Robert Sawyer - Watch

“God, it’s hard,” she said. And it was: her breathing had accelerated, and she felt herself sweating. Staying focused on that one orange line took prodigious concentration; she was sure if she relaxed her attention for even a moment, instead of continuing to move along its length, she’d snap back to where she’d begun. But attention wanted to wander; vision—even internalized mental vision—wanted to flick now here and now there in an endless series of saccades. She concentrated totally, concentrated the way she did when tackling a really tough math problem, concentrated for all she was worth, and—

There.

“Oh, my God,” Caitlin said, softly.

Spread out before her, filling her perception, spilling over in all directions into her mental peripheral vision, was a vast sea of points, each again resolvable only at the very limit of her perception. Not thousands, not millions, not billions, but trillions upon trillions of them. In aggregate, it appeared as a pulsing mass of grayness, but, as she strained to discern, she realized that the ever-so-tiny pixels came in different colors.

And she counted the colors: there was black, and yellow, and—that was green, wasn’t it? Yes, and blue, and red, and—

Ah! The colors Newton had named, her brain drawing on what she had read about optics: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, the seven hues of the rainbow, plus black, which was no color at all, a nothingness, a—

Yes, a zero!

And the colors came in two intensities: dull red and bright; pale orange and a flaming shade; a yellow so muted it was almost brown and another yellow that flared like the noonday sun. And that shade of gray, she’d seen it before, too: it was black but with the brightness turned up. There weren’t eight shades here, but sixteen! She was seeing not binary, as she had before, but the base-16 counting system of most computers, the colors no doubt corresponding to the hexadecimal digits that would be written as 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, and F. Pushing to concentrate at a higher level had driven her perception to a new level, too. Spread out before her was a vast ocean of data, of information.

“There’s so much,” she said.

“Indeed,” said Webmind.

“Okay,” she said, and she took a deep breath. “Here’s what we’ll do…”

“Well?” snapped Tony in the WATCH control room.

“It’s working,” said Colonel Hume, looking at the central monitor. “Our initial attempt was only getting about thirty percent of the aberrant packets, but we’ve adjusted the algorithm. Some are still resistant—I’m not sure why—but we’re now deleting sixty-two percent of those that pass through the switching station.”

“Ah…” said Tony. “Good.”

“Damn right it’s good!” said Hume, shaking a freckled fist at the screen. “Time for that son of a bitch to sing ‘Daisy’…”

The vast shimmering mass made up of all the colors of the rainbow heaved and throbbed, almost as though it were a living thing. Caitlin held her breath as she backtracked now along the orange link line, her attention to the rear, watching as the mass—yes, yes, as it started to move toward her. She felt a bit like the pied piper—although, in her case she supposed it was the πed piper!—enticing all the rats to follow.

As she hurried along, the orange link line grew wider and wider, like a road or a sluice, and the mass, the torrent, the deluge surged toward her, running down its length. She sped up—she might not be able to run well in the real world, but in webspace she was a gazelle!

“What’s happening?” her mother’s voice called from the other realm, but Caitlin didn’t dare break her concentration to answer.

Webmind, though, could better subdivide his attention, and she heard him say, “We’re giving them more than they bargained for.”

“Traffic at the switching station is increasing,” said Aiesha, looking up from her console.

Tony looked at the right-hand monitor, beneath the WATCH eye logo. It was now showing a graph of web-traffic levels at the Alexandria AT T switching center. It had just shot way, way up, the curve looking an awful lot like the leading edge of a tsunami. “Where’s it coming from?”

“Everywhere!” shouted Shel. “Anywhere—still can’t trace the damn source.”

“God,” said Colonel Hume. “It’s a fucking flood.”

Tony looked at Hume, then back at Shelton Halleck. “A denial-of-service attack?”

“Maybe,” said Shel. “There are so many packets now. The ones we were looking for were initially a tiny fraction of the traffic flow, but now they’re not even one in a billion.”

“What is it?” demanded Tony. “What the hell is it?”

“Analyzing now,” said Shel. “Gotta string the packets back together—give me a sec…”

And then the center screen filled with a hex dump, including 6F 75 72 20 74 69 6E.

“Well?” snapped Tony. “What is it? Viruses? Program code? Encrypted data?”

“Oh, crap,” said Shel. “No, it’s not encrypted. It’s goddamn plaintext. It’s fuckin’ ASCII, for crying out loud.” He hit a key, and the hexadecimal bytes were converted to their English equivalents on the screen: Are you sad about your tiny penis? If so, we can help! Just respond with your credit-card number, and—

“Jesus!” said Tony.

“It’s still pouring in,” said Aiesha. “It must be everything since Webmind started intercepting it! Something like 300 billion messages—and it’s bouncing it all back at our node at once.”

“AT T is reporting critical overload conditions,” said Dirk Kozak, the communications officer, holding a telephone handset to his chest. “They say if we don’t do something, that node will lock up totally.”

“It’s not going to give up without a fight, is it?” Tony said to Hume, who slammed his freckled right fist into his left palm. Tony turned and looked out at the vast room. “All right,” he shouted. “Abort! Abort! Abort!”

Caitlin, her mother, her father, and Matt were all in the Decter living room. Schrödinger prowled. The big rectangle of the wall-mounted TV was off.

Caitlin’s dad was intimidating at all times, but particularly so when he was standing, looming over everyone else. “Who did you tell?” he demanded.

“Nobody,” said Matt.

Only anger, Caitlin knew, could make her father speak so much. “Come on, Matt! You’re the only person outside of this family, Masayuki, and Dr. Bloom in Israel who knows about the cellular automata. And none of us said a word.”

“I—um, I didn’t…”

“Who’ d you tell?”

“Nobody. Nobody. I promised Caitlin, and I keep my promises.”

The words He’s telling the truth flashed across Caitlin’s vision.

“He isn’t lying,” Caitlin said. “Webmind says so.”

“Then how’d the government find out?” her father replied sharply.

“I didn’t say a word,” Matt said. “Honest. But…”

“Yes?” snapped her father.

Matt lifted his shoulders. “I was curious. I wanted to know more.” His voice was cracking on every syllable. “And, well, I—”

“Oh, shit,” said Caitlin’s mom, getting it. “You googled it.”

Matt nodded.

“What search terms did you use?” demanded her father.

Matt’s voice was small. “It spiraled outward. I started with ‘cellular automata,’ and then ‘Conway’s Game of Life,’ and ‘Stephen Wolfram.’”

“Did you include the term ‘Webmind’ in any of your searches?” her dad asked.