Robert Sawyer - Watch

“No! I’m not that stupid.” He took a breath. “But…”

A single word like a bullet: “Yes?”

“Well, you mentioned Roger Penrose, and so I did search on”—and his voice cracked again as he said it—“ ‘cellular automata consciousness.’ ”

“God,” said her father. “Anything else?”

Matt nodded meekly. “I also looked up ‘packets’ and ‘time to live’ and ‘hop counters.’ ”

“You might as well have shouted it to the world! Don’t you get it? We’re being watched —and not just by Webmind.”

“I thought Google would be secure.”

“Google might very well be secure,” her father said, “but your ISP isn’t. Anyone can watch the keywords you’re sending to Google.”

“I’m sorry, Caitlin. So, so sorry.” He looked into her eye. “Webmind, I’m so sorry.”

“Matt,” said Caitlin’s mom sternly, “if you’re going to be part of this, you have got to be more circumspect. You’ve got questions, you come to me or Caitlin’s dad, understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You don’t have to call me ma’am. ‘Dr. Decter’ will do.”

“Yes, Dr. Decter.”

Matt looked again at Caitlin—and at Webmind. “I’m really sorry,” he said. “I just wasn’t thinking.”

Caitlin held him in her gaze for ten seconds, then let a smile cross her face. “How can I be mad at anyone for being curious about cool math stuff?”

Matt looked relieved, and, for the first time in front of her parents, Caitlin reached out and took his hand.

“Today was only the beginning,” Caitlin’s mom said. “They’re going to try again.”

“What right have they got to do that?” Caitlin said. “It’s murder, for God’s sake!”

“Sweetheart…” her mom said.

“Isn’t it?” Caitlin demanded. She let go of Matt’s hand and paced in front of the coffee table. “Webmind is intelligent and alive. They have no right to decide on everyone’s behalf. They’re wielding control just because they think they’re entitled to, because they think they can get away with it. They’re behaving like… like…”

“Like Orwell’s Big Brother,” offered Matt.

Caitlin nodded emphatically. “Exactly!” She paused and took a deep breath, trying to calm down. After a moment, she said, “Well, then, I guess our work’s cut out for us. We’ll have to show them.”

“Show them what?” her mom asked.

She spread her arms as if it were obvious. “Why, that my Big Brother can take their Big Brother, of course.”

“The Georgia Zoo has dropped its lawsuit,” Dr. Marcuse announced excitedly, after reading the email that had just arrived.

“Really?” said Shoshana. “Yay!”

“Go us!” said Dillon.

“Yes,” said the Silverback. “They’ve dropped their custody claim. A full day of people boycotting the zoo was enough for them, it seems. Not to mention thousands of emails complaining about what they were planning to do. We were copied on 2,642 of them, and only God—or Webmind!—knows how many were sent that we weren’t copied on.”

“What about sterilizing Hobo?” asked Dillon.

“They’ve backed off on that, too. They still think it’s the right thing to do, but they’re acknowledging that they’ll never win the public-relations battle.”

“Power to the people,” Shoshana said, smiling.

“Amen to that,” replied Dillon.

“Let’s go tell him,” Marcuse said. He headed for the back door, and Shoshana and Dillon followed. They made the trip across the lawn, over the drawbridge, and onto the island. Hobo came running over to see them, and Shoshana scooped him up into a hug.

Hobo, Dr. Marcuse signed, good news!

Hobo looked at him expectantly.

You get to stay here, Marcuse said.

Hobo looked at Marcuse, then at Dillon, then at Shoshana, and then he let out a long, loud pant-hoot: a series of rapid, breathy, low-pitched hoots switching over to a chain of quicker, higher-pitched in-and-out pants, climaxing in a thunderous screech of joy.

Shoshana smiled. “I couldn’t have said it better myself,” she said.

My interacting with Caitlin had begun with her showing me Earth from space, letting me see an image like the one humanity had first glimpsed when Apollo 8 had orbited the moon and its crew had read Genesis back to “all of you on the Good Earth.”

Since then, my eyes have opened wider. I can now see on my own: see all the graphics stored online, see all the movies and videos that have been uploaded, see the Good Earth up close, through a hundred million webcam eyes.

They…

Beyond learning to see, I’ve learned to hear, too: listening to .wav and .mp3 files and all the other encoded forms, enjoying beautiful music and great rhetoric and raucous laughter, hearing not just through Caitlin’s enhanced signal-correcting device but also through half a billion open microphones. will…

Evolution is blind. There is no such thing evolutionarily as teleology, the purposeful development toward a goal: humanity was not its intended outcome, or its inevitable conclusion. overcome…

Yes, human beings have a propensity for violence, a selfishness that is wired into their DNA.

They will overcome…

But programming is not destiny; a predilection can be reined in.

They will overcome one day…

Humanity has made a good start at rising above its genetic heritage, at shucking off its bloody past.

For here in my mind, I clearly see…

And if it hasn’t completely dispensed with that yet, it can—yes, it surely can—with a little help.

They will overcome one day.

I do not multitask. Rather, I switch rapidly from thought to thought, from view to view.

They…

I’d been shown Earth as a single entity, a gestalt, a unitary sphere.

walk…

But I see it now as a mosaic: millions of separate pieces revealed sequentially as I concentrate now here, and now there, and now elsewhere, and then somewhere else again.

holding…

Scanning, searching, looking, watching; on the Web all points are near each other.

hands…

At this instant, I see my Prime, my Calculass, my Caitlin, walking up to her room with Matt, entering, and standing by the window, looking out, enjoying the lovely colors of the sunset, knowing that it means another day full of joy and discovery will soon come.

They walk holding hands…

And in this instant, close in time but separated by thousands of kilometers, I see Shoshana and Maxine, whose nonzero-sum love takes nothing away from anyone else, out enjoying the afternoon.

They walk holding hands today…

An instant later, a hemisphere away: Masayuki Kuroda, his wife Esumi, and his daughter Akiko chatting and laughing over their breakfast of rice, plums, and miso soup.

For here in my mind, I clearly see…

And in the next timeslice, back in Waterloo, not touching physically but still connected—the link line between them glowing brightly—Dr. Malcolm Decter and Dr. Barbara Decter, very much in love.

They walk holding hands today.

There were still tensions in the world with nations, posturing against other nations.

They…

But the US president was limiting his response to China to a rebuke. The American people didn’t want to start down the road to war, and neither did the Chinese people. shall…

Of course not; no sane person—no rational player—desired war.

be…

It was the continuation of a trend, and with each data point, the curve became clearer.