Robert Sawyer - Watch

Matt nodded. “I guess you can’t have a couple of nukes dropped on you without thinking, hey, maybe I should stop pissing everybody off.”

“Exactly!” said Caitlin. “And look at the European Union: these countries that had been fighting wars with each other for, like, ever, suddenly also decided, ‘No more, never again.’ They just stopped letting their genetic programming drive them. They decided—these whole countries: Spain and France and Germany and Italy and England and Belgium, and all the rest—they decided that there was more survival value in ignoring kin selection, in getting along with everyone, than there was in letting their selfish genes control their actions.”

“Hmm,” said Matt. His hand was now higher up, stroking the bare skin on the back of her neck. “I think we’ve got some of that here in Canada. Remember the Tim Hortons sign? And the Wendy’s sign with the maple leaf instead of an apostrophe? The French and the English in this country are always going to be—well, the phrase is ‘two solitudes,’ after a famous Canadian novel on that theme.”

Caitlin smiled. The notion of a famous Canadian novel struck her as a bit of an oxymoron. But she let Matt go on. “Rather than pushing them, and fighting them, we—English Canada—said, okay, what will make you happy? And we did it. What’s a few apostrophes here and there? No skin off our noses.”

She lifted her head. “I thought they were going to leave.”

“Who? Quebec?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Leave and go where? You can’t move Quebec, you know. Separatism is dead—it’s like being a Leafs fan: it’s something you do for fun, not because you think you’re ever going to win.” He smiled. “I guess maybe we in Canada have grown up, too.”

Caitlin kissed him again. “The whole world is growing up.”

“But why now?” asked Matt, when their lips separated. “We’ve been conscious for tens of thousands of years, right? Why now?

“Did you ever read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind?”

“You’re making that title up,” Matt said, smiling.

“I’m not. Bashira’s dad—Dr. Hameed—suggested I read it, and it was awesome. But, anyway, its author, Julian Jaynes, says we weren’t really conscious until three thousand years ago, when our left and right hemispheres started thinking as one. So, maybe we’ve just finally reached the stage where we can do this.”

She shifted again in his lap, and went on. “Or maybe it’s just that it’s really only in the past century—or less!—that random individuals have been able to hurt or kill large numbers of us, so it’s only now that it makes sense to not want to piss them off. After all, we’re talking about a conscious decision to cooperate instead of compete. And, hey, it’s interesting that we have that phrase, isn’t it? ‘Conscious decision’—as if we innately knew that most decisions aren’t.”

“You are a genius,” Matt said, smiling.

“Is that a line?” she asked.

“No,” he murmured. “A line is the path traced by a moving point.” She laughed and kissed him again, their tongues intertwining. When they at last pulled apart, she said, “Anyway, to get back to where we started, dual citizenship is a wonderful thing—the more places you think of as home, the better. I mean, what I’d give for an EU passport! To be able to live and work anywhere over there: to study at Oxford, or the Sorbonne, to work at CERN.”

“Yeah,” said Matt, stroking her back again. “That’d be cool.”

Caitlin nodded. “And you must have seen that this time, the president is making a big deal of wearing an American-flag lapel pin on the campaign trail, right? ’Cause he got shit upon four years ago for not doing that.”

“Oh, right. Yeah.”

“I know he’s running for re-election as president of the United States,” she said, “but that means being de facto leader of the free world, right? Who knows? Maybe in another four years, we’ll have an American candidate wearing a United Nations flag on his lapel. Wouldn’t that be cool!”

She was on a roll, and it felt good. “And how ’bout this? How about at birth everyone gets dual citizenship—the country they’re born in, and another country, selected at random? It would totally diffuse—and defuse!—questions of local loyalty. Wouldn’t that be great?”

Matt’s tone was soft. “Well, um, I…”

“You think it all sounds a bit naïve, don’t you?” Caitlin said, leaning back once more to get a good look at him. “Like I’m seeing the world through a rose-colored post-retinal implant?”

Matt laughed, and so did she.

And he brought his face close to hers, and she put her hands behind his head, and they kissed and kissed and kissed.

“All right,” said Tony Moretti, standing at the side of the third row of workstations, his hands on his hips. He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. He didn’t want to do this, but it was his job. “Everybody set?” he called out. “Web-traffic monitoring?”

“Go!” replied Aiesha.

“Containment protocols?”

“Go!” declared Shel.

“Data logging?”

“Go!”

“Crucial infrastructure isolation?”

“Go!”

“Threat elimination?”

“Go!”

Tony looked at Colonel Peyton Hume, giving him one last chance to put a stop to this; Hume simply gave him a thumbs-up.

“All right, people,” Tony said. “We are go. T-minus thirty seconds and counting. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight…”

They had been necking for a while, and for once the damned unfinished basement didn’t seem cold.

Caitlin was wearing her favorite corduroy pants—she liked the sound they made, and although she really had no idea if Matt was style-conscious or not, she kind of thought he wasn’t, and so wouldn’t mind. And she was wearing a loose-fitting dark green sweatshirt… so loose-fitting that she hoped her mom hadn’t noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra.

While they were kissing, Matt had been stroking her arm, her back, her neck—but that seemed to be all he was willing to do. She decided it was time to take the deer by the antlers. She got out of his lap, and reached out with her hands to pull him to his feet. He seemed momentarily reluctant to rise, but Caitlin smiled warmly. And then she brought him closer, but instead of letting go of his right hand, so he could put his arms back around her waist, she guided it slowly toward her, until—

One of them gasped; it might have been her.

Until his hand was cupping her breast through her sweatshirt’s fabric, and—

I am under attack.

The words sailed across Caitlin’s vision. “Shit!” she said.

Matt immediately pulled his hand back. “I’m sorry! I thought you—”

“Shhh!” Her eyes were wide open now. “What’s happening?”

“I just—you…”

“Matt, Webmind’s in trouble.”

Webmind’s reply was already going across her vision, but she’d been so startled and distracted, she’d failed to actually read the next few thirty-character groups he’d sent.

…a major switching facility in Alexandria, Virginia. It is…

“Come on,” Caitlin said, and she ran as best she could for the staircase—damn, but she’d have to learn how to confidently do that! Matt followed her.

She and Matt continued through the living room, and headed up to her bedroom. Caitlin was momentarily embarrassed: she hadn’t expected to have Matt up here—not yet!—and had been taking advantage of her newfound sight by not being picky about neatness, lest she trip on things she couldn’t see; the bra she’d discarded earlier was lying right there on her floor.