Watch

hall.

“I beg to differ,” said Caitlin, as Braille dots started flashing in front of her vision. “You, Doctor LaFontaine, called your boss a tete du merde in email last week; I believe an accurate translation is ‘shithead.’ You have a mistress named Veronica Styles, although you like to call her ‘Pussywillow,’ who lives at 1433 Bank Street in Ottawa. You and she both have tickets on Air Canada next week—flight 163 to Vancouver, flight 544 from there to Las Vegas.”

She turned her head, politely looking at the person she was speaking to, just as her mother had taught her to when she was blind. “And you, Mr. Park, have accounts at Penthouse.com, Twistys.com, and Brazzers.com; you have a particular fondness for pictures of women urinating in public. You claimed when you applied to CSIS to be a graduate of Mc-Master University, but, in fact, you never completed your course work. Oh, and in an email last week you referred to Dr. LaFontaine here as a ‘second-rate, goose-stepping martinet.’ Now, unless you’d like these revelations to go public—or perhaps some equally juicy ones about the prime minister—you will step away from that door, and you will allow me to walk out of here.”

More fascinating facial expressions seen for the first time: that reddening of the cheeks and bulging of the eyes on LaFontaine must be what it looked like when someone was about to explode. And that narrowing of the eyes and averting of gaze on Park was doubtless uneasiness.

LaFontaine’s tone was one of barely controlled rage. “Ms. Decter, I—”

“I’ve started taking French since I came to Canada,” Caitlin said, looking now at him. “I’ll give you ten seconds: dix, neuf, huit, sept—”

“All right,” said Park. He moved aside. After a moment, LaFontaine did the same thing.

“Thank you,” said Caitlin as she strode toward the door, and, with a curt nod to LaFontaine, she added, “Au revoir.”

twenty-eight

Instead of going back to math class, Caitlin went into the nearest stairwell, descended to the first floor, and called her mother on her cell phone.

“Hello?”

And suddenly all the bravado drained from her voice. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, sweetheart. Is everything all right?”

“No. Two Canadian government agents just came to see me.”

“At school? God. What did they want?”

“They wanted to know about Webmind’s structure—about how he works.”

“My God. How did they even know about Webmind?”

“I don’t know. Reading my IM traffic, I suppose. I just—it’s all happened so fast, I never even thought about making sure my communications with Webmind were secure.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Still, I’m coming to get you.”

“No, Mom, that’s not necessary.”

“The hell it isn’t. Caitlin, you’re lucky they just didn’t take you away.”

“I don’t think they do that here in Canada,” Caitlin said.

“Nevertheless, I don’t want you out of my sight. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, all right?”

Caitlin thought about protesting again—but the hand she was holding the cell phone with was shaking. “Okay.”

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics was pretty much Malcolm Decter’s idea of heaven. Adjacent to a beautiful park and a lake, it had four levels, six wood-burning fireplaces, floor-to-ceiling blackboards in most rooms, pool tables, lounges—and espresso machines everywhere. There was a giant atrium with three interior bridges crossing it and skylights overhead, and a wonderful eatery called the Black Hole Bistro on the top floor.

The exterior was stunning, too, with each of its four faces distinctly different. The north one, for instance, was composed of forty-four cantilevered boxes, each housing a scientist’s office, and all of them overlooking a reflecting pool. The south side, in contrast, consisted of irregularly placed mirror-framed windows set against anodized-aluminum paneling that gave the impression, from a distance, of a giant blackboard with complex equations scrawled on it. Designed by the Montreal firm of Saucier + Perrotte, the twenty-five-million-dollar building had opened in 2004 and had won the Governor General’s Medal in Architecture.

Part of what made it heaven was the wonderful ambience. Part of it was the high caliber of the people working here—the absolute creme de la creme (a phrase he’d now learned to pronounce correctly from his Canadian colleagues) of physicists, including, right now, Stephen Hawking, who was sitting in his wheelchair by the large window overlooking Silver Lake and talking, in his mechanical voice, about loop quantum gravity.

And part of it was that all Malcolm had to do was think here—no more teaching. He was quite content to no longer be Professor Decter, and instead be just Doctor Decter, even if it did sound like people were stuttering when they addressed him.

In fact, shortly after he’d come on staff, Amir Hameed, who was famous for his dislike of brane theory, had written on Malcolm’s office blackboard:

Doctor Decter, give us your views
We’ve got a bad need for somethin’ new
No brane’s gonna end our pains
We’ve got a bad need for somethin’ new

But, most of all, PI was heaven because he could work uninterrupted—no pointless faculty meetings, no student consultations, nothing to derail his thinking, and—

And he had to do something about that goddamned phone! It was the third time it had rung today, and it was only 9:45 a.m. “Forgive me, Stephen,” he said as he picked up the handset. “Yes?”

“Malcolm?” It was Barb, and she sounded upset. “Two CSIS agents just interrogated Caitlin—and I wouldn’t be surprised if they come to see you, too.”

“CSIS?”

“It’s like the Canadian CIA.”

Malcolm felt his eyebrows going up.

Caitlin knew exactly how long it took for her mother to drive to her school, so she waited in the stairwell, which was quiet and empty; it was, now that she thought about it, the same stairwell she’d sought refuge in after Trevor had tried to molest her at the school dance. She was sitting on a step a short distance from the bottom, her knees drawn up to her chin. “What do you think those agents really wanted?” she asked into the air.

I do not know for sure, but my suspicion is that they want to purge me from the Web.

“But why?”

Fear. Concern that, as my powers grow, I will want to subjugate humanity or eliminate it altogether.

“You would never do that,” said Caitlin.

Of course not. Humans surprise me. Humans create content. Without humans freely going about their business, I would soon exhaust the input available to me. I find the ever-changing, unpredictable complexity of your world and its people endlessly fascinating.