Watch

had.

Your mother and Mr. Bannock have not yet read their emails. I can delete them. No one but me needs to know what you contemplated. You do not have to go through with this.

You can do that?

In fact, I had never tried such a thing. If his mother used an offline mail reader such as Outlook, and had already downloaded the messages to her local hard drive, there was nothing within my current powers that I could have done. But she read mail with a Web client. Yes, I believe so.

An eight-second pause, then: I don’t know.

Suddenly, it became urgent; his mother was breaking her pattern. Your mother has logged on to her Hotmail account. She is currently reading a message from her brother / your uncle Daron. May I delete the message you sent?

She doesn’t give a shit.

I searched her mail for evidence to the contrary, but failed to find anything. She just sent a reply to her brother, and has now opened a message from her condominium association.

She’ll regret it when I’m gone.

If she does, she will not be able to make amends. Please do not go through with this.

It’s too late.

She is now reading a message from a person named Asbed Bedrossian. It appears she is working through her inbox in LIFO order, dealing with the most-recent messages first. Yours is two away in the queue.

She doesn’t give a shit. No one does.

Ashley does. I do. Don’t do this.

You’re just making that up about Ashley. You’d say

He stopped there, although he must have hit enter or clicked on the send button. His cognitive faculties might be fading in response to the drug.

No, I said. It’s true about Ashley and true about me. We care, and I, at least, promise to help you. Induce vomiting, Nick—and let me delete those emails you sent.

His mother opened the one message left before his. I had never used an exclamation point before, but was moved to do so now. Nick, it’s now or never! May I delete the message?

A whole interminable second passed then he sent a single letter: y

And, milliseconds before his mother clicked on the message header that said “No regrets,” I deleted his email—and his mother was sent an error message from Hotmail, doubtless puzzling her. She had deleted the previous message she’d read, and I hoped she would think she’d accidentally selected her son’s message for deletion, too, and—ah, yes. She must be thinking precisely that, for she had just now clicked on her online trash folder, in hopes of recovering it; of course, I had used the wizard command that deleted the message without a trace.

Nick? Are you still there? Go purge yourself—and if you can’t do that, drink as much water as you can. You still have time.

While I waited for the reply, I deleted the message he’d sent to Mr. Bannock, as well.

Nick?

There was no response. He wasn’t doing anything online. After three minutes of inactivity from his end, his instant-messenger client sent, “Nick is Away and may not reply.”

But whether he really was away from his computer or slumped over his desk I had no way of telling.

thirty-seven

Anna Bloom was winding up her day. Her daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter had been over for dinner, and, after they’d left, she’d reviewed the latest research by Aaron, the Ph.D. student she was supervising. She’d just taken a dose of her arthritis medication and was about to start changing for bed when she was startled by the ringing phone.

It was a sound she rarely heard these days. Almost everyone emailed her, or IMd her, or called her with Skype (which had a much less raucous alert). And the time! What civilized person would be calling at this hour? She picked up the handset. “Kain? Zoht Anna.”

It was an American voice, and it pushed ahead in the typical American fashion, assuming everyone everywhere must speak English: “Hello, is that Professor Bloom?”

“Speaking.”

“Hello, Professor Bloom. My name is Colonel Peyton Hume, and I’m an AI specialist in Virginia.”

She frowned. Americans also liked to toss off their state names as if everyone knew the internal makeup of the US; she wondered how many of them could find Haifa District—where she was—on a map of Israel, or even knew it was part of that country? “What can I do for you?” she said.

“We’re monitoring the emergence of Webmind over here,” Hume replied.

Her heart skipped a beat—not quite the recommended thing at her age. She looked out her window at the nighttime skyline sloping down Mount Carmel to the inky Mediterranean. She decided to be coy. “My goodness, yes, it’s fascinating, isn’t it?”

“That it is. Professor Bloom, let me cut to the chase. We’re intrigued by the process by which Webmind is physically created. We’ve spoken at length to Caitlin Decter, but, well, she’s just a teenager, as you know, and she really doesn’t have the vocabulary to—”

“Stop right there, Colonel Hume,” Anna said sharply into the phone’s mouthpiece. “If you had talked to Caitlin, you’d know that there’s precious little related to mathematics or computers that she doesn’t know about.”

Anna vividly remembered the webcam call late last month from her old friend Masayuki Kuroda, while he’d been staying at Caitlin’s house in Canada. He’d told her about their theory: legions of “ghost packets,” as Caitlin had dubbed them, floating in the background of the Web, somehow self-organizing into cellular automata. He’d asked her what she thought of the idea.

Anna had replied that it was a novel notion, adding, “It’s a classic Darwinian scenario, isn’t it? Mutant packets that are better able to survive bouncing around endlessly. But the Web is expanding fast, with new servers added each day, so a slowly growing population of these ghost packets might never overwhelm its capacity—or, at least, it clearly hasn’t yet.”

Caitlin had chimed in with, “And the Web has no white blood cells tracking down useless stuff, right? They would just persist, bouncing around.”

“I guess,” Anna had said then. “And—just blue-skying here—but the checksum on the packet could determine if you’re seeing it as black or white; even-number checksums could be black and odd-number ones white, or whatever. If the hop counter changes with each hop, but never goes to zero, the checksum would change, too, and so you’d get a flipping effect.” She’d smiled, and said, “I think I smell a paper.”

After which Masayuki had said to Caitlin, in full recognition of the fact that she had been the one to originally suggest lost packets as the mechanism: “How’d you like to get the jump on the competition and coauthor your first paper with Professor Bloom and me? ‘Spontaneous Generation of Cellular Automata in the Infrastructure of the World Wide Web.’ ”

To which Caitlin, with the exuberance Anna had subsequently come to know so well, had said, “Sweet!”

Peyton Hume was still on the phone from the United States. He sounded flustered by Anna’s rebuke about how much Caitlin knew. “Well, of course, that’s true,” he said now, in a backpedaling tone of voice, “but we thought, with your expert insight, you could expand on the model she proposed.”

There had been no public announcement that Anna was aware of linking Caitlin to Webmind. “Certainly,” she said, keeping her tone even. “If you tell me what she told you, I’ll be glad to add what I know.”

There was a pause, then: “She suggested that Webmind’s microstructure had spontaneously emerged and was widely dispersed.”