Watch

Anna nodded to herself. General statements. “Colonel Hume, I imagine I’m like most of the human race at this particular moment. I’m conflicted. I don’t know if Webmind is a bad thing or a good thing. All I know is that it’s here, and that, to date, it’s done nothing untoward.”

“We do understand that, Professor Bloom. We’re simply trying to be ready for contingencies. Surely you must know that we could be facing a singularity situation here. Time is of the essence—which is why I picked up the phone and called you directly.”

“I’m more than a little peeved that you’ve been monitoring my communications,” Anna said.

“Actually, we haven’t. We honestly don’t know what you and Caitlin Decter have discussed. But if one thing has become apparent in the last few hours, everyone’s communications are being monitored—and not by anything that’s human. We need to be able to respond to this effectively, should conditions warrant.”

“You mean, you need to be able to purge Webmind from the Internet, don’t you? Has the decision been taken to actually try to do that?”

Hume paused for a half second. “I’m merely an advisor, Professor Bloom—and no, no decision has been taken. But you have made a career of mapping the growth of the Internet. You know what’s happening—and how significant this point in history is. We need to fully grasp what’s going on—and that must start with understanding how Webmind is instantiated.”

“Look, I’ve had a long day,” Anna said. “It’s late here. I’m going to sleep on this, and then—let me be blunt— I’m going to consult with the Legal Affairs people at the Technion in the morning, and review my options.”

“Professor, surely you know how much this can escalate in eight or ten hours. We really can’t wait.”

“You’re going to have to, Colonel. Shalom.”

“Professor, please—”

“I said shalom.” And she hung up the phone.

Finally, Matt knew, it was time for him to go home. Caitlin walked him to the front door, opened it, and stepped outside with him, then closed the door behind her, so they could have a little privacy. She draped her arms around his neck and—his heart was pounding!—she pulled him to her, and they kissed. This time she touched her tongue to his—wow!—and he could feel the goose bumps on Caitlin’s bare arms.

When they pulled apart, she said, “IM me when you get home from school tomorrow, ’kay?”

“I will,” he promised, and then, of his own volition, he leaned in for one more soft, warm kiss. Then he headed down the driveway to the street, and turned and waved at Caitlin, and she waved back, grinning, and went inside.

Matt was a good Waterloo resident: he had a BlackBerry, and, among other things, used it as his MP3 player. And he was a good Canadian: he had it loaded with Nickelback, Feist, and The Trews—but he’d have to get some Lee Amodeo, and find out what Caitlin was so excited about.

As he walked along, feeling happier than he had—well, pretty much forever—he had his hands in his pockets and the collar on his Wind-breaker turned up against the late-evening chill. He also had the volume turned up— ninety decibels, he estimated—so he heard only a muffled sound and didn’t recognize that it was someone calling his name.

But there was no mistaking the sudden slamming of a fist into his upper arm. Adrenaline surging, he turned and saw Trevor Nordstrom.

“I’m talking to you, Reese!” Trevor said. Another quick estimate: Trevor outmassed him by twenty kilos, and all of it was muscle.

Matt looked left and right, but he could hardly outrun Trevor, who had apparently just come from hockey practice—he’d dropped a stick and a gym bag on the sidewalk. That it wasn’t a planned ambush was small consolation.

“Yes?” Matt said—and, damn it, damn it, damn it, his voice cracked.

“Think you’re the shit, getting everyone to sign that card for Caitlin?”

Matt’s heart was pounding again, and not in a good way. “It just seemed a nice thing to do,” he said. Something you wouldn’t know anything about.

“She’s outta your league, Reese.”

He didn’t actually dispute that, but he didn’t want to give Trevor the satisfaction of agreeing, and so he said nothing.

But apparently silence was not an option. Trevor punched him again, this time on his chest just below his shoulder.

And Matt thought about all the things movies and TV shows said about situations like this. You’re supposed to stand up to the bully, you’re supposed to hit him in the face, and then he’ll run away scared, or he’ll respect you, or something. You were supposed to become him to defeat him.

But Matt couldn’t do that. First, because if Trevor didn’t run off, he’d pound the living shit out of him; there was simply no way Matt could win. And, second, because, damn it, the TV shows and movies were wrong. Responding to violence with violence didn’t defuse things; it caused them to escalate.

“Stay away from her,” Trevor said.

Matt had been tormented by Trevor for three years now; he’d endured the horrors of gym class with Trevor, and the utter indifference to his agony demonstrated by the Phys.Ed. teachers. Matt knew the joke that those who can, do; those who can’t, teach—and those who can’t teach, teach Phys.Ed. God, why was it considered pedagogically sound to ask someone to shoot ten baskets and give them a score based on how many they got while others were calling them a spaz? He wondered how Trevor would fare if he were asked to solve ten quadratic equations while people were shouting that he was a moron?

“She’s going to be home-schooled,” Matt said. “You’ll never see her again, and—”

And then it hit him—and so did Trevor, pounding him once more on the opposite side of his chest. Trevor wasn’t afraid that he wouldn’t ever see Caitlin again; rather, he was afraid of exactly the opposite. Miller had dances the last Friday of every month; the next one was only two weeks away. And if Caitlin Doreen Decter—if the girl he had brought to the dance last month—showed up in the company of someone like Matt, that would be humiliating for Trevor.

“Just stay the fuck away from her,” Trevor said. “You hear me?”

Matt kept his voice low—not out of fear, although he was mightily afraid, but because that helped keep it from cracking. “You don’t have to be this way, Trevor,” he said.

Trevor slammed the flat of his hand into Matt’s solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him and knocking him to the cement sidewalk.

“Just remember what I said,” Trevor snarled, and stormed off.

An hour later, Nick’s mother sent him an email message that said:

Hey, Nick.

Did you send me an email earlier? I thought I saw one in my inbox but I must have accidentally deleted it— sorry. You doing OK?

Mom

Forty-four minutes later, I finally detected activity from Nick’s computer, and soon he replied to his mother:

Mom,

All’s well. Thanx.

N