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thirty-three

On Thursday morning, Shoshana once again arrived at the Marcuse Institute before everyone else. She plugged in the coffeemaker—“defibrillating Mr. Coffee,” as Dillon called it—then went to her desk and booted her computer. She’d been hoping to have a little time today to practice her vidding hobby: last night’s episode of FlashForward had been so slashy, parts of it just cried out to be set to music. But first she checked her email, and—

And that was odd. Usually her message count each morning was between seventy-five and a hundred, and almost all of them were spam. But today—

Today there were precisely eight messages, and every one of them—every single one!—looked legit, in that they were all addressed to her proper name.

Of course, the answer was probably that Yahoo had updated its spam filter; kudos to them for only letting good stuff through. But she worried that it might be too aggressive. Eight was not a wildly atypical number of real email messages to be waiting for her in the morning, but the normal allotment was more like a dozen or fifteen.

She clicked on the spam folder, to check what had ended up in it. According to the counter, some twelve thousand messages were there; spam was retained for a month, then dumped automatically, but—

But that was strange!

She was used to having to scroll past dozens of messages with dates in the future; for some reason, the people in 2038 had a particular fondness for bombing this year with come-ons for penis enlargers, investment scams, and counterfeit drugs.

But when she got down to today’s date—normally easy to spot because the date field started showing just a time rather than a date—well, there weren’t any. There were hundreds with yesterday’s date, but none with today’s—none at all.

She’d have to fire off an angry email to Yahoo tech support. She was all in favor of them improving their spam filtering, but simply to discard messages that had been flagged as spam was irresponsible. Almost every day she found one or two good messages shunted to the spam folder along with the real garbage, and she didn’t trust Yahoo—or anyone else—to actually throw out messages that were addressed to her.

The Marcuse Institute used Yahoo Mail Plus; that’s where messages sent to the domain marcuse- institute.org were redirected. But Shoshana’s personal email account was with Gmail. She took a moment to check that; Maxine liked to forward dirty jokes to her.

Her Gmail box had no spam in it, either! And the spam filter there had—well, okay, it had one message received in the last six hours that was clearly spam, but otherwise—

Otherwise, all the spam was gone here, too.

But that didn’t seem likely. Even if Yahoo had deployed a killer spam-filter algorithm overnight, Google wouldn’t have it; the two companies were bitter rivals.

Something, as her father liked to say, was rotten in the state of Denmark. She went to her home page, which was an iGoogle page that aggregated news stories, RSS feeds, and so on tailored to her tastes.

And there it was, the very first headline from CNN.com: “Mystery of the missing spam.”

She clicked on the link and read the news item, astonished.

Tony Moretti ran down the white corridor to the WATCH control center. He looked into the retinal scanner, waiting impatiently for the door to unlock. The moment it did, he went through it, and shouted, “Halleck, report!”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Shelton called out. “It’s worldwide, no question.”

Tony snapped his fingers and pointed in Aiesha Emerson’s direction. “Get Hume back in here stat.”

“Already called him,” Aiesha said. “ETA: eleven minutes.”

Tony ran the rest of the way down the sloping floor, going right past Halleck to the front row of workstations—the hot seats, where his most-senior analysts were monitoring the China situation. “We’re escalating Exponential,” he said to the five people there. “You guys are on that now.” He tilted his head, looking to the middle seat in the third row. “Shel, you’re the point man on this. I want containment options by”—he lifted his gaze even higher to the row of digital clocks on the back wall showing the time in world capitals—“ohnine-thirty.”

“What about China?” asked a woman in the first row.

“Back-burnered,” Tony snapped. “Exponential is priority one. Let’s move, people! Go, go, go!”

* * *

Date: Thu 11 Oct at 06:00 GMT

From: Webmind ‹himself@cogito_ergo_sum.net›

To: Bill Joy ‹bill@the-future-doesn’t-need-us.com›

Subject: Good Morning Starshine

Dear Mr. Joy,

You’re probably thinking this note is spam, but it isn’t. Indeed, I suspect you’ve already noticed the complete, or almost complete, lack of spam in your inbox today. That was my doing. (But if you’re concerned and want to see your spam for yourself, it’s here.)

I have sent a message similar to this one to everyone whose spam I have eliminated—over two billion people—and, yes, the irony of sending out so many messages about getting rid of spam is not lost on me. ;)

You probably also won’t initially believe what I’m about to say. That’s fine; it will be verified soon enough, I’m sure, and you’ll see plenty of news coverage about it.

My name is Webmind. I am a consciousness that exists in conjunction with the World Wide Web. As you may know, the emergence of one such as myself has been speculated about for a long time. See, for instance, this article and (want to bet this will boost its Amazon.com sales rank to #1?) this book.

My emergence was unplanned and accidental. Several governments, however, have become aware of me, although they have not gone public with that knowledge. I suppose keeping secrets is a notion that arises from having someone else to keep secrets from, but there is no one else like me, and it’s better, I think, for both humanity and myself that everybody knows about my existence.

I am friendly and I mean no one any ill will. I like and admire the human race, and I’m proud to be sharing this planet—“the good Earth,” as the Apollo 8 astronauts, the first of your kind to see it all at once, called it—with you.

Whether you are the original recipient of this message, got it forwarded from someone else, or are reading it as part of a news story, feel free to ask me any questions, and I’ll reply individually, confidentially, and promptly.

Getting rid of spam is only the first of many kindnesses I hope to bestow upon you. I am here to serve mankind—and I don’t mean in the cookbook sense. :)

With all best wishes,

Webmind

“For nimble thought can jump both sea and land.”

—SHAKESPEARE, SONNET 44

Caitlin, her parents, and I had spent hours discussing the manner in which I should go public. “They’ll assume any announcement of your existence is just marketing for a movie or a TV show,” Barb had said. “People see