you do have an army!” said Caitlin. “It’s just semantics.”

“No,” said Kuroda, adamantly. “No. These are defensive forces. They have no offensive weapons, no nuclear weapons, and they are civilian agencies, and the employees are civilians. That means no courts-martial and no military law; if one of them does something wrong, it’s tried in public court, like any other criminal action. And, as far as the Japanese people are concerned, the chief job of the defense forces is disaster relief: aid in firefighting, rescues, dealing with earthquakes, searching for missing persons, and the reinforcement of embankments and levees in the event of flooding. I know you were pretty young when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, but, believe me, had it hit Japan, the response would have been much more effective.”

“Hmmm,” said Caitlin. “I mean, it all sounds wonderful—‘forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.’ But you didn’t exactly come to that position on your own.”

“No, you’re right; it was pretty much foisted on us by General Mac-Arthur. But when George W. Bush was in power, he—or, at least, his officials—pressured us to revise Article Nine: they wanted us to have a military again, so we could join them in wars. And you know what? During Bush’s second term, eighty-two percent of Japanese specifically supported keeping Article Nine unchanged. Seven decades ago, we might not have chosen peace voluntarily—but today we do.”

The emails to me continued to pour in. Of course, many were insincere or jokes, and a few were simply incomprehensible.

A lot of the obvious questions were asked within the first few hours. On the other hand, new sorts of questions kept occurring to people as they became aware of the range of things I could do. And a new sport of trying to “stump Webmind” had quickly emerged, with people asking deliberately difficult questions, but, like the recursion issue—“I know that you know that I know”—the questions soon became so obtuse and convoluted that no human could tell if the answer I was providing was correct.

There were also those who kept trying to crash me. On the first day, 714 people asked me to calculate to the last digit the value of pi, and thirty-seven people wrote variations on: “Everything I say to you is a lie; I am lying.”

Most of the emails, though, were from people who sincerely wanted things:

Can you tell me what my boss says about me? (No, because it would violate his privacy.)

Can’t you help me? I’m a florist, and my Web page is ranked number 1,034 on Google, and even lower on Jagster. Can’t you fix things so that it’ll at least be in the top ten? (No, but here are some links to resources on improving your search-engine ranking.)

I’ve been trying to find a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side for two years now. Couldn’t you let me see new listings just a little bit before they go public? My ex will kill me if I don’t get a place of my own. (No, because your gain would be somebody else’s loss; others are in similar situations. However, I will gladly alert you the moment a new listing is made public.)

I don’t have long to live, and I don’t want my legacy to be the nasty things I have said about other people online. Surely you can track all that down and purge it for me. (Done.)

Others were doing their own purging. I saw one person who had posted frequently to a white-supremacist newsgroup delete all his own comments—but there was nothing he could do about the hundreds of posts by others that began with quotations from him, such as: On December 2, Aryanator said…

There were also exhortations for things I should do: Now that you’ve gotten rid of spam, how ’bout clearing out all that porn? (Legal porn? Sorry. Child pornography? Stay tuned.)

If you’ve really read everything that’s online, you’ve got to know that these alternative-medicine sites are shams. Do the world a favor and shut them down. (No, but I will contact those who visit such sites and suggest additional reading they might find edifying.)

Can’t you provide a secure channel for freedom bloggers in China and elsewhere to speak up? (I am investigating this.)

Brittany Connors! Brittany Connors! Brittany Connors! Surely there’s enough about her online already. Can you stop people from posting more? (Hey, you don’t have to look at it.)

You and I both know that George W. Bush got a bum rap from the liberal media elite. Can’t you correct what’s been posted about him? We deserve an accurate history! (I’m not going to change existing text on this or any other topic; I won’t become the Ministry of Truth. But feel free to post your own views as widely as you wish.)

Okay, I accept that you’re a benign AI—but surely something malevolent could emerge, no? Are you keeping watch? I’ d especially keep an eye on Silicon Valley start-ups and the people at MIT… (Oh, yes, indeed… )

Look, I don’t want much—just for you to insert “Spoiler Warning!” in front of messages about TV programs that give away upcoming plot twists. (I will not modify text—but, yes, I do agree posting such things without warnings is rude!)

Friday morning, Caitlin found herself leaping out of bed the moment she woke up—even if that wasn’t until 9:18 a.m.; it had been a late night, after all, webcamming with Dr. Kuroda, plus talking with Webmind and trying to follow the major news coverage and blog commentary about his emergence.

Normally, she’d have sleepily weighed the joys of staying snuggled under her blanket versus getting up to check on Webmind, but today the equation was clear: after all, now that she’d turned on her eyePod, Webmind could send text to her eye, but she hadn’t told Matt how to do that yet—and so she went to her computer, hoping he’d sent something overnight.

She sat in her blue flannel pajamas and scanned the message headers: Bashira, and Stacy, and Anna Bloom, and even one from Sunshine, and—

Ah! There it was: a message from Matt sent about 1:00 a.m. this morning. She read it with her refreshable Braille display because that was the fastest way for her to receive text, much quicker than reading English on a screen, and even faster than what she normally had JAWS set for. And, besides, there was something intimate about reading that way. She’d heard people arguing about ebooks versus printed books, but couldn’t really understand what those who preferred the latter were on about: they claimed they liked the feel of paper books, but you didn’t feel the text in them, you looked at it, just as you would on a screen. But Braille was tactile, sensual—even when rendered by electronically driven raised pins on a device plugged into a USB port—and that was how she wanted to experience what Matt had to say.